You Don't Know Jack

Jack Young may be Baltimore’s most unlikely modern mayor. Will he keep the job?

- Ron Cassie

No one has ever described Jack Young as an orator. Standing at a podium slapped with the city seal next to a basketball-size crater on North Collington Avenue, Young takes all of 90 seconds to introduce his “Mayor’s 50-Day Pothole Challenge” before handing things over to Department of Transportation director Steve Sharkey.

“One of my top priorities is to clean up this city . . . I encourage all residents to report potholes to 3-1-1 so that together we can improve city roadways,” he says, reading from notes for the televison cameras and promising to fill 5,000 N potholes in just under two months. And that’s it, other than fielding a couple of softballs from the media. Which is not to say the man who assumed Baltimore’s highest office after Catherine Pugh resigned over corruption charges is an individual of few words. Grabbing a shovel, the former City Council president immediately starts chatting up the asphalt crew.

To his credit, Young later seeks out the only neighbor on the block who turned out for this February photo opp. She informed him, of all things, the city’s street sweeping trucks came by too often—“four times a week”—leaving potholes in their wake. Young never heard this complaint before in Baltimore, and he asked the woman if she spoke for her community. She assured him, in fact, she did. (“I go to meetings.”) “Okay, we’ll move the sanitation trucks,” Young responds with a wry glance toward Sharkey. “I’m sure some other neighborhoods could use them.”