Strange Bedfellows

Organizations looking for grants from Baltimore County be warned: Turn in the required paperwork.

Six such nonprofits expecting a total of $240,000 in grants could be left in limbo because they haven’t filed the required financial reports.

“What would happen if the council deleted those items?” Council Chairman Kevin Kamenetz asked Rec and Parks Director Robert Barrett during yesterday’s council work session.

Barrett went before the council seeking approval to appropriate the nearly $4.8 million budgeted for grants and endowments through the county’s Commission on Arts and Sciences.

The money is typically given to nonprofit and cultural organizations such as Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, Center Stage, the Hampton National Park Endowment and Pride of Baltimore. This year, nearly 60 organizations were budgeted to receive grants between $5,000 and $800,000.

The council deleted a $23,000 grant for the Great Blacks in Wax Museum during budget hearings this spring because the organization had not sent the county required financial information.

Now six more organizations are in arrears with their paperwork. The organizations and the grants that are in jeopardy are:

1. American Visionary Art Museum, $70,000
2. Baltimore Clayworks, $25,000
3. Fire Museum of Maryland, $20,000
4. Living Classrooms, $25,000
5. Maryland Historical Society, $65,000
6. Young Audiences of Maryland, $35,000

“Shouldn’t we be consistent here?” Kamenetz asked.

Barret said all six of the organizations, after many phone calls and letters, had submitted draft copies of the required reports and that no money would be disbursed until final versions were filed.

“No one receives a check until we send a grant agreement and we don’t send a grant agreement until we receive the documents we need,” Barrett said. “Then they are reviewed, audited and then we send the agreement. When it’s signed, we send the check.”

The council will decide on Aug. 4 if they are going to hold up the funding for the six groups.

Let’s assume you’ve got nothing better to do on any given evening and you’re just hankering for some hot, local political or public policy action. You might tune into the county’s government affairs channel, right?

And if you have done that been recently, it’s likely you’ve either turned it off in frustration or become an expert in lip reading. The audio quality of the broadcasts makes councilmen and Planning Board members sound a lot like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

In Baltimore County, the government programming runs on Channel 25 on both Comcast and Verizon FiOS. If you don’t have the times and days of your favorite shows memorized, you can find a guide here.

While all the complaints I’ve received have come from Comcast customers, it’s not the cable giant’s fault. It’s likely that you FiOS customers out there also are experiencing difficulties.

The council approved Verizon’s cable franchise about 16 months ago. As part of the franchise, the company was obligated to also carry the county’s government channel. Comcast is responsible for the taping of council and Planning Board meetings and other shows such as “Police Report” and “Hello Baltimore County.”

Having Comcast make copies and deliver them to Verizon presented its own set of logistical issues. So, the county decided to take the taped programs and broadcast them from the county schools system’s Education Channel studio at Carver High School in Towson.

And that’s the likely origin of the technical glitch that is the cause of the audio distortion, according to Thomas Peddicord, the council’s legal adviser.

The council is the regulating body for cable service in the county.

County officials and technicians at the Education Channel are now aware of the problem and working to correct it, Peddicord said on July 24.

Whatever the exact problem was, it appeared to be fixed this morning. The sound on a few programs checked at random contained no distortions.

Del. Bill Frank finds himself in an interesting position.

The Republican who represents the 42nd District, including Towson, Timonium and part of Pikesville, has been appointed to a commission he voted against creating to study an issue, the death penalty, that he says he supports.

Despite it all, Frank said he’s trying to keep an open mind.

“I’m ambivalent,” Frank said. “I struggle with it a little bit. I can see arguments on the other side.”

Frank was appointed to the commission as one of two picks allotted to House of Delegates Speaker Michael Busch, an Anne Arundel County Democrat. Democratic Del. Adrienne Jones, who also represents Baltimore County, was Busch’s other selection.

Frank said he was at a loss to explain his appointment.

“I’m not sure why they picked me and not someone else,” Frank said.

“I know what I think in my heart and in my mind, but I don’t consider myself an expert,” he said.

The 23-member commission is charged with reviewing the state’s death penalty law and making recommendations to address any racial, jurisdictional or socio-economic factors, as well as the risks of executing innocent people. It will compare the cost of executions in the state versus a sentence of life in prison.

The commission is expected to make its recommendations by Dec. 15.

The issue is one that has been studied at least four times since 1987.

Frank said he voted against a bill that created the commission on which he now serves “because I felt like we’ve been down this road many, many times. I don’t know what we’ll learn that we don’t already know. So, we’ll see.”

That knowledge will come at a cost. Estimates by legislative analysts place the cost of the commission’s work at about $42,000. Frank said “the rule of thumb with any blue ribbon commission is usually about $100,000.”

Former Gov. Paris Glendening’s 2000 study of the issue cost about $225,000.

It appears that Mike Davis, a county land-use attorney and former top aide to then County Executive Dutch Ruppersberger, is making big strides in his recovery from an emergency liver transplant. (You can read that post here.)

Ann Davis, Mike’s wife, wrote in an e-mail that her husband has been moved to a private room. He could come home as soon as July 21, just two weeks after his life-saving surgery.

Don’t be tempted to file this under the category of “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

David Carroll, the county’s environmental czar, says deer hunting is still going to happen in the area around the Loch Raven Reservoir this fall despite some nonspecific rumblings to the contrary from those oppose the idea.

The rumors “are rife with inaccuracies,” said Carroll, whose formal title is director of sustainability.

And the hunt is still on?

“Well, certainly bowhunting, that’s our plan,” he said.

Carroll said that county and city officials are still ironing out details of the hunting plan first reported by Patuxent Publishing (read the story here). Officials plan to hold public meetings on the plan but those have not been scheduled.

Initially, the idea was to hold those meetings in the first two weeks of August, but Carroll said it is more likely any such meeting will happen in the third or fourth week of August.

Carroll also said officials are likely to meet separately with an unspecified number of community leaders to discuss the plan.

“We want to have a nonyelling and nonscreaming meeting to get some facts out there,” Carroll said.

Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger says he hopes to use his position on a state commission reviewing the death penalty to explain why Maryland’s ultimate punishment should not be abolished.

“I think my role on the commission is to make sure everyone knows why the death penalty in Maryland needs to stay on the books,” Shellenberger said, adding that he believes it is used in only the worst of cases.

“I still firmly believe that the death penalty is an important punishment that needs to be available to prosecutors like me,” said Shellenberger, a Democrat.

Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley, an opponent of the death penalty, appointed 13 of the 23 members of the commission that will review racial disparities, the impact of DNA evidence and the difference in costs to taxpayers for sentences of life imprisonment and the death penalty.

Also on the commission is Kurt Bloodsworth, who was convicted of murder in Baltimore County and sentenced to death. Bloodsworth was serving a life sentence after he was convicted in the 1984 murder of Dawn Hamilton. He was sentenced to death in his first trial but was granted a second after the Court of Appeals ruled prosecutors had withheld evidence.

Bloodsworth was exonerated by DNA evidence in 1993. Former Circuit Court Judge Jim Smith, now the Baltimore County executive, presided over the hearing that ended in Bloodsworth’s release.

Led by former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, the commission is expected to report its findings in December.

Baltimore County long has been considered a jurisdiction that favors the death penalty. Sandy O’Connor, Shellenberger’s Republican predecessor, had a reputation for seeking the death penalty in nearly every case where it was deemed appropriate.

Currently, five inmates are on the state’s death row, including two sentenced for murders in Baltimore County. Four of the five, including the two from Baltimore County, are black; all five were convicted of killing white victims.

Does Shellenberger believe he’ll have to defend the county’s historical position on the ultimate punishment?

“I don’t know if ‘defend’ is a good enough word,” he said. “I think the word is ‘explain.’ ”

“It’s a representative Democracy and for 30 years the people of Baltimore County have spoken loud and clear on the death penalty,” Shellenberger said. “County residents believe in the death penalty, and I believe in the death penalty. I reflect the community.”

Mike Davis, a well-known land use attorney in Baltimore County, is recovering from emergency liver transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Davis is a partner with Venable in Towson and was a top aide to former-County Executive Dutch Ruppersberger.

Ann Davis, Mike’s wife, said both she and Mike recently became ill with hepatitis A.

Hepatitis-A infections are fairly rare, occurring in about 1.2 people per 100,000 according to the Centers for Disease Control. Most people who are infected recover and are no longer infectious and cannot get the disease again. There are about 100 deaths a year related to the disease, according to the American Liver Foundation.

Ann became ill but recovered. Mike’s illness took a more severe turn.

On July 3, Mike went to a doctor who recommended he go to the hospital to receive intravenous fluids and have some blood tests. He was later admitted to GBMC.

“From then on, that’s when things went downhill,” Ann wrote in an e-mail to me. “Michael’s liver was shutting down, and his condition deteriorated by big margins every 12 hours.”

Mike was transfered to Hopkins on July 5, and a liver became available the next day.

Mike seems to be recovering well, according to e-mail updates sent by his wife.

As of yesterday, the breathing tube had been removed. He’s able to talk and watch television and has been asking for ice chips, and there’s the expectation that he will be able to start eating in the next day or so.

I don’t plan on doing this often but in light of the fact that County Executive Jim Smith honored Lou Panos today with a proclamation (you can read about that here), I wanted to share one story about Lou.

I worked my first newspaper job back in 1987 at the tender age of 19. I met Lou the following year. He was on a media panel asking questions at a debate between incumbent Republican Rep. Helen Delich Bentley and Joseph Bartenfelder, the Democratic challenger.

I found myself on the panel after my more qualified editor bowed out due to illness.

I don’t remember the question that provoked Bentley, but after the debate Bentley came flying off the stage and into my face. Her question was peppered with expletives (she did work at the port, you know) demanding to know who told me to ask that question.

I was paralyzed. The tirade continued for a moment and abated.

Lou then approached and patted me on the back.

“Is that your first time meeting the congresswoman?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Don’t worry, that’s everyone’s first meeting with her,” he said with a smile and walked away.

Fourteen years later, I was hired to fill the position Lou was leaving for semiretirement but would continue on at Patuxent as a columnist until earlier this year. It was an amazing opportunity and a dream of mine.

To this day, people still ask me about Lou. He knew everyone, and his institutional knowledge, which he freely passed on, is endless. He was always humble about his work and I often heard him, while speaking to sources, introduce himself as “Lou Panos, boy reporter.”

He is irreplaceable, and for me, doing this job that was once his feels a lot like being a child walking around the house in his father’s shoes.

A nationwide search for a new county health officer is seemingly on hold but that doesn’t mean the county is necessarily any closer to a permanent replacement for Dr. Pierre Vigilance.

At its July 7 meeting, the County Council confirmed Dr. Gregory Branch, Vigilance’s deputy, to a second 60-day term as acting health officer.

Don Mohler, a spokesman for County Executive Jim Smith, pledged a nationwide candidate search when Vigilance stepped down earlier this year to take over the top doc slot in the Washington, D.C., health department.

Prior to the July 7 council vote, Mohler said that search “has slowed down.”

“I think at this point we’re very pleased with the job and the leadership Dr. Branch has provided,” Mohler said.

So why not make Branch the permanent health officer? Mohler declined to directly answer that question.

“I think given the job that Dr. Branch is doing it seemed prudent to provide him with some more time to think about his future plans,” Mohler said.

Branch will continue as acting director for 60 more days unless he or someone else is named permanently to the position. At the end of the 60-day period, Smith must resubmit Branch’s name to continue as the acting health officer.

Two-term legislator Jim Brochin confirmed that in May he convened a meeting of advisers, many important to his previous Senate campaigns and one current county legislator whom he declined to name. Also in attendance was his media consultant, whom he flew up from Florida.

“I feel because of my independence, I question if I can be more effective being county executive,” said Brochin, a Democrat who represents the 42nd District, which includes Towson, Timonium and part of Pikesville. “These are the thoughts that are running through my head.”

Dipping his toe into the water is one thing, but jumping in is something else altogether. It’s not a stretch to say that Brochin loves being a state senator. He always wears his Maryland Senate ring on his right ring finger.

“I really like my job, I like it a lot,” Brochin said. “I think my constituents think I do a good job.”

Brochin is also a machine when it comes to campaigning; he is known for going door to door in his district most nights during campaign season. He acknowledges that such an effort would be nearly impossible countywide.

“I think that’s really hard to do countywide, but I would do it in areas that are up for grabs,” Brochin said.

And then there’s the money issue.

Brochin said his 2002 and 2006 campaigns were difficult and depleted his campaign war chest. As of the most recent report filed in January, Brochin had about $32,000 in cash on hand and about $90,000 in outstanding debt.

And if Brochin enters the race, he could face a heavily contested Democratic primary field that could include at least two County Councilmen — Joseph Bartenfelder and Kevin Kamenetz. Both reported raising nearly $250,000 last year on top of already-healthy campaign accounts.

“They’ve had two really good cycles where they haven’t had any competition, and they’ve been able to stockpile money,” Brochin said.

Some believe it could cost $1.5 million or more to run a winning campaign. County Executive Jim Smith raised and spent $1 million in 2oo2 and raised another $2 million for his 2006 campaign.

Still, Brochin believes he can raise the money needed to run an effective campaign.

The senator said he is not likely to make or announce a decision until late in his current term — possibly late 2009 or early 2010.