Walk through the Old Goucher neighborhood in North Baltimore, and husbands Kelly Cross and Mateusz Rozanski will tell you how several of the tree-lined streets weren’t always filled with such greenery. The couple planted hundreds of trees and took out over 100 tons of concrete in the neighborhood over the past decade.

A distance of less than a mile stands between the condo towers and hotels of Harbor East and the Domino Sugar plant across the Patapsco River, the northern shore representing aspirations of prosperity, the southern shore representing a vanishing past. Baltimore’s waterfront was once the city’s economic engine, producing canned oysters, spices, umbrellas, garments, hats, ships and steel. One by one all of them shut down or moved except for Domino.

After a three-hour hearing Thursday evening, a City Council committee unanimously approved Mayor Brandon Scott’s pick to lead the Baltimore Police Department, longtime veteran Rich Worley. The 6-0 vote culminated a smooth nomination process for the homegrown Worley, who Scott announced as his nominee immediately after former Commissioner Michael Harrison’s abrupt departure and without a national search or input from community residents. The City Council is expected to take a full vote on Oct. 2.

For the first time since 2016, the Baltimore Orioles are postseason-bound. And, with a playoff berth comes playoff merch, as each team gets its own postseason merchandise collection. The Orioles’ collection can be found in numerous places like MLBshop.com, Fanatics and Rally Sports. Among the most popular items, according to Fanatics, is an orange T-shirt that reads “Take October” with the Orioles logo in the center, buoyed by the 2023 MLB postseason logo.

While chief information officer for the Maryland State Department of Education, I oversaw more than $100 million in annual technology spending across 36 divisions and helped local school districts manage 100% remote learning during the pandemic. Data governance was one of the department’s top priorities during the tenure of Superintendent Karen Salmon. The department was required under legislative mandate to develop and implement practices around data governance.

Members of the Baltimore City Council pressed representatives from Mayor Brandon Scott’s office Thursday to forge ahead with plans to convene a workgroup focused on reforming the city’s property tax structure.nHeld by the newly formed Finance and Performance Committee, council members took turns defending the decision to sponsor a resolution calling for the formation of an interdepartmental work group, saying the Scott administration had not moved swiftly enough to deliver on its promises to study the issue.

As Maryland lawmakers hash out whether to again change child conviction laws, the Baltimore area’s top prosecutors want constituents to tell their State House reps one thing. “The email you should send them is ‘juvenile crime is out of control — reverse the Juvenile Justice [Reform] Act,’” Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger told a group of well over 100 listeners during a rare joint Baltimore City-Baltimore County town hall Wednesday night.

Beverly Taylor can’t figure out why her commute has become more congested. When summer ended and schools resumed this fall, her typical 50-minute drive from Bowie to downtown Washington began taking 75 minutes, worse than before the coronavirus pandemic started. “I don’t understand, because downtown is so vacant,” said Taylor, 60, a human resources director at a law firm.

Since starting work for Anne Arundel County government in 2008, Earl “Bud” Reaves, the aptly nicknamed county forester, has been raising concerns to his peers about an overwhelming quantity of invasive vines strangling and killing the tree population. With a push from a concerned resident, Reaves finally has been given the go-ahead to enlist county employees in tackling the problem.

There is legitimate concern about the amount of violence in Baltimore and other parts of Maryland. There is also significant misinformation about that violence. Violent crime increased after the onset of the COVID pandemic across the country, especially in Baltimore. And while the actual increase was bad enough, the fear of violence was exasperated by constant coverage in the traditional press and social media.