Commentary

There has been a long running controversy about the value of adding toll lanes to portions of I-270 and I-495. Many options and alternatives have been proposed in place of present plans, but the approach driven by controversy has been unsystematic – lacking a serious dialogue. In contrast, I was recently on a Zoom call that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the November 30, 1972, decision by the Republican Governor of Massachusetts Frank Sargent to eliminate all the proposed urban highways in the Boston region except for one in construction and substitute mass transit. In addition, associated with that decision was a successful bipartisan campaign to open the federal Highway Trust Fund to permit mass transit funding.

“The coronavirus caused by far the biggest disruption in the history of American education,” Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovits wrote in The Atlantic last year. Things have not reverted back to normal as COVID has gradually lost its grip on American life. Today’s teachers and students are living with a set of altered realities, and they may be for the rest of their lives: Shrinking enrollments. In the first full academic year of the pandemic, K-12 public school enrollment fell by 1.1 million students and fell by about an additional 130,000 students the following fall. New Stanford-led research finds that 26% of that decline was caused by students switching to homeschooling and 14% by students leaving for private schools. Another 34% of the decline is hard to track, but some students were probably going truant, doing unregistered home-schooling or simply opting out of kindergarten.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted cert in January for a case arguing violations of the Fifth Amendment due to unlawful taking without just compensation by the government and the Eighth Amendment for excessive fines and fees (Tyler v. Hennepin County). The case based in Minneapolis challenges the government’s ability to seize a property because of delinquent taxes, and profit from any remaining equity. The case stems from a tragic circumstance, when Geraldine Tyler fell behind on her property taxes of $2,300 in 2010. By the time all penalties, interest and fees were added in 2015, she owed $15,000.

In the 25 years since they were first uttered, I’ve never forgotten the words of a criminal defendant in Baltimore County Circuit Court: “I keep thinking maybe I could have done something more. But I’m only 21. How much could I do?” The guy who said that was one of three people charged in a horrible child abuse case. He lived in a house with his girlfriend, the girlfriend’s mother and two girls, one 9 and one 15. The three adults were all convicted of the second-degree murder of the younger girl.

As the world considers the life of Jimmy Carter, his legacy in one Baltimore neighborhood is more than an important memory. It’s a witness to hope and possibility. In 1992, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter came to the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in West Baltimore to build homes with Sandtown Habitat for Humanity. At the time, there were some 1,000 vacant houses in the neighborhood, and the occupied rental houses were often substandard beyond words. Families frequently faced eviction for a few hundred dollars.

One of the curiosities to rise out of the Norfolk Southern train derailment that spilled toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3, and caused a days-long fire, has been the outcry from Republican opinion leaders. High-profile conservatives — from U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — have questioned whether the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Transportation and President Joe Biden have done enough to help Upper Ohio Valley residents and protect other U.S. communities from similar disasters.