Politics

Calling the proposed agreement with BGE “completely lopsided in all aspects,” the Baltimore conduit division has quietly written a scathing response to Mayor Brandon Scott’s plan to end the franchise fees paid by the utility in favor of promised investments in the underground system. “Very difficult to understand why the City would even entertain this sort of arrangement,” says the Department of Transportation (DOT) staff report, objecting to a draft agreement struck between BGE and the city that was revealed last week by The Brew.

Gov. Wes Moore said Thursday he is committed to filling vacancies as quickly as possible at the Maryland Department of the Environment, the state’s troubled regulator of drinking water and wastewater treatment, which has been plagued by staff shortages and extensive backlogs of expired pollution control permits. For years, environmentalists and advocates have called for rebuilding the state’s primary environmental enforcement agency, whose staff numbers plummeted and performance deteriorated under the administration of former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who served for eight years.

Legislation to help local law enforcement agencies afford body cameras and storage for thousands of hours of footage has bipartisan support in Maryland’s legislature. Under a law passed during the 2021 General Assembly session, police agencies in Maryland are required to have on-duty officers wear cameras by July 1, 2025. But smaller agencies have struggled to come up with funding to buy cameras and store digital files.

Rusty Carr took to the podium in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing room Thursday holding two glass jars. “Ladies and gentleman, I hold in front of you: hemp,” the Mount Airy resident said. “It’s also called cannabis, but this is legal and it’s not impairing. I invite you to smell it.” Carr was testifying in favor of a bill to stop warrantless vehicle searches by police that are based solely on the odor of cannabis.

Tracking the health of the Chesapeake Bay is a massive undertaking. It involves multiple agencies in federal, state and local governments monitoring the health of the air, land and water, of trees, vegetation and aquatic life. Measuring Bay health can also become a mind-numbing amalgam of statistics and reports, most designed to gauge how Maryland and the six other Bay jurisdictions — Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and the District of Columbia — are progressing to meet federal pollution control standards.

Annapolis — Running bamboo grows so fast and is so invasive that it’s rooting up headstones in cemeteries, crossing neighborhood property lines and becoming a “major issue” in Maryland parks. Bamboo overgrowth was so bad for one Maryland resident that the constituent contacted Del. Linda Foley, D-Montgomery, for help with a neighbor’s bamboo crossing the property boundary. Now Foley, a member of the Environment and Transportation Committee, has introduced a bill to regulate the invasive species.

A Maryland Senate bill would create a task force to diagnose what’s causing long wait times at hospital emergency departments and make recommendations to resolve it. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Maryland has ranked last with the longest average wait times in the country over the past seven years. Candice Akbar, of Anne Arundel County, recently waited for hours to be seen by a doctor in a hospital emergency room.