Business

The Harford County Association of Realtors will host a community-wide shred day on Saturday from 9 a.m.-12 p.m. The event will be held at the association’s office located at 2227 Old Emmorton Road, No. 117, in Bel Air. Members of the public will be able to bring items to be shredded by Chesapeake Shredding. During the event, HarCAR’s Voter Registration Task Force will be registering voters and assisting with any voting needs.

The state is poised to spend $425 million on an extensive renovation of the busiest parts of BWI Marshall Airport. On Wednesday, the state’s spending board will consider a $332.5 million contract with a Bethesda-based construction firm to advance that massive capital improvement project at the Anne Arundel County airport. The contract with Clark Construction Group is the second construction package for the overall project that would connect the airport’s A and B concourses and improve its luggage handling by creating a new security screening system. It is the largest terminal improvement project in the airport’s history, said Jonathan Dean, a spokesperson for BWI. The project was temporarily placed on hold in April 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Law firm Baker Donelson is spearheading an innovative use of empty office space by donating an entire floor at 100 Light Street in Downtown Baltimore for use as a small business incubator. Baker Donelson is partnering with Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program for the incubator, which will be called The Light of Baltimore. The incubator will support 30 small businesses and already 26 companies are confirmed inside the space. The influx of new companies downtown is especially valuable as more and more businesses pivot to remote work or, like Baker Donelson, downsize their space.

An Owings Mills medical device company, IZI Medical Products, will now have new owners from across the pond after a $153.5 million deal. IZI Medical will be a standalone subsidiary within Halma plc, a British conglomerate involved in several “life-saving technology” sectors, from smoke detectors to medical devices. The deal with Halma, a company with a market capitalization over $8 billion, closed on Sept. 30. Halma is not the first firm outside of Maryland to acquire the 90-person medical device company. IZI was acquired by Illinois radiation company Landauer Inc. in 2011, before becoming a portfolio company of private equity firm Shore Capital Partners in 2016.

The Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, struggling to recover from economic hardship brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, made several cuts to staff and student services ahead of the fall semester in an effort to become financially sound again. While many public colleges and universities in Maryland have rebounded and are poised to even exceed pre-pandemic enrollment and revenue numbers, the recovery at MICA hasn’t been as strong as expected, president Samuel Hoi told The Baltimore Banner. Total enrollment for degree-earners, once typically about 2,100, has leveled at about 1,900, Hoi said.

BayFirst Financial Corp. will close three Maryland loan production offices as the company moves to shut down its nationwide residential mortgage lending business. As a result, 20 employees will be laid off, according to a public filing on Maryland’s Work Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) log, which says the layoffs will be effective Nov. 25. The St. Petersburg, Florida-based bank announced in September that it would shutter its residential mortgage lending business after a cool-off in the housing market that began at the start of the year.

Montgomery County’s growing life sciences industry is getting a boost from collaborative efforts between businesses, higher education institutions, nonprofits and government agencies. Life sciences is a top industry in the county. The Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation (MCEDC) reports the county’s more than 300 bio companies attracted nearly $8 billion in investments in 2020. At the end of July 2022, Indeed’s job search site listed nearly 750 biotechnology job openings in the…

A University of Maryland, Baltimore County professor hopes to rapidly speed up the drug approval process, making it easier for drugs to get to market and help patients. In August, Chengpeng Chen earned a five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a new way to model how drugs will impact human organs, starting with the liver. The device would shorten the time it takes to get U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval by providing a more accurate view of how drugs impact the human body than current testing methods.