Commentary

Throughout the pandemic, housing providers have held a vital stake in keeping residents housed, whether it was through payment plans, late fee waivers or other prevention efforts. Housing providers have also spent countless hours and human resource costs facilitating access to rental assistance. And, at the same time that federal rental assistance wound its way through government processes, Maryland’s housing providers worked with United Way of Central Maryland to recruit housing providers for the Strategic Targeted Eviction Prevention (STEP) Pilot Program, which quickly provided residents with rental assistance through a unique model that allows housing providers to apply for bulk rental assistance that will benefit all of their eligible residents.

Would you rather your kids be bitten by a mosquito or be exposed to cancer-causing chemicals in your backyard? This mosquito season, the Maryland Department of Agriculture is replacing its previously used truck-based pesticide, Permanone 30-30, with two similar pesticides after our organizations found alarming levels of the toxic “forever chemical” per- and polyfluoralkyl substances — PFAS — in a sample of Permanone 30-30.

You can bet Democrats in the General Assembly are feeling pretty good about themselves today. Thanks to a few sentences in legislation they championed this past session, Gov. Larry Hogan’s effort to end enhanced federal unemployment benefits paid to out-of-work Marylanders got stopped in its tracks by two lawsuits. Baltimore City Circuit Judge Lawrence Fletcher-Hill’s ruling delivered Tuesday morning proved to be the coup de grâce. Siding with the plaintiffs, he issued a preliminary injunction that prevents Maryland’s labor secretary from taking action to deny expanded benefits to state residents.

As sure as night follows day, national pundits are reading way too much into a single primary result and are prematurely extrapolating trends that may or may not be developing in Democratic politics. And they are giving oxygen to weak-kneed party establishment folks, nationally and in Maryland, who are already convinced that Democrats are too far out in left field on a host of issues, especially police reform, and warn of dire political consequences in 2022.

Serving in the Civil Air Patrol’s National Capitol Wing, which encompasses the Washington, D.C. area, is a Courtney family affair. Dean Courtney II, a sophomore at Chesapeake Math and IT (CMIT) Academy South, joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) when he was 12 years old and is currently serving as the cadet deputy commander at the Tuskegee Composite Squadron in the National Capitol Wing. His father, Dean Courtney, is a resource manager for the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade (Cyber) at Fort Meade and is the squadron’s character development instructor.

Sixty years ago, urban renewal came to Harlem Park, and the West Baltimore neighborhood has never been the same. In the cause of “slum clearance,” the city demolished dozens of houses with no plan to replace them or relocate their residents. Officials carved away half of gorgeous Harlem Square Park for a school and athletic fields, removed streetcar lines that connected the neighborhood’s residents to jobs and downtown shopping, and demolished 12 blocks of houses and businesses to make way for a doomed interstate connector that became known as the Highway to Nowhere.