Joining Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming’s battle to regain the access to documents she lost in January, a city councilman is introducing a bill that would allow the Inspector General to serve as a co-custodian of records.

By giving Cumming the same access to records as the city’s Office of Information Technology, the bill would enable the city government watchdog to properly carry out her mission to root out waste, fraud and abuse, Councilman Mark Conway said today.

“This legislation addresses a real problem. The inspector general has not consistently been able to access the records needed to do their job. That’s not how accountability should work,” Conway said at a news conference today outside City Hall.

“With this she’ll have all the access necessary to do her investigations,” Conway said, noting that his measure, if approved, would come in the form of a charter amendment to be approved by voters in November.

“Right now, the IT Department can go into anybody’s emails and do whatever they need to do. So we give her the same access. Problem solved,” he said. “In fact, for the last 20 years, that is what the IG has had. I remind you, it was the decision of the administration to pull that access from the IG.”

Chiding Mayor Brandon Scott, Conway said the mayor shouldn’t block efforts to ensure efficient, fraud-free government.

“He’s done great work [with reducing crime], but there is no time that we stop being accountable,” said Conway, who is running to represent Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. “There’s no time that public officials can not be accountable for how we spend tax dollars and weed out fraud.”

MONSE Hearing Planned

The 4th District lawmaker reviewed the history of the records access controversy, beginning with the Scott administration cutting off Cumming’s access to documents after she began investigating SideStep, a youth diversion program piloted by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE).

• Baltimore IG Cumming says the Scott administration is blocking her investigations (1/27/26)

• An alarming and baseless attack on Baltimore’s inspector general (2/2/26)

• Unprecedented: Baltimore inspector general sues Baltimore mayor over records access (2/24/26)

“Instead of getting cooperation through the administration, she received over 200 documents that were almost fully redacted, including cash app payments, where she couldn’t tell who sent the money or how much money was sent,” Conway said. “Regardless, she was able to find thousands of dollars of dollars of mismanagement.”

Asked why he thinks Scott is restricting the IG’s ability to get records, Conway said he couldn’t speculate.

“But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. My hope is that the fire is not someone in the mayor’s office pulling strings in an improper way. But if that is the case, it should be the council and certainly the mayor’s highest priority to weed out those people.”

Since January, Conway said, the mayor has improperly imposed a system where an appointee, City Solicitor Ebony Thompson, can determine what information can be released to the IG – and, thus, to the public.

“It doesn’t make sense. It means that Cumming doesn’t really have any access unless the mayor says so,” Conway said, adding that “it may well be the case that she has to, in some point in the future, investigate the mayor.”

Under his bill, the IG “would have access to these files, and she would then be responsible for making sure that she is not sharing anything that should not be public, which is always, I remind you, how it has been.”

He added that, as chair of the Public Safety Committee, he has scheduled an oversight hearing on MONSE that is scheduled for April 28.

As to the questions of “whether or not someone in the administration is pulling strings in a nefarious way . . . my hope is that in that hearing, we’ll understand maybe if that is the case or not, and if there’s something that can change or should change.”