Her resignation comes days after the Baltimore City Council proposed amending the city charter to make it possible to remove her, and after the FBI raided her two homes and her office at City Hall.
Pugh stepped down from the hospital network’s board, but she had resisted calls to step down as mayor. She has been home on medical leave for weeks. Her lawyer told reporters previously that she was too ill to make decisions. Bernard Young, president of the Baltimore City Council, has been serving as acting mayor and will complete the rest of her term.
Pugh’s lawyer, Steve Silverman, announced her resignation Thursday, effective immediately. He read a statement from the mayor that said, “I am sorry for the harm that I have caused to the image of the city of Baltimore and the credibility of the office of the mayor.”
Pugh has been under intense scrutiny since March, when The Baltimore Sun reported that she was one of nine members of the board of the University of Maryland Medical System who had profited personally from contracts with the hospital system.
When the scandal broke, Pugh maintained that there was nothing illegal or unethical about her deal to sell her “Healthy Holly” children’s books, which promote nutritious food and exercise, to the hospital network, whose board she served on as a state senator. The network, in turn, was supposed to donate the books to Baltimore schools and day cares.
She apologized for failing to report the deal on disclosure forms as a state senator and returned the most recent payment of $100,000.
But questions continued to swirl over who authorized the contract and how many of the books actually reached children, especially after thousands of books were discovered untouched in a school warehouse. Pugh has reportedly received more than $500,000 since 2011 for the books.
“This whole entire episode has been hurtful to the city,” said Jill Carter, a state senator representing Baltimore who has been pushing to limit self-dealing on the hospital network’s board. “Those of us who are holding elected office now, it is incumbent upon us to do everything in our power to restore the public trust.”
Carter said she began investigating the hospital network’s contracts after hearing complaints from minority-owned businesses that it was impossible for them to bid on contracts, while politically connected board members received lucrative deals that did not go through normal channels of procurement.
Carter noted that other board members reaped far more from the hospital network, including Francis X. Kelly, who advocated the privatization of the hospital network as a state senator, and went on to obtain $16 million in contracts through his insurance company, Kelly & Associates Insurance Group.
“It’s been very troubling to me that so much focus has been placed on the mayor that there has been too little scrutiny and too little desire to investigate the other members,” Carter said.
The hospital network’s website lists Kelly as being “on leave” from the board, along with three other members who had business contracts. He did not return a call seeking comment Thursday.
A recent bill passed by Maryland’s General Assembly will replace the medical system’s entire board in July, and generally prohibits future board members from receiving no-bid contracts.
Michael Schwartzberg, a spokesman for the medical system’s management, said it would not be issuing a statement on the mayor’s resignation.
Pugh, who was elected mayor in 2016, has long been a fixture in the city’s politics. She previously served as a state senator and majority leader in Maryland’s General Assembly. Her resignation comes after a series of other corruption scandals in the city have shaken faith in Baltimore’s government. Last year, six Baltimore police officers pleaded guilty in a wide-ranging corruption trial that included robbing a motorist of $25,000 and dumping garbage bags full of stolen prescription drugs on the market.
The city, which endured riots and unrest in the wake of the 2015 death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, has seen four police commissioners cycle through since Gray’s death. Last year, former police commissioner Darryl De Sousa pleaded guilty in federal court to failing to file income tax returns.
In 2010, another Baltimore mayor, Sheila Ann Dixon, resigned after being found guilty of misappropriating gift cards for the poor. Baltimore County Schools Superintendent Dallas Dance was convicted of lying on disclosure forms about money he received from a contractor that had business interests with the school system.
Joanne Antoine, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, said her group has received several calls from people expressing a loss of faith in Pugh. But Antoine said she is heartened by recent proposals brought by Baltimore City Council members to tighten ethics disclosure rules and make it easier to remove the mayor.
“I think we’re on the verge of recovering from all of this,” she said. “We believe the City Council is taking steps to move forward.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.