The newly remodeled Dollar General store in Blue Ridge Summit helped the company surpass 5,000 locations selling fresh produce, a milestone reached in late January. The store at 15038 Buchanan Trail East now sells produce in addition to its traditional products. The Blue Ridge Summit store joins three others in Franklin County, Pa., as well as five in Washington County, Md., carrying the top 20 fresh items typically sold in traditional grocery stores.
In his previous three bids for office, Baltimore mayoral candidate Thiru Vignarajah has run financially competitive campaigns, some costing upward of $1 million, fueled by donations from some of the region’s most well-funded business executives and community leaders. The families of local real estate leader John Luetkemeyer, Baltimore Sun owner and Sinclair Chairman David D. Smith and Baltimore Orioles Chairman and CEO John Angelos are among those who have backed his past efforts, in addition to over 100 more who supported with maximum contributions or donated to a PAC backing Vignarajah.
There’s insomnia. Frantic group texts. Obsessively reloading websites. It’s summer camp sign-up time, and we parents are stressed out right now. The good news is there are a dizzying number of camps to sign up for in the Baltimore area. Your child can learn to sail, build a robot, perfect their lacrosse skills, act in a play or gallop across fields on horseback. The bad news is most camps are expensive — sending our three kids to a premium camp for two weeks would be like taking out a second mortgage. And the logistics are overwhelming.
They have been perhaps the most talked-about candidates to replace U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., who is retiring. While they both announced their candidacies last May, U.S. Rep. David Trone and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks both filed with the Maryland State Board of Elections last week to run in the upcoming Democratic primary. The Maryland primaries are scheduled May 14.
I applaud Gov. Wes Moore for introducing mental health legislation (Senate Bill 453 and House Bill 576) to establish assisted outpatient treatment in Maryland to help save the lives of our loved ones with SMI. Unfortunately, it is too late to save my beloved son, Ben, who had serious mental illness, and tragically died on Dec. 8, 2023, at the age of 35. On Dec. 4, four days before Ben’s death, he was found unconscious from an anoxic brain injury on a Baltimore street without identification and admitted as a John Doe to the same hospital where he had recently, and voluntarily, received psychiatric treatment for a month. He was discharged on Nov. 27.
The recent commentary published in Maryland Matters attacking the ability of farmers to install solar panels on their farmland is deserving of condemnation after a fact check. The lead author is the PR person for the massive poultry industry and appears to be worried that farmers choosing to augment their farm income with solar arrays may lead to less land to grow more chickens and grains to feed them.
The Maryland Homeowner Assistance Fund represented a lifeline for low-income residents at risk of losing their homes. The fund officially spent or allocated all the $185 million it was provided by the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development to assist homeowners with mortgages, reverse mortgages, homeowners insurance, water bills, property taxes and home ownership association fee defaults.
Shortly before an abrupt two-week shutdown for safety reasons, the Baltimore region’s light rail service experienced something novel — the single largest month-to-month jump in ridership since 2019. But it wasn’t because droves of people suddenly decided to hop on board last November. The Maryland Transit Administration had just changed how it counted ridership on the single north-south line starting that month, believing the previous method led to significant undercounting.
As the matriarch-in-charge of Faidley’s Seafood, Damye Devine Hahn, is a natural expert on Maryland crabs, and an expert, by necessity, of bureaucracy and logistics. “It’s more than complicated,” she said of the odyssey of opening their new restaurant. “It’s ridiculous.” On a recent afternoon, Hahn, who studied marine biology in college, stood at one of Faidley’s 1950s-era counters a few strides from her makeshift office, which is crammed into a corner by the entrance next to a pallet of saltine crackers used to make her restaurant’s famous crab cakes.
Recent legislation proposed by Gov. Wes Moore and leaders of the Maryland General Assembly that directly contradicts the progressive juvenile crime agenda of the Juvenile Services Secretary Vincent Schiraldi highlights the issues that arise when major political appointees are woke, misguided and too soft on crime. After an enormous amount of public pressure, leadership in the Maryland General Assembly and Governor Moore have recently introduced new legislation with the goal of ensuring that children who commit crimes are held accountable for their actions and that they are rehabilitated to an extent to which they can become productive members of society.