Business

Just a month into his first public office, the top media started asking Maryland Gov. Wes Moore if he’s running for president. While it can be hard to deflect the spotlight, Moore insists that he is focused solely on Maryland and Marylanders. One month almost to the day after Moore officially took office, he appeared on “DMV Zone” on Fox5 – a top station in a top-10 national media market, and was asked by anchor Marina Marraco, “You’ve been in office for 23 days and people are already raising your name as a potential Democratic nominee for 2024.

TEDCO, Maryland’s economic engine for technology companies, announced a recent Pre-Seed Builder Fund investment of $150,000 into CyDeploy, a woman- and minority-led startup working to provide businesses with security solutions to improve the overall functionality of their systems. TEDCO’s Builder Fund invests in and provides executive support to Maryland-based technology companies run by entrepreneurs who demonstrate economic disadvantage.

The Walters Art Museum and its employees signed an agreement Monday night that paves the way for a union election this spring, resolving a nearly two-year impasse. The agreement is a win for employees because it will allow about 90 of them to be represented by the labor union of their choice and to form one, large and presumably stronger union instead of two smaller ones.

In November, Maryland became the 20th state to legalize adult-use recreational cannabis. Maryland follows states such as Colorado and Washington, which each legalized in 2012. Medical cannabis became available in Maryland in 2017. “The world of legalized cannabis, it changes daily, and comparing it to what it was in 2014 or 2012, it’s a different world,” said Justin Tepe, a lawyer at Baltimore law firm Goodell DeVries who works with cannabis companies.

Salisbury-based Green Street Housing and Rockville-headquartered TM Associates Development, two of Maryland’s largest affordable rental housing developers, will host a groundbreaking ceremony March 29 at the second and third phases of Slippery Hill in Queenstown. The new construction includes two additional phases to the existing first phase. The first of the new phases will provide mixed-income, mixed-use residential apartment homes. The third phase will provide senior living apartments.

A nonprofit developer will soon file early-stage plans for a sizable new Metro-accessible affordable housing project in downtown Wheaton, involving a land swap with the county government and co-location of a new county arts and cultural facility. Montgomery Housing Partnership Inc., a nonprofit developer and service provider, owns the 1960s-era Amherst Square garden apartments, just east of and adjacent to a vacant publicly owned lot, which property records show the county government acquired from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in 2020.