Around Maryland

Maryland’s agriculture secretary was charged on Thanksgiving for illegally hunting waterfowl in Dorchester County, according to Maryland Natural Resources Police. Police charged Joseph Bartenfelder for hunting wetland or upland game birds “with the aid of bait or on or over any baited area,” which carries a minimum $500 fine and a maximum of $1500 for a first offense. Lauren Moses, public information officer for Natural Resources Police, could not say whether this was Bartenfelder’s first charge.

A nine-month grace period on late fees for video tolls in Maryland comes to an end Thursday, the Maryland Transportation Authority announced Monday. The agency urges customers to check their accounts for unpaid video tolls before the $25 late fee kicks back in. Since the grace period was instated in February, MDTA waived $137 million in late fees for about 756,000 drivers and businesses that have paid their outstanding video tolls, the agency said.

One person rescued from a small plane that slammed into a Maryland power line tower was released from a hospital Monday as federal investigators launched a probe into the crash. The crash in suburban Montgomery County outside Washington led to a complex, hours-long rescue operation, caused power outages to about 120,000 homes and businesses and prompted the state’s largest school district to cancel classes.

When a plane crashed into a power line tower in Gaithersburg on Sunday evening, Montgomery County Public Schools announced that night all of its schools would be closed Monday due to ongoing power outages. But power was restored in all of the system’s impacted school buildings hours before classes would have started. Still, schools remained closed.

Pastor Marvin McKenstry Jr. waited for more than an hour at his West Baltimore church, but the young man he was supposed to meet did not show. “He was spinning us for a minute,” recalled McKenstry of the young man who told them he was waiting for a Lyft ride at first but never made it to the church. McKenstry, who is pastor of the Victory House Worship Center, decided to go find the man in Penn North. McKenstry and two outreach workers from the nonprofit Youth Advocate Programs met with the man to encourage him not to engage in violence and instead to participate in the city’s violence intervention program, known as the Group Violence Reduction Strategy.

Cheese lovers can now find Firefly Farms goat cheeses in grocery store chains, but when Mike Koch and Pablo Solanet started their business in 2002, they were operating on a very small scale and doing everything themselves. “We started in the way that a lot of cheesemakers do on a farmstead on our property,” said Koch, describing the first operation in Garrett County, Maryland, as a microbusiness. “Pablo was a fulltime goatherd,” Koch said with a laugh. Their cheeses were sold at farmers markets across the D.C. area, and Koch said they marked their first full month in business that year with “just shy of $700 of sales for the month.” Now, Koch told WTOP, “between the retail business and the manufacturing business, it looks like 2022 will finish a little over $4 million” in business.