Around Maryland

Resort planners last week got a better understanding of tourism data as they look to update Ocean City’s comprehensive plan. Last Wednesday, the Ocean City Planning and Zoning Commission invited Tourism and Business Development Director Tom Perlozzo to participate in a work session for the comprehensive plan update. City Planner Bill Neville said Perlozzo’s knowledge of tourism data would assist commission members as they begin to update the planning document.

The Graduate School at Hood College is launching a new doctoral program in counselor education and supervision beginning this fall, the first-ever doctoral program offered at Hood. The program, which is based on guidelines set by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP), will train counselors, supervisors and counselor educators at the highest level.

Montgomery County Public Schools saw a more than 500% increase in legal fees this fiscal year compared to last, according to a December report from the district. The school system spent $487,735 on legal fees during FY24, the report showed — a 548% spike from the previous fiscal year, when the district reported spending a total of $75,191 on such costs.

Baltimore County Animal Services got a call early this month about a family that was being evicted. Workers went and collected a dog, cat and turtle. Already at the county-run shelter was a gentle, silver-blue pit bull mix named Storm Ray who was surrendered with her mother after their family moved somewhere that didn’t allow pets. The mother soon got adopted, leaving her daughter behind.

When Prince George’s County police chief Malik Aziz took over in 2021, he inherited a department facing nationwide attention after an officer fatally shot a handcuffed man, a lawsuit alleged systemic racial discrimination in how it hired and promoted officers, and a loss of confidence from the local NAACP in county law enforcement leadership.

Several stakeholders expressed concerns over the lack of school funding in the Harford County Public School superintendent’s proposed $660.9 million operating budget for the 2025 fiscal year during a public comment session Thursday evening. The meeting, held at the Board of Education building, comes nine days after Superintendent Sean Bulson presented his operating budget to the board members.

Carroll County will continue using a part-time traffic engineer consultant, which the government has been forced to do since March 2020 because it has been unable to find a full-time employee to fill the position. The Board of Carroll County Commissioners unanimously approved Thursday a contract renewal for a part-time traffic engineer with Wallace Montgomery at a cost not to exceed $52,000.

University leaders and state lawmakers have called for the legislature to require public deliberations and decisions for contested academic program proposals to keep Maryland in line with a recent settlement for underfunding HBCUs for decades. In a set of roughly two dozen recommendations approved Friday, a work group of school leaders and lawmakers also pushed for the Maryland Higher Education Commission, which establishes statewide policies for public and private colleges and universities, to clean up and regulate the program approval process.