UPDATED 4 p.m.

The Baltimore official who coordinates UDARP meetings said today’s closed session “wasn’t a UDARP meeting.”

Anthony Cataldo instead termed the two-hour-plus session “a departmental meeting.”

Asked why at least two of UDARP’s five members were present at the closed meeting together with city officials and private lawyers and architects, Cataldo said, “We just wanted to take advantage of their expertise.”

Asked why signage directing people to the meeting said UDARP (see photo below), Cataldo said he placed the sign there this morning because he thought he may not have time to put up the sign when UDARP’s public meeting started at 1 p.m.

Cataldo declined to answer further questions, referring a reporter to Thomas J. Stosur, director of planning, who could not be reached.

The agenda for Baltimore’s Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel (UDARP) was unusually light today – two items, one starting at 1 p.m. and the other at 2 p.m.

But the panel was meeting in a different room, on a different floor, from where it usually meets. And its members actually gathered more than three hours ahead of today’s announced session.

More than two dozen people arrived around 9:50 this morning at the Department of Transportation’s Richard L. Baker Conference Room on the 7th floor of the Charles Benton Building at 417 East Fayette Street.

By 10 a.m. the conference room doors were closed, so no one outside of the room could hear what was being discussed.

“Inner-Harbor Related”

For the next two hours, the panel met with the doors literally shut.

Among the attendees were Planning Department Director Thomas J. Stosur; UDARP coordinator Anthony Cataldo; Caroline Hecker, a lawyer from Rosenberg Martin Greenberg (she represents the Horseshoe Casino, among other clients); landscape architect Scott Rykiel; and Waterfront Partnership President Laurie Schwartz.

A person coming out the meeting said the subject was “Inner Harbor-related,” but didn’t get more specific.

City design panel meetings have been open to the public since 1991.

Open Meetings Act

That year The Baltimore Sun, citing the Maryland Open Meetings Act, pressed the city to open the previously-closed meetings of the Architectural Review Board, as it was then called.

Then-Mayor Kurt Schmoke and Greater Baltimore Committee Senior Advisor Walter Sondheim, Jr., made arrangements to open the meetings.

Around the same time, Al Copp, president of Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management Inc., resigned his position.

Copp had resisted opening the meetings.

Today the five-member panel typically meets twice a month to review the architectural designs of significant buildings and developments proposed for the city.

UDARP usually meets at the Planning Department’s Phoebe Stanton Conference Room on the 8th floor of the Benton Building.

Today, the public session was to be held at the 7th floor DOT conference room.