Business

A lunchtime market returns to downtown Baltimore, featuring small businesses through September. Many major American cities, including Baltimore, continue to struggle in a post-pandemic world to get people interested in coming back downtown. So, the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore is doing its part to encourage people to visit downtown with the opening of the Pratt Street Market.

Neil Meltzer, president and CEO of LifeBridge Health, was appointed chair of the Advisory Panel on Outreach and Education (APOE), a federal health care advisory committee to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Meltzer will begin his term as chair in June.

A new coworking space with over 90 offices has opened in Columbia with the goal of attracting Howard County entrepreneurs who are tired of the commute to Baltimore or Washington, D.C. The 20,400-square-foot space at 8865 Stanford Blvd. will be the first Venture X location in Maryland and has already signed leases with 28 companies in industries including fitness, psychotherapy, clothing design and cybersecurity, franchise owner Dimitrios Topaltzas said during Wednesday’s grand opening.

Joe Benny’s will close this spring after nine years of serving focaccia-style pizza out of its tiny shop on High Street in Little Italy. The restaurant will close at either the end of May or “very early June,” owner Joseph Gardella said in an emotional video posted to social media on Thursday afternoon. Gardella said his business model relied on him being in the restaurant all the time but “without a kitchen, without a staff, it just made things challenging at times, very stressful to say the least.”

Ever since Baltimore officials chose a team to redevelop 18 city-owned properties along Howard, Lexington and Fayette streets, the $100 million project has been characterized as a mixture of historic preservation and new construction. Next week, the developers will meet with Baltimore’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) to see which properties the panel will allow them to alter or tear down to make way for their project, called The Compass.

White House economists said in a new analysis released Wednesday that an extended breach of the nation’s borrowing limit could wipe out more than 8 million jobs and cause “severe” economic damage, as lawmakers run out of time to resolve the fiscal impasse. In the report, the White House Council of Economic Advisers compared the potential economic impact of a debt ceiling breach to the 2008 Great Recession, in which economic growth contracts sharply and unemployment surges.

The signing of legislation legalizing cannabis in Maryland marks a mile post in a long strange trip for one Republican former delegate turned marijuana policy advocate. Don Murphy, a former lawmaker from Baltimore County, once sponsored legislation two decades ago that made it possible for someone arrested for possession of the drug to argue it was for medicinal purposes.

When the Maryland Jockey Club and Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association on Thursday announced their intention to race at Laurel this past weekend, a lot of folks scoffed. John Passero’s involvement had only been agreed to April 25, the thinking went. If the dirt track had been in such bad condition then, what could he possibly have accomplished in a day or two to make it safe to race?