Kudos to City Council President Zeke Cohen for noting that the many fee and fine increases that Mayor Brandon Scott wants to impose on city residents are ill-timed and problematic (“Baltimore City Council president ‘extremely concerned’ about fines, fees in mayor’s budget,” April 8).
 

It seems that Mayor Scott is being ill-served by his advisers. Take city budget director Laura Larson’s rationalization for the hikes: “There are things that haven’t been updated for many years and that are … out of line with some of our neighboring jurisdictions.”
 

Baltimoreans know that the “thing” that’s most out of line with their neighbors (and rivals for investment) is the city’s property tax rate which is 104% higher than the surrounding counties, about 130% higher than that in Anne Arundel and Harford counties and 236% higher than in Montgomery County.
 

Evidently, Larson and her boss believe that if there is a particular cost of city living on which they are simply non-competitive, they can ignore it. But if Baltimore has a competitive advantage on some margin, they should squander it.
 

There was good news recently from the U.S. Census Bureau which estimated a small increase of 751 residents in Baltimore’s population last year — the first increase in a decade. A guaranteed way to crush that little bit of momentum is to continue to provide residents with under-performing schools, unsafe streets and crumbling infrastructure — yet charge them premium prices for it all.
 

— Christopher B. Summers, Rockville