Politics

Flanked by members of President Joe Biden’s administration, Gov. Wes Moore on Monday announced Baltimore’s commitment to its designation as one of the nation’s five Workforce Hubs through investments in career and technical education and training for local workers. An initiative of the Biden administration, Workforce Hubs are cities focused on providing people who have historically had less economic opportunity, like women and people of color, with training and services to help them access well-paying union jobs.

As soon as U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes announced in late October that he won’t seek reelection, cellphones in the political world lit up with texts and calls: Who might run for his seat? Sarbanes is a Democrat serving his ninth term representing the state’s 3rd Congressional District. In its current form, it encompasses all of Howard County, a small bit of Carroll County and a large swath of northern and central Anne Arundel County.

Despite a state transportation trust fund that is currently stretched thin, Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson late last week was upbeat on prospects that the 2024 session of the state’s General Assembly would provide additional aid to help head off possibly sharp cuts in services by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA).

Over the last five months, Baltimore has held mayoral events and press conferences without a deaf interpreter, upsetting organizations representing the deaf and hard of hearing who say Mayor Brandon Scott is violating of provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The critics say the Scott administration’s use of interpreters has stopped completely, in recent weeks.

An effort to cut state worker vacancies in half is on pace to fall short of a promise made by Gov. Wes Moore. Moore (D) entered office in January promising to fill 5,000 vacant state jobs. Since then, the administration has not kept pace with that goal, according to the state’s own data. Arriving at an exact number has been difficult.

These should be heady times for CASA, the immigrants’ rights group based in Langley Park. The organization just finalized its new strategic plan, and canvassers from CASA’s political unit were on the ground in Virginia for the past few weeks, contributing to the Democrats’ significant victories in legislative races. CASA helped muscle through groundbreaking rent control legislation in Montgomery County earlier this year, and the state Senate committee chair who tucked a piece of health care legislation in her desk drawer last spring that was a priority for the group has just left the legislature.

U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes shocked the political world — and his constituents — when he made a surprise announcement this fall that he won’t run for reelection next year. By the time the 61-year-old Democrat’s term is up, he’ll have completed 18 years in Congress, representing communities largely in the Baltimore suburbs. He’s focused his career on improving health care, restoring the quality of the Chesapeake Bay and improving voting and political engagement.

Baltimore’s dominant utility provider is asking Maryland regulators to keep secret a key document that sheds more light on the controversial deal the company inked earlier this year with Mayor Brandon Scott — an agreement a state watchdog says could cost ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming decades.

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D) got headlines this week that former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) could only envy. Manchin’s announcement that he wouldn’t run for reelection in 2024, all but guaranteeing that Republicans will pick up his seat — and move that much closer to grabbing control of the chamber in the next Congress — was national news.