Maryland Democratic Party Chair Ken Ulman recently joined Center Maryland’s The Lobby to discuss becoming party chair and 2024. You can watch the full interview on our new YouTube page, Center Maryland TV.

When Gov. Wes Moore packed up and moved from his North Baltimore home to the governor’s mansion in Annapolis this time last year, he left with a promise to his adopted hometown. The health of Maryland’s future was contingent on the success of its largest city, and — after eight years of Baltimoreans often feeling cast aside by his predecessor — he’d be investing heavily in everything from the city’s lagging public transportation system and under-resourced law enforcement to its vacant homes and struggling businesses.

Marylanders beware. When members of Congress returned to work earlier this month, they had the chance to avoid a partial government shutdown on Saturday. And instead of doing the hard work needed to pass a long-term bipartisan deal, Congress, once again, resorted to a temporary extension. Our state is home to roughly 140,000 federal workers. That number does not include federal contractor workers (there are no available estimates for how many of these workers live in Maryland).

Maryland Secretary of Agriculture Kevin Atticks told the Rotary Club of Frederick on Wednesday afternoon about challenges farmers face and what he envisions for the future of agriculture. The department’s main goal, he said, is to make sure farmers can grow what they want, produce and process their food, and sell it. But there are barriers and pressures for farmers, he said. It’s more expensive to farm in Maryland and there are more regulations for farmers because of the need to protect the Chesapeake Bay, he said.

 

The Wes Moore-for-president talk started before his inauguration a year ago. Barely a month into his term, a top House leader had to tell Democratic members of Congress at a Baltimore retreat that the “Wes Moore selfie line” needed to sit down so that President Biden could speak. All year, attention followed the lone Black governor of a U.S. state, a new-to-politics politician, whose charisma overshadowed obvious minor defeats. Rapper LL Cool J played at his birthday party; famed portrait photographer Annie Leibowitz captured him for Vogue.

My very first job, as a fresh-faced 14-year-old, was for The Baltimore Sun. Notice that I said “for” and not “at.” In my several months of employment, I never made it inside the then-Calvert Street newsroom. My task was not the delivery of stories as a writer but the literal delivery of the newspaper in which those stories appeared. Every morning, I got up before the sun to distribute The Sun as a papergirl, lugging heavy bundles of papers into my mom’s car so she could drive my sister and me around Northwood in the dark.

As Brooke Lierman’s first year as comptroller comes to a close, the AFRO reflects on her accomplishments and goals as Maryland’s chief financial officer and general accountant. In 2023, the Comptroller’s Office of Maryland processed more than $2.7 million in tax returns and sent out $1.8 million in refunds valued at more than $2.25 billion.

The Western Maryland Democratic Summit is an annual political rite of spring — or, occasionally, the fall — that draws scores of candidates, officeholders, activists and party stalwarts to the Rocky Gap Casino & Resort outside Cumberland. One of the most popular aspects of the two-day event is a straw poll that comes near the end, in which summit attendees express their preferences for various offices soon to be on the ballot.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Donte Futrell, Willow Overly and Tavon Powell strolled around the hills of Patterson Park with watchful eyes. Dressed in matching khaki green uniforms, the park rangers inspected a fallen tree, filed a maintenance request, and reminded people that dogs must be leashed at all times while in the park. The three are part of relaunched park ranger program put in place three years after a damning report by the Baltimore Office of the Inspector General led to the firing of two Baltimore Recreation and Parks Department employees and brought scrutiny to the park ranger program.

Frederick County’s state delegation is moving ahead with a bill proposing a new approach for increasing the salary of Frederick County’s sheriff — despite a senator’s doubts that it can pass. The county’s delegation voted 9-4 on Friday morning to redraft a bill by Sen. Karen Lewis Young, a Democrat from District 3, as a bill from the overall delegation. Lewis Young unsuccessfully requested to table the bill, saying she didn’t believe it would succeed.