Commentary

The Maryland Environmental Human Rights Amendment is a bill being heard this session in the Maryland General Assembly. It is being sponsored by Delegate Wanika Fisher in the House and Senator Will Smith in the Senate. House Speaker Pro Tempore Delegate Sheree Sample-Hughes is a co-sponsor.

The Anne Arundel County Green Infrastructure Master Plan gives us a chance to leave a conservation legacy of natural spaces forever connected to each other and to our communities. My own conservation story started years ago when my husband and I purchased 50-plus acres of forest, farm fields, and wetlands along a quiet road in Lothian. With such a diverse habitat, wildlife was everywhere. Especially important were the birds as we continued to pursue our hobbies of birding and bird banding.

Let me start with this: Overhead power lines are not only ugly, they’re vulnerable to collapse in storms. Ten years ago, after Hurricane Sandy caused power outages across a large swath of the country, a question appeared in this space: Why not bury power lines? Why not put them out of harm’s way and out of sight? Take a minute to look at it and the system seems archaic — heavy black wires strung from pole to pole along miles and miles of roads, in rural and suburban areas as well as city neighborhoods.

By not acting, the governor and state legislature are condoning the failure by Maryland agencies to rein in massive poultry industry pollution. Their failure to enforce critical pollution control regulations condemns the health of thousands of residents living close to industrial-scale chicken operations and the health of Eastern Shore rivers. The Environmental Integrity Project’s meticulously researched “Blind Eye to Big Chicken” report from last October documents how state enforcement agencies have abdicated their responsibilities to enforce poultry regulations.

In May 2019, County Executive Steuart Pittman penned the following memo to the county’s Office of Planning and Zoning: “Protection of the environment is vital to the quality of life, health and economic vitality of Anne Arundel County residents, and is a foundational tenant of this Administration.” Since the date of that memo, Anne Arundel County has consistently charted a new, balanced course with respect to land use planning. Gone are the times of unchecked urban sprawl that led to deforested landscapes, burdened infrastructure and polluted streams. Over the past three years, Pittman has laid the groundwork for a different kind of future that balances growth in the right places for the right reasons with protections of our open spaces.

Backyard Bounty, a local lawn care company in the Montgomery County area, made the switch to all-electric equipment three years ago after getting rid of its gasoline-powered leaf blowers. “Our crews love the lower noise, lack of gas fumes, and lighter weight of the equipment,” said Kris Colby, operations manager. “Our clients love how quiet the machines are; one even mentioned to me that she can’t tell when the crew’s been for a visit until after they’ve gone because of the lack of noise.”

$30,000 a year. Or, put another way, $2,600 a month — that’s how much $15 an hour amounts to before taxes. A recent cost-of-living study put out by Missouri Economic Research and Information Center (MERIC) examined what families pay for standard necessities, such as groceries, housing, utilities, transportation and health. It showed that Maryland is the seventh most expensive state in the nation, and our housing costs sit 64% above the national average. Though MERIC’s study did not account for other common out-of-pocket costs, like student debt or child care, they are worth noting.

After completing the first year of my four-year term on the Prince George’s County Board of Education, I would like to share my observations of the limitations of our current structure and how it can be improved. COVID has been an unprecedented challenge to public education for several years, but it should not mask the importance of good, democratically-based governance at the local school board level. Every Marylander has a stake in better schools.

The pandemic is the biggest shock to American working life since the shift to military production during World War II. Working from home surged twelvefold between 2018 and May 2020. Employees are driving this revolution. Surveys of 50,000 workers across the country find they want to work from home 2.5 days a week on average after the pandemic. Employees working from home frequently tell me how they enjoy the freedom of being able to go to the gym or see the dentist during a weekday, making up the work time in the evenings or on weekends. I enjoy the ability to pick up my kids from school on work-from-home days. Employees with young children are the most likely to want to work from home.