Around Maryland

Silence. This is what Sean Rose, 33, heard when he clicked his car’s electronic key in his apartment’s garage in Adelphi, Maryland, one morning in early August 2023. He was met with an empty parking spot where his car should have been. He later found out through a security video camera that his 2020 Kia Rio had been stolen.

It’s hard to pinpoint just where it started, but somewhere along the way, lawmakers set their sights on a common culprit for a tidal wave of car thefts: teenagers. City and state officials have launched hearings and called in agencies, law enforcement officials and advocates to scrutinize the laws and look for solutions. Some have wondered if laws that make it harder for police to arrest children could be part of the problem.

Baltimore’s spending board voted Wednesday to approve paying a $3.3 million penalty to the state — a historic fine for pollution that flowed from the city’s poorly maintained wastewater treatment plants and into the Patapsco and Back Rivers. Along with the payment comes a big to-do list for the city, in the form of a court-monitored consent decree, which the city’s Board of Estimates also approved Wednesday.

As the sun shined on Monday in Brunswick, a black veil fluttered while it was pulled off a bronze plaque on a building wall. Engraved on the plaque was the name of a new city building — the Milton E. Frech, Jr. Operations Center. The new $6.8 million building is named after former Frech, a Brunswick police chief who died unexpectedly in his home in Emmitsburg in March 2021.

The Anne Arundel County Board of Education is set to vote on a redistricting plan that will affect more than 6,000 students who attend 48 schools. The school system began hashing out a plan to help balance enrollment almost a year ago. Not long after, it opened the plan to public input. The need to redraw school boundary lines is due to an increase in the number of students, especially in the northern part of the county.

Maryland legislators and audit officials pointed to staffing shortages and a lack of proper accounting at Tuesday’s meeting of the General Assembly’s Joint Audit and Evaluation Committee as the cause for the Maryland Department of Health’s money woes. “This is something that’s clearly been going on for a very long time, and we know the previous administration did not fill or choose to invest in staff. You can’t divorce that from any of these conversations,” said Del. Jared Solomon, a Democrat and the co-chair of the Joint Audit and Evaluation Committee.

Rockville’s ReveraGen BioPharma Inc., a 15-year-old Children’s National Hospital spinout, is preparing for the launch of its neuromuscular disease drug — and sees an opportunity to advance it for other conditions. ReveraGen scored the Food and Drug Administration’s approval in late October for its treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, or DMD, the most common and severe type of muscular dystrophy that plagues young boys with progressive muscle weakness and atrophy.

Fewer than 9,000 Marylanders lost Medicaid coverage last month, the lowest number of terminations since April, when the state began discontinuing coverage on a monthly basis in what’s called the “Medicaid unwinding.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, people were not required to reapply for the low-income federal health insurance program annually, with the goal to insure as many people as possible during the global health emergency.

The Frederick Planning Commission unanimously voted on Monday to reconsider its approval of the Brickworks master plan to review one specific condition for the developer. On Oct. 17, the Planning Commission approved the master plan 3-2 with nine conditions for the developer, Greenberg Gibbons, to meet. The ninth condition required that Greenberg Gibbons work with the Maryland Department of the Environment on a mitigation plan for possible environmental contamination on the property.