By Brooks DuBose
Capital News Service
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland — The applause was raucous, snapping through a spacious hotel meeting room in Annapolis.
At a Maryland Municipal League conference this month, both candidates for governor spoke, but one was met with more enthusiasm. Much more.
The ovation was for Gov. Larry Hogan as he emerged from a side door and jogged to the stage with an ease that belied his 62 years.
By Brooks DuBose
Capital News Service
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland — Ben Jealous is exhausted but optimistic.
The Democratic candidate for Maryland governor conceded as much in an Oct. 15 interview with Capital News Service.
“You can see I’m a little weary after 500 days of … campaigning, but I am extremely optimistic that we’ll win this general the same way we won the primary,” Jealous said. “We’’l defy every pollster and every pundit. Then we’ll win.”
It was a big night in the Baltimore City Council chambers, as lawmakers approved new measures adopting a citywide Complete Streets transportation framework, raising taxes on property sales to fund affordable housing and mandating that most places with public bathrooms add diaper-changing facilities. The council also approved a shift of $21 million to pay for the Baltimore Police Department’s overruns on overtime from 2017, even as five of the 15 members opposed the move.
Also last night, a measure changing Baltimore’s fire code–passed by the council months ago–took effect, despite a lack of a signature from Mayor Catherine Pugh.
“Faith, family and friends”—that’s where John Olszewski Jr. says he leaned for calm this past summer, as state elections officials re-tallied the votes from the Democratic primary for Baltimore County executive. He’d finished in a dead heat with state Sen. Jim Brochin (D-42nd District) on June 26. It took nearly three weeks before elections officials affirmed “Johnny O” had eked out a victory by 16 votes.
The first results are in from the new joint poll from Baltimore’s 126-year-old African-American newspaper, The Afro, and Morgan State University, and they indicate black Marylanders are unsurprisingly backing former NAACP president Ben Jealous in the gubernatorial election.
They didn’t know where Al Redmer Jr. was.
A who’s who of the Maryland Republican Party–Gov. Larry Hogan, Congressman Andy Harris, U.S. Senate candidate Tony Campbell and attorney general candidate Craig Wolf, among others–was getting ready to pose for a group photo with supporters and campaign workers yesterday outside an early voting place in Perry Hall, and the candidate for Baltimore County executive was the only one missing.
He was off to the side doing a TV interview, they soon learned. Hogan saw an opportunity to rib his buddy.
“Your friends are taking a picture, and you want to be on TV,” he joked as Redmer rushed in to be part of the shot.
By Harrison Cann
Capital News Service
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland — Despite the gubernatorial race being centered on Republican Larry Hogan and Democrat Ben Jealous, there are more than two names on the ballot for the state’s highest office.
On paper, the 32-year-old Joshua Harris boasts the kind of background Democratic strategists salivate over. Raised in poverty by a single mother in Chicago, he credits basketball with teaching him the skills that made him the first in his family to graduate from college. In 2012, Harris moved to Baltimore to work for a nonprofit that provides scholarships to African-American youth, and later served as a legislative aide to Democratic Del. Charles Sydnor in Annapolis. He started an arts-based nonprofit in Hollins Market, where he lives, and sits on the boards of numerous community associations, including the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance, the NAACP’s Baltimore branch and Arena Players, Inc.
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