Commentary

With the financial devastation and uncertainty wrought by the pandemic, we must act to prevent additional harm to Baltimore City residents — and that means delaying or canceling this year’s tax sale. At the annual auction, held in May, city government sells delinquent property tax liens to the highest bidders, generally private investors. This often leads to a devastating foreclosure for the homeowners whose liens are sold and to the loss of equity they have in the home. Haven’t city residents dealt with enough this year? The time is overdue for Mayor Brandon Scott and Finance Director Henry Raymond to postpone or cancel this year’s tax sale — or, at the least, remove homeowners from the sale, to protect residents from the potential loss of their homes.

After a March 1 car crash in downtown Gettysburg killed the driver and sparked a three-alarm fire that destroyed a gift shop and damaged other buildings, I received emails informing me that the victim was possibly a man I had written about three years ago, Kurtis Darius Williams. Indeed, a 35-year-old man by that name had come to The Baltimore Sun for help in 2018. Williams had been having a tough time finding a job after serving 17 years in prison for second-degree murder, a crime related to his former life as a drug dealer. In 2001, when he was 17, Williams had pleaded guilty to fatally shooting another teen in a street argument. Released from prison, he had come back to his mother’s home in Baltimore determined to beat the odds by finding work and staying out of trouble.

The recent vote in the Maryland General Assembly to abolish, but not replace, the offensive state song, “Maryland, My Maryland” has, for the time being, finally put that long-debated issue to rest (unless Gov. Larry Hogan vetoes the legislation, which is an unlikely prospect). The song — written as a pro-secessionist tract by the poet and Maryland native James Ryder Randall — was originally adopted in 1935 by a Democratically controlled legislature (certainly a different brand than today). But it was vetoed by Republican governor Harry W. Nice because lawmakers refused to delete “objectionable verses” about Abraham Lincoln, the Union Army and Northern citizens. After Nice left office, the next governor, Herbert R. O’Conor, signed the song into law in 1939.

Americans are welcoming government help from a pandemic that has closed thousands of small businesses and pushed many American families into poverty. In the1960s, according to Pew Research, “more than three in four Americans said they trusted the government.” This enabled the government to do big things like enforce clean water and air regulations, get lead-based paint out of our homes, and pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to name a few. However, trust in the government was diminished by the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Protests, and the assassinations of President John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The only good news in that decade was when America landed a man on the moon in 1969.

Baltimore County is in the process of updating its master plan, something that it does every 10 years. It is the last opportunity this decade for the county to enhance the quality of life for residents by protecting land from development that is needed to create adequate amounts of networked, publicly available open space in neighborhoods. The county has failed to preserve enough green space in the past. Sixty-five percent of residents lack access to open space within a quarter mile, or walking distance, of their homes. The livability of many communities suffers as a result, with less affluent ones suffering the most.

Well, here we go again, Baltimore. Except this time, unlike in recent years, we have not one, but two prominent city officials under criminal investigation — a married couple, at that. And that’s pretty much all we can say with any certainty right now. The recent revelation that City Council President Nick Mosby and his wife, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, are being investigated by the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI has raised far more questions than it has answered.

As the COVID-19 pandemic devastates our communities, the country continues to grapple with another urgent epidemic that is killing people every day from coast to coast. Over the past decade, nearly half a million people in the United States have died from a preventable drug overdose. The pandemic has increased risk of overdose, as millions of people struggle with loneliness, isolation, anxiety, stress and loss of income.