Acre

Harbor East, Harbor Point and most of Locust Point would be removed from a state enterprise zone that offers businesses tax breaks under new maps drawn up by the Baltimore Development Corp. The Baltimore City Council will review the plan this month to shrink the city's enterprise zone from 22,000 acres to 14,000 acres. The state enterprise zone program gives tax breaks to businesses for investing in property or hiring workers. "The enterprise zone has done its work in those areas," said Larisa Salamacha, the BDC's managing director of business development.

The 19 wooded acres in northern Harford County blend in well with the sprawling Boy Scouts campground that surrounds it. But on state tax rolls, the tract essentially doesn't exist. No owner is listed - a rarity in Maryland - and as the Boy Scouts try to add the land to their campground and be declared the official owner, they must grapple with an arcane, Colonial-era convention known as a land patent. Purchasing property by securing a land patent from the state was the way many people built wealth in the years after the Revolutionary War, but the practice mostly ended after the bulk of land in Maryland was first surveyed and sold off. The Baltimore Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America is using the same method to acquire a parcel that somehow slipped through the cracks.

Spike Gjerde's Hampden project has a name - Half Acre - says the Baltimore Business Journal.  First reported on here last April, Spike Gjerde's new project is located at 3801 Falls Road in Hampden. Half Acre will have no table service, although there will be limited seating inside and out. When the project was first announced last spring, Gjerde said that it, like Woodberry Kitchen, would be driven and inspired by the food of the region.      

The city of Baltimore will donate 11 acres in Catonsville to Baltimore County to preserve for recreational and open space, under an agreement approved Tuesday. Baltimore County Council members unanimously signed off on accepting the $110,000 property, which is on Maple Avenue near Frederick and Rolling roads. NeighborSpace, a group that works to preserve open space within the county's urban areas, will protect the land from development. "Open space helps protect and increase property values," said Councilman Tom Quirk, a Catonsville Democrat who helped work out the agreement.

It has been a long slow decline for Harold's Market since former owner Ronnal Simpson moved to Florida. Today, Harold's has been reduced to rubble, and it is uncertain what will happen to the property it occupied now that the new owners are seeking a zoning change through Baltimore County's Comprehensive Zoning Map Process. Located at 1750 E. Joppa Road for nearly 40 years, it had been the place to pick up fresh fruits and vegetables for those who didn't want to bother with the parking and check out lines of a large supermarket.

In a deal hailed as a model for land preservation in lean budget times, a wealthy businessman has agreed to give up development rights — and grant limited but free public access — to a 950-acre former wildlife sanctuary on the Eastern Shore that he bought 18 months ago. Robert A. Pascal, a businessman and former Anne Arundel County executive, agreed to donate to the state a permanent conservation easement on the former du Pont family hunting...

In a deal some say could be a model for government land preservation in lean budget times, a wealthy businessman and former Anne Arundel County politician has agreed to give up development rights -- and grant limited but free public access -- to a 950-acre former wildlife sanctuary on the Eastern Shore that he bought 18 months ago. Robert A. Pascal, a former county executive and state senator, has offered to donate a permanent conservation easement...

Bob Hedgebeth recently approached a police officer catching speeders with a radar gun and asked if he would follow him home in his patrol car and measure the speed of an airborne golf ball. While the officer politely explained that his apparatus wasn't designed to detect the movement of an object that small, he had a question of his own: How does the Columbia retiree drive balls in his backyard? The answer is simple: Hedgebeth, 73, practices on "The Range," his nickname for golf features he has built under the 100-foot loblolly pines on his 1-acre lot off Route 108 in Beaverbrook.

A large wooded parcel along the bustling Route 24 corridor in Abingdon will become a regional arts center with theaters, galleries, classrooms and community meeting space under a proposal for how to use property unexpectedly left to Harford County by a widow who lived in New Jersey. A larger adjoining tract will be turned into public parkland — described by some as Harford's "Central Park" — under a county-backed plan. The area sits squarely in Harford's designated growth zone and is the largest undeveloped parcel between Interstate 95 and Bel Air, the county seat.

- Judas 760 knew just where to swim last fall after federal trappers set him free: back to his home in the marshes of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, where other nutria lived. But true to his name, Judas betrayed members of his colony by providing a virtual road map through dense cattails and inky inlets via a tiny GPS unit on his back. Trappers followed and, in a scene played out with other Judases, exterminated a handful of the destructive rodents that have been responsible for denuding thousands of acres on the Eastern Shore.