Salaries for the Baltimore County executive, council members and the county’s head administrator will increase by roughly 10% after Baltimore County Council members approved a pay raise for future county councils and top county officials. The council also voted by a 5-2 margin to hike a cap on pension benefits for council members to 70% of their averaged final compensation, up from 60%. Although council members had considered removing the cap entirely, Democratic councilmen Julian Jones, Izzy Patoka and Tom Quirk, and Republicans David Marks and Wade Kach instead voted to raise the cap on pensions paid to council members 55 and older who served at least one term.

A long list of urgent needs sits before Christopher Shorter as he leads Baltimore’s executive team through a weekly Zoom leadership meeting. A city report on how local tax credits are both inefficient and unfair will publish soon: What solutions are available? Residents are reporting that squeegee kids are scamming motorists via Cash App: How can leadership help victims and prevent future thefts? The city is digitizing payroll and expense reports: How will workers be onboarded? The wide-ranging challenges all fall to Shorter, who as Baltimore’s first ever Chief Administrative Officer has the gargantuan task of making the city more efficient.

If you ask her, how she started making neon lights was a happy accident. Selena Carter was working in the Built Environment Applied Research Lab at Morgan State University, learning how to laser cut plywood. One day, she came across a piece of slime green-colored fluorescent acrylic in the lab and started thinking about how something like that would look lit up. After several Amazon purchases, trips to Home Depot, broad discussions about electricity with her father, and a lot of experimenting, she made her neon first sign. It took almost a year and many more signs after that to perfect her practice, she said.

For almost one hour on Tuesday, Ivan Bates, who’s set to become the next state’s attorney in Baltimore, reflected on the primary campaign and answered questions about his future plans at an event at Goucher College in partnership with the Great Baltimore Committee. Bates, 54, of Locust Point, defeated the two-term incumbent, Marilyn Mosby, in the Democratic primary on July 19. He’s running unopposed on Election Day. Sharon Schreiber, chief operating officer of the Greater Baltimore Committee, and Mileah Kromer, director of the Sarah T. Hughes Center for Politics at Goucher College, moderated a Q&A session and took several additional questions from the audience.

Baltimore City officials are in the process of setting up a new state-mandated police accountability board tasked with weighing in on policy discussions and appointing members to a smaller disciplinary committee that will investigate citizen complaints. Applications for the board are due Friday. The city is acting later than other jurisdictions, largely because it was slowed by a prolonged fight in Annapolis that left many criminal justice advocates dissatisfied with how the new oversight group is taking shape. The effort has also been beset by other issues, including a disorganized application process and limited outreach efforts that have drawn only modest interest, a lack of clear details on how the board and its accompanying committee will function, and a sprawling 17-member structure that could prove difficult to organize.