The Edgewood of the 1970s and 1980s, as John Myrick remembered it, was bustling with businesses and attractions — supermarkets and department stores such as Ames, Giant, Mars, and even a roller skating rink.
Myrick grew up in the Hanson Road area and became a deputy for the Harford County Sheriff’s Office, all while watching his hometown spiral downward. The soaring crime and blight spurred Myrick, in the early 1990s, to lead an effort to make Edgewood a municipality and, in turn, master of its fate.
While that effort fizzled out, there’s a renewed push to create an “Edgewood City” that seems to be gaining much more political momentum, more than 30 years later. An informational meeting is being held at 6 p.m. Monday, at 1493 Harford Square Drive, for residents to learn about incorporating Edgewood and what it would mean for them.
Harford County Council member Nolanda Robert, a Democrat, has been working on these “town halls” with fellow Edgewood residents and state Dels. Steve Johnson and Andre Johnson, who have tried three times to get a state bill passed that they believe would dismantle the main obstacle to Edgewood’s incorporation.
That obstacle is a longtime state law requiring the county, not the state, to approve any new municipality — which counties are generally loath to do, since they don’t want to lose that tax base, as the Maryland Municipal League has noted.
To become a municipality, a community with at least 300 residents must have 20-25% of its population sign a petition, according to the Maryland Municipal League. Once that threshold is met, it is presented to the county, which works with an organizing committee. The committee then will speak with community members regarding the desire to become incorporated. Next, a charter would be created and sent to the County Council.
In 1954, the power to create municipalities transferred from the state of Maryland to each county. Since then, no new communities have been incorporated, according to Justin Fiore, director of advocacy and public policy for MML. MML says it is actively working to shift this law by presenting a bill to state representatives. So far, a bill has been presented to the General Assembly three times and failed, but MML intends to draft another one for the 2026 legislative session.
Although a new state bill hasn’t passed, its appearance signals that the political winds may be shifting in Edgewood’s favor.
Small-town life
If you’re among the 75% of Marylanders who don’t live in a municipality, the whole idea may be a foreign concept. The vast majority of Baltimore-area residents live in unincorporated communities. Baltimore County, Howard County and Baltimore City (which functions as a county) have no towns or cities.
Harford has three — Bel Air, Havre de Grace and Aberdeen — but it’s still a challenge to explain to Edgewood residents why becoming a municipality could be advantageous, Robert said.
“Some people are saying, no, they don’t want it because of taxes,” she said. “I think because other people have put in their heads that it’s going to be, like, thousands of dollars, when it’s not.”
She’s been part of a task force, along with the two delegates and two representatives of Progressive Harford and the county’s Democratic Central Committee, to beef up public support for the municipality concept.
The task force is putting together a fact sheet to spell out what incorporation would look like and what it provides.
“From someone who’s knocked on people’s doors, I’ve heard the reason why a lot of people don’t go vote or do anything is because they don’t believe they have a voice, so why bother?” Robert said. “And that’s why we’re trying to say, the more you get involved, the more you will have a voice at the table.”
Another 2026 County Council candidate, Kelly Bryant, a Democrat who’s challenging Robert for her seat, told The Baltimore Sun he is in favor of incorporating: “This community has enormous potential,” he said. “I refuse to watch it go untapped any longer.”
Among others supporting the effort is an elected official from the municipality next door. Aberdeen City Council member Adam Hiob said he’s been providing assistance and guidance to the task force.
“The process [of incorporation] as a whole in Maryland has been stagnant since the ’50s,” Hiob said.
He doesn’t believe it’s “set up reasonably,” because “the county just says no.”
Myrick said that was exactly why the effort failed in the 1990s. It got “massive” pushback from then-Harford County Executive Eileen Rehrmann.
Edgewood residents “had one vote on a six-person [County] Council, and the county had continually used Edgewood as a dumping ground for everything they didn’t want,” Myrick said.
Hiob agreed that the southern end of Route 40 needs more political autonomy.
“If the majority of people want a pathway to incorporation, they should be given a pathway,” he said.
Edgewood is “not on the receiving end of a lot of economic activity. … I think it bodes well for all of us if we have more local governments advocating for the southern end of the county,” he said.
Theresa Kuhns, the chief executive officer at MML, said she thinks becoming a municipality is more than a legal step, it’s “a profound act of self-determination and equity,” that she believes Edgewood is looking for.
Kuhns said municipalities are a driving force in growth within the state economically, and becoming one would create opportunities that could shape a better future for Edgewood’s 25,000 residents.
“Bottom line, when our cities and towns are thriving, Maryland is going to thrive,” she said.
The bottom line
Robert agreed that the Edgewood community needs revitalizing, and said she’s been working with longtime shopping center owner The Cordish Companies to try to fill vacancies “with family-friendly things.”
“I mean, we don’t have anything. We used to have a bowling alley. We used to have a movie theater,” she said.
She said she’s seen many people supporting the municipality effort.
“We do have a lot of people liking it,” Robert said, noting that Edgewood has lost out on many millions of dollars in revenue from the hotel tax, for example. Despite having so many hotels in town, the tax revenue goes countywide.
Just like 30 years ago, the main concern comes down to the cost associated with an incorporated Edgewood.
Robert argued that “it doesn’t cost that much more. It might be $50 more, if we have this in your taxes, right? But at the end of the day, when you have a huge city, it’s probably going to be like $1,200 more — not $10,000 more, which some people seem to think, [that] it’s going to be this astronomical amount of money, but it’s not. And we’ve looked at [the other municipalities like] Havre de Grace, and we’ve looked at Aberdeen, and we looked at Bel Air to see what their rates are.”
Robert believes making Edgewood a city will benefit everyone, including the county, economically.
She noted that Havre de Grace and Aberdeen are revitalizing and booming, attracting money to the county. Meanwhile, “all the people in my section go to White Marsh, because it’s straight down [Route] 40 — not even going over to Bel Air, [but] going to Baltimore County, and that includes the Joppa residents,” she said.
A seat at the table
Making Edgewood a city, advocates say, is also about giving Harford County’s racial minorities a voice.
Edgewood is home to nearly one-third of Harford County’s Black residents, who constitute about 16% of the county’s total population. Roughly 44% of Edgewood residents are Black, compared with 29% of incorporated Aberdeen.
“That’s also the main point, is to give the residents a voice at the table,” Robert said. “And they can go to their local government, not having to go all the way to the county level and have that discussion, and actually have more people on the local government that look like them and feel that they can talk to.”
Previous skepticism about incorporating Edgewood has pointed out the number of low-income residents in the community.
County Executive Bob Cassilly, a Republican, mentioned that line of reasoning recently, telling the Capital News Service that he isn’t sure the cost of building a city hall and setting up a government, for example, “is in the best interest of the Edgewood community.”
“I am concerned that incorporation would be counterproductive to the Edgewood community, burdening residents and businesses with another layer of taxes and government they cannot sustain,” Cassilly told The Aegis in an emailed statement. “Edgewood and similar communities have too long suffered from a failure of county leaders to consider and address the unique challenges and opportunities in every part of our county.”
And, just like 30 years ago, the county is finding new ways to try to solve Edgewood’s problems, rather than greenlighting the municipality. Cassilly’s administration has the Southern County Task Force, which Robert said “is great, but we could do so much more if we had our own money.”
They were recently discussing the county’s street-sweeping program, for example. Robert said she’s seen him only twice, and the text messages sent about it are inconsistent.
During the 1990s Edgewood-municipality push, the county responded to crime concerns by building a Sheriff’s Office location on Route 40.
Myrick said that “was more visual than anything else,” because the Sheriff’s Office staffing remained the same. In fact, he said the new station actually slowed things down because everything still needed to be processed in Bel Air.
Myrick also believed Edgewood’s lower-income population could still benefit from incorporation, because the tax base from the many homeowners is still going to be there.
“If people see the opportunities to have their voices heard, you will bring people into that area, you will increase the economic stability of that area,” he said.
Edgewood’s median income of $86,355 is higher than both Aberdeen’s and Bel Air’s — $76,019 and $69,912, respectively, as measured from 2019 to 2023.
Edgewood’s poverty rate is just slightly above Havre de Grace’s, at 10.5%.
“I think there’s more ‘Section 8’ housing and stuff like that in Edgewood, but I also know there’s million-dollar houses in Edgewood,” Robert said. “So, I think Edgewood gets a bad rap because, if you go down certain streets, there’s beautiful, gorgeous, waterfront homes and things like that, and then you do have, like, the apartments and … that little pocket where the crime happens, the drug-dealing happens, those things happen.”
When Mountain Christian Church’s Luke Erickson was getting ready to launch The Epicenter facility on Route 40, about 12 years ago, he recalled how he was steered away from buying a home in Edgewood in the early 2000s. Erickson, who is white, said at the time that he heard from Black people who were, instead, encouraged to buy there.
He said at the time: “We are unsettled about the stigma that gets attached to Edgewood. We are not going to participate in Edgewood-bashing. We are just trying to see things as they are.”
More than a decade later, the community does have new amenities. The vacant Washington Court property, once home to a federal housing project, has been revamped as Coppermine’s CopperPlex, a turf-field sports complex.
Robert said she was talking with Coppermine’s director about, “where do all his people go? Because he doesn’t have his food stuff set up yet, either. … But he’s, like, ‘I know we go to 7-Eleven, Subway and Food Lion.’ But I was like, there should be so many more choices for these families to be able to go to and not have to travel far to get lunch.”
Myrick left Edgewood in 1999 for a federal job in Florida. He now lives in Prince George’s County — which has 27 municipalities — but still visits Edgewood often to see his brother. He said the area has gotten worse, and he believes drug problems, vandalism and robbery have increased.
“The crime has skyrocketed,” he said. “As you bring in more low-income housing, there’s less incentive for businesses to be there.”
And, although he was unaware of the renewed push to incorporate Edgewood, he still believes the concept would be “extraordinarily” helpful for the community.
“I have always been a proponent for people to determine their own destiny,” Myrick said.
For more information about the July 21 Edgewood Municipality Information Meeting, contact tori4edgewood@gmail.com.
Have a news tip? Contact Bryna Zumer at bzumer@baltsun.com. Contact Shaela Foster at sfoster@baltsun.com.
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