For three of the people who have been trying for months to get the Scott administration to remove the big, ugly pile of garbage sitting at the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT) maintenance yard at 2601 Falls Road, there was a small victory yesterday.

They got two lawmakers to tromp through the mud and take a look at it.

“It’s bad,” said Councilwoman Odette Ramos, looking at the roughly 20-foot-tall pile.

It included old sofas and chairs, a car tire, an air conditioner cover, several soggy, stained children’s white teddy bears, busted car parts, lots of scrap wood and who knew what else under the light dusting of snow.

“I mean, it’s mostly mattresses,” said the 14th District’s Ramos, standing beside her 12th District colleague, Jermaine Jones. “It looks like it’s illegal dumping to me.”

A code enforcement inspector on the scene agreed that it was a scene of classic Baltimore illegal dumping – but said he couldn’t do anything about it.

“It’s the city’s property. I can’t cite anyone!” declared Brian Morgan, a member of the Department of Housing and Community Development’s special investigations unit for dumping.

How could the city have for months stored garbage on its own land that would have been a criminal offense for a private citizen, Morgan was asked. Would anyone be held accountable?

“I don’t know,” he said. “DOT’s got to answer that.”

But none of the higher-ups that Ramos had invited – including DOT Chief of Staff Patrick Fleming – showed up on yesterday morning.

Getting off the phone with a city official, Ramos said the pile would be gone in two weeks, and advised a reporter to contact transportation officials to verify it.

“We’ve got commitment from DOT to take care of this,” she said. “We still have to follow the mystery of how it all came about.”

Potential Pollution Runoff

It’s a mystery that stretches back at least to August, when residents started noticing the dump pile growing, and began filing complaints with 311 that were closed, despite the fact that the pile remained.

Why this sequence happened over and over was one of the questions The Brew asked DPW, DOT and DHCD again this week, but that that the agencies have yet to answer.

“We will investigate the matter and will follow up with you once we have more information to share,” DPW spokeswoman Mary Stewart wrote.

• Despite months of complaints, a garbage pile on city-owned property near the Jones Falls remains (3/2/26)

Even though there were no agency representatives present who could answer them yesterday, dump tour participants were eager to list the questions they say need to be investigated.

Dick Williams, of Friends of The Jones Falls, wanted to know how could city officials have allowed something so environmentally harmful to sit so close to the waterway?

“Doesn’t this trash mountain say to you, a lot of toxins and stuff like that are going right over there?” he said, pointing to the nearby Jones Falls.

“If we have a big, huge rain, which we get in the summer, a lot of this would be in there, no question,” agreed Ramos, who said she called for the site visit because Williams kept bringing the matter up at meetings of the Sisson Street Task Force.

(That group, ironically, pondered the idea of moving a municipal trash facility to a property just north of the dump pile and rejected it – in large part because of its proximity to the Jones Falls.)

Another question was raised by Blue Water Baltimore’s Barbara Johnson, senior manger of water protection and community advocacy, as she spotted a large pile of yellow sand beside the trash heap.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not compliant, either,” she remarked, taking photos. “I think it should have a stormwater barrier or netting – something so the runoff doesn’t go into the Jones Falls.”

The residents on hand also grilled the council members about how the dump issue demonstrates a perennial problem raised for years in Baltimore and seemingly never solved: 311 tickets “closed” without the issue being fixed.

“It’s city government that’s not working, it’s not 311,” Ramos began.

“When I make my complaints and it doesn’t work, that to me says 311 isn’t working,” Williams countered.

Jones said he and his council colleagues are fed up as his constituents are.

“We’ve expressed that frustration, but they’re saying that’s the way the system is designed to work,” he explained.

“All I can do is highlight a system that’s broke, but when they clearly saying it’s not broken, I can’t force them to even fix it,” he continued. “Now I’m looking for other moments and other ways in which we can leverage our power influence to get them to fix it and change it, besides saying it’s broke.”

“They dump at night”

It was longtime Jones Falls advocate Jan Danforth, however, who posed the harshest questions, based on a number of disturbing things she has documented since last summer, including:

• The gate to the DOT facility is never locked.

• Private small haulers seen dumping trash on the pile.

• Yellow city agency trucks dumping – and sometimes hauling away – material in broad daylight.

“The gates were always wide open, and I would come down at night and swing the gates closed,” she recounted, as Ramos and Jones listened.

“There’s no locks. I would throw the chain in between the chain links of the fence so it looked closed, and I would come back around dawn and they’d be wide open again,” Danforth said, concluding: “They dump at night.”

Ramos was asked how it could be that city trucks, as well private individuals, have been dumping there.

“We don’t know, we’re just trying to get to the bottom of it,” she said. “One thing I can tell you is those gates are going to be closed and locked from now on.”

“If you have photos of the city trucks, I need those because they have numbers on them,” Ramos said, addressing Danforth, who promised to provide them.

Speculating about another possible source of the dumping, Danforth remarked that “one of DPW’s duties is clearing out vacants.”

“Yes, it is,” Ramos replied.

Danforth said she hoped no low-level workers would be penalized for allowing dumping to take place. Williams said, “No, no, of course, we have to see who was responsible up the chain.”

“I think the councilman and I will have conversations with the deputy mayor and a few others to be like, how did this even happen,” Ramos said. “If it was what we suspect, we’ll have to develop a plan.”