Around Maryland

Richard Bennett has worked as an usher for the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs since the team’s stadium opened in 2008. In that time, he has seen firsthand both the number of fans and the quality of the Waldorf stadium decline. Bennett saw the largest crowds from 2008 to 2010, but over the past couple of years, he said, attendance has been especially low. “It’s always been a struggle to tell people we’re back,” Bennett said. “That’s why we haven’t seen as many fans since COVID hit.” It’s not just the Blue Crabs, one of six minor league teams in Maryland, that are facing this challenge.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland made an appearance in West Baltimore on Tuesday night for National Night Out, a yearly nationwide event meant to strengthen relationships between residents and police. Garland talked with community members at Wilson & Etting Park in Upton but did not take reporters’ questions. Police officers mingled with young people, who played basketball and jumped rope while snacking on fresh-cut fruit and food truck nachos at the event organized by Central West Baltimore advocacy group No Boundaries Coalition. Garland later continued his visit at a Western District block party in Sandtown-Winchester.

The U.S. Postal Service will release a new stamp in September celebrating the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope. The Forever stamp, which can be pre-ordered starting August 8, features an image of the iconic telescope and its 18 golden hexagonal mirror segments atop a starry background. The image used for the background was taken by scientists operating the telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. It shows the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula, roughly 7,600 light-years away, said Cheryl Gundy, a spokeswoman for the institute. The institute, located on the Johns Hopkins University’s campus, serves as the mission control for the telescope.

As the beginning of the school year approaches, the Baltimore region is facing a high number of teacher vacancies. A presentation at Tuesday’s Maryland State Department of Education board meeting described nearly 2,000 teacher vacancies statewide as of September 2021. Individual school systems such as Baltimore City and Prince George’s County are still reporting high numbers of vacancies as the 2022-23 school year approaches.

The teenage squeegee worker accused of fatally shooting Timothy Reynolds was defending himself and should not face criminal charges, a group of activists joined by the youth’s family insisted on Monday night. Just under two dozen protesters gathered in McKeldin Plaza in the Inner Harbor near the intersection of Light and Conway streets where a confrontation July 7 between a 48-year-old white man wielding a baseball bat and a group of young Black squeegee workers resulted in the Hampden man’s death.

With Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh leaving office in the coming months, survivors of clergy sexual abuse are calling on him to update the public on his office’s investigation of the Catholic Church in Maryland. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests plans a Tuesday news conference outside the attorney general’s Baltimore office to “call for openness and transparency” about the probe.

David Barker did not live to see Anne Arundel County waters become a federal No Discharge Zone, but were it not for his advocacy, it might still be legal for boats to dump sewage into the Severn River. Barker, founding president of the Back Creek Conservancy and a former president of the Severn River Association, died in May at age 77 after contracting the coronavirus. Six weeks later, all navigable rivers in the county, with the exception of the Patuxent River bordering Baltimore County, became a federally recognized “No Discharge Zone.”

Plans for a hotel and conference center in downtown Frederick are expected to come before the city in the fall, the next step in the lengthy process between the city and a local hospitality company. Plans for the project are expected to come before the city’s Planning Commission by October or November, while the city and Plamondon Hospitality Partners work to iron out legal details of the deal.