Commentary

In 2020, Montgomery County adopted Question C, expanding the County Council from nine seats to 11. In Montgomery County, seven council members (five before 2020) are elected by district and four are elected at-large. Question C was competing with Question D, which would’ve instituted nine districts and no at-large seats.

The Maryland General Assembly concluded its work this week in a session that dealt with important, weighty matters, as well as more mundane concerns, as it always does. Newly elected Gov. Wes Moore had a successful first session, getting almost his entire agenda approved, as would be expected when a Democratic governor has an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature with which to work.

Baltimore doesn’t have celebrity home tours like in Los Angeles — and even if we did, it would be bad because they’re creepy stalker bait. But between the movies and TV shows filmed on location, the city’s professional athletes and just random folks hanging out here, we’ve got a lot of stories of just running into celebrities. Sometimes literally.

Baltimore’s first big cultural moment was arguably 209 years ago, when a local lawyer, trapped on a ship in the middle of a battle, wrote a poem about his relief at knowing the American flag still waved over Fort McHenry. It was similar to a lot of the artistic splashes the city would make in the next few centuries: dramatic, concerned with race, identity, and sense of place, and more than a little messy.

Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film, “Born on the Fourth of July,” about Vietnam veteran-turned-war-protestor Ron Kovic, appeared on Netflix last week. I hadn’t seen it since its release in 1989, when its star, Tom Cruise, was 27 years old, so I gave it another look. It’s a hard film to watch, but opens innocently enough: The 10-year-old Kovic and his buddies playing soldiers, armed with toy machine guns, in a wooded area of small-town Long Island in 1956.

Hear that? It’s the sound of credit crunching all across America.Okay, if not crunching, maybe squeezing. Or tightening. Or whatever euphemistic verb you might choose to communicate that, basically, it’s gotten more difficult to borrow lately. Lots of measures have shown that businesses and consumers have found it more challenging to obtain financing recently, particularly in the wake of major regional bank failures in March.

It was an emotional highlight of the 2023 General Assembly session. Men and women of all ages and races were in tears as historians and legal experts recounted the early career of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and some of his successful — and heartbreakingly unsuccessful — battles to desegregate Maryland.

Before adjourning, the General Assembly took a major step toward making Maryland a leader in the emerging offshore wind industry. By passing the Promoting Offshore Wind Energy Resources (POWER) Act, we quadrupled the state’s goal to generate offshore wind energy. The new goal, 8.5 gigawatts, will produce enough electricity to power approximately 3 million Maryland homes. The measure lays out a framework to proactively strengthen our power grid infrastructure and sets up a novel offshore wind procurement process to benefit ratepayers.