Annapolis Alderman Elly Tierney’s retirement from the Annapolis City Council starts Sept. 1, according to a letter of resignation provided to the Capital Monday. Tierney submitted her resignation to the city last week, according to Mitchelle Stephenson, spokesperson for the city. In May, Tierney announced that she would be retiring from politics to move to Massachusetts with her husband. Tierney, a Ward 1 Democrat, declined further comment on the announcement.
Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer has served as a member of the Baltimore City Council for more than seven years, having handily won the Democratic primary election this year and with no Republican opponents heading into the general election. He serves District 5 in Northwest Baltimore. Among council members, Schleifer is one of the least active sponsors of legislation, but he gets mostly positive reviews on constituent service requests from residents of his district who spoke with The Sun.
Maryland First Lady Dawn Moore — and Tucker, Maryland’s squirmy first dog — appeared this week in the first of a series of public awareness videos from the state’s health department designed to encourage parents and caregivers to make sure their children are up-to-date on their back-to-school vaccinations. Although the Maryland Department of Health typically promotes similar advice to families each fall, the video — posted Thursday on the health department’s social media pages — signifies the start to a larger-than-usual push, health department spokesperson Chase Cook said in an email.
Before dismissing President Biden’s proposals for reforming the Supreme Court as useless, as some already have, it might be wise to consider what Maryland did to instill and keep public confidence in the judiciary. For this we set the Wayback Machine to the mid-1960s, when there was a movement to change the way Maryland dealt with judges accused of incompetence or considered in some way disabled.
Many people in the D.C. area were ecstatic to see downpours this past weekend following a very dry summer start but we have more hills to climb to eradicate our drought. Baltimore-Washington International Airport topped the list with an excess of 3 inches of rain this weekend. Pockets from D.C. to the Allegheny Highlands got the short end of the stick with a half-inch of rain or less. While the grass in spots will green up, keep in mind this drought is far from finished.
Halee Simons, 18, is headed into her junior year at Atlanta’s Spelman College after racking up 32 college credits at the Community College of Baltimore County that she didn’t have to pay for. She earned many of them while still attending Chesapeake High School in Essex, from which she graduated a year early in 2023. “It was very busy and time-consuming,” said Simons, who was dually enrolled in high school and college classes during the school year, as well as during winter and summer breaks.
Facing a limited supply of drinking water, Carroll County’s Westminster plans to draw from a surprising source — its own sewage. This winter, the city of 20,000 will begin constructing a new building at its wastewater treatment plant, where already-treated wastewater will be purified with an array of special membranes and UV light, and sent into the city’s drinking water reservoir — rather than discharged into a creek.
In Maryland’s race for the U.S. Senate, much of the focus has been on how the winning candidate — either Democrat Angela Alsobrooks or Republican Larry Hogan — could tip the balance of power to their party. With that would come a different agenda of priorities from the party in power. Democrats likely would put forward legislation to protect abortion care, limit gun ownership and promote public education.
On a busy weekday afternoon, cars and taxis clog the pickup loop in front of the main entrance of Baltimore’s Penn Station as luggage-carrying passengers squint in the hot sun looking for their rides. If Amtrak gets its way, however, that pickup loop will disappear in a few years. The passenger rail company wants to turn the south side of the station into a pedestrian plaza as part of its ambitious reimagining of the 113-year-old landmark and its surrounding area.
The debate over Maryland’s energy future has been heated, from unwanted high-voltage power lines to a dispute about how best to provide electricity to proposed data centers. But for those of us still on the learning curve, let’s add a vocabulary word: “agrivoltaics.” That’s the term now applied to efforts to merge or “co-locate” farming with solar power. The goal is not for new solar “farms” to displace traditional agriculture but for the two activities to work together.