Commentary

In Maryland, success stories about rural local governments often do not make the news. Unlike the State of Maryland or the larger, more affluent jurisdictions, places like Caroline County on the Eastern Shore do not have teams dedicated to tweeting, touting, or otherwise trumpeting accomplishments. By many measures, Caroline is Maryland’s second poorest county. Like many local governments, it was devastated by the Great Recession of 2008. The loss of revenues from falling property assessments was compounded by the State taking 90 percent of local road maintenance money.

The gigantic federal infrastructure bill, which finally passed both houses of Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Biden, is going to provide enormous benefits, transforming our community and our state. While the total size of the spending plan is $1.2 trillion, much of that is renewal of existing spending programs. But the new money in the bill is about $550 billion over the next five years. Think about that for a moment.

Although vaccination rates continue to rise and coverage on COVID-19 is fading away from prominent news dashboards, our rates are still higher than in summer 2020. While we still adapt to living and working with COVID-19, we must prepare for future public health emergencies so we do not lose another year figuring out our response. While many provisions of the Maryland Essential Workers’ Protection Act (MEWPA) expired when Gov. Larry Hogan ended Maryland’s state of emergency, one important, future-looking provision remained. Under the law, the Maryland Department of Health is required to develop a template catastrophic health emergency preparedness plan.

There’s nothing particularly pretty about the latest round of maps carving up Maryland’s eight congressional districts — even by preschool finger-painting standards. The shapes fashioned in the four entries produced by a legislative redistricting committee last week are sensible in the rural periphery (the Eastern Shore, Southern Maryland and Western Maryland stay intact), but in the central part of the state, they swirl like the artist dropped her colors by accident. This was no mischance, however; the results were carefully crafted.

Dollar houses have become a sort of urban lore in Baltimore. The fabled William Donald Schaefer-era program breathed new life into neighborhoods like Barre Circle and Otterbein, and most people in Baltimore have heard about someone’s mother or aunt or cousin who was able to grab hold of a piece of the American Dream for just $1 if they promised to fix up a vacant and falling down house. Community members still ask: Can we bring back dollar houses? And over the years, elected officials and candidates for office have opined about the possibility of handing over the keys to vacant, city-owned properties to regular folks, so they can fix them up and live in them and revitalize neighborhoods house by house by house.

Anyone paying attention to climate news, domestic politics, or international relations is well aware of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) underway in Scotland this week. Intertwined in the announcements of emissions reduction commitments or reforestation promises is news about the ever-changing Build Back Better framework. While global leaders meet in Glasgow, here at home the stakes for negotiations on the Build Back Better framework are high. Ambitious climate provisions in the framework demand significant investment, and yet, willingness to pay for them weakens daily.

The continuing pandemic has dramatically altered the nature of work — where, when and how we labor. And within this environment, it is “remote” work that has brought the most significant change. There has always been a wide range of jobs that are “remote-intense” (for want of a better description), such customer service representative, writer, web developer, coder, data analyst and graphic designer. However, the pandemic has forced companies to reconfigure work arrangements so that as many jobs as possible can be performed remotely.

Gov. Larry Hogan’s Maryland Citizens Redistricting Commission has proposed a new map of congressional districts that are compact and contiguous, respecting county boundaries and communities. It is a model of what a nonpartisan redistricting process would produce. And it has virtually no chance of being enacted by the Maryland General Assembly. Hogan formally accepted the maps for new congressional and legislative districts drawn by the commission on Nov. 5 and signed documents calling for a special session of the General Assembly on Dec. 6 to redraw the congressional boundaries.