Frances Miller has been commuting from her Middle River home to Anne Arundel County for years — she used the Francis Scott Key Bridge to get there every Tuesday through Thursday. On her first commute since its collapse on March 26, she accidentally started driving toward the bridge out of habit. With the bridge, her morning trip used to take 30 to 40 minutes.

Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates threw his support behind Sheila Dixon for mayor, just days after going public with a spat with Mayor Brandon Scott. Scott, meanwhile, picked up endorsements from Maryland’s U.S. Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, who he has spent much of the past two weeks with related to their response to the Key Bridge collapse.

Maryland lawmakers approved a plan to rebuild Baltimore’s storied but antiquated Pimlico Race Course and transfer the track to state control in the waning hours of the state’s legislative session on Monday. The measure would use $400 million in state bonds to rebuild the home of the second jewel of horse racing’s Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes.

The Pride of Baltimore II, the replica of a 19th century “Baltimore clipper,” has finally returned to its home dock in Baltimore. The ship had been anchored in Annapolis after the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge left it unable to return home. On Monday, as most people were looking up at the partial solar eclipse, the ship’s crew was given the green light to sail the vessel through one of the alternate channels created to get ships through the wreckage.

Across Baltimore, abandoned buildings tell residents that their neighborhood has no future. Migration out of the city has left the shells of homes — nearly 14,000 of them — to be held by land speculators or in administrative limbo without a clear owner, while they crumble. Baltimore’s population decline from nearly a million in the 1960s to less than 600,000 today both drives our abandoned building crisis, and is driven by it.

Infrastructure projects in Frederick’s proposed fiscal 2025 budget include continuing design work on the intersection of East and All Saints streets in Frederick, as well as looking at traffic signals at several other intersections in the city. The Capital Improvements Program in Mayor Michael O’Connor’s proposed fiscal 2025 budget includes work to construct a new traffic signal at the intersection of East Street and All Saints Street in downtown Frederick, as well as realigning the entrances and exits to the nearby transit center as necessary.

An 82-year-old Baltimore County real estate developer has quietly become one of the top donors in local politics, giving more than $1.3 million to candidates around the region over the past dozen years, a Banner analysis of campaign finance records shows. In this cycle, John “Jack” Luetkemeyer Jr., has directed $300,000 — his biggest single effort to date — to a super PAC supporting Sheila Dixon for Baltimore mayor.

The clock is ticking at the Maryland State House in Annapolis. Maryland lawmakers face a midnight deadline Monday on the final day of Legislative Session 2024, known as Sine Die. While many big ticket items are already on the governor’s desk, some significant pieces of legislation are still up for discussion at the last minute.

 

As state lawmakers move closer to passing new guardrails on the state’s retail electricity marketplace, an opposition army arrived on Friday. The energy giant Constellation sent two dozen trucks to Annapolis, which circled the legislative complex all morning as a few dozen Constellation workers fanned out to urge lawmakers to vote against Senate Bill 1.

A Baltimore company won $150,000 in investment from celebrity investors Mark Cuban and Emma Grede on ABC’s popular “Shark Tank” show. Dawn Myers, the CEO of Richualist, won over the panel with a presentation on Friday about her hair care device, the Mint. After years of research and development, she plans to use the investment to bring the product to a broader market, targeting Black customers with highly textured hair.