Andrea Oliver has always taken issue with how society perceives stay-at-home moms. “The misconception of stay-at-home moms is, you’re very free. You’re only running errands and taking care of your child,” she said. “Some people are thinking that if you’re stay-at-home, you don’t have a skill to contribute to society or make money.” That’s why Oliver, a resident of Bel Air in Harford County, launched a nonprofit aimed at helping single and stay-at-home moms use their parenting skills, from cooking to crafts, to start a business or side hustle. 

After two years of a temporary provision to allow remote voting in the U.S. House, the top 36 users of the proxy voting system are all Democrats, though Republicans have also taken advantage of it. Proxy voting was meant to keep crowds of House members smaller and thereby limit the spread of COVID-19, back in the early days of the pandemic. The first proxy votes were cast on May 27, 2020.

Marriott International says it’s going to suspend all of its operations in Russia amid the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The Bethesda-based hotel operator, which has operated in Russia for 25 years, said Friday that it has decided that newly announced U.S., U.K. and EU restrictions will make it impossible for the company to continue to run or franchise hotels in the Russian market. Marriott previously announced in March that it was closing its corporate office in Moscow and pausing the opening of upcoming hotels and all future hotel development and investment in Russia.

Maryland’s legal community is preparing for the seismic changes to landlord-tenant cases that will come with the impending arrival of access to counsel in evictions. The statewide program is set to launch in the coming years after Maryland lawmakers passed legislation in the 2022 General Assembly session to fund legal representation for low-income renters facing eviction. In some parts of the state, variations on an access to counsel program are already underway. Baltimore County, for example, offers day-of assistance to tenants in need of legal guidance.

The Hogan administration has launched the first steps to recoup roughly $220 million in funds from Maryland’s mental health and addiction treatment providers. The recoupment of these funds is unfair and dangerously destabilizing to Maryland’s public behavioral health system. The Hogan administration selected Optum as the vendor to manage the state’s Administrative Services Organization, which pays claims for publicly funded mental health and addiction treatment. Optum’s claims processing system launched in 2020 and promptly failed, causing MDH to issue advances – or estimated payments – for a seven-month period that overlapped the disruption and chaos caused by the onset of COVID-19.

When Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. pulled the plug on the Red Line in 2015, he slammed the long-planned Baltimore project, calling it a “wasteful boondoggle.” The nearly $1 billion in federal funding that Maryland had secured to build the rail line was returned to the U.S. Treasury for use elsewhere. Seven years later, the Maryland Transit Administration has unveiled a new set of transit options that would serve the Baltimore region in similar ways. The agency hopes the public will study the options and offer comments.

The Maryland Department of the Environment may still impose upon counties stormwater pollution-prevention standards more stringent than those called for under the federal Clean Water Act, the state’s top court ruled Wednesday in rejecting Queen Anne’s County’s argument that the court should overturn its similar 2019 decision. Citing its earlier ruling as binding precedent, the Court of Appeals said MDE acted within its Clean Water Act authority when it issued a permit holding the county responsible for stormwater runoff to the Chesapeake Bay not only from the county’s Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems – known as MS4s – but from natural “nonpoint” sources such as parking lots and fields.

The members of the Baltimore City Council kicked off a week of budget hearings Tuesday with inquiries about the city’s American Rescue Plan spending, a topic that the group has scrutinized repeatedly. Over the course of several hours, council members questioned whether any of the city’s backlogged or stalled services will be restored by the funds, expressed concern about the various agencies that are handing out the money and pressed for answers about how the remaining money will be spent.

A citizens group called the Livable Frederick Coalition has been formed in opposition to the proposed Sugarloaf Treasured Landscape Management Plan. That document calls for rezoning almost 20,000 acres from the Monocacy National Battlefield to the border with Montgomery County to prevent it from being developed. “They downzoned almost 20,000 acres of land, removed some employment and commercial zoning on the west side of I-270 at Maryland 80,” says Rick Weldon, President and CEO of the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce. “Something like 600 acres that could be used for jobs and economic opportunity.”