“Stokes for mayor!” chirps the young woman who answers the telephone at Carl Stokes’ 12th District City Council campaign office in the late morning of July 6. Asked for the candidate, who is running for City Council, the woman takes a phone number and promises to get back to a reporter.

It is, perhaps, an understandable reaction. Just a day earlier, Stokes was running for mayor, not trying to keep the 12th District Council seat he was appointed to in 2010 when it was vacated by Bernard C. “Jack” Young on his appointment to the Council presidency.

“It’s an intern there who is probably not aware,” Stokes says by phone later in the day about the receptionist still answering the phone for his mayoral campaign.

The councilmember’s last-minute entry into the crowded field vying for the 12th, which encompasses the neighborhoods within about a half mile of Greenmount Cemetery on the city’s east side, took the other seven contenders by surprise. It also changes the dynamic of a race heretofore dominated by political newcomers like De’Von Brown.

Brown, a slightly built man with a lilting voice, ushers a reporter into his home at 1722 N. Caroline St.—the house, he pointedly says, that he has lived in since the age of three, his grandmother’s house where he lives with a sister and brothers.

Brown declared his candidacy for the 12th District seat on April 15. The 21-year-old film student at MICA is the youngest of eight candidates. His one brush with fame to date came as a co-star in The Boys of Baraka, the 2005 documentary.

Brown decries the politics as usual that dynastic leadership has produced: “Nothing changed in this district since the ’90s,” he says, pointing across the street at two abandoned three-story rowhouses that bookend an occupied third house. One has empty window frames, and Brown says it’s been that way for nearly a decade.

“I’ve been part of the community. I live here. I know the struggles people go through,” Brown says. “I know what it’s like to have a drug-addicted mother. I know what it’s like to be in foster care, to struggle to keep the lights on.”

Brown walks down his street and points to disheveled yards behind two empty houses, contrasting them with that of a neighbor he calls Miss Ann. “But she’s the one who gets a ticket if there’s an extra trash bag on top” of the can, he says. Brown says he would submit a bill that would give landlords a time frame, say, six months, to get their place fixed up, or they would face fines. But they would not pay property taxes until the renovated units were rented.

Brown pledges to get police to live in the community—or at least know the people there better. He says he would reinstitute twice-weekly trash pickup with savings cut from City Hall—printing fees, for instance. “I want people to think about not just the names” in the 12th District race, he says, “but ask themselves, ‘What have they done for me lately?’”

Jason Curtis thinks: not much. The president of the Mount Vernon Belvedere Association and a downtown hotel manager is uncomfortable just being in the 12th District. He and his midtown neighbors were in the 11th District until this year.

“Politics is never something I thought I would go into until the recent redistricting,” Curtis says. “Knowing there’s nothing we could do about it . . . we said, What are we going to do—me mostly—to make sure we had good representation in the Council?” And thus a candidacy was born.

“As a small-business manager, I understand the concerns of small business,” Curtis says. “We need to retain those small businesses so they can help our employment numbers” by hiring locals. He also wants to bring the crime rate down and impose “special fees and fines and penalties” on vacant “properties that are not being utilized.”

Curtis says he can raise $100,000 to win the seat if necessary and, having spent years immersed in Mount Vernon’s neighborhood politics, he’s keen to campaign in the rest of the district. “You’ve got to learn what people want,” he says. “I need to get out there and continually learn their thoughts, ideas, and opinions.”

Odette Ramos has spent much of the past decade doing just that, and she has done plenty for folks in the district lately, citing restored street lighting on the 1900 block of Cecil Avenue and vacant lot mowing. “I know the city is understaffed,” she says, “but there’s no excuse.”

And that’s a campaign slogan for the 38-year-old Rutgers University-educated consultant to nonprofits who is running her first political campaign. Ramos has perhaps the most organized campaign among the challengers, with colorful signs, a big campaign office on East 25th Street, and regular e-mail blasts to supporters and media. She boasts support from 43rd District state Del. Maggie McIntosh and 14th District Councilmember Mary Pat Clarke. She has spent the past decade learning the political ropes, first as a founder of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, an initiative allied with the city Planning Department to gather data about the strengths and needs of neighborhoods, and later as president of the Baltimore Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Despite Stokes’ entry into the race as an incumbent, “Everyone is still on board,” Ramos says of her supporters. “Certainly it makes it a little bit more challenging, but I have to say he has not ever campaigned in this district, not recently anyway, because he was appointed to the seat.”

> Email Edward Ericson Jr.