Around Maryland

At the first-ever Baltimore Banner panel in Howard County Tuesday night, officials and experts touched on hot topics such as the Zum bus crisis, the consequences of narrowly avoided cuts in the school system’s budget, as well as the county’s lack of affordable housing and plans for the coveted lakefront. The panel featured County Executive Calvin Ball and Bill Barnes, the school system’s superintendent. The event, “Howard County: Unpacking a Dynamic and Visionary Region, by The Baltimore Banner,” took place in Columbia, sandwiched between Merriweather Post Pavilion and The Mall in Columbia. Around 300 people registered for the panel, making it a sold-out event.

Maryland’s Transportation Authority is accepting proposals for a new Key Bridge as they start the process of rebuilding the span over the Patapsco River that is expected to take years. What will a new Key Bridge look like? One proposal from Italian company, WeBuild, shows a cable bridge with its supports away from the main navigation channel for safety.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office created a new website to report hate crimes and bias incidents. Authorities said the online portal is intended to help track hate crimes, identify trends with hate crimes and help officials create recommendations to address such incidents in Maryland. Users can anonymously report incidences of hate and\or bias.

Administrators at a Howard County school are trying to silence Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian students who are speaking up in support of Palestine, the ACLU of Maryland said in a letter Tuesday. The letter, which focuses on River Hill High School, said Principal Robert Motley and Assistant Principal Allison Volinsky are violating district policy and the First Amendment rights of the students.

Crews in the Patapsco River are still cutting and lifting large chunks of what remains of the Francis Scott Key Bridge as they clear the way to restore the full 700-foot-wide channel into the Port of Baltimore. While larger vessels have recently been able to transit cargo into and out of the port through a limited-access channel, heavier lifts are needed to restore traffic back to normal.

With Maryland nearing 1.5 million reported cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, experts are monitoring new variants of the virus that could create a surge in cases in the coming months. Despite its cutesy nickname, health officials say the so-called “FLiRT” variants of COVID-19 seem to be more successful at evading immunity despite previous infections or vaccinations.

Maryland transportation officials are prioritizing speed and experience as they seek bids from private companies to design and build the new Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. The Maryland Transportation Authority, an independent state agency responsible for the state’s eight toll facilities, including the Key Bridge, on Friday sent out a formal solicitation for proposals, calling for completion of the bridge design “as quickly as possible” to pave the way for construction.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for when a city contains more than 13,000 vacant homes and some 20,000 empty lots. Instead, Baltimore’s vast vacant housing landscape has ushered in waves of new ideas — and people, all hoping to slice off a piece of the pie. WaterBottle, a worker-owned cooperative, is one such example.