Roughly a year after Gov. Wes Moore revived plans for the Red Line, an east-west rapid transit project that would link East and West Baltimore, officials are gearing up to answer the potentially billion-dollar question: Will it be a train or a bus? State officials have said an announcement on whether Baltimore will get roughly 14 miles of new light rail track or dedicated rapid bus lanes will be made before the end of June.
In a county boardroom 4 miles away from the Delaware border, the five members of the Cecil County Board of Education grew increasingly worried about the state of the school system’s finances. Federal pandemic-relief dollars used to prop up the budget the past three years are gone. Inflation and health care costs have ballooned. Starting salaries for teachers need to be raised to $60,000 by 2026.
For anyone concerned about people killed as the result of unnecessary police chases — and given that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data shows such deaths have reached 577 annually nationwide that should apply to all of us — this has been a difficult week. First, it’s clear that police in Maryland (whether county by county or municipality by municipality) don’t have a uniform policy for deciding when it’s reasonable to initiate a high-speed pursuit.
Chasity Vain, one of the entertainers at Frederick Pride and a frequent flyer at Western Maryland drag events, brought the heat to an already stifling-hot afternoon along Carroll Creek on Saturday. As the drag queen danced her way around the amphitheater, the sun reflected off of her sequined headdress and sparking tights as hundreds of people in the crowd flapped multicolored fans and flags in time with the thumping music.
A Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School student is hoping to make an impact for low-income families across the DMV. Lukas Jaskunas, a junior at BCC has been playing the bassoon since the 3rd grade. He plays with his school’s orchestra and with the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestra at the Strathmore. However, he told WUSA9 many of the schools’ instruments were poor quality, making it difficult for aspiring musicians to get better.
On June 5, Montgomery County faced something unusual but not unprecedented in our county: two confirmed EF-1 tornadoes. On June 6, MoCo 360 quoted a Montgomery County emergency management official as saying, “We had no forewarning whatsoever that the storm was coming.” I’m not sure how much warning this official expected to receive, but the county actually was well warned of the June 5 tornado threat, given the nature of tornadoes.
Not long ago, I got in the car, and a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers tune was on the radio. I was hopeful that the next song would be another Tom Petty favorite, since it was Tuesday, and “Twofer Tuesday” has been a staple of rock radio as long as Petty himself. But the next song was Journey, and the song after that wasn’t another Journey song.
The first big batch of bills passed during the 2024 legislative session goes into effect next week. Democratic Gov. Wes Moore signed 1,049 bills in the weeks after the 90-day session, which saw big budgetary issues and a push for changes in the state’s juvenile justice system, adjourned April 8 for the year. Negotiated in the session’s dwindling days and shortly after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed March 26 in Baltimore, the state budget for the next fiscal year goes into effect July 1.
Fabric samples line the walls of the “materials library” in Baltimore-based Under Armour’s innovation labs in a corner of Building 37 on a corporate campus in Baltimore Peninsula. A trend board for spring 2026 stands nearby, meant to inspire with its display of athletic shoe uppers in the latest textiles. The textiles team meets here with product designers to select fabrics for seasonal apparel pieces and hash out fabric ideas.
Baltimore’s shipping channel is fully re-opened after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse and the cargo ship Dali, which knocked the bridge over, will soon head out of town — but the bills from the disaster’s cleanup are starting to come in. Maryland’s Board of Public Works will consider at its next meeting a $50.3 million contract between the Maryland Transportation Authority and Skanska, a Swedish construction company, for “removal, disposal and cleanup of debris” following the collapse of the Key Bridge.