Both the Prince George’s County Council and the Montgomery County Council have nine members. In Prince George’s, all nine represent individual districts, while in Montgomery five represent individual districts and the other four are elected countywide.
Critics of the Prince George’s government frequently complain that the district-by-district system is partly to blame for the county’s dysfunction.
Editor’s Note: Josh Kurtz will be leaving his position as a managing editor at Roll Call next month to become editor of Environment & Energy Daily, E&E’s online publication that covers Congress. Fortunately, Josh will continue his regular column for Center Maryland.
The Baltimore region’s economy has demonstrated relative strength in weathering the recession when compared to others in the nation’s Top 100 metropolitan regions, according to a June MetroMonitor report from Brookings Institution. Overall, the Baltimore region ranks among 19 regions that were rated as the “second strongest” metropolitan areas to have weathered the Great Recession.
The most exciting state Senate primaries in Maryland — with a couple of exceptions — are bunched together this year in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.
This isn’t particularly surprising in Prince George’s, where bare-knuckle politics is commonplace, and factions and resentments are deep-seated. But it is somewhat surprising in white-glove Montgomery County. It’s not that Montgomery — a place where candidates woo voters by reminding them how high their IQ’s are — is lacking for ambitious pols.
Major business advocacy organizations from Maine to Virginia, including the Greater Baltimore Committee, are urging the U.S. Department of Transportation to fund and lead an $18.8 million planning effort for strengthening high-speed rail resources and related transportation modes in the heavily-traveled northeast corridor.
If there is any region on which the federal government should focus its initial round of high-speed rail funding, it would be the northeast corridor, which has a population of 55 million and a $2 trillion annual economy.
The candidate filing deadline is upon us, and it’s always an exciting day. It’s always fun to hang out at the Board of Elections office in Annapolis, or in county boards of elections, to watch the stragglers come in, and it’s fun to pore over the candidate lists. It’s a ritual that separates the mere political junkies from the truly hard core.
Loyal readers of Center Maryland shouldn’t have been surprised by former Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s announcement Wednesday night that he had picked Mary Kane as running mate in this fall’s election.
Back on March 16th, Center Maryland’s Josh Kurtz had revealed that Mary Kane was getting a close look by the Ehrlich campaign. Josh explained the many advantages that Kane could bring to the Republican ticket, as well as some potential lines of attack from the Democrats.
Will Election Day be merely bad for Democrats across the country, or catastrophic? The answer will have some bearing on what Election Day looks like in Maryland.
History dictates that Democrats will do badly. With just two exceptions since the Civil War — the Depression election of 1934 and the post-9/11 election of 2002 — a new president’s party has always lost a significant chunk of Congressional seats during his first midterm. So even if this was an average year, Democrats could be expected to lose 25 or so seats in the House and five or six in the Senate.
A recent report on the education requirements projected for the nation’s work force in 2018 sends a compelling message to students, administrators and teachers in Maryland’s K-12 schools, as well as to our state’s higher education institutions. The report cites a “growing disconnect” between the types of jobs employers need to fill and the number of prospective employees who have the education and training to fill them.
If you’re a business owner or manager, how would you like to start an initiative in your workplace that would save your company almost six times the cost to implement it and increase employee productivity?
What’s this strategy and how complicated is it, you ask? The answer is: it’s simple. Just participate in the state’s recently-launched Healthiest Maryland workplace wellness program.
It wasn’t all that surprising when Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith (D) announced 10 days ago that he wouldn’t run for state Senate this year. Despite the very vocal and insistent prodding from Senate President Mike Miller (D), Smith couldn’t see a path to victory in a conservative Towson-area district that he didn’t live in. Plain and simple.
So his decision immediately raises two, inter-related questions: What does he do now? And what does he do with all his money?
In one way or another, you could call several members of the Maryland General Assembly throwbacks.
Sometimes it seems like time stands still in Annapolis — governors come and go, but presiding officers of the legislature, committee chairmen and powerful lobbyists never leave. Political trends may take hold nationally, new political movements form, new coalitions exert power and influence, but in the Maryland State House, it’s the same good ol’ boys club.
Those jobs lost in the Great Recession of 2007? Many of them won’t be coming back, even if there’s robust economic recovery.
Why this seeming paradox? According to a report to be released Tuesday by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, by 2018 the number of jobs requiring a college education will far outpace the number of jobs available to high school graduates and dropouts.
If Democrats lose control of Congress this November, will Nancy Pelosi pull a Hastert? Or will she stay and fight? You’ll recall that Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was Pelosi’s predecessor as Speaker of the House, wasted no time bailing when Democrats seized control of the House in 2006. He resigned his House seat early in 2007 (and it then fell to a Democrat in a special election). Would Pelosi do the same? It’s a question no one on Capitol Hill wants to ask publicly.
Do you know what was in that cool little photoblog app that you installed on your office computer last Tuesday? This is a seemingly innocent rhetorical question that cyber expert Bill Anderson, founder of Oculis Labs in Hunt Valley, Maryland, asks a Greater Baltimore Committee workshop audience of business executives.
Could American voters really hand the keys to the Capitol back to the Republicans this November? Hard as it may be to believe, the answer is yes. Polls continue to show that Americans blame George W. Bush more than Barack Obama for the economic crisis we’re in.
Republican sources tell me that as he plots his political comeback, former Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R) is taking a very close look at Mary Kane, the former Maryland secretary of State and wife of ex-state GOP Chairman John Kane, to be his running mate.
While there are unique circumstances relating to the recent contest between Maryland and Virginia for the Northrop Grumman headquarters, our state’s second-place finish in a high-profile two-horse race serves as a useful reminder of the basic reality of economic development.
The “nation’s report card” for big cities was released Thursday, and the reading scores of Baltimore fourth- and eighth-graders were middling, just as they had been in mathematics last December, when city kids were in the second tier among 18 big-city districts.
Michael Steele's tenure at the RNC has been simultaneously difficult and fascinating to watch. To beat a few metaphors to death, Steele is navigating in shark-infested waters, and to his credit, he hasn’t been eaten alive yet.
The recession has clearly affected the recent pace of growth in the Baltimore region’s three major bioscience and research parks. But it’s easy to also recognize that bioscience growth is still percolating in the Baltimore region.
We object to the characterization of easing of the stormwater pollution rules. The rules, as one of the speakers noted, were strengthened by adding the outside construction date of 2017 in the now adopted emergency regulations.
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