Commentary

In a recent interview, Mayor Brandon Scott committed to a “total re-imagining” of downtown Baltimore as the city emerges from the pandemic. It’s a message that residents of Baltimore’s City Center have been waiting years to hear. If you ask the growing residential population in Baltimore’s downtown core, they’ll tell you that they are bullish on City Center’s recovery, but it’s only going to work if we take a frank look at where we are and get creative about tackling the problems that have held us back for too long.

The Howard County Education Association recently told teachers that they should not work at all outside of their contractually obligated work times (“Without vaccinations, teachers vote to work-to-rule,” Feb. 25). This is the wrong call for our students at a time when they need us most. This misguided resolution states that educators cannot work before and after school, on weekends or on holidays. This includes grading, mentoring, student support, answering parents’ and students’ emails after those hours, and sponsoring student teams, clubs and organizations.

I agree with the Maryland Sierra Club that Gov. Larry Hogan should not waste one dollar in pursuing a “maybe” project that is years in the future (The Capital, May 10). Please governor, take what dollars you were going to spend on MAGLEV and put it into the crumbling roads in Maryland. Twice I have sent a complaint to Hogan’s office about the conditions of the roads in Maryland and specifically in Anne Arundel County.

With the Preakness set to run Saturday, it’s the right time for tuning up a new state song. Herewith are some humble suggestions. There are two ways to go, get an off-the-shelf song and make it the official Maryland melody. The state has done something like this, adapting a successionist screed to “Oh, Tannenbaum,” the German Christmas carol more commonly known as “Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree.” We all know how that worked out.

This weekend, The Baltimore Sun reported a fire and deadly shooting in Woodlawn, Maryland. The fire was at the home of a 56-year-old man who for years claimed that the federal government surveilled him. He accused neighbors of being involved in this government surveillance. The neighbors recounted that he would sometimes march up and down the sidewalk with a gun or yell accusations from his porch through a bullhorn. On Saturday, authorities say the man attacked four people, killing three of them, before he was killed himself by Baltimore County Police officers.

If proponents of a law think it does not go far enough in solving a problem, and opponents complain that it has gone too far, chances are good that lawmakers have arrived at a decent compromise. So it is with the police reform measures passed by the Maryland General Assembly this year, and then enacted into law despite the veto from Gov. Larry Hogan.

In a virtual hearing before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure this week, Amtrak CEO William J. Flynn observed that a proposed magnetic levitation train running between the District of Columbia and Baltimore would “benefit only a small number of affluent travelers,” with ticket prices that would overwhelm the average Amtrak or MARC commuter. He also suggested to members of Congress that scarce transportation dollars would be far better spent on expanding Amtrak’s high-speed rail service to bring it more in line with successful systems in Europe and Asia.