Business

Booz Allen Hamilton announced Tuesday it has opened a new Pax River Mission Systems Integration Facility (MSIF) in the St. Mary’s County city of California, expanding upon the firm’s specialized engineering ecosystem of resources to tackle growing client challenges across the Department of Defense (DOD). Booz Allen will celebrate the opening of this new facility with a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday.

Bird, one of the e-scooter brands found throughout Baltimore over the past year, is no longer permitted to provide rides in the city. The dockless vehicle company was axed in the Baltimore Department of Transportation’s latest round of permits, which allow two other e-scooter brands — Spin and LINK by Superpedestrian — to continue operating through June 2024.

At the height of the pandemic, the co-owners of Diamondback Brewing Co. in Locust Point signed a deal with Legends Limited, giving them a one-stop shop for distribution and a wide reach across the state. Colin Marshall and Tom Foster had experienced working with multiple distributors to sell their beers and wanted out. So, they paid half of $24,000 to exit their contract with Wantz Distributors in Hagerstown.

The Washington County Commissioners sent a proposal to update the definition of a convenience store in the county’s zoning ordinance back to the Planning Commission after a lengthy public hearing Tuesday. The proposed zoning text amendments would change the definition of a convenience store to eliminate the size restriction, which is currently 5,000 square feet — including areas for gas pumps. That restriction “is a big problem,” civil engineer Fred Frederick, president of Frederick, Seibert and Associates, told the commissioners.

The longtime owner of a 1960s-era garden apartment complex in downtown Bethesda has proposed to redevelop it as a new, much denser apartment tower, adding to a growing trend of similar residential projects in the area. A partnership of the Kossow and Gelman families — of Kossow Management Corp. and The Gelman Cos., both real estate firms — has owned the 84-unit, roughly 72,000-square-foot Battery Lane Apartments at 4861 Battery Lane since 1984.

Baltimore entrepreneur Michael Saunders can’t wait to open Matriarch Coffee in a long-vacant space in Harborplace’s Pratt Street Pavilion this fall — and hopes the shop will be part of the beleaguered retail center’s future. Saunders and his partners have entered a deal to open the coffee shop in October in 600 square feet of the former M&S Grill space on the first floor of the nearly vacant pavilion. MCB Real Estate, which is redeveloping Harborplace, has a licensing deal with Matriarch, a Baltimore County coffee roaster that uses beans from the African country of Rwanda.