Around Maryland

The Maryland Court of Appeals is among the nation’s most diverse state supreme courts in terms of the percentage of minority and female judges, according to recently released data. The post Md. high court ranks high in gender, ethnic diversity, report finds first appeared on Maryland Daily Record.

Dora Duncan’s phone line is often busy. As a bilingual community health worker at the Asian American Center of Frederick’s office in the Hillcrest neighborhood, she hears from people every day won how to enroll in health insurance or afford to take their child to the dentist.

Frederick County and city officials were unable Wednesday to reach agreement about the site for a library branch on the west side of the city. Two potential locations are under consideration for the new library branch. One is at 800 Oak St., along Himes Avenue. It’s a 209,000-square-foot facility the county purchased last year after leasing it for a mass COVID-19 vaccination site.

This summer Maryland will impose new restrictions on crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay — including the first-ever limits on how many bushels of male blue crabs watermen can haul each day — in response to a troubling decline in the population of the beloved crustaceans. Regulations issued this week, to be in effect starting in July, will limit commercial watermen to at most 15 bushels a day of male crabs in August and September and will end their harvest two weeks earlier than normal on Nov. 30. And the new rules will tighten existing restrictions on the commercial harvest of female crabs and the recreational harvest, too.

Work to convert the former elementary school of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall into a community center starts this week with a goal to open the $12.5 million facility next July. Interior demolition is underway at the former city public school in Upton that will transform into the Justice Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center at P.S. 103. The center will honor the life, career and legacy of the nation’s first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice who was raised in West Baltimore. He became a civil rights activist and later an associate justice on the Supreme Court from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall died at age 85 on January 24, 1993.

The Harford Community College Board of Trustees has approved a $56 million general operating budget for the coming fiscal year, a $4.3 million increase above the current operating budget. With this budget increase, tuition should remain the same, according to the budget presentation June 14 by Trevor Jackson, vice president of finance and administration at the college. “Given the unpredictable fluctuations in the economic market, we know that finances are a primary concern for many of our students,” said Harford Community College President Theresa Felder. “By freezing tuition rates, students will not realize the additional burden of increased academic costs.”

The prehistoric-looking horseshoe crabs native to the Delmarva Peninsula are on the move for their annual migration down the Atlantic coastline back to Maryland. According to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the peak of the horseshoe crab spawn depends on late spring and early summer high tides, culminating on or around each full and new moon in June.