Baltimore mayor aide earns nearly $200,000 while working in D.C.

A senior adviser to Mayor Brandon Scott is drawing nearly $200,000 a year while spending much of the workweek away from City Hall, raising a basic question for Baltimore taxpayers: what exactly is being delivered for that salary, and from where? The aide has also been seen making multiple trips to a Washington, D.C., mayoral campaign headquarters, even as residents and city agencies depend on responsive leadership inside City Hall at 100 North Holliday Street.

The adviser has been identified in other reporting as Marvin James, one of Scott’s closest political allies. James previously served as Scott’s chief of staff and campaign manager before moving into a senior adviser role, a trajectory that keeps him in the mayor’s inner circle while placing him in one of the city’s most sensitive and highest-paid staff positions.

The pay is striking in its own right. Baltimore Brew has reported that Scott’s office at one point paid a senior adviser salary of $225,000 for a staffer, later reduced to $173,000, showing that senior-adviser titles have been used for unusually well-compensated roles inside the administration. That history makes the current arrangement more than a personnel note. It goes to whether Baltimore residents are getting clear lines of accountability from a top aide whose work is supposed to be anchored in the mayor’s office.

The scrutiny around the office is not limited to staffing. Baltimore’s inspector general reported Feb. 25, 2026, that the mayor’s office spent more than $800,000 on food, flowers, parties and similar items from July 1, 2022, through Nov. 17, 2025. FOX45 later reported that more than $52,000 of that total went to box suites at Ravens and Orioles games, deepening concerns about how taxpayer dollars have been used for staff comforts and perks.

That spending has unfolded in a tense oversight environment. Baltimore Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming has been locked in a legal dispute with Scott over access to records, making independent review of the mayor’s spending and staffing decisions more difficult at the very moment City Hall is facing sharper questions about transparency.

Baltimore City Council members were asked whether the spending represented an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars, but they did not publicly respond. For a city government already under pressure to show discipline and openness, a nearly $200,000 aide working out of Washington instead of Baltimore adds another unresolved burden to the public ledger.