Around Maryland

In a parking lot off the Jones Falls Expressway, my eyes started to water from staring into the sun. I could hear it better than I could see it. At five-minute intervals, a low hum sounded and a small Cessna airplane, roughly a mile from the ground, passed overhead. Throughout April, I’d heard from several Baltimore Banner readers that a surveillance plane was flying over West Baltimore.

Citing “financial challenges … faced in recent times,” the owners of Pimlico Race Course notified employees Saturday that they are shutting down the track’s off-track betting (OTB) facility by June 30 — the same date a key agreement for racing operations in Maryland is due to expire. In an e-mail to employees of the Maryland Jockey Club — subsidiary owner of the Pimlico and Laurel Park tracks — Mike Rogers, the company’s’ acting president, wrote that “this decision was not made lightly.”

In his first response to being indicted by a federal grand jury, Frederick County Sheriff Charles “Chuck” Jenkins denied having “any financial incentive or fraudulent intent” when he helped a gun dealer obtain machine guns to rent out to the public. “Sheriff Jenkins’ entire role in this alleged conspiracy, was to sign the letters put before him,” his attorneys wrote in a new court filing.

A hundred employees with the Baltimore City Fire Department are called back to work overtime each day because of the agency’s staffing crisis, fire officials said at a Board of Fire Commissioners meeting this month. Those employees are often firefighters asked to man shifts as paramedics or emergency medical technicians, positions that have been beset by vacancies for years.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office filed twin lawsuits Tuesday against several manufacturers that used PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” in firefighting foam and a host of other consumer products. Filed in Baltimore City Circuit Court, the lawsuits allege that companies such as 3M and E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company were aware of the dangers of PFAS chemicals but continued to sell them to consumers for decades.

Carroll County will induct 16 lieutenants into the new Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services Thursday during a commissioning ceremony that county officials are calling historic. The induction comes three years after the county created its first combination fire and EMS department. “It’s extremely important,” District 5 Commissioner Ed Rothstein said.

A Baltimore County Police trial board found last week that an officer used reasonable force when, according to a county attorney prosecuting the case, he struck an unruly suspect in the head 15 to 20 times while the man was on the floor in 2020. Earlier last week, the same county attorney dismissed a separate use-of-force allegation against the same police officer, David J. Folderauer Jr., who struck a man in the head with a flashlight during an incident in 2021, according to the officer’s defense lawyer.