Commentary

MCB Real Estate’s mixed-use development plan that includes high-rise apartment buildings for Harborplace in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor is not the right development for this key location. Yet, the Baltimore Planning Commission, along with much of the city’s leadership, are saying we want this major project done quickly. The reality is we want this project done right. Baltimore has a vibrant arts, food and music scene, and showcasing these elements is essential.

Because of the extraordinary generosity of the late Richard W. Kanode, Frederick County has a rare and wonderful opportunity to create a new park near Thurmont to celebrate the agricultural community and create an equestrian park. But the county must be careful as it proceeds. The Frederick County Planning Commission has unanimously agreed that the preliminary master plan for the 183-acre Richard W. Kanode Farm Park is consistent with the county’s comprehensive plan.

Leaders in Maryland’s Democratic-held House and Senate are approaching critical votes to give faculty, staff and graduate workers at public colleges and universities the right to unionize. But, as is a common thread in state and national political discourse, this vote’s immediate impact stretches beyond four-year university workers and the “ivory tower.” This bill is among those with a long-term, sizable, and inescapable impact on every aspect of Maryland — perhaps even extending to our collective ability to survive in our shared environment.

In the early 1990s, Father William “Bill” Watters, a Jesuit priest, was sent to Baltimore with a discomfiting question: whether the venerable but struggling St. Ignatius Church, founded in the 1850s, should be closed. His superior made clear he favored an exit. Watters pondered the boarded-up rowhouses across from the church and noticed a plaque marking the founding of a Jesuit university and prep school on the site more than a century before.

When you think about all the challenges that kids can face growing up in Baltimore, asthma might not come to mind, but it should. In 2020, one in five children in Baltimore had an asthma diagnosis, a rate more than double the national average. As a pulmonologist, I’ve seen firsthand how asthma can disrupt the day-to-day lives of our friends and neighbors, resulting in missed days from school and work, emergency trips to the hospital and expensive medical bills.

On Wednesday, as the U.S. Supreme Court pondered whether to uphold a ban on “bump stock” devices, which can speed up the firing of semi-automatic firearms to near machine-gun rate, lawmakers in Annapolis were presented with concerns about the rising use of “Glock switches” which can likewise convert Glock semi-automatic handguns into fully automatic ones. In other words, in the war to keep the most destructive firearms out of the hands of evil-doers, yet another battlefront has opened up.

Steve Inskeep’s recent interview of Rep. Andy Harris on NPR’s “Morning Edition” revealed the utter shallowness of the Republican position on Ukraine and the Maryland congressman’s inability to credibly defend it outside of the right-wing echo chamber. Harris, a do-little rep for most of his seven terms, got time on NPR because he’s co-chair of the House Ukraine Caucus and because he’s changed his mind about funding the fight against Russia’s hideous invasion.

Despite some positive news about public transit in and around Baltimore in recent weeks — from a $213 million federal grant to replace the region’s aging fleet of light rail cars to the delivery of the Maryland Transit Administration’s first zero-emission electric buses — these are still challenging times for those who rely on the MTA to get from one place to another. Staffing and equipment shortfalls have been numerous.