Here are previews of some editorials we're working on. Let us know what you think. The best comments will run alongside them in the print edition.
--The Baltimore Development Corp. has certainly done a lot of good over the years in helping to revitalize the city. But it has also operated under a shadowy set of rules that, BDC alums acknowledge, are more or less passed down from generation to generation. The Sun's Annie Linskey reports that what legal documents they have establishing what the quasi-public agency can and can't do have, in some cases, been photocopied so many times that some of the words have had to be inked in by hand. There is no statute establishing the BDC, and there is no publicly available charter -- no clear code by which it operates.
The recent flap over the BDC's awarding of demolition grants without going through the city's competitive bidding process highlights the problem. Not only is it unclear whether such work would have to be bid under BDC rules, it's not even altogether clear how an agency that's supposed to be an advisor to the mayor and city council on development matters is in the business of awarding demolition contracts in the first place. The city should reconstitute the BDC under a clear charter, available to the public, that spells out its powers and responsibilities under the law. No other quasi-public body in the city plays such an important role in Baltimore's civic life, and no other acts under such a fuzzy legal authority.
--The news that Johns Hopkins University Professor Carol W. Greider won this year's Nobel Prize in medicine for her research with two others into the mechanism by which chromosomes protect themselves from degrading when cells divide – a key to understanding the process of aging – is an occasion for celebration and a reminder of the groundbreaking research being conducted by members of our community.
