Highly recommended for Baltimore’s Mayor and City Council
Thursday, July 1, 2021
If you’re like me, you watch one of the local Baltimore news stations when you’re putting on your jammies at the end a long day. With luck and cool sheets, you’ll be asleep before you hear the lead stories about murder and mayhem in the big city. Forget about all the wonderful and impressive things the people of Baltimore do every day. Crime is the lead story. No matter where you live in Maryland, if you watch the evening news on one of these stations, crime is last thing you hear about the state’s greatest city. Likewise, first thing in the morning if you get up watching local news. And it’s been this way, not just recently, but for decades.
March 20, 2021
First of all, a confession. I live in Howard County. Full employment. High income. My wife and I have given up long ago trying to find a neighborhood kid to do yard work. My guess is they’re too busy washing the hand-me-down BMWs and Subarus their parents give them. When I grew up, I saved my lawn mowing and snow shoveling money to buy an old two-door Ford Falcon with three gears on the column and a bench seat. Girls you were dating would sit next to you back in those days.
The screenshot on the left is from an article in yesterday’s Baltimore Sun about the billboard in the picture. Whether or not it is related to Mayor Pugh’s scandalous behavior and the FBI’s investigation, it marks an extraordinary moment in the continuing downward spiral of Baltimore’s public image.
As what might be described as a casualty of the mess that has turned out to be the administration of Mayor Catherine Pugh, William Coles is resigning as the head of the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC). And not a moment too soon. But then this isn’t about the specifics of why he should be replaced. It’s about a much larger problem, that being the entire mission of the BDC.
Of all the development options the owners of the Horseshoe could have proposed to go on the water, next to their Baltimore casino, is a Topgolf driving range/bar really the best they could do?
It’s a good bet that Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh will be running for re-election in 2020. Why shouldn’t she? Incumbents are always hard to beat. She’ll have plenty of developer and other business money to fund her campaign. She’ll win the Democratic Primary and that will be that.
Our President has recently called into question the common sense understanding of what constitutes an emergency or crisis. Is, for example, the lack of a wall across our southern border really as disconcerting as, let’s say, the abuse of opioids? Or the fact that 1 out of 8 women in the United States will develop breast cancer in her lifetime?