Around Maryland

After two years of major construction, the nonprofit Maryland Food Bank hopes to serve as a central point in the state for hunger relief efforts and expand its culinary job training program as it pushes for increased community efforts during national Hunger Action Month. Community members who work for the organization, helped support the cause or directly benefited from the food bank’s assistance gathered last week to celebrate the completed remodel and look towards the next chapter for the nonprofit’s hunger relief efforts.

A truck driver who fatally struck a State Department employee riding her bike in Maryland — shortly after the diplomat had returned from a presumably more dangerous posting in Ukraine — pleaded guilty to a traffic offense Monday and was fined $2,000. Santos Reyes Martinez, 52, admitted in court to causing the death of Sarah Langenkamp 13 months ago when he turned his flatbed building supply truck into a bike lane along River Road in Bethesda.

“We are trying to be as fiscally responsible as we can, given that we are already set up with a limited budget,” said Elizabeth Marchetta, executive director of food & nutrition services for the Baltimore City Public Schools System. Since the start of the pandemic, the school system has seen higher food costs across all sectors, said Monique Rolle, BCPSS’s manager of meal planning and procurement. Their biggest jumps in expenses have been from meats and grains.

Carroll County sheriff’s deputies will soon have another tool available to monitor speeding drivers on county roads. The Board of Carroll County Commissioners approved a request from Carroll County Sheriff Jim DeWees earlier this month to purchase 10 solar-powered speed signs at a cost of $52,135 from All Traffic Solutions, in Chantilly, Virginia. The signs detect and display vehicle speed as drivers approach them, and work as a traffic-calming device to make drivers aware that they are driving at speeds above posted limits.]

Despite rising hospitalizations and case numbers of COVID-19, the federal global health crisis is officially over. That said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are looking to create a research and development network to better counteract future outbreaks and emerging disease. According to a CDC announcement Friday, the federal health agency awarded $262.5 million to 13 recipients in the public, private and academic sector, including the Maryland-based Johns Hopkins University, as part of the new Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling Network (OADMN).

The University of Maryland’s law school announced Sunday it is launching a center focused on racial justice in Baltimore and beyond, an attempt to align itself with Baltimore’s history and current challenges with racial inequality. Named after the law school’s first Black tenured professors, Larry Gibson and Taunya Banks, the Gibson-Banks Center for Race and the Law will “re-imagine and transform institutions and systems of racial and intersectional inequality, marginalization, and oppression,” the center’s newly named director Michael Pinard wrote in an open letter.

The leadership at Frederick Municipal Airport believe it is well past time to highlight their facility as a valuable community hub. They are doing so through their first-ever Festival of Flight: Meet Your Airport open house, which will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sept. 30. The event will include aircrafts on display, local vendors, airport employee and instructor talks, kids activities and food trucks. Attendance is free to the public, and the event will be held rain or shine.

The City of Annapolis received a $224,000 grant from the Maryland Department of Transportation to begin designing a bike path that will connect downtown to Quiet Waters Park. The announcement of the grant, from the department’s Kim Lamphier Bikeways Network Program, came Monday, two days before the city announced that an electric trolley would begin running in Eastport to popularize public, environmentally-conscious transportation in the city.