Baltimore County spending $550K to shield 2020 settlement to brother of county executive’s friend

Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr.’s administration secretly paid his friend’s brother an $83,675 settlement after backing out of an agreement to increase the retired firefighter’s pension, which county lawyers said would have violated state law.

And now, the administration could pay more than half a million dollars on a fight in court to keep secret details about the settlement. The Baltimore County Council agreed July 1 to allocate an additional $200,000 to pay outside lawyers in a former county official’s public records lawsuit, after already setting aside $350,000.

Former County Administrative Officer Fred Homan sued the county in 2021 , alleging officials violated the Maryland Public Information Act by withholding documents he requested related to the settlement. New documents released in that lawsuit earlier this year reveal that the county’s lawyers believed in 2020 that allowing the firefighter, Philip Tirabassi, to transfer retirement credits from his past Baltimore City job to his county pension would be illegal and could threaten the county retirement system’s tax status.

In an interview with The Baltimore Sun, Olszewski said his administration paid Tirabassi to protect the county from litigation after Tirabassi signed an “unauthorized agreement” sent by a former county lawyer in early 2020. Tirabassi threatened to sue after the county tried to back out of that agreement.

County officials exchanged dozens of emails about Tirabassi’s claim starting in 2019, keeping Olszewski apprised along the way, and eventually agreed to pay Tirabassi from the county’s general liability fund in spring 2020, records from Homan’s lawsuit show.

Tirabassi is the brother of John Tirabassi, who graduated from Sparrows Point High School in 2000 with Olszewski and is a friend, the county executive said.

“I do not have a close personal relationship with Mr. Philip Tirabassi,” said Olszewski, a Democrat now running for Congress .

He called it “patently false” that he approved the settlement as a favor to his friend’s brother.

The county Office of Law did not tell the County Council about the confidential settlement at the time , despite the council passing a law earlier that year requiring the county attorney to provide council members with an annual list of settlements. A 2020 list of payments obtained by The Sun listed the recipient as “Philip Dough,” not Philip Tirabassi.

County spokesperson Erica Palmisano said former budget director Ed Blades “mistakenly” told a county employee to enter his name as Philip Doe, misattributed as Dough. She said the law office corrected the list sent to the council after learning of the error.

Blades, who left the county in 2022, did not respond to a request for comment.

“They violated the [Maryland Public Information Act], using it as a tool to keep people from finding out that they violated state law,” Homan said in an interview. “Then to cover it up, they made a payment using the liability fund where there was no liability.”

In February, a Baltimore County judge ruled that the county improperly withheld documents concerning the payment to Tirabassi — including a settlement agreement and correspondence — and ordered the county to turn some records over to Homan.

Palmisano said the county has “substantially complied with” a February court order to turn over 10,000 pages of documents in Homan’s ongoing lawsuit and that Homan is prolonging litigation by challenging redactions and decisions to withhold documents.

Rignal Baldwin V, Homan’s attorney, disagreed.

“They have yet to offer any kind of coherent explanation or consistent explanation for why they hid and continue to hide what the county paid Mr. Tirabassi and why,” Baldwin said.

After serving in Baltimore County government for 40 years, Homan retired in December 2018 at Olszewski’s request . Homan served as temporary county executive for a few weeks after Kevin Kamenetz’s death in May 2018.

Olszewski has called his administration “the most open, accessible and transparent in Baltimore County’s history.”

Tirabassi retired in October 2020 after 31 years in the Baltimore County Fire Department. He declined to comment when reached by phone last week. Tirabassi began asking county officials in 2018 whether he could transfer his two years of service credits from working as a Baltimore City wastewater treatment technician in the 1980s to increase his county pension.

Blades and his predecessor turned Tirabassi down, citing a state law that gave employees six months to transfer pension credits, according to emails and transcripts from a county Board of Appeals hearing. Tirabassi’s attorney, Jay Miller, argued his client was never notified of that 1991 deadline.

Documents from Homan’s suit show Olszewski was involved early in dealing with Tirabassi’s claim: An assistant county attorney copied Olszewski’s personal email in a message about Tirabassi’s request in January 2019.

According to emails, Olszewski thanked former County Administrative Officer Stacy Rodgers and his former chief of staff, Pat Murray, for their work on Tirabassi’s case in December 2019.

In February 2020, Murray told James Benjamin, the county attorney, he would ask Olszewski’s scheduler to set up a call with him to “discuss and decide this matter.”

On June 1, 2020, Murray told Blades, the former budget officer, and Benjamin in an email, “we’re reporting back to the [county executive] and Stacy [Rodgers] on this.”

“This is probably the most annoying thing I have encountered in this tour of duty so far,” Rodgers wrote the same day to Murray. “Just so wrong on so MANY levels.”

Rodgers, who retired in April , did not respond to requests for comment. Murray, who left the county in September 2022 , declined to comment.

Meanwhile, in January 2020, soon after the County Board of Appeals told the parties to bring Tirabassi’s case to the county employee retirement board, former Assistant County Attorney Michael Raimondi wrote a memo to Benjamin that said: “Even if the county [Employee Retirement] Board desired to allow Tirabassi to transfer his 2.8 years of prior city service to Baltimore County, the board could not do so, without placing the tax exempt status of the retirement plan in jeopardy.”

All county retirees could lose the tax exemption of their benefits as a result, Raimondi wrote.

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Raimondi, who has since left the county, did not respond to requests for comment.

Later that month, Tirabassi signed a settlement agreement sent by a county employee that agreed to add his city time to his pension.

Olszewski said Raimondi sent Tirabassi that agreement without authorization or informing him and Benjamin. He did not directly answer a question about whether that agreement violated the law, but said the county opted to settle with Tirabassi after county leadership “learned of this unauthorized agreement and expressed concerns.”

After Raimondi wrote Jan. 29 to Miller that he needed to change the agreement, Miller threatened to sue the county , writing that he knew other firefighters who could argue they were never told about the deadline to transfer service credits from other jurisdictions. Miller declined to comment through an employee at his Baltimore law office.

“If we settle I will not represent them nor tell them anything. If we are forced to go to trial, I will add them to our case,” he wrote, according to a text message forwarded to an assistant county attorney in March 2020.

In May 2020, the county signed an agreement that allowed Tirabassi to transfer half his city service credit. Palmisano said that agreement didn’t happen.

More than a year later, on Sept. 7, 2021, the county and Tirabassi signed an “addendum” to that agreement, to “document what had actually occurred with the settlement,” said Christopher Dahl, an attorney for Baker-Donelson, the county’s law firm in Homan’s suit. The addendum said the payment from the liability fund was not part of Tirabassi’s service time calculated for his retirement.

The county had paid Tirabassi on Dec. 2, 2020, according to a copy of the check.

Asked why that addendum was dated after Tirabassi received a check and Homan’s lawsuit was brought, Dahl said it documented an agreement that didn’t exist in writing, so “we could show to Mr. Homan what he was alleging that the county had done did not occur.”