An Anne Arundel County judge ruled Monday to invalidate a ballot question asking Baltimore City voters to rezone the Inner Harbor for development on the grounds that it’s not proper charter material.
Not only are ballot measure efforts relatively cheap compared to electoral politics, they’re effective. Baltimore City voters rarely reject charter amendments.
Pharmacy giant Walgreens will pay Baltimore $80 million to settle a lawsuit the city brought against it and other drug companies as part of an overdose epidemic that’s plagued the city for years, Mayor Brandon Scott’s office said Tuesday.
Baltimore has won $322.5 million in settlement monies from opioid manufacturers and distributors, which the city plans to use to address the overdose rate.
Baltimore City sued Juul Labs in 2020, accusing the company of deceptive marketing campaigns aimed at children and teens by offering flavored vaping pens without disclosing their high nicotine content.
Together, the court’s decisions about the two proposals showcased the limits of Maryland’s ballot initiative process and affirmed the sole power of legislative branches to make specific policy — a hallmark of representative democracies.
Mayor Brandon Scott laid the groundwork for the city to begin spending money, with designs on slowing the death toll in a city where in recent years an average of three people have died from overdoses every day.
The Department of Public Works is scheduled to discuss working conditions at a City Council oversight hearing Thursday night following the death of a solid waste worker.
Union leaders and former federal officials are sounding the alarm over the law firm hired by Baltimore to investigate safety practices at DPW following the death of Ronald Silver II.
The increased paving costs for water main projects means shifting funds that had been earmarked for elsewhere in Baltimore, including water system improvements.
What was once known as “Murder Mall” will now become headquarters for a city office, with Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration ready to award $16 million to developer and campaign supporter P. David Bramble.
For more than a decade, the city has awarded millions of dollars in no-bid contracts to a Florida company to do much of the work that falls under the Baltimore City Board of Elections’ purview.
The heat-related death of a Baltimore sanitation worker has prompted City Council members and city worker unions to demand more stringent safety-measure for municipal workers. The city Department of Public Works paused trash and recycling collection Tuesday to focus on heat safety training sessions.
City code makes clear that employees are prohibited from working for or receiving payment from organizations that have contracts with their agency, as Chase Brexton does with the health department.