Around Maryland

The town will pursue a partnership with a local company to co-produce a monster truck event scheduled for next fall. On Tuesday, Ocean City Special Events Director Frank Miller presented the Mayor and Council with a request to partner with The Metal Shop, a Delmar-based business, to co-produce the first annual Monsters of Metal Beach Brawl. Scheduled for Oct. 18-20, Miller said the event would fill a vacant weekend on the special events calendar and offer a family friendly activity that would benefit both the organizer and the town.

The Baltimore City Public School System saw improvement in the number of schools that scored a three-star grade or above on Maryland’s school performance rating system, according to 2022-23 data released Wednesday. The Maryland Report Card grades individual schools on a one-to-five-star scale. Over a third of city schools, about 35% of its 148 schools, scored a three or above. The district is the only one in the region that saw more schools gain stars than lose them over last year, and BCPSS has more improved schools, by number and percentage, than any of the other school system in the state.

Staff at a youth detention center in Baltimore County systemically raped boys incarcerated at the facility, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The civil complaint and request for a jury trial center on the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School near Loch Raven, where 37 victims, now men between 30 and 66 years old, allege sexual abuse from the 1970s through 2009. The lawsuit was filed by attorneys from law firms Levy Konigsberg and Brown Kiely on Wednesday morning in Baltimore City Circuit Court against the State of Maryland and the Department of Juvenile Services under the Child Victims Act.

Light Rail service remains suspended Wednesday after the Maryland Transit Administration announced it would be shut down indefinitely for inspections and repairs. Meanwhile, MTA administrator Holly Arnold appeared before the Maryland Board of Public Works at a meeting. Comptroller Brooke Lierman asked her about several issues including the outage. “It is not a result of the budget actions in the past week. We were doing the overhaul and making sure we had been maintaining the system in a state of repair for the life of the vehicles.

Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld and other officials have sounded the alarm this year over the long-term health of the well the state taps for funding transportation — as Marylanders hop in more electric and fuel-efficient vehicles over gas guzzlers, the state has brought in less revenue from the gas tax factored into the price at the pump. Last week, Wiedefeld announced his office would be cutting more than $3 billion worth of funding from the state transportation budget it sends to lawmakers for signature, citing declining revenues and increasing costs.

Approximately 9 million lead pipes carry drinking water across the country, according to estimates from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Under a newly proposed rule, cities and other jurisdictions will be required to replace all service lines made out of the hazardous material within 10 years — but first, they have to find where they are. And that’s where you come in. Baltimore is among the cities asking homeowners to test their own pipes for lead and complete an online survey with their results, as it races to complete a required inventory of its pipes.

Baltimoreans seeking more bold and decisive action from city leaders got what they asked for Monday when a coalition of three disparate city entities united on a single issue for the first time in over 30 years. The Greater Baltimore Committee, joined by Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration and BUILD Baltimore, an interfaith community organizing group, released a “landmark” plan to remediate the city’s stock of vacant and abandoned housing, a conundrum it has faced for more than a generation.

The rail car that experienced an electrical fire recently, triggering the suspension of Baltimore’s entire light rail line last week, had received a scheduled rehabilitation prior to the incident, Maryland’s top transit official said Tuesday. Holly Arnold, the administrator of the Maryland Transit Administration, said the rail car flagged for safety reasons was among 49 that had gotten a so-called “midlife overhaul.”

The house at 1113 North Carrollton Ave. is like many you see traveling the veins of the city and moving away from the spine of Jones Falls, and it tells a story of Baltimore. The two-story brick rowhouse in Sandtown-Winchester is a few blocks away from the Billie Holiday Statue on Pennsylvania Avenue, once a thriving entertainment district for African American people, dubbed the “Harlem of Baltimore.”