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Photo by Laurie Avocado, via Wikimedia Commons

A coalition of black Maryland legislators seeks to overhaul the state’s medical cannabis commission by giving it more regulatory power and a stronger focus on diversity. This week, the leader of that coalition wants the public’s help.

Last year, several hopeful marijuana firms sued the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission, alleging its members didn’t pick a diverse enough array of firms for licenses to grow, process and dispense medical marijuana. The Maryland Black Legislative Caucus, a coalition of the state’s African-American lawmakers, backed their argument.

This General Assembly session, they took it a step further by introducing two measures to change its membership and allow more growers to receive licenses and, most significantly, repeal parts of the law that created it and instead create a new cannabis-focused division in the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The second proposal is called the Natalie M. LaPrade Medical Cannabis Commission Reform Act.

Del. Cheryl Glenn of Baltimore City today sent out an email calling upon those who want more minority representation in Maryland’s future medical pot industry to come testify at House of Delegates and Senate hearings in Annapolis later this week. (Baltimore City Sen. Joan Carter Conway, has sponsored an identical measure in the Senate.)

“In the words of the Vice Chairman of the Black Caucus, Del. Darryl Barnes, ‘This whole thing is jacked up,’” wrote Glenn, who is chair of the caucus. “Before this problem is exacerbated, the Black Caucus is taking action to balance the playing fields for minorities. We cannot allow this multi-billion dollar industry to go without minority participation.”

A spokesperson for the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission hasn’t yet returned a request for comment on Glenn’s email.

Last year, Alternative Medicine Maryland sued the commission in Baltimore Circuit Court, arguing its members ignored racial diversity when picking 15 companies apiece for preliminary licenses to grow and process cannabis last summer. The company was the third to sue; two others filed a joint suit alleging the commission skipped over their applications for lower-ranked companies for purposes of geographic diversity.

The commission has taken these allegations seriously, hiring a diversity consultant to explore what they could do better during the pre-licensing process to better reflect the diversity of the state. They’ve also published data showing the racial and minority makeup of of selected companies’ owners and workers. The data indicate 35 percent of the pre-licensed businesses are minority-owned, 15 percent of them by African-Americans, and that 60 of their employees are racial or ethnic minorities.

But Glenn and her colleagues are arguing the system itself is flawed and needs to be restructured. The reform act would create a new Medical Cannabis Division in the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene with regulatory powers that they say the commission doesn’t currently have.

“The preliminary results in licensing showed a blatant inequality in gender, race, and geography, a disparity that may have been avoided had the Commission been established to be a regulatory agency reflective of the population they serve,” Glenn wrote in her email.

The Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee will hear testimony for Sen. Conway’s bill this Thursday, March 2, at 1 p.m. on the second floor of the Miller Senate Office Building. The House Health and Government Operations Committee will hear testimony for Del. Glenn’s version of the bill on Friday, March 3, at 1 p.m. in House Office Building room 241.

“I urge you to come down to Annapolis and share your testimony,” Glenn wrote. “We have the opportunity to ensure the opportunity for minorities to build generational wealth through the Medical Cannabis industry.”

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As legislators prepare to meet in Annapolis today for hearings on two fracking-related measures, a new poll shows one in four Maryland voters are still unsure about a proposed fracking ban.

According to the most recent Goucher Poll released yesterday morning, 40 percent of Maryland voters oppose passing a permanent ban on hydraulic fracturing, while 36 percent support doing so. The results show a seven-point drop from September 2016 in the percentage of voters who support a ban.

One key point here, though, is that 24 percent of voters say in the most recent poll that they don’t know if they support or oppose such a ban.

“Really, it will be up to those proponents who are against hydraulic fracturing, who want to ban it, they really have to take their case to the people if they want to sway public opinion,” said Mileah Kromer, director of the center that publishes the Goucher Poll, on WBAL yesterday.

Notably, the new poll didn’t ask if voters were against hydraulic fracturing — just whether they oppose a ban. Another poll conducted last fall by the Washington Post and University of Maryland found a strong majority (65 percent) of voters felt fracking poses significant environmental risks for the state.

While Baltimore County Sen. Bobby Zirkin and Montgomery County Del. Delegate David Fraser-Hidalgo have proposed an all-out ban on the practice, Baltimore Sen. Joan Carter Conway has proposed her own bill that would extend the current moratorium, which is set to expire on Oct. 1. Conway’s bill would also allow individual jurisdictions to vote on whether to allow drilling within their boundaries.

If no action is taken, Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration will be able to open up wells for companies to begin fracking this October, as they’ve already requested.

Of course, most of Maryland isn’t at risk of ground and drinking water contamination, methane pollution, seismic instability and numerous other risks associated with fracking. Western Maryland would be hit by most of these problems, since parts of it sit atop the Marcellus Shale that holds natural gas deposits that Hogan and companies hope to tap.

Today, Western Maryland business owners and elected officials and residents from across the state will rally in Annapolis ahead of Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee hearings for both Zirkin’s and Conway’s bills. At the demonstration, business owners plan to deliver a letter signed by more than 180 businesses from across the state, and activists plan to deliver thousands of petitions and letters signed in support of Zirkin’s proposed ban.

Maryland’s faith leaders have already backed this cause by signing a letter that says lawmakers are “morally bound” to ban fracking in Maryland.

Activists are also planning a larger demonstration called the March on Annapolis to Ban Fracking Now. It’s set for this Thursday, March 2, starting at the Senate Building at 11 a.m.

Del. Cheryl Glenn, D-Baltimore City, speaks at an event on food access and environmental health in the House of Delegates.

For Rodette Jones and her neighbors in Curtis Bay, a simple trip to the grocery store isn’t so simple. For anyone without a car, the errand can require hopping on two buses to the nearest supermarket two miles away, shopping and then hauling the groceries back home on the bus.

“I just want the people here to know that the food desert is real,” said Jones. “We want to eat healthy. We don’t want other people to determine what is healthy in the corner stores. We want the fresh fruits, the fresh vegetables that everybody else is eating.”

Jones explained this yesterday at a luncheon gathering of legislators, environmental justice experts, advocates and other stakeholders in Annapolis. The Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland, a group of black legislative leaders from around the state, hosted the hearing in a room within the House of Delegates building with the Maryland Commission on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Communities.

A 2015 Johns Hopkins study defined the “food desert” as a place where residents must travel more than a quarter-mile to reach a supermarket, median household incomes equal or fall below 185 percent of the federal poverty level, more than 30 percent of households are without access to a vehicle and, crucially, healthy food supply is low or non-existent.

The study determined this problem is particularly grave in Baltimore: One in four city residents lives in a food desert, the authors found.

Food access map of Baltimore with food deserts indicated in red. Map via mdfoodsystemmap.org

Legislators and environmental justice advocates organized the meeting, called “Environmental Justice: Food Deserts and Equity,” so stakeholders and legislators could discuss the problem of food access and how it ties into other environmental justice issues for communities. The same neighborhoods that often lack access to produce and healthy foods, relying instead on unhealthy options from corner and packaged-good stores, also deal with issues of unclean water and air and other types of pollution, experts explained.

“It’s become apparent that the same communities that we deal with around issues of pollution, around environmental degradation, around the lack of resources, have a lack of resources in a compounded sense,” said Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, executive director of Maryland Environmental Health Network. “For us, this is not new work. It’s just another part of a paradigm.”

Others offered examples of this confluence of problems for poor communities. Sacoby Wilson, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, noted Curtis Bay doesn’t just deal with food deserts as an isolated issue. He told lawmakers that the zip code for the South Baltimore neighborhood bordering Anne Arundel County was ranked the most toxic one in the country in 2009, due in part to heavy industrial pollution. “When it comes to toxic pollution, that community has been impacted,” he said.

Vernice Miller-Travis, outgoing chair of the commission, said “the burden is falling most heavily on communities of color or low-income communities and on rural communities. We want to make sure that their voice and their presence is prominent here in Annapolis where the legislative work of our state is being done.”

Entities both private and public are trying to bridge the gap in healthy food options. Stacy Carroll, director of partnerships for the produce delivery service Hungry Harvest, told of how her company salvages millions of pounds of produce deemed unfit for display in grocery stores. For every box they buy from a farmer or wholesaler, they donate two pounds to hunger-relief partners that can then give those items to poor communities.

Hungry Harvest also sells the salvaged produce at subsidized farmer’s markets and their “Produce in a SNAP” stands where residents on what were formerly known as food stamps can purchase fruits and veggies.

“Our idea was the fact that you don’t have to be a nonprofit to do the right thing,” she said. “We connect the 600 million pounds of food waste that happens at the farm level and at the logistics level – before the consumer waste happens – with the people that are hungry.”

(An estimate by the nonprofit Feeding America pegged the total for food waste much higher at 20 billion pounds, Carroll later noted.)

City agencies are also working to fight issues of food access. Jones, who runs a community garden in Curtis Bay, noted Baltimore City offers property tax credits to corner stores that agree to carry healthy items. Another option is Baltimore’s “virtual supermarket” program, which lets residents order food online and pick it up at no extra cost at a designated spot in their community.

Rodette Jones, who runs a community garden in Curtis Bay, speaks at the meeting in the House of Delegates.

Del. Cheryl Glenn of Baltimore’s 45th district was one of nearly 20 delegates who attended the hearing. Others included recently appointed Baltimore City Del. Robbyn Lewis, Alfred Carr, Jr. of Montgomery County and both Carolyn J.B. Howard and Dereck Davis of Prince George’s County.

At one point, after Rodette Jones had described her community’s plight, Lewis stood up and offered some assurance. “Miss Rodette, I’m one of your new delegates. Whatever we need to do in Curtis Bay, we’re gonna do,” she said.

Glenn, chair of the Black Caucus, concluded the hearing on a personal note. She spoke of growing up poor in the same district in East and Northeast Baltimore that she represents now, and knowing what it means to go hungry. “It makes you angry when you’re hungry,” Glenn said. “It makes you angry when you don’t have the right nutrition.”

She suggested legislators hold work sessions on the topic of food access when the General Assembly is not in session, so they can prepare legislation that would fight food deserts in the next term.

“As state legislators, we have to ensure that we do everything we can do from a holistic approach to make sure that nowhere in our state, in our cities, in our counties do we have food deserts,” Glenn said.

Roger Taney’s statue in Annapolis. Photo via City of Annapolis.

One-hundred and sixty years ago, infamous Marylander and then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney issued a ruling that Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who escaped his owners, was not a citizen. The decision furthered the detestable tradition of slavery for several more years before Abraham Lincoln abolished it. Yesterday, Scott’s and Taney’s descendants stood together in front of the Maryland State House in Annapolis to make amends.

The gathering coincided with the 160^th anniversary of the infamous Dred Scott decision. That ruling, which also barred Congress from being to abolish slavery at the time, has permanently tarnished Taney’s legacy. In recent years, civil rights advocates to call for removals of his statues across the state.

Charles Taney IV, the Supreme Court justice’s great-great-great nephew, and Lynne Jackson, Dred Scott’s great-great granddaughter, told the Frederick News-Post they valued the bond between their families, despite the circumstances. “We share a sorry past, but we have hope for a bright future,” Charles Taney told the newspaper. He also issued an apology to Scott’s family and “all African-Americans for the injury caused by Roger Brooke Taney and this decision.”

According to The Washington Post, Jackson accepted the apology and the two hugged it out.

This wasn’t the first time they’ve met. Taney’s daughter, Kate Taney Billingsley, produced a play called “A Man of His Time” in New York last year about this exact exchange between the two families. The one-act production was fictional art imitating life, as it brought descendants from the two families together in person.

A bill to remove Taney’s statue in Annapolis and store it instead in the Maryland State Archives died in committee last year. Frederick, where the original Taney lived and practiced law before he became a Supreme Court Justice, already voted to relocate its own bust of him from a government building to a graveyard last year. Baltimore preservationists also moved last year to remove his statue from Mount Vernon.

Some have called for statues of Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass to replace Taney’s head in Annapolis. But looking ahead, both Scott’s and Taney’s descendants would like to add an additional statue of Scott alongside Taney, rather than remove the latter altogether. The Sun reports they both support doing so because it would provide appropriate context for the decision and its aftermath.

“The Scotts and the Taneys believe that Americans should learn from their history, not bury their history,” the families said in a joint statement.

A rendering of 1405 Point, via Beatty Development Group.

Vida Taco Bar of Annapolis is coming to Baltimore this year.

Beatty Development Group announced that the popular restaurant is scheduled to open in December at 1405 Point, a 17-story, 289-unit luxury apartment building under construction on Harbor Point’s Central Plaza, just south of the Exelon Building.

Known for its “farm-to-taco” menu, featuring local, sustainable products whenever possible, Vida Taco Bar is the first announced retail tenant for 1405 Point, which is also scheduled to open by the end of the year.

Vida Taco Bar will lease 3,659 square feet of space. As in Annapolis, it will feature tacos and shared plates that respect the traditions of Mexican cuisine but also leave room for experimentation, as well as handcrafted margaritas created using mixes made from scratch daily.

Earlier this year, Beatty and principals of the Foodshed restaurant group announced plans to choose retailers and restaurateurs throughout the 27-acre Harbor Point development that emphasize the use of local, sustainable products. Vida Taco is consistent with that approach, said Beatty president Michael Beatty.

“With Harbor Point, our goal is to establish a new urban neighborhood that is wholly dedicated to supporting local sourcing and sustainability, especially with our food offerings,” Beatty said in a statement. “Bringing Vida Taco to Harbor Point is a perfect example of those efforts in action — a home grown restaurant with a commitment to using fresh, locally sourced ingredients. It’s a great pairing.”

Photo by Thomas Meyer, via Food and Water Watch Maryland

About a dozen faith leaders and environmentalists were arrested on Thursday morning in Annapolis at a demonstration against allowing fracking in Maryland.

Dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the State House today to push Senate leadership to bring a a proposal to permanently ban natural gas drilling in Maryland to a full vote. The House of Delegates has already passed such a bill proposed by Del. David Fraser-Hidalgo of Montgomery County. The Senate version of the bill, proposed by Baltimore County Sen. Bobby Zirkin, remains stuck in the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs committee.

During the protest today, about a dozen people stepped forward and blocked a door to the State House. After refusing to move, they were arrested and charged with blocking an entrance to a public building.

A spokesman for Capitol Police Department said on a phone call that 11 people were arrested, though a spokeswoman for Food and Water Watch Maryland, which helped to organized this morning’s protest and announced the planned sit-in before it happened, said there were 13 in all.

Among them, she said, were: Chesapeake Climate Action Network director Mike Tidwell; Brooke Harper, the network’s Maryland outreach coordinator; Ann Bristow, a member of former Gov. Martin O’Malley’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission; and the Rev. Julie Wilson, of the Baltimore Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Fracking is one of the key issues to come before the state legislature this session. Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration has proposed regulatory changes that would allow companies to begin drilling in western Maryland atop the Marcellus Shale formation once the current drilling moratorium expires in October 2017. While Hogan and others have argued fracking will create a new source of jobs and revenue stream for the state, faith leaders and environmentalists have urged lawmakers to ban the practice outright, citing studies that show fracking’s public health risks and environmental damage.

If legislators don’t approve any measure or if Gov. Hogan doesn’t sign it in the next 25 days — the 2017 session ends on April 10 — Maryland will be open for drilling on Oct. 1.

Sen. Joan Carter Conway, chair of the committee where the Senate bill now sits, has proposed her own measure that would extend the current moratorium to 2019 and allow jurisdictions to vote via referenda to allow drilling. The committee has held hearings on both her proposal and Sen. Zirkin’s, though Conway has not called for a vote on either.

A staffer at Conway’s office said she wasn’t available to speak this afternoon.

The dozen or so arrestees will be released this evening between 5 and 6 p.m., according to the spokeswoman from Food and Water Watch Maryland.

A dispensary in Denver, photo via O’Dea/Wikimedia Commons

Maryland legislators won’t be interrupting their summers to discuss medical marijuana in Annapolis.

That decision was made two weeks ago, actually. A newly released letter dated July 19 (shared by WBAL) from Maryland Senate President Mike Miller and House Speaker Michael Busch to Baltimore City Del. Cheryl Glenn indicates leaders would rather wait until the 2018 legislative session begins to reconsider a bill reserving additional grower’s licenses for minority and female owners.

Busch and Miller wrote that they were “disappointed” about the outcome of Glenn’s proposal this past spring – it died on the House floor – but offered their “full support for passage of emergency legislation early in the 2018 legislative session.” Their letter implied they wouldn’t call a special session, which Glenn and her colleagues from the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus had requested in April.

Black lawmakers have repeatedly highlighted the lack of diversity in the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission’s picks for grower and processor licenses for the state’s future medical cannabis industry. None of the 15 licenses for each category went to a minority-owned business.

Their proposals included Glenn’s bill, which would have created seven additional grower licenses – five reserved for minority-owned firms and two for companies that sued the state after they were denied licenses last summer – and another that would have reorganized the commission entirely. The former bill passed both houses of the state legislature, but never received a necessary full House vote after it’d been rewritten with compromises; the latter never got a full vote in either house.

The fallout regarding minority representation in the state’s medical cannabis industry has been straining. One company unsuccessfully sued to stop the commission from awarding full licenses to pre-approved growers, but delayed the process for weeks. The cannabis commission hired a diversity consultant to explore the issue, and Gov. Larry Hogan ordered a disparity study of the burgeoning industry, with results set to come out this fall.

Miller and Busch credited Glenn for spurring Hogan to order the study, and wrote that they hope the results will “inform any appropriate policy steps” needed to pass emergency legislation.

A spokesman for the Black Caucus hasn’t responded to a request for comment on the letter.

As of this morning, the state has nearly 8,500 patients and caregivers fully registered to receive medical cannabis products once they’re available, according to Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission spokeswoman Mary-jo Mather. A combined 10,855 hopeful patients and caregivers had applied for access to the drug.

Mather said the commission’s executive director, Patrick Jameson, declined to comment on Busch and Miller’s letter.

This story has been updated.

Roger Taney’s statue at the State House. Photo via City of Annapolis.

Maryland’s Republican governor has switched sides in the debate over whether to remove a statue of Roger B. Taney from the State House in Annapolis.

Hogan said in a statement today that taking down the statue of the Confederate-era Supreme Court chief justice “is the right thing to do.”

“As I said at my inauguration, Maryland has always been a state of middle temperament, which is a guiding principle of our administration,” he said. “While we cannot hide from our history – nor should we – the time has come to make clear the difference between properly acknowledging our past and glorifying the darkest chapters of our history.”

He said his administration “will ask the State House Trust to take that action immediately.”

“The time” that Hogan referenced is a socially fractured one. Three days ago, hundreds of white supremacists descended upon Charlottesville, Va., to defend a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had been proposed for removal. Counter-protesters showed up, too. What followed was a deadly afternoon of violence in the historic town.

Amid the chaos, a 20-year-old white supremacist drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding 19 others. By the end of the day, two state troopers had also died after their helicopter crashed, and at least 15 others had been injured in other incidents.

In the aftermath, cities and states have been moving to get rid of their Confederate monuments like long-expired perishables. Here in Baltimore, hundreds of residents gathered for a protest at the site of a statue of Lee and his fellow Confederate general Stonewall Jackson in the Wyman Park Dell. Vandals later defaced that statue and another in Bolton Hill.

On Sunday, Councilman Brandon Scott announced he’d authored a resolution calling for the “immediate destruction” of the city’s four controversial statues honoring Confederate leaders, soldiers and families, including a bust of Taney that sits in Mount Vernon. The resolution passed unanimously on Monday night.

Legislative leaders jumped on the bandwagon to get rid of the controversial statue of Taney in Annapolis. Taney’s legacy in modern America isn’t a good one. He was the chief Supreme Court justice who authored the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857, which determined black people could not become U.S. citizens and that the federal government couldn’t regulate slavery in the states. (It was undone in 1866 by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.)

House Speaker Michael Busch said on Monday that he gave his full support to removing the bust of Taney from the State House front lawn.

100% support removing Taney from State House. We can find a better way to honor history & light a path to progress equality & understanding https://t.co/4YFshD7ldo

— Mike Busch (@SpeakerBusch) August 14, 2017

His counterpart, Senate President Mike Miller, said in a statement yesterday that he doesn’t support getting rid of Taney’s likeness. He argued the judge wasn’t tied directly to the Confederacy and because he said “there is greater value in educating” the public about the decision. However, he deferred to Hogan, saying, “should he support removal, I will not stand in the way of his decision.”

The governor’s decision is a 180-degree reversal from his feelings from 2015. That summer, he labeled a push to remove Confederate monuments in Maryland as “political correctness run amok.”

“Where do we draw the line?” he posed at a presser, per The Washington Post.

Roger Taney’s statue in Annapolis. Photo via City of Annapolis.

With Baltimore’s Confederate memorials now gone, the political fight against Maryland’s commemorations of those who supported or advanced the Lost Cause has shifted to Annapolis.

Yesterday, the Maryland State House Trust voted to remove a statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney from the lawn of the building in Maryland’s capital. The Capital Gazette reports the vote took place by email. Three of the trust’s four members – House Speaker Mike Busch, Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford and trust representative Charles Edson – voted to get rid of the statue, while Senate President Mike Miller didn’t cast a vote.

At issue is Taney’s legacy as a judge. He’s known largely for his notorious Dred Scott ruling from 1857 in which he determined that black people were property and could not be U.S. citizens, allowing slavery to continue for nearly a decade more until the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were added to the U.S. Constitution.

Busch was among the first Maryland legislative leaders to call for the removal of Taney’s statue this week. He tweeted on Monday,”100% support removing Taney from State House. We can find a better way to honor history & light a path to progress equality & understanding.”

He aired his thoughts after cities around the country began mulling whether to remove their statues to Confederate heroes and soldiers following Saturday’s deadly unrest in Charlottesville, Va. The violent afternoon, in which three people died and about three dozen were injured, was sparked by the presence of hundreds of torch-wielding white supremacists who gathered there to defend a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

One day later, Gov. Larry Hogan made the surprising announcement that he agreed. Only two years earlier, the governor had fended off calls to remove the statue, calling such efforts “political correctness run amok.” But on Tuesday, he said in a statement that taking down Taney’s statue was “the right thing to do.”

Miller was the only one of the four members to publicly object to the removal, but said he wouldn’t try to block any vote on the matter.

The path forward for Taney’s statue remains unclear. The trust didn’t approve any plan for what to do with the bronze bust.

The Rev. Mike Berry, who helped orchestrate a reconciliation meeting earlier this year between the descendants of Taney and Dred Scott, the slave at the center of the judge’s hallmark case, suggested an interesting idea to the Capital Gazette. He proposed moving Taney’s statue just down the road in Annapolis to Lawyers Mall, to stand next to a bust of Thurgood Marshall, the first-ever black Supreme Court justice.

“Why would we want to bury that history?” he was quoted as saying. “Why don’t we tell that history in Annapolis? Removing it allows white people to continue on in their denial.”