Business

A 700-acre site in Harford County that has been mired in controversy for years over plans to construct a massive warehouse development could get a new addition: a state-owned horse racing training center. The Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority listed the Mitchell Farm on the Perryman peninsula as one of three potential sites for the new training center in a report released Friday.

“Dry January” has gained popularity as an annual tradition where people voluntarily abstain from consuming alcohol for the entire first month of the year, and now Montgomery County, Maryland, is officially joining the trend. Montgomery County Alcohol Beverage Services (ABS) is promoting the trend, offering discount prices on nonalcoholic beverages in its retail stores.

Berman Enterprises won another key entitlement toward a big mixed-use development in Walker Mill, a project that planners hope will spur additional growth along a Metro corridor that Prince George’s County has long considered an economic development lynchpin. The project, dubbed Glenwood Hills, envisions residential, retail and industrial components spread over 133 presently-wooded acres immediately south of Central Avenue, about two-thirds of a mile east of the Blue Line’s Addison Road Metro Station.

Baltimore’s top officials met last month and went over city spending as though they were ticking items off their weekly grocery list. Funding a community garden? Check. Reimbursing employees for travel costs? Check. Sinking another $1 million into a city-owned hotel that’s been bleeding money for years? Check. When Mayor Brandon Scott floated the possibility of selling the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor at a news conference after the spending board meeting, the idea drew cheers outside City Hall.

A Maryland company’s confidential consumer lists and pricing information are trade secrets and were misappropriated when a group of employees left their jobs for a rival company and brought many of their former clients with them to the new company, the Maryland Appellate Court held. In a reported opinion written by Judge Andrea M. Leahy and filed last month, the Maryland Appellate Court affirmed in part and vacated in part the judgment of the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, finding that Cantwell-Cleary Co. could seek actual damages under its claims for misappropriation of trade secrets and that its former employees had misappropriated the company’s trade secrets.

Plans by Baltimore-based Constellation Energy to mass-produce carbon-free hydrogen could be jeopardized under proposed federal guidelines that exclude existing nuclear plants from tax subsidies designed to boost a budding clean hydrogen industry. The newly released rules outline qualifications for clean hydrogen production credits offered through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which, in part, aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030. Constellation, which produces electricity at power plants, including the nation’s largest fleet of nuclear power plants, had been counting on the credits to help make clean hydrogen production cost-effective.

Baltimore’s largest bank will close two Baltimore County branches, including its branch in a popular Towson mall. Bank of America plans to close two branches in Baltimore County, a freestanding location in Pikesville and a branch located in the Towson Town Center mall. The branches were the two smallest by deposits that the bank operated in the county. A bank spokesperson confirmed the closures and said the bank does not expect the closures to impact customers, as there are branches less than a mile away from the shuttered locations.

Tessemae’s, which has been mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings for nearly a year, is in talks to be sold to a New Jersey-based consumer packaged goods company for $4.5 million. The Baltimore salad dressing business has a proposed agreement to sell to Panos Brands pending approval from the Maryland bankruptcy court, according to a December motion filed in federal court.