Appearing with a mea culpa message at a hearing on a bill to place more restrictions on the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund (BCYF), Comptroller Bill Henry said he was there to “accept a measure of responsibility for the things the Council did not do when it originally helped to set up the fund.”

What did Henry – at the time a 4th district councilman who was heavily involved in the creation of the taxpayer-funded nonprofit –  think they failed to do?

Provide proper context, he explained to a standing-room-only audience at a City Council hearing yesterday.

“I don’t think it’s in writing anywhere, but I am here to testify that one of the things that we were trying to address was that coming out of the Uprising, there was definitely a feeling that Black-led community-based organizations were not being equitably represented in mainstream philanthropic giving, and the expectation was that the fund would be essentially a foundation that focused in that area,” he said.

The result in his view: unfair media coverage attracting public scrutiny and accusations that the fund lacks transparency in its spending.

“We completely ignored the optics of the situation,” Henry continued. “And that there were going to be people – and some of those people would control media outlets – there were going to be people who felt empowered to pay closer attention to the details of how the money was spent because it was originally tax dollars in a way that quite frankly nobody in the media pays attention to the specific spending of mainstream philanthropic sources.”

If entities like the Abell Foundation or the Goldseker Foundation “had wanted to spend money on any of the things that the Children and Youth Fund had been castigated for, no one would report it. And if they reported it, no one would care,” he complained.

Focusing again on media coverage, Henry noted his office’s role in embarrassing reports that BCYF had failed to submit annual audits.

“When asked, ‘Did we receive those audits?’ the Department of Audits replied, ‘No, we did not receive them,’ which was accurate in the sense that they were not specifically sent to the city auditor,” Henry explained.

“But all of those audits were publicly posted on the organization’s website and therefore publicly available to the Department of Audits if we had been inclined to be proactive in how we approached our side of this. I just wanted to make that statement publicly as well.”

Pushback from BCYF

Henry’s testimony came at the start of a nearly three-hour hearing on a bill that would: require more detailed disclosure of the fund’s budget, increase the size of its board and and prohibit spending on programs beyond direct grants.

Speaking before a crowd of red-tee-shirt-clad fund supporters, bill sponsor Mark Parker lauded the organization, saying it does “vital and transformative work” assisting youth-focused organizations with funding and technical support.

But oversight rules need to be tightened on the now expanded organization, he declared.

“Given that organizational growth and success, it’s now time for the City Council to return to authorizing legislation from 2020 to make needed updates to better align the legislative framework with the operational reality of the current BCYF organization, to fill in some of the gaps that were left in that legislation and to bring a bit more clarity to the law,” Parker said.

• Today’s hearing on the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund should lead to much-needed accountability (12/18/25)

Another feature of Parker’s legislation is a requirement for a performance audit of BCYF’s budget to be conducted every three years. Henry said auditors would have to be hired, at a cost of $320,255, to do the work.

That prompted pushback from Councilman James Torrence.

“I was just baffled by the cost,” Torrence said, asking why the audit preparation could not be done with existing staff.

“We don’t have the capacity now to do additional auditing,” Henry replied, noting that the additional staff would help with other work, in addition to the BCYF review.

Kicking off testimony by a large crowd of project partners primarily opposed to the legislation was the group’s president and CEO, Alysia Lee.

“BCYF has and always will support transparency, oversight and accountability with public dollars,” but the bill as written “does intentionally weaken the very outcomes that we all intend to protect,” Lee said, offering proposed amendments to Parker’s bill.

“BCYF is one of Baltimore’s greatest public sector success stories,” she said. “We hope that moving forward together we can strengthen oversight without compromising what works.”

Members of the Education, Youth and Older Adults Committee did not discuss amendments or vote on the bill.

Chairman John Bullock said amendments will be considered at a future hearing.