Commentary

“BYE DAN,” blares a banner unfurled over Route 50 in Maryland. Daniel Snyder tentatively agreeing to sell the Washington Commanders, a once-beloved team that he wrecked, has rightly led to an outpouring of relief across the D.C. region. The NFL franchise’s new owners should aim not just to win again but to unite people across racial, class and partisan lines — as the team did before.

Roman Welzant, who claimed to have been tormented for years by neighborhood teenagers, shot two of them one winter night in 1980 as they threw snowballs at his house in Eastwood, just over the city line in Baltimore County. Welzant, who was 68 at the time, killed one of the teens and seriously wounded the other. Six months later, a jury in Towson felt sorry for Welzant and found him not guilty of second-degree murder. But 18-year-old Albert Kahl was dead over snowballs, and his mother cried out in the courtroom: “You all have Albert’s blood on your hands. Mr. Welzant, you’re a killer.”

Almost a full decade after the Frederick County Board of Commissioners went out of existence, its ghost continues to haunt Winchester Hall, tying the hands of current officials and forcing excessive growth on the county. As in Dickens’ “Christmas Carol,” our problem is not so much the ghost of the past as it is the ghost of the future. Decisions made by those commissioners still require county officials to approve projects that they know the county is unprepared for.

Six roadway workers were killed last month when a driver traveling at high speed collided with another car on the Baltimore Beltway, Interstate 695 (”Where is the rage (and policing) over deaths on Maryland’s roads?” April 19). The force of the crash sent the vehicle barreling into a highway construction zone, causing the vehicle to flip. The video from a nearby Maryland Department of Transportation camera makes it clear no one in the pathway of that car had any chance to survive.

This past September, Baltimore City issued an all-too-familiar boil water advisory to residents of West Baltimore, a region of the city with historically and predominantly Black communities. A potential E. coli exposure meant residents had to boil their tap water for at least a minute before consumption. Months after the contamination incident, residents remain concerned about the water quality.

Easily distracted by spring and the call of the wild, I doubt I could sit this month in the Maryland Horse Library and Education Center, appealing as it is, and read a history of British steeplechase, though one never knows: It might give me the itch to attend this month’s Maryland Hunt Cup for the first time in years. Still, in fall or winter, on a day of rain or snow, I could see myself sitting in the library’s comfortable loft with some old book about horse racing or horse shoeing or horse barn building or running hounds with horses.

For those who tuned in to Mayor Brandon Scott’s State of the City address Monday evening, live from the Middle Branch Fitness and Wellness Center, the experience was likely underwhelming. That doesn’t make it bad, necessarily. Such annual assessments — whether in Towson, Annapolis or other seats of local government — are usually aimed at the political class and public servants who follow the minutia of bureaucracy, budgets, political alliances and the like, because, let’s face it, their careers center on it.