Lawsuit accuses BGE of false arrests in Federal Hill protest fight

Former Maryland Deputy Attorney General Thiru Vignarajah on Monday said a new lawsuit accuses Baltimore Gas and Electric of triggering unlawful arrests with false information during the 2023 Federal Hill protest over gas equipment on Warren Avenue.

The case reaches back to June 22, 2023, when Baltimore police arrested Sandra Seward of Federal Hill, Magdalena Fitzsimmons of Washington Hill and Claudia Towles of Fells Point during a confrontation over BGE’s installation of exterior gas regulators. Police said the arrests involved charges including tampering with gas equipment, disorderly conduct, failure to obey a lawful order and interference-related allegations. The three women spent roughly 19 hours in Central Booking before the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges on Aug. 4, 2023.

State’s Attorney Ivan Bates later said the case likely would have been handled through the city’s citation docket program if citations had been issued instead of arrests. That dismissal did not end the broader dispute over BGE’s work in older Baltimore neighborhoods, where residents have argued for years that outside regulators could be unsafe, visually intrusive or imposed without consent.

The Maryland Public Service Commission stepped in on Sept. 5, 2023, ordering BGE to revise its standards and practices so residential customers can choose whether a gas service pressure regulator is installed inside or outside their home, with narrow exceptions for legal, safety or practical reasons. The commission said customers in BGE’s territory had filed numerous complaints and joined a petition in Baltimore City Circuit Court on June 23, 2023, a day after the Federal Hill arrests. BGE later said on its website that it was fully complying with the order.

Baltimore’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation had also voted down BGE applications to install external gas regulators unless a homeowner requested them, underscoring how the fight spread from one block in Federal Hill into Baltimore’s preservation and utility oversight systems. For neighbors in Federal Hill, Washington Hill and nearby rowhouse communities, the lawsuit raises a larger question about how far a utility can go when its projects run into organized resistance.

The new civil action lands after a string of earlier consequences: the arrests, the dismissals, the state regulatory order and years of neighborhood pushback over the company’s exterior-regulator program. That sequence now puts BGE’s role in the center of a dispute over protest rights, neighborhood control and when utility work crosses into police action.