There’s a proposed measure from Baltimore City Council President Jack Young that will penalize vacant property owners.  This is an alternate to the defunct tax bottle proposal which the city anticipates raising $1 million dollars.  Read more on this article from Daniel J. Sernovitz for information on this.

Vacant commercial and industrial owners in the city would be hit with a vacant building fee of $250 under a proposed measure to close Baltimore’s $121 million budget deficit.

City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young will introduce a measure on Monday seeking to penalize vacant property owners and to encourage them to find tenants for their properties, according to Michelle Wirzberger, Young’s director of legislative affairs.

“We want to go after the folks who have completely abandoned their properties,” Wirzberger said in a telephone interview. “We’re trying to get at that population of property owners who are not doing anything with their properties.”

The proposal could raise about $1 million and is one of several measures city council is looking at as an alternative to the now-scrapped plan to tax bottled beverages.

Young’s measure builds on an existing city requirement that all non-owner-occupied residential buildings must be registered with the city housing department and pay a $30 fee for that registration. Those buildings can include townhouses rented out to tenants.

On top of that fee, Young’s proposal would require the owner of a vacant owner-occupied residential property to register it as vacant and pay a $100 fee. Vacant commercial or industrial properties would also be subject to the vacant property fee at a registration cost of 250.

Residential property owners that fail to register their buildings as vacant would be fined $100, and vacant commercial or industrial property owners would be fined $500. Multi-family dwellings like apartment complexes and boarding rooms wold also be fined, $500 per unit, for not registering their properties as vacant.

The measure could conceivably apply to downtown skyscrapers, but only if they’re completely vacant, Wirzberger said. The presumption in that case, she said, is that the owner of those buildings are seeking tenants to fill them.

“The person that owns that property does want to have tenants, and we don’t want to influence that,” she said. “We want to give those people support.”