Commentary

If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. So goes the maxim in the street safety community, which is outraged by the light penalties imposed on drivers when they kill pedestrians and cyclists on roadways across America. I am outraged, too. Eighteen months ago, my wife, Sarah Debbink Langenkamp, a U.S. diplomat and the mother of our two boys, was crushed when a driver for Beacon Building Supply swung his 50,000 pound truck into his parking lot without seeing Sarah, who was riding her bike in a clearly marked bike lane.

We can all agree that our homes should be safe and healthy, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. They should all be well-insulated and equipped with up-to-date appliances and heating systems that don’t pollute our indoor or outdoor air or harm our health, and ensure our energy bills are affordable. But too many low-income families across Maryland are trapped in unhealthy homes that suffer from extreme heat and extreme cold, with old, inefficient, costly appliances and heating systems.

The county school board has approved — without making any changes — a $991.5 million budget request for the fiscal year beginning July 1, the same as what Superintendent Cheryl Dyson proposed. The board voted 6-1 to send the budget request for the school system to County Executive Jessica Fitzwater. In a budget of almost $1 billion, the members of the board found nothing to cut, add or revise. That is rare. After all, the request is about 9% larger than the current year, an increase of about $81.3 million.

When I moved out of my parents’ house in Lutherville, I vowed to never live in the suburbs again. For nearly two decades (minus a 2-year stint in Honduras), I was a city person. I found the scent of bus exhaust exciting. I lived in Charles Village and Hampden and, for six years, in a quaint Mount Vernon apartment so near the old Hippo night club that its dance music rattled my radiators until 2 a.m.

On a scale of 1 to 10, the political rhetoric regarding U.S. border policy has landed somewhere around “11” in recent weeks, as the number of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border continues to climb and U.S. Border Patrol encounters reach record highs. But amid all the speech-making and fist-banging, communities across the United States face the more practical challenge of how to ensure access to adequate shelter, food and medical care for all people, regardless of their immigration status — whether they’re near the Southern border or in the middle of the Free State.

For perhaps the first time, activists who have spent years advocating for special elections to fill General Assembly seats are getting a serious hearing. For the first time, the legislature is considering a bill that would have aligned Maryland with the 50% of states that use special elections to fill most or all open seats in state legislatures.

Growing up on the Eastern Shore, my middle school classmates and I went to the chicken plant in Salisbury. It’s still there on Route 50, at the Wicomico River. Flatbed trailers were stacked high with crates pulled into the loading docks, the birds inside stunned into stillness by their open-air ride from some long, low chicken house where they’d spent their whole 59-day lives.