Politics

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.

A bill that would create a Maryland Rail Administration to expand the state’s rail network and oversee financing, construction and maintenance of the system is likely facing strong headwinds in the Maryland General Assembly this session. The bill, introduced for a second year by House Majority Leader Marc Korman (D-Montgomery), would create a funding source for expansion of the state’s rail program by increasing tolls around the state and tapping into toll revenues collected by the Maryland Transportation Authority. That money, however, is already dedicated to pay for upkeep of the state’s toll tunnels, bridges and the Intercounty Connector, and used as a dedicated revenue source to pay the debt service of bonds that transportation authority sells to fund projects.

A proposed agreement for Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. to maintain the city’s underground conduit system is moving quickly and could be put to Baltimore’s spending board for consideration in the next month, city officials said Wednesday. The details of the agreement, which have yet to be fully released and which officials say are still being negotiated, call for BGE to take over maintenance of the 700-mile terra cotta pipe system that runs beneath the city and contains telephone, electric and fiber-optic cables. In exchange, BGE would no longer pay to rent space in the system. BGE is the largest user to the system, which dates to 1898, and it currently occupies 76% of the conduit.