Business

A Howard County HVAC firm is staying put in the Baltimore suburbs with a new 47,000-square-foot lease that will expand its office space. Quick Servant Co. Inc. recently signed the deal with Adler Real Estate Partners to move its headquarters into new office, storage and warehouse space in the Rivers Park I office park at 9065 Guilford Road in Columbia.

One of Baltimore’s largest biotechnology companies has hired a new CEO as it pushes toward a wider commercial launch of its early cancer detection device. Delfi Diagnostics announced on Friday that Susan Tousi will take over as CEO, replacing founder Victor Velculescu. Velculescu will remain a member of the company’s board of directors.

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.