Two stories PR people waited to release until the day after the election:
Not a year after news of the SW district's "Flex Squad" broke, a second specialized police unit has been shut down on account of a criminal investigation. This time, a "Special Enforcement Team," or SET, in the Southeast is facing allegations that officers lied on charging documents. Once again, dozens of cases may be dismissed.
What the?! Baltimore city found $16 million-- and is going to give $440,000 to the Jewish Museum?! My kid's school needs $2 million of structural repairs and has contaminated water! That museum can't raise its own money?!?! How dare they. That is my money, and if I wanted to give it to some museum then I would! Who decided this? How can it be legal? Even if it's legal it sure ain't right!
In Baltimore Couny, trial is underway for Carl Evans, 36, accused of killing his 13-year-old stepdaughter Breaunna and setting fire to his house to cover up the murder.
Twenty-four-year old Nicole Stevenson was indicted for taking the personal info of a patient at Harbor Hospital and using it to buy more than $61k worth of stuff. And a Dominican man got 132 months in prison for smuggling cocaine and heroin into MD inside car batteries. And a postal employee who faked a bad back will have to pay $242k in fraudulently collected pay, back. And a serial bank robber, fake accounting at the credit union, felons with guns, etc.
A campaign volunteer for State's Sttorney candidate Steve Fogelman was robbed at 3 a.m. as he put on signs near a middle school on the West side. Duh.
Nutcase Karl Glenn Salenieks of Crofton got 6 1/2 years in prison for being a felon in possession. He was busted after posing as a cop and pulling over a car full of undercover officers, which had to have made one hi-larious scene.
Underage drinkers at Uncle Lee's China Room and the Latin Palace were charged for illegal consumption and trying to pass fake IDs.
Residents are being fined for not draining standing water after a rainstorm.
Two HoCo women are charged with animal cruelty for cat-collecting.
"That part of urban America which has been left behind by the economy and by the greater society" = good watchin'! The Wire will go on for a fifth season!
In Annapolis, a principal blamed MySpace for the recent high-school gang fight.
Looks like Franchot has won.
Fill in the blank: A Delaware band director was arrested for ...
38 comments:
"...The city plans to give $5.6 million to children's services, including the city school system and the Healthy Start program. Another $250,000 will go to the Maryland food bank.
The Jewish Museum of Maryland will get $440,000 and the city plans to spend about $3 million in repairs -- including replacing elevators in several city buildings...."
Looks like schools get the lion-share of the booty. Galt would have allocated all of it to police? I would have used a bunch on roads, sidewalks, and trees.
No matter what, politicians are going to spend your money in ways that you might not like. It has always been that way.
Anyways, the museum is a reminder of what was once a major component of Baltimore history. I think that is a worthy cause.
Museums are bourgeois causes for private donors, not governments-- Do we need any more museums in this town?! Does anyone go to the ones we do have? If it's all about history, how about an exhibit at the Historical Society?
Not to mention, what's the state doing funding a religious museum?! The Catholics don't have a museum, the Quakers don't have a museum.
I am just livid. It is a completely inappropriate use of public money and obviously a special favor to someone.
And if Sheila Dixon is behind this or could have stopped it and didn't I STG I will vote Ehrlich just to keep her out of here.
The Jewish museum isn't a religious museum. It's a cultural/historical museum. I'm not defending the city's decision to give it money, I dont know anything about that decision, just trying to straighten out the facts.
Yeah if 440K bothers you, you'll have a heart attack if you look at the city budget.
Well, it isn't like they're going to use the money to fix potholes... or hire more police officers...
At this point, I don't so much wonder what they spend the money on as much as I wonder who they are spending it on. Obviously the city has granted lucrative government contracts to differing bodies that supported them, but I wonder: how many of these were grossly out of proportion with the going rate of their jobs?
We've all heard the allegations of Sheila Dixon supporting a guy who got ten times what was expected for the work he did. How many other times have people such as O'Malley and other City politicians (in particular, those who are generally insulated from electoral challenges) managed to pinch money from the city budget?
I suspect that if this information were made public, heads would roll.
Yeah, they 'found' $16MM, kinda the same way they 'lost' $50MM from the school system.
No one's that incompetent. Even if they learned to add in Baltimore City's schools. It's NO'Malley's idea of November Surprise. He figures he's leaving, so why not deplete the slush fund his people created with embez... I mean segregated.. funds from the budget before heading to Annapolis?
Meanwhile they've conveniently failed to hired the requisite or even the authorized manpower for the police department. What happened to that unspent money? Surprise. It went to the Jewish Museum, the school system, and the food bank.
'Get In on It.' In on what? The theft, of course. Vote Ehrlich, if for no other reason than that NO'Malley pulled this crap. Call your councilmen and have them reject the spending bill.
F#@k Baltimore.
Jeez, tomorrow's Examiner will feature another scandal about police abuse. This on top of the dissolution for cause (yet without present firings) of the Southeast Hot Team. The State's Attorney will be advising all the defendants' counsel in cases in which the involved officers were to appear as witnesses. Most of those cases will likely be dismissed. When this happened in Southwest, it was over 100 cases, mostly drug.
Guys, Lenny Hamm's ineptitude is not only unproductive, its counterproductive. And very, very costly. Someone please, please get this idiot the f#@k out of here. Even if you have to pay him to take a long trip.
I cannot believe this f***in' city. We NEED a receivership for the police department. Mr. Ehrlich, please?
I don't know or care if they'll have torahs or pictures of the construction of a shirt factory in the Jewish Musuem (and it actually sounds kind of neat-- mohels' knives and explorable matzoh ovens) but it's still a museum about one particular religious group. Can you imagine the fury if $440k of public money, approved up by Ehrlich, was donated to an museum about the history of Evangelical Christians in Baltimore? (didn't they just decide to tear down some big old historic church around the SE lately?)
Anyway, people would say it stank to high heaven (ha!) and could be considered a kind of kickback, bribe or even means of money-laundering campaign donations to big-money religious supporters.
But I don't know. Maybe a previous administration promised it to some city cultural agency or something and I don't have all the facts.
I've ranted on this before, but it seems to me that one of the nation's worst governments, which is constantly excusing its failure by crying poverty, should be forbidden to give away public money. Absent such a provision, the only legal requirement about grants from general funds under Maryland law is that the (purportedly) public purpose of the grant be stated by the grantor government.
In principle, there's no reason why the city councilmembers couldn't form a nonprofit, place themselves on its Board, and grant the entire city revenue to their nonprofit. The only difference I see is there are shill boardmembers in place and the recipients are multiple.
I don't believe in grants from government.
I'm not against all government grants to nonprofits. But that should be something that taxpayers should know about, have input on and ultimately be able to vote for or against, like as a ballot intitative or that Simpsons when they have the surplus and they decide to get a town monorail.
Are you aware that the city's Housing Authority which provides public housing accommodations was sued for lead paint poisonings of children and the defense attorney had the case dismissed because there was no money to pay claims?
The City, operating through a dummy corporation, declared itself too insolvent to pay, but they have 'found' $16 million somewhere to give away to well-connected nonprofits.
Perhaps the City should also be forbidden to operate through agencies until it stops running out on its bills.
Moral of the story: if you want to steal but don't like jail, run for office.
In about a week and a half, we will have currently exceeded the total annual murders of both the District of Columbia and Dallas.
The only jurisdictions with higher annual murders than our current total are disastrous Detroit and the 6 largest cities in the nation, whose average population per city is just under ten times ours.
Translation: this place is just awful. The next time a politician tries to tell you Baltimore is much improved,... beat the crap out of him.
galt, although i agree with the basic sentiment of that last post, you're exaggerating again. the average population of the six biggest cities in the nation (according to wikipedia's list of united states cities by population) is 3,295,330, which is only 5.18 times the population of baltimore!
also, i can't believe i forgot that it was wednesday (aka new murder ink day). looks like a fair amount of murders went unreported by the sun this week. and they'd been doing so good lately! guess i've got a lot of map-updatin' to do tomorrow morning.
On the Jewish Museum thing, in all fairness, The Jewish Musuem of Maryland is not just a museum for a particular religious group, it is also a cultural museum for an ethno-group which was a crucial and vital contributer to Baltimore’s cultural and historic fabric, putting it on in the same catagory as the African American Museum. Also, there are Quaker museums, and a Quaker historic site which recieves city money, just a few blocks northeast of the Jewish Museum of Maryland - with lots of stuff on Johns Hopkins and Peabody - two quakers who contributed vast amounts, both culturally and economically, to the city (and in the case of the former, STILL fuels 25% of our economy) - and the same can be said about the Baltimore Jewish community - both within and outside of the context of Judiasm being a religion - and this doesn’t even address the fact that the Baltimore Jewish community (which like any other cultural group, likes to be appreciated) contributes a hell of a lot more than 440 G’s annually to our city’s tax base. Sometimes the city has to lick the hands that feed it. I’d rather not lose a part of that tax base because the city shows itself to be ungrateful. This isn’t to say that such spending shouldn’t be monitored and kept in check, but it really needs to be viewed in the context of the bigger picture.
Also, the Jewish Museum of Maryland is by and large a children’s museum, and is attended and used as an educational tool, to educate and foster a sense of identity and pride in a city’s Baltimore Jewish roots, for both jewish and non-jewish kids alike. In that context alone, it is probably worth the investment, even if it doesn’t contribute futher to the city’s tax base 30 years down the line... which it probably will... in the millions... or tens of millions... to be conservative. Like, if it sways a single investment in the biotech park or something.
anon, you're correct. I transposed, but even so, our stats still suck. We still have about five times the homicides we should.
Imagine if we were the size of New York... people would be absolutely livid.
Galt for Mayor!
Oh please, eeb.
Do you think people are going to stay or move out of the city because of an epxlorable matzoh oven?
And do we certainly don't lack the museum experience for kids, there's the Science Center, Port Discovery, the Walter's, the BMA... Baltimore has 26 museums-- one to take the kids to every single day of the month (but Monday).
Cybes,
Y'know what we really need ? A Baltimore Crime Museum. Ya want a cool $440,000 ??
You could have a Wall of Shame across from the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors' Agency listing the names with a digital murder counter in big, bright, beautiful red.
Slogan: As a murder capital, Baltimore's still Number Two. The streets may smell like Number One, but Baltimore's just a pile of Number Two.
I love this town!
We bitch because we care.
I think there actually is a forensics museum, now that you mention it! I should look into that, we could have a feild trip.
And back to museums, eeb, what actual child in his or her right mind wants to spend a day indoors looking at stuff in a glass case?
there is no "oh eeb" about it, fact of the matter is cultural investments breed fiscal investments. a derth of cultural investments breed no fiscal investments. Washington is recieving ten times as much as baltimore in biotechnology firms. why? because they are surrounded by the worlds best hospitals? no, that's us. it's because we are outshined in the cultural investment department, making it a more appealing location to investors. Gee, I wonder why nobody wants to invest in Gary, Indiana? Why does new york get so much investment. Hello! 26 museums? So what, if we are outshined by other cities who gobble up all the investments that pass us over because we are too proud to kiss the right asses.
like you said, it’s bourgeois. but, what isn’t addressed it that it is the bourgeoise that fuels the economy in every country and every city and every town in the world. you antagonize your bouregoise, your town... your city... your country, gets flushed down the toilet.
like you said, it’s bourgeois. but, what isn’t addressed it that it is the bourgeoisie that fuels the economy in every country and every city and every town in the world. you antagonize your bourgeoisie, your town... your city... your country, gets flushed down the toilet.
And in the case of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, you never know, its existence, or more specifically, the existence of strong jewish cultural community and all the trappings that go along with it, could sway, in theory, an owner of a football team or something to leave an ingrate town and move his team to the city. Like, it that team owner, had grandchildren or something. wait a second. I’m talking crazy. I’m sure the existence of a strong jewish cultural community had nothing to do with that. capitalists are never concerned with anything other than the bottom line... ever. besides, it isn’t like a football team or something would help the economy or anything.
whoops, sorry for the double paragraph posting. i was trying to correct my inability to spell "bourgeoisie" with a spell checker.
"And back to museums, eeb, what actual child in his or her right mind wants to spend a day indoors looking at stuff in a glass case?" heh. museums are like castor oil for children. they're educational tools. it takes 20 years for the investment to pay off, like education itself.
If you want to make an impression, take the kid to a bris, send him to a seder, drive by the hannukah house, get some kosher Chinese food, shop at the Seven-Mile Market, visit Dorothy Parker's remains...
As far as educational tools, how about getting the lead out of the drinking water in schools... gotta stop stupidening em up before you learn 'em.
I'm not talking about making an impression, I'm talking about greasing the wheels to spur capital investment. Our city can wear the high hat and refuse to invest in cultural institutions. meanwhile, communities that do invest in cultural institutions will grow, prospor and get richer and richer; while our community becomes more and more like gary, indiana. if we want a tax base that can potentially pay to fix our myriad of problems, we need to make sure there is actually a tax base to fix them. and if all it takes is throwing a few G's here and there at a children's museum to make a community happy, than I say keep the grease flowing.
I'm not talking about making an impression, I'm talking about greasing the wheels to spur capital investment. Our city can wear the high hat and refuse to invest in cultural institutions. meanwhile, communities that do invest in cultural institutions will grow, prospor and get richer and richer; while our community becomes more and more like gary, indiana. if we want a tax base that can potentially pay to fix our myriad of problems, we need to make sure there is actually a tax base to fix them. and if all it takes is throwing a few G's here and there at a children's museum to make a community happy, than I say keep the grease flowing.
Donation: $440,000
Jewish Museum of Maryland Admission Prices:
JMM Members:Free
Non-members:$8
Students: $4
Children under 12: $3
First 55,000 Baltimore City taxpayers get in free!
eebmore,
Glad you mentioned the role of various factors in attracting investment. Do you what are the two most (overwhelmingly) important factors in determining the long-term market price of single-family residential housing? Public safety and the availablity of good public education. Not 'cultural amenities'.
This was suggested as a basis for the massive investments in the Stadium area. It'll create jobs and investment.
Actually, this was studied. What the investigators found was that amenities do not increase factor productivity and while are flows of investment and jobs into the target area, there are other flows out of other areas. The net effect is that these investments do NOT bring in increased tax base. They just shift it around. Nonprofits, in particular, tend to suck the economic blood from grants they receive. The nonprofit economy is a black hole.
What Baltimore's massive nonprofit sector does really well is to suck federal dollars out of maryland's statewide private sector and concentrate them as grants to inner-city nonprofits in Baltimore City. The economic value of what those nonprofits do with the money is way, way less than what the rest of the state loses in the process.
Baltimore's most urgent need is to stem the outflow of functional, educated middle income blacks die to crime, poor public schools, and high taxes. A Jewish History Museum ain't gonna do it. That's just a boondoggle.
The problem with public money for cultural institutions is, who gets to decide what a "cultural institution" is?
The way it used to, and ought to, work was people had an interest in whatever artifact (like Steve Geppi and his comic books), so they collected what they were interested in and then they and friends of people of similar interests raised money to house the collection.
Museums are tax shelters and cultural morgues.
You need living people to create cultural institutions.
bboyneko,
People memorialize best what they regard most highly. The Ukrainian diaspora on the American East Coast were largely urban, right-bank Ukrainian.
Equivalently, they were largely left-wing workers with great sympathy for the Soviets responsible, so that growing up, we encountered a lot of apologetics for Holodomor.
The Museum at UKK in the East Village was strangely silent on this subject, yet was very vociferous about the cultural accomplishments of Shevchenko, etc.
I guess that Musem kind of idealized the Ukrainian experience under the 'benign' Soviet, up until we started hearing of increasing Russian chauvinism in the 80's. Only then did nationalists start publicizing the famine in the way that the Armenians always have.
We also had the problem coming out of the Second War that we sometimes didn't treat minorities in our land so very well (for a lot of historical reasons, some of which are even reasonable), which predisposes a people to keep a low profile when it comes to righteous indignation.
But the Museum at UKK was not grant-based. Like it's near neighbor it was driven by Samopomich, Self-Reliance.
I'd like to see more of that sentiment among Baltimore nonprofits.
bboyneko, nobody brought up the holocaust. the discussion was about the jewish museum of maryland. What interest I have in the Jewish Museum of Maryland pertains to the history of the development of Baltimore as a city, and possible future development in the context of the metropolitan baltimore area being home, per capita, to the largest jewish community in the United States, on par with New York, and home to the largest per capita Orthodox Jewish community in the United States, exceeding New York. When the Ukrainian community grows to such a size and has such a large effect on the Baltimorean economy, I’ll start paying attention to them instead. Holocausts and Holodomors and the jewish people getting too much attention don’t come into play here one way or the other.
you may really “hate” that there is such a focus on the jewish people, and not to dismiss the human tragedy of the Holodomor, it is impossible to dismiss a tragedy on such a scale that credible sources scientifically estimate to be over 3 million (soviet apologists say 1.5 million, Ukrainian nationalists say 10 million. both are incorrect. source) I’m sorry if it is terribly dickish for me to point this out, but 3.2 million is a smaller number than 5.1 million. so your statement is incorrect, unless the death toll of the Holocaust has been exaggerated or something.
You're right. You shouldn't have gone there.
It's quite difficult to quantify the mortality consequences of a distributive famine.
Now, let's talk about the population of jews in Baltimore City. Actually, only about a quarter of the number you cited live in Baltimore City, primarily in the Park Heights northwest corner. The bulk of the jewish population lives in Pikesville, Balto. County. A Baltimore City government appropriation to benefit a mostly County constituency is a misappropriation. An optimal subsidy should actually tax extra-jurisdictional users.
Now, how useful is the Jewish Museum in downtown for attracting Jewish entrepreneurs (I mean, you weren't talking farmers, were you?)
Well, they're not going to move into Cedonia. They're NOT going to move into Sandtown-Winchester. If they're entrepreneurs rather than day laborers, they're headed for Pikesville, not Park Heights. Furthermore, these are mobile people. If they want to visit a museum which is in Philly, they'll hop in the Lexus and go there for a day trip, but it won't really influence where they choose to live.
Museums don't make cities. What you're really trying to get at is Florida's notion of an elite class of 'creative' or productive people.
What Florida fails to take into account is that the elite is interested in the depth of that elite's characteristic amenities, but it's also interested in that elite's ability to insulate itself from the characteristics of local non-elite populations.
They want amenities with the option of enclave. When amenities are subject to the requirement that you mix with the undesirable others on their terms, they vanish in value.
Example: Asia House in New York is on a ritzy part of Park Avenue. It's very dignified and upper crust, even though everyone is technically welcome. It's very Anglo. It's very inviting.
Suppose instead you housed the collections in a ratty Chinatown walk-up on a back alley off Bayard Street or Mott Street where many (quite authentic) Chinese restaurants are entered. The staff speak no English and most everything's written in Chinese. There are scruffy Bao vendors piled up in front of the tiny doorway and the air smells of overused oil. Tong guys are propped up in the stairwell, doing whatever it is they do. Very authentic New York downtown CHinese experience.
This is not Asia House. This will not be seen as an amenity which is effective at attracting anyone, other than maybe people already from within that subculture.
Museums are not good public investments. They make excellent private philanthropic investments to promote their own, admittedly narrow, agenda. Public benefits are much exaggerated and never seem to materialize.
I don't understand the intense focus on the jewish museum either.
I think I'll chalk it up to what I call "internet libertarianism"--
For whatever reason, a large number of people suddenly become extreme libertarians when logged into the blogosphere. When they step away from the computer, they're practically invisible. But as soon as they get on a blog, you see crazed indignance at where minute amounts of tax dollars go.
-H.
Actually, southeast Baltimore, the butcher's hill area, used to have one of the highest populations of jewish people in Maryland.
-H.
Yes, it did.
And once upon a time, Baltimore was among the most productive and prosperous cities in the Western Hemisphere. It was a center of trade and industry. That commerce made Johns Hopkins University & Hospital and the Pratt Library possible. Now there is virtually no real private sector left. Crime and taxes erode the private sector in identical fashion. Baltimore's nonprofit sector is largely dependent upon a generous supply of crime for its funding. (It's mostly not cultural.)
The objection is not to museums or judaism. The objection is to draining the life out of the private sector (which made Baltimore what it was) to fund 'necessary' public expenditures, and then turning around and handing out the ill-gotten gains to a bunch of private nonprofits.
Why not just grant nonprofits the ability to tax the private sector directly. That's the problem we're getting at. And it's NOT a small amount of money in total.
Yes, $440k may seem like relative peanuts-- but it would build four gyms or playgrounds for four public schools that have no physical education, for instance, or thousands of rolls of toilet paper or paper towels for schools that can't afford those either. It could hire a teacher or two, fix potholes, hire a police officer... it could be used in a way to benefit all citizens, or on things that we all (or most) people agree that the city ought to buy.
Hey, y'know, that right. What's this crap (no pun intended) about no toilet paper in the schools? I've heard parents tell me they have to give Johnny a pocketfull so he can stay clean.
And we're not talking occasionally. I mean, ok, if there's none in a given stall, you fetch from another stall. But as I hear it, there is NO frickin' paper in the whole school, except maybe faculty and admin. bathrooms. That's just gross.
I also hear regularly from teachers that they need books for kids. Hello? What kind of school has no frickin' books? We spend a lot of money per student, so that's not it.
It seems the priorities pyramid is inverted so that books and TP are last to be funded and yet more administrative assistants in the Assistant Principal's office are first.
Again, real cities don't do this. Baltimore, Detroit, and Camden are out standing in their field.
Post a Comment