SATURDAY MAILBOX

The Baltimore Sun

Commerce triumphs over city's history

Two front-page headlines Tuesday seem to signal an alarming sea change in Baltimore ("Challenge to razing dropped" and "Historic Senator Theatre to be sold at auction," Feb. 6).

Those of us who moved to Baltimore and bought houses here because of the architectural gems scattered in seeming profusion about the city have now discovered that Baltimore is like every other city: History capitulates to commerce.

The preservation organization Baltimore Heritage, which seemed to be a bulwark behind which we could stand and fight for keeping the past as part of our future, didn't call an emergency meeting of its membership or mount a public fundraising appeal to save the 1820s-vintage rowhouses, with their seminal connections to the city's African-American history.

Rather, the board of Baltimore Heritage decided to give up the battle and let Mercy Medical Center bulldoze its way into a future in which Baltimore becomes yet another city of parking lots and tall, ugly buildings.

And then I read about how Tom Kiefaber, owner of the Senator Theatre, has had to agree to a mortgage foreclosure auction and therefore a likely change of ownership.

I finished reading the articles wondering which important historic buildings might be left in Baltimore in a few years. Will they also disappear because there's not enough money to be made from them, or because a nonprofit institution demands their space?

What will be the news tomorrow?

Linda C. Franklin

Baltimore

The writer is a member of Baltimore Heritage.

'Living wage' chills Md. business climate

The Sun's article on Gov. Martin O'Malley's backing of a mandatory "living wage" for companies doing business in Maryland clearly shows that a new age of state government micromanagement of economics is afoot ("O'Malley pledging a 'living wage,'" Feb. 2). You can hear business groan as far away as Western Maryland.

As a lifelong Catholic, I do congratulate Mr. O'Malley on his obvious concern for the social and economic well-being of Marylanders.

But the core philosophical problem with political liberalism is and has always been that class warfare and demagoguery damage the process of creating effective public policy. Everyone should have learned this by now.

I think the recent fiasco with the effects of electricity deregulation gives us a hint about how well Maryland legislators really understand the economic implications of their well-intentioned maneuvers.

When policy errors facilitate macroeconomic distortions, it is usually several years, or even longer, before the side effects are felt. At that point, the need for additional interventions often takes on emergency proportions.

You cannot intentionally balance capital and labor. President Richard Nixon tried to do so in the 1970s with his disastrous wage and price controls.

Mandatory state wages for bidders will encourage overbidding, put an additional burden on the state's economy, and eventually mean higher taxes and slower growth.

Somehow, I don't think that's what the governor really wants by the end of his first term.

Frank O'Keefe

Baltimore

LNG project offers jobs and revenue

The editorial "A clear message" (Jan. 30) noted that Baltimore County's attempt to ban liquefied natural gas facilities by amending its zoning regulations was ruled unenforceable by a U.S. district judge.

The court recognized the important role the county has in the review process but determined that the final decision was not the county's to make.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will make the final decision after it has considered all studies performed by AES Corp., all comments received by federal and state regulatory agencies and all information presented by the public.

The process is intended to ensure that national, regional and state interests are considered along with local needs and concerns.

The national interest in diversifying our sources of clean-burning natural gas is obvious.

North America has only about 5 percent of the world's gas reserves, and those supplies are in decline. And the gas pipelines that serve the Mid-Atlantic region, including Maryland, are at or near capacity.

Introducing more gas into this area, with its increasing demand for energy need, would better balance supply and demand and help lower energy prices.

The project also has environmental benefits.

The Maryland Healthy Air Act recognized the need to decrease air emissions from power plants. Increased access to natural gas will help accomplish that goal.

AES will remove contaminated sediments from the Chesapeake Bay during dredging in a safe and controlled manner, and recycle the sediments into useful products rather than putting them in contained disposal areas.

The AES project will also put to productive use the heavy-industrial land at the old Bethlehem Steel site.

These benefits, combined with the economic benefits of the construction jobs the plant will create (about 4 million man-hours of work), direct and indirect income to the local communities during operation of the plant (about $50 million per year) and the taxes the plant will pay ($13 million per year), make this a good project for all Marylanders.

We will continue to press forward on this important project.

Kent Morton

Arlington, Va.

The writer is project director for AES Corp.

Climate changes predate mankind

The quote that ends The Sun's article "A warmer Md. will be wetter" (Feb. 3) sums up everything that proponents of the idea that humans are causing massive global warming leave out.

Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says, "We're starting to see things change that we've never seen before in recorded human history."

He is precisely correct about "recorded history." But the Earth goes through periods of warming and cooling on its own, whether or not humans are here to observe and record them.

The article mentions that ice sheets covered North America 20,000 years ago. They melted away without any interference from humans, raising sea levels at the same time.

We weren't here to see it, so we certainly could not have caused it.

Sea levels then dropped to where they are now, creating what we now call islands.

As today's period of ice melting occurs, water levels will rise again, and some of those islands will disappear.

Anything that brings attention to preserving the Chesapeake Bay is a good idea.

However, we are in a period of warming temperatures caused by the cycles that the Earth has experienced over the last 4 billion years or so.

For the first time, we have the technology to observe and precisely record what we see.

But our actions are only a minuscule portion of the cause.

Michael Connell

Baltimore

Energy efficiency curbs carbon wastes

This week, Sun reporter Tom Pelton addressed the dangers Maryland faces should global warming cause coastal flooding and more severe storms in this century ("Is this Baltimore's future?" Feb. 4).

Major worldwide reductions in the production of greenhouse gases seem to be the only antidote to the problem.

Yet reversing Americans' love affair with electrical gadgets and gas-guzzling vehicles is indeed a daunting task.

So what can we do? We can stop the naysaying and hand-wringing.

Anyone who remembers the Marshall Plan and the race to the moon knows that American ingenuity and vigor can solve massive problems and achieve lofty goals.

Let's start with energy conservation and efficiency, spurred by state and federal government initiatives and incentives, not foot-dragging and science-bashing - and with research and development of safe, clean alternative energy resources such as solar, wind, tidal and geothermal power.

Here in Maryland, we can also get behind the clean cars law to reduce harmful emissions from our vehicles and insist that our industries chop a quarter of their greenhouse gases by 2020.

Frank L. Fox

Mechanicsville

Training isn't what our teachers need

According to The Sun's article "Local schools used state aid to raise salaries" (Feb. 1), members of the Maryland State Board of Education "had hoped that more of the new money would have been spent on teacher training."

I am sorry that the board doesn't seem to recognize that our teachers are educated professionals, not "trained" laborers.

Maryland's teachers do not need training sessions that focus on implementing rigid programs selected by consultants with special interests; they do not need training in how to collect more data on skills unrelated to increasing comprehension.

If you ask teachers, they will tell you what they need.

Here's what some of them have told me they need: extensive classroom libraries full of exemplary literature of all genres; more time teaching and less time on meaningless paperwork; temperature-controlled classrooms; and better services for the students who come to school hungry, unclean and stressed from not having their basic human needs met.

And yes, an increase in salaries.

I hope the members of the state board will read these comments and reframe their thinking.

Our teachers should be respected and complimented for their professionalism and their efforts.

Nancy Rankie Shelton

Catonsville

The writer is a professor of education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Will vaccine reach the Third World?

As a gynecologist, I am glad to be able to offer Gardasil, the preventive vaccine for cervical cancer developed by Merck & Co. ("Drug firm pushes vaccine mandate," Jan. 29).

However, the United States has about 9,700 new cervical cancer cases per year, with approximately 3,700 deaths annually, according to the National Cancer Institute's Offices of Women's Health. This can be contrasted with 500,000 cases of cervical cancer worldwide a year, and 250,000 deaths annually.

I was touched by Merck CEO Richard T. Clark's statement that he was "reminded of the deep sense of satisfaction all of us at Merck feel by contributing to such an important development in women's health."

But with cervical cancer deaths in the United States accounting for only 1.5 percent of all cervical cancer deaths worldwide, what exactly is Merck doing for the other 98.5 percent of the world's cases?

This vaccine presents a huge opportunity to prevent and possibly eradicate cervical cancer in developing countries - where many women no doubt participated in Merck's clinical trials.

As Merck anticipates $1 billion in vaccine sales this year, which could increase to $4 billion if the vaccine becomes mandatory, surely it could fund a vaccination program in other countries.

And then Merck really would be contributing to an important development in women's health.

Dr. Eileen Coelus

Bel Air

Draft special rules for prison killings

If capital punishment is to be abolished in Maryland, we need to know what to do with men and women already incarcerated who kill other inmates and prison staff ("End the death penalty," editorial, Jan. 28).

In recent years, the level of violence in Maryland's prisons has escalated sharply. Serious assaults, most of them with shanks (homemade knives), are far too common behind bars ("Man gets life in inmate killing," Feb. 1).

About a half-dozen Maryland inmates a year die at the hands of other inmates.

And prison staff are hardly exempt. Indeed, the two men charged with stabbing correctional officer David McGuinn to death last summer at the Maryland House of Correction at Jessup were serving life sentences for murder.

I suggest that the following be written into any legislation that abolishes the death penalty in Maryland:

"Any prisoner convicted of a murder committed while in correctional custody is to be housed for the rest of his life, without parole, in a super-maximum-security facility. He is to be confined to a single cell. He may receive one visit a month. All of his visitors must speak to him by telephone from the other side of a Plexiglas barrier.

"He may never be touched again by anyone except the correctional officers who cuff and shackle him every time he comes out of his cell. He may not leave his cell for more than one hour a day.

"He may never engage in any activity - meals, recreation, work, worship, whatever - with another person."

Hal Riedl

Baltimore

The writer was a correctional case manager in Maryland's prison from 1990 to 2006.

Social cost of slots far exceeds revenue

In response to the letter "Gambling already sponsored by state" (Feb. 1), I would say that I, too, remember when slots were in Maryland - I remember the political corruption, the increased crime and the social costs.

That's why the public fought so hard to close them down.

And morality is just one facet of the slots debate.

I object to slots because they are a bad idea economically and socially.

One only needs to look at what slots have done and not done for Illinois.

State Rep. John Bradley said that after 15 years, "results show that gambling is a social failure. It is the taxpayers who have been left holding the bag when it comes to paying for the costs of cleaning up the unseen messes it creates."

Maryland would do well to learn from Illinois' mistake.

Slots look like a great revenue source, and they are for the first couple of years.

But if you look at several reputable, non-industry-funded studies, you'll find that the social costs (for addiction treatment, insurance fraud, lost productivity, law enforcement and business closings, to name just a few) far outweigh the revenue slots generate in just a few years.

And to argue that because the state already sponsors gambling, slots are a good idea just doesn't make sense.

The types of gambling we now allow could be equated to marijuana. But slots are called the "crack cocaine" of gambling because they are much more addictive.

Barbara Knickelbein

Glen Burnie

The writer is a co-chairwoman of NOcasiNO Maryland.

Series underscores value of mentoring

The Sun's series profiling the accomplishments of Edmondson-Westside High School football players and coaches was not just another football story ("The Big Game," Jan. 28-Feb. 1).

It was a story that reaffirmed critical lessons that have been essential for our community's development.

The first lesson is that despite the odds, academic and athletic progress continues in Baltimore's public schools.

The second is that although we live in an era in which African-American males are challenged by many negative forces, many individuals have stepped forward and performed above and beyond what is expected.

But the most significant lesson of the series was its story of mentoring. This is a story that spans decades and has included teachers and coaches from schools as diverse as Archbishop Curley, Patterson, Loyola, Bates, Douglass, Carver, Western and Annapolis high schools and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute.

Essentially, it is the story of how a trusted, competent adult can be a life-teaching and life-saving guide to a youth.

Our community continues to search for instant answers to youth violence, unemployment and school absenteeism.

Mentoring is one response that is readily available and has proven value.

The Maryland Mentoring Partnership and its staff were pleased to work with a wide range of Maryland organizations that focus on youth development.

I hope the authors of the recent series and The Sun will keep the mentoring message before the community throughout the year.

Stuart O. Simms

Baltimore

The writer is the co-chairman of the Maryland Mentoring Partnership.

Time has come to close Rosewood Center

The Maryland Coalition for the Civil Rights of Persons with Disabilities is greatly concerned that Maryland is making no progress toward developing opportunities for people with disabilities to live in integrated settings ("Rosewood's revocation," editorial, Feb. 2).

The Office of Health Care Quality's recent findings of immediate jeopardy for Rosewood Center residents came as no surprise to us; many former residents and their advocates have been complaining of the deplorable conditions at that facility for years.

No one should have to live in an institution such as Rosewood.

Research demonstrates that outcomes are better for people with disabilities who live in integrated community settings. And community care costs a fraction of what institutional care costs.

But beyond the significant cost implications, people with disabilities have the legal right to live in integrated settings.

In its 1999 Olmstead decision, the U.S. Supreme Court said that institutionalization of people with disabilities perpetuates the unwarranted assumptions that such individuals are incapable or unworthy of community life.

Yet Marylanders with disabilities are still waiting for the state to fulfill the promise of Olmstead by developing a plan to move people out of outmoded institutions into community-based care.

Large congregate settings such as the Rosewood Center are relics of the past. People with disabilities demand the right to be included in the mainstream of society.

The notion that some residents of Rosewood are "too disabled" to live outside an institution is a myth.

Not all of Rosewood's residents have severe disabilities, and for each resident who does have significant impairments, there are many more individuals with similar impairments living successfully in the community.

The state will not be in a position to offer people with disabilities and their families real choices as long as facilities such as Rosewood continue to drain its long-term care system of valuable resources.

The state should close it, stop throwing good money after bad, immediately begin developing individual transition plans for its residents and use the significant savings to improve the community care infrastructure.

Virginia Knowlton Kimball Gray Baltimore

The writers are co-chairpersons of the Maryland Coalition for the Civil Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The latest notice of jeopardy issued by the state for residents of the Rosewood Center highlights the immediate need to close this facility ("Rosewood warned of funding cutoff," Feb. 1).

This situation is not new.

In 2004, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported to the General Assembly that if an institution for the disabled were to be closed, it should be the Rosewood Center.

DHMH had found that closing this center could yield substantial cost savings that could be applied to moving people to less-restrictive settings and serving some of the 16,000 people on the state's waiting list for community services.

In 2004, the Department of Legislative Services projected general fund savings of about $11.8 million over five years from moving people out of Rosewood Center and into the community.

Funding the closure of the center was a barrier cited by the department in 2004. This is no longer a problem.

Maryland was awarded a federal "Money Follows the Person" grant that gives more money to the state as people are moved from institutions to appropriate community services.

In addition, legislation introduced by Del. James W. Hubbard would allow the state to borrow from the Community Services Trust Fund to finance the first two years of the closure process until the state realizes the savings it will accrue by transitioning institutionalized people into quality community services.

No one is talking about moving the few dangerous criminals at Rosewood Center into community neighborhoods.

What we want is appropriate treatment settings for everyone and the opportunity for people with severe and profound disabilities to live safe and connected lives in the community.

Maryland has the money to close Rosewood Center in a conscious, deliberate manner.

Does the state have the political will?

Ed Worff

Arnold

The writer is the president of the Arc of Maryland.

I am an individual with a developmental disability who once received services at a state institution. I see no credible argument for keeping the Rosewood Center open, given the opportunities available for individuals with developmental disabilities in the community ("Disabled center's closure debated," Feb. 2).

While a small portion of the residents at Rosewood do need a secure setting, alternative and secure placements could be developed once their status is reviewed.

Community-supported services are well established in Maryland and operate in environments that are more humane and fiscally responsible than Rosewood.

The federal government recognizes the intuitional model as archaic; many other states also see it as a flawed model and have closed their institutions.

I appeal to the governor to not use additional taxpayer dollars to attempt to fix a system that has, for more than 20 years, been documented to be broken.

Tom Webb

Chestertown

The writer is a former outpatient at the Holly Center and a member of the Maryland Developmental Disabilities Council.

Copyright © 2021, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Place an Ad
72°