Around Maryland

Homeowners in Frederick are concerned about their safety after a tanker crashed and exploded along a busy highway earlier this month. State and local leaders held a meeting Wednesday to hear the concerns of those residents. “It wasn’t good,” Frederick resident Jeff Oranczak said. “It wasn’t good at all.” Oranczak and his wife live along U.S. Route 15 in Frederick, right near where a tanker truck crashed into a tree and exploded on March 4. Firefighters said the truck was carrying flammable liquid.

Residents in Frederick sounded off after a tanker explosion killed a driver and damaged several homes and vehicles earlier this month. Wednesday night, they received a promising response. Frederick City held a community discussion Wednesday night discussing the incident and the steps the city and Maryland are taking moving forward. The biggest issue residents like Lamar Reese brought forward is a lack of barriers between U.S. Route 15 and nearby neighborhoods.

Civil rights attorneys say they haven’t ruled out appealing a Maryland court’s ruling this month in a decades-old lawsuit over the state’s funding for Baltimore City schools. The original 1994 case known as Bradford v. Maryland State Board of Education has ricocheted through the legal system for years, resulting in a consent decree, a local governance overhaul and several attempted funding fixes by lawmakers.

Wholesale price increases in the United States slowed sharply last month as food and energy costs declined, a sign that inflationary pressures may be easing as the Federal Reserve considers whether to keep raising interest rates to fight higher prices. From January to February, the government’s producer price index fell 0.1%, after a 0.3% rise from December to January. Compared with a year ago, wholesale prices rose 4.6%, a big drop from the 5.7% annual increase in January.

The Board of Carroll County Commissioners will get its first look Thursday at a list of the transportation priorities in the county, and like last year, the widening of Route 97 in Westminster tops the list. The county must send its priorities in a letter to the Maryland Department of Transportation by April 1. If approved by the state, funding will be included in the Maryland Consolidated Transportation Program, the state’s six-year capital budget for transportation projects.

Jason Perkins-Cohen will leave his longtime position as director of the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development next week, according to the mayor’s office. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott accepted the Perkins-Cohen’s resignation on Tuesday, which takes effect March 21, according to a news release. MacKenzie Garvin, the office’s current chief of staff, will become the acting director of the mayoral office.

The Maryland Supreme Court will consider whether the state’s Public Service Commission’s oversight of utility companies includes the authority to penalize them for deceptive telephone solicitations. The justices this month agreed to hear SmartEnergy Holding LLC’s challenge to a Maryland Appellate Court ruling that PSC’s authority to protect consumers against “anticompetitive and abusive practices” includes those conducted by phone in violation of the Maryland Telephone Solicitations Act.

The American Civil Liberties Union of D.C. filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. government Tuesday for damages on behalf of a woman who says she was injured by low-flying military helicopters used to disperse protesters in Washington in 2020 during the widespread racial justice demonstrations after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. The ACLU of D.C. filed an administrative complaint in 2020 against the National Guard for the maneuvers, but that case has remained unresolved, said ACLU staff lawyer Michael Perloff.