Commentary

Baltimore City Council Bill 22-0238 seeks to place on the November ballot a proposed amendment to the city charter that would bar elected officials, their designees, state or government employees, and lobbyists from serving on a board that oversees the city’s Office of the Inspector General. It is meant to reduce conflicts of interest that could arise, given that investigation of any one of those individuals could come under the IG’s purview. Baltimore needs an independent and effective OIG. Council members who care about the city will vote in favor of the bill.

When I first heard that Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando (D) was writing an autobiography, with the title “My Seven Black Fathers,” the cynic in me raced to a couple of conclusions. There was something a little too Obamaesque about the title to make me think this was anything but a calculated political document by a very ambitious politician whose own history, with a white mother from Kansas, an African father and a Black wife named Michele, aligns very neatly with the 44th president’s. I was wrong.

Just shy of 30 years before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln was grappling with severe melancholy, often telling those around him that he was thinking about suicide and wandering in the woods alone with his gun. On two separate occasions, those around him became so concerned that they took Lincoln in, cared for him, and kept him safe through his crises. Imagine how different our country — and the world — would look today if Lincoln’s loved ones had not intervened. And he was only one person.

Like so many aspects of pre-pandemic life, COVID-19 continues to reshape how we think of education in radical and unexpected ways. Nowhere has this been more relevant than in the field of summer learning. Owing to the historic challenges and opportunities posed by the virus, summer learning providers engaged an unprecedented number of students with meaningful learning experiences and provided essential services to the young people who needed it most. Over 120,000 Maryland public school students attended summer learning programs between June and September of 2021, amounting to the largest expanded learning initiative in the state’s history.

s the COVID-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States, young adults are facing the consequences of becoming emancipated from foster care. Once a young person turns 18 years old, they are legally no longer a child and cannot be considered as a foster placement. Those who age out of foster care must adjust to living independently and facing a great deal of adversity. They are expected to move out and start their lives on their own amid an ongoing pandemic.

The Hogan administration has launched the first steps to recoup roughly $220 million in funds from Maryland’s mental health and addiction treatment providers. The recoupment of these funds is unfair and dangerously destabilizing to Maryland’s public behavioral health system. The Hogan administration selected Optum as the vendor to manage the state’s Administrative Services Organization, which pays claims for publicly funded mental health and addiction treatment. Optum’s claims processing system launched in 2020 and promptly failed, causing MDH to issue advances – or estimated payments – for a seven-month period that overlapped the disruption and chaos caused by the onset of COVID-19.

Our trade imbalance with China and others has compounded to a cumulative value that rivals our national debt. We layer on tens of thousands of pages of regulations on our businesses (wage, safety, environmental) and allow, in the name of “free trade,” our foreign trading partners to avoid these costs. China plows its profits into the military and industrial base that we will have to counter to defend Taiwan from intimidation and threatened invasion.