Commentary

The billboard shows what looks like a young woman’s hands tied with rope. The words written over the image state “It happens here.” I saw the billboard across the street from a motel in Wicomico County, Maryland, where I met 40-plus migrant seasonal farmworkers from Mexico on H2A visas working on farms in Maryland. The horror of human trafficking, farmworkers tell me, can be true. It is not just about sex trafficking.

For nearly 2 1/2 hours Monday night, on the fourth floor auditorium at the National Federation of the Blind headquarters in South Baltimore, representatives of MCB Real Estate — including managing partner P. David Bramble — pitched their plan to tear down the Harborplace pavilions and replace them with four new, much taller buildings. Whether they changed a lot of minds in the crowd of about 200 people isn’t clear; more than a few seemed skeptical, particularly of the size and scale of the project, with its estimated $400 million in public investment required.

It is a busy time to be a data analyst in the Maryland Transit Administration. They’ve likely been working overtime crunching numbers for the anticipated revival of the Red Line. You’ll recall, that’s the east-west Baltimore light rail project that was deep-sixed by Gov. Larry Hogan but is expected to make a return — in some form — under Gov. Wes Moore. What if it’s a rapid transit bus? What if tunnels are or aren’t dug?

The writer is a health literacy and health communication expert, director of the University of Maryland Horowitz Center for Health Literacy and a professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Health’s Department of Behavioral and Community Health. Maryland residents have a lot to cheer about with the state’s focus on plain language public information.

This is the first in an occasional series on the 2023 election for Congress in Maryland Sarah Elfreth eased into the dimly lit, crowded interior of the Eastport Democratic Club just as The Leftovers were finishing their Wednesday night set. Michael Hughes, an affable MC who reminds members to tip the bands and bartenders generously, stepped in front of the mic and apologized for what he was about to say.

On Oct. 9, the Maryland Cannabis Administration (MCA) began accepting applications for the first cannabis business licenses to be issued pursuant to the Cannabis Reform Act — the new state law legalizing the cultivation, manufacture and sale of cannabis for adult consumers. A total of five licenses to cultivate cannabis will be available in this first application round (there are 22 businesses currently authorized to grow cannabis in the state), which ends Dec. 7.