Around Maryland

The Public Service Enterprise Group, an energy company based in New Jersey, plans to build a new 500,000-volt transmission line across parts of Frederick, Baltimore and Carroll counties as part of updates to the regional power grid to accommodate growing power needs. The project, also called the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP), will be about 70 miles long.

The organizers behind a much-anticipated ballot question asking voters to slash the city’s property tax rate submitted more than 23,000 signatures Thursday, more than double the number needed to place the question on the ballot. The proposed question would ask voters to cut the city’s property tax rate from 2.248% to 1.2% over seven years. After that, the rate would be capped.

The Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts is working with the city to finalize their contract ahead of BOPA’s flagship event later this summer. Interim board chair Andrew Chaveas said during a special board meeting that due to prolonged negotiations with the city, BOPA missed a deadline to submit its contract to the city’s spending board, which has to approve it.

Casi O’Neill works at the heart of Maryland’s youth legal system, but she rarely does her job. If she did, the specially trained social worker hired by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender would be assessing the complex needs of children charged with low- to moderate-level crimes. As a forensic social worker and member of Baltimore’s juvenile division, O’Neill is trained to uncover why a child may have committed a crime in the first place.

A defining feature in the skyline of historic Frederick, Maryland, is in danger of condemnation, but there’s a new effort to preserve Frederick’s oldest spire and the City of Frederick’s clock tower. If you stand at 10 W Church St. and look straight up, you’ll see the stone face of Trinity Chapel topped with a wooden superstructure housing church bells, and above that, the clock.

Eight crew members of the Dali will be allowed to leave the country, after attorneys representing the city reached an agreement with the ship’s owner to ensure crew would be available for lawsuit-related interviews. The massive container ship crashed into the pylon of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the early morning hours of March 26. Six men died when the bridge collapsed into the water, while one person survived the fall.

A decade of conflict and tension between Republican county executives and the Republican-dominated Wicomico County Council came to a boil Tuesday, as the council voted 5-2 for a ballot referendum asking voters to amend the county’s charter to do away with the elected executive — just two decades after that office was created.

Down among the rumpled, sandy hills of Millersville lies a secret stream. The rivulet is unseen by the drivers of 112,000 cars and trucks passing every day on Interstate 97. Farmers, home builders and highway engineers carved centuries of careless decisions into it. Choking on the muck they unleashed, the stream sent a brown plume into the Severn River with every passing storm.