County Receives More Than $1 Million in Grants

By Press Officer
PG County Government

Largo, MD - Prince George’s County Government and the Chesapeake Bay Trust announced funding for 13 new projects to support stormwater restoration efforts throughout Prince George’s County. The collaborative Stormwater Stewardship Grant Program was created earlier this year to encourage on-the-ground restoration activities that reduce nutrient and sediment pollution and community education activities that engage Prince George’s County neighborhoods, faith-based organizations, non-profits, and residents in the restoration and protection of local rivers, streams, parks, and other natural resources. In total, $1,050,000 was awarded through 13 projects

“Prince George’s County residents and local businesses alike are doing their part to help protect the rivers and streams of our County and the broader Chesapeake Bay watershed,” said Adam Ortiz, Director of the Prince George's County Department of the Environment. “Through this partnership with the Chesapeake Bay Trust, we are able to implement projects that not only reduce polluted runoff from entering local waters, but also educate our residents, neighborhoods, communities of faith, and others on how they can partner with us to help improve our community.”

 The Stormwater Stewardship Grant Program sought proposals in two specifics areas: water quality projects that achieve nutrient and/or sediment reduction (funding from $20,000 - $200,000 was available for each project); and engagement projects that aim to involve residents in efforts to improve local watersheds ($5,000 - $50,000 was available per project). The projects announced today include on-the-ground efforts such as rain gardens, bioretention practices, and impervious pavement removal as well as outreach campaigns related to green workforce development and stormwater management. Non-profit organizations, community associations, civic groups, and faith-based organizations were encouraged to apply, as well as municipalities, higher educational institutions, and public agencies.

“These stormwater practices truly accomplish two goals: Improving water quality and improving our communities.  It’s a classic win-win,” said Jana Davis, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Trust. “This new partnership with Prince George’s County allows nonprofit organizations like faith-based organizations, homeowners associations, community groups, and others to play a much-desired larger role in the community effort to restore our collective green spaces and waterways.”

Grants approved in 2014 include:

1. Alice Ferguson Foundation, $23,836: This grant funds the development of a clean water educational course for citizens who are interested in obtaining stormwater management jobs.

2. City of District Heights, $34,862: This grant will support the design and installation of a highly visible rain garden to allow the area to better handle stormwater runoff while promoting green infrastructure.

3. Town of Landover Hills, $126,578: Funding through this project will install rain gardens, a bioretention swale, and permeable pavers as a centerpiece in a community park.

4. The Low Impact Development Center, Inc., $55,895: This project will provide a highly visible demonstration area for the seven stormwater practices promoted by Prince George’s County's Rain Check Rebate Program.

5. Town of Forest Heights, $49,794: This grant will

train a team of high school students to water, weed and mulch 500 street trees as well as educate homeowners about the benefits of trees on their own properties.

6. Anacostia Watershed Society, $48,000: This grant will educate and train residents in watershed protection issues and empower them to design and implement projects that prevent stormwater runoff and engage additional community members.

7. City of College Park, $66,180: This project will treat stormwater flowing from roadways and demonstrate the use of bioretention, tree planting, and tree boxes for improved stormwater management.

8. City of Greenbelt, $187,700: This project will include the redesign, retrofit, and treatment of impervious surface, replacing it with low impact development techniques and environmental site design practices.

9. Pheasant Run Home Owner’s Association, Inc., $11,730: This grant will fund a citizen engagement campaign focused on erosion, stormwater runoff, and pet waste reduction.

10. Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, $25,000: This initiative will include workshops to educate faith leaders on stormwater runoff and provide tools to help congregations overcome technical and financial obstacles to project implementation.

11. The Empowerment Institute, $152,145: This grant will remove 20,000 square feet of existing asphalt and replace it with stormwater facilities with native plants to help filter and store rain water.

12. Neighborhood Design Center, $79,308: Funding will assist community groups, small municipalities, schools, and faith based organizations with creating a comprehensive plan for how they can retain and treat stormwater on their property, rather than having it flow into storm drains and local waterways.

13. Alice Ferguson Foundation, $188,972: This grant includes construction of a rooftop rainwater collection system and cistern, rain garden and bioswale as well as educational programming for students, teachers, and Prince George’s County residents.

In addition to these 13 grants, the Chesapeake Bay Trust also announced funding for five new projects in partnership with Prince George’s County through the collaborative Rain Check Rebate Program. For more information on both grant partnerships, visit www.cbtrust.org.

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MD Is Nation’s Most Improved State in 2014 America’s Health Ranking

By Press Officer
DHMH

ANNAPOLIS, MD – The UnitedHealth Foundation today released “America’s Health Rankings 2014,” which found that Maryland had the greatest improvement of any state this year.  Maryland improved eight spots from 24th last year to 16th in 2014.  Key areas of improvement cited in the report include increased immunization rates and reductions in rates of preventable hospitalizations, smoking, and binge drinking.

“Over the course of the O’Malley-Brown Administration, we have made better choices to bring low-cost, high quality health coverage to more Marylanders across our State,” said Governor O’Malley.  “Today’s news shows a lot of improvement, but our work is far from finished.  We are focused on strengthening Maryland’s middle class, and helping to lift families out of poverty -- continuing to ensure that more Marylanders have access to quality, affordable health coverage is a key ingredient of that effort.”

“This jump in national rankings is another sign of significant public health improvement in Maryland,” said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, Secretary of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.  “It reflects efforts in communities and coalitions across the state to support well-being and prevent disease, as well as our strong clinical care system.”

The report, which is in its 25th year of production, also found that Maryland is one of the most improved states for health since 1990.  The report noted that in Maryland:

• Since 1990, children in poverty driven down by 7 percent from 16.4 percent to 15.3 percent of children.

• Since 1990, infant mortality driven down by 43 percent from 11.6 to 6.6 deaths per 1,000 live births.

• Since 1990, cardiovascular deaths driven down by 40 percent from 415.8 to 250.7 deaths per 100,000 population.

• Since 1990, violent crime driven down by 38 percent from 768 to 477 offenses per 100,000 population.

As part of the O’Malley-Brown Administration’s 16 strategic goals to move Maryland forward, the State is working to reduce preventable hospitalizations by 10 percent by the end of 2015 and to reduce infant mortality in Maryland by 10 percent by 2017.  To date, Maryland has reduced preventable hospitalizations by 11.5 percent per 100,000 people since 2011, exceeding the state’s goal, and has surpassed the goal to decrease Maryland’s infant mortality rate by 10 percent by driving it down by 17.5 percent.

In April 2014, the Commonwealth Fund issued a report highlighting the substantial progress Maryland has made over the last five years.  The report noted that Maryland is one of only four states that “stand out for their net improvement across indicators.”  The State improved in fourteen indicators, while only four indicators deteriorated, making Maryland only one of two states to have a +10 differential.  Additionally, Maryland was one of five states that improved on ten or more indicators of health equity, rising from a rank of 30 to a rank of 12.

Additionally, the O’Malley-Brown Administration has embraced CRISP, Maryland’s statewide health information exchange (HIE).  CRISP’s Regional Extension Center for Health IT and HIE efforts serve to advance health and wellness of Marylanders by enabling healthcare providers to share clinical data with other providers and hospital systems across the State.  These initiatives, and others, were detailed in an August 2014 report from Business Insider titled, “An Amazing Healthcare Revolution Is Happening In Maryland — And Almost No One's Talking About It."

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Baltimore’s Neighborhood Bars Remain the Community Meeting Place

BBy Josh Logue
Capital News Service

BALTIMORE – It’s game day on a cool Sunday afternoon in Baltimore. Tavern owner Dan Macatee is sitting at the corner of the bar, sipping coffee and wearing a black-and-purple Ravens fleece under a white apron. Three wall-mounted TVs in his quiet Locust Point tavern show the Ravens are holding their own (for now) against the San Diego Chargers.

He’s talking about the role his place, and others like it, played in the community 30 years ago.

“The neighborhood bar,” he says, “back in the day when we first started, damn near every corner had its own spot. And the community -- people that worked in the community, people in the neighborhood -- it was a spot where they would come to find out what was going on in the neighborhood. It was sort of a meeting place.”

An audit of the Baltimore liquor board last year sparked controversy and a significant overhaul of the state agency, but life in the city’s bars proceeds at it has, in some cases, for generations.

Most of those corner bars are long gone, but Macatee’s place, Hull Street Blues Café, has survived.

Macatee bought it in 1984 when it was still called Buck’s Place after its original owner, Charlie Krepp, who first opened the tavern in 1936.

Its clientele has changed over time, Macatee says, but Hull Street Blues has always attracted a blend of local, blue-collar workers and younger professionals.

“When I first moved to the neighborhood in 2001, it was very working-class,” said Melissa Abernathy, a Hull Street regular who was sitting a few seats down the bar from Macatee, watching the game.

“To this day a lot of people live in their grandparents’ houses, but over the years that’s shifted. There aren’t so many of those people. It’s shifted so the newcomers to the neighborhood like me are taking over the place… .

“This has pretty much been my living room for the last eight years.”

Since Macatee took over, his bar has weathered the manufacturing slump that killed the nearby Procter & Gamble factory, the rise and fall of the ‘90s tech bubble that followed, and the influx of new, younger clientele who appeared when Under Armour moved its national headquarters a few blocks away.

It’s still a place where people in the community gather, socialize, and even attend functions like weddings and funerals.

“Of course (that part of the) history of bars probably goes back to Revolutionary times,” he says, “You know, to talk politics or find out what’s going on in the community. That’s where you went to get your information, and you went there for social interaction, and then of course you had a few drinks and something to eat while you were there.”

Which, according to Nancy Struna, the chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, is absolutely right.

In that respect, Hull Street Blues is preserving, at least in part, the role taverns originally played back in the 17th century.

Back then, Struna said, the term for such a place was “ordinary,” and in addition to acting as social centers, ordinaries played the role of workplace and hotel. 

“The earliest taverns were actually set up for … the entertainment of travelers and visitors,” she said. “Every tavern had to provide a certain number of beds, food, both cold and hot at particular rates, and stabling….

“Businessmen conducted business there. People got their mail there,” Struna said. “There were weddings. You name it, they did it in the taverns.”

Tavern owners were still required to obtain a license, which they could purchase from the Maryland General Assembly for 7 pounds, -- the equivalent of two or three weeks’ income, Struna said. State government also set rates for all its services until both those responsibilities were handed to county governments in the 1700s, Struna said.

A “Hot Dinner, with Small Beer, or Cyder,” for example, cost 26 pence in 1789, according to a digital copy of the official Tavern Rates that Struna has. 

So important were taverns to the social fabric of communities then, that the courts and legislators actively promoted the purchase of new licenses.

“These people were committed to the encouragement legal taverns,” Struna said. “Because they served all these functions.

But by the late 1700s and early 1800s, the advent of boarding houses and the appearance of upper-class, European-style hotels around the country re-routed and undercut the original role of taverns as temporary lodging.

The exodus of wealthier people to those new, expensive hotels also served to link taverns more closely to the working -class, ethnic communities in the city.

Despite the gentrification, Baltimore taverns kept their role as important social centers in working-class communities around the city. And by the turn of the century, they had come to resemble the tavern-on-the-corner environment Macatee says has survived.

In those years leading up to Prohibition, “there were a lot of neighborhood bars, and they were on corners,” said Rob Kasper, who has written extensively about the history of beer in Baltimore.

“Traditionally people who lived in about a one- or two-block area would go down to the tavern…. It was a focal point for the community.”

Taverns would provide services like check cashing, he said, and they often served as hiring halls, particularly for immigrants who, as soon as they arrived in the city, would be directed to a tavern whose owner was connected politically and could find him or her a job.

Prohibition rolled around eventually, but Baltimore and the entire state of Maryland essentially ignored the 1920 constitutional ban on alcohol sales in the United States, Kasper added.

Maryland never adopted a state-level ban, so enforcement in the state fell to federal agents, who couldn’t possibly keep up. Baltimore city cops certainly weren’t about to help.

“Mencken said, if you come to Baltimore and need a drink, ask a policeman,” said Kasper, referring to the well-known writer and one-time Baltimore Sun editor H.L Mencken.

Still, alcohol was less abundant, even in Baltimore, and it was still technically illegal. Speakeasies in Baltimore would shine red lights to indicate they had booze available.

Prohibition ended in 1933 with the 21st Amendment, and Mencken famously hoisted a glass of Arrow Special beer outside the Rennert Hotel in Baltimore and said, “Pretty good, not bad at all.” (Though it probably wasn’t good at all, Kasper said. Arrow beer “was pretty terrible stuff.”)

The end of Prohibition in Baltimore ushered in the framework for the city’s modern liquor regulation. “It became apparent that appropriate controls and licensing of alcoholic beverages at the retail level were necessary in the State of Maryland to insure public safety,” according to Baltimore City Liquor License Board website.

Enter the Baltimore City liquor board and Article 2B of the Annotated Code of Maryland, which still enshrines the city’s liquor regulations.

Those laws have changed over time, often acquiring confusing loopholes and exceptions. But taverns continued to act as social centers in working class communities around the city throughout much of the 20th century.

Today, there aren’t bars on “damn near every corner,” like Macatee says there used to be. Still, “some of these younger professionals are still willing to come in and have a few beers and have lunch and talk a little business,” he said.

“And oftentimes they tell me they’re somewhat productive here, you know, that they do get some, get a little bit of business done.” But the days of factory workers stopping by for a shot and beer at lunch are long gone. And people don’t need a local tavern to find out what’s happening in their community.

“Now you’ve hardly got to leave your house,” Macatee says. “All you’ve got to do is open up your computer and you find out what’s going on in the neighborhood and what your friends are doing. You go on Facebook and see up-to-the-minute updates on what everybody’s doing and going on in their lives."