Business

Talbot Goes Purple this week announced prescription medication collection from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. April 30, in St. Michaels, as part of National Drug Take-Back Day.  National Drug Take-Back Day is an annual collection event sponsored by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA also sponsors a collection event each October; that event saw 372 tons of medications collected across more than 4,900 sites, including two in Talbot County. For this month’s event, Talbot County Sheriff’s deputies will collect unused prescription medications at the St. Michaels Volunteer Fire Department at 1001 South Talbot St. in St. Michaels. Medication collection here in April filled an entire barrel.

Atlantic General Hospital has a new president and CEO, the Berlin-based health system announced. Donald Owrey comes to Berlin from Pittsburgh, Pa., where he spent the past 20 years in various leadership roles with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, AGH stated in a release. Owrey succeeds Michael Franklin, who left the health system in September last year after 17 years.

Foreign investors are hungry for U.S. multifamily real estate, as one local firm has found. Bethesda’s Excelsa Holding has raised its second equity fund from international investors looking to acquire properties in the United States. It took just three months to raise $154 million, a big upswing from its first, $85.6 million round in 2016. With it, Excelsa is looking largely for multifamily deals in Greater Washington and the Sun Belt, though it is willing to consider a wider range of property types, said Khalil Hibri, head of business development.

Compost Crew wants your old food scraps. The Rockville company has cooked up a plan to expand its food waste recycling service in Greater Washington — starting with $5.5 million in new funding. The goal, said CEO Ben Parry, is “to take composting from a niche market to a mainstream service.”

The Klein Family Harford Crisis Center, a public-private mental health and addiction clinic in Bel Air, was allocated $2 million in this year’s state budget, according to a news release from State Sen. J.B. Jennings. “I am keenly aware of the mental health crisis in Maryland,” wrote Jennings, a Republican who represents District 7, in an Aegis op-ed earlier this month. The center, which opened in 2018, provides resources such as a 24-hour crisis hotline and mobile crisis team, scheduled outpatient services and a walk-in urgent care clinic.

When the University of System Maryland Board of Regents first established a fund to invest in early-stage student-, faculty- and alumni-led companies, they funneled $10 million from the system’s operational balance into it.  The hope was that the fund would become evergreen, with the money made from the investments serving to refill the pot. So far, only one of the Maryland Momentum Fund’s 24 portfolio companies has been acquired: an edtech company focused on K-12 vocabulary, called InferCabulary, that was officially bought in March. The fund’s leaders say this is only an issue of timing — the companies are too young to sell, but exit events are expected to begin in the next few years.