Annexation

Mayor Craig Moe and members of the City Council will attend a special service Sunday, Oct. 7, at 11 a.m., at Oaklands Presbyterian Church, 14301 Laurel Bowie Road, for World Communion Sunday and to celebrate the church's annexation into the city of Laurel. After the service, there will be a dedication of the Heart Labyrinth behind the church, which will be for congregational and community use and enjoyment.

The city's eclectic theater scene includes DIY-style troupes that cleverly carve out spaces for themselves, sometimes in unlikely spots. Consider the case of Baltimore Annex Theater. Most folks passing the long-deserted New York Fried Chicken store at the corner of North Charles Street and North Avenue would probably not think, "What a cool spot for a theater. " The Annex team saw precisely that possibility. After a lot of clawing away at the remnants of the fast food emporium and a lot of waiting for city permits, the company's new home, dubbed -- what else?

ALL IT TOOK the other day was a rumor -- in this case that Baltimore city was about to annex Lansdowne and Baltimore Highlands in Baltimore County -- to draw nearly 1,000 anxious countians to a community meeting.But it's harder than you might think for the city to gobble up parts of surrounding jurisdictions. That's because of a confusing ballot question 43 years ago that might well have gone the other way. It's a classic story of "what if."Question 5 was an amendment to the state Constitution Nov. 2, 1948.

It looks like a full-fledged trend -- Baltimore theater companies adding performances of productions thanks to popular demand this winter. First to announce was Everyman Theatre, which  extended the run of "August: Osage County. "  Two more companies have likewise found themselves with hits. Katori Hall's "The Mountaintop" isn't for everybody, but this serious/humorous/surreal look at Rev. Martin Luther King's last night, April 3, 1968, has turned out to be "one of the highest grossing plays" in the 50-year history of Center Stage, the company reports.

WHO DECIDES where and how a community should grow? In Maryland, counties, cities and towns all have master plans that designate how development should progress. The final say on any planning issue is usually in the hands of elected officials. So when voters aren't happy with decisions, they can eventually make changes at the ballot box. But along the border between towns and counties, the rules are not always so simple. The problem? Annexation - the transfer of territory from county to municipality - can put governments at odds and offer developers a way to sidestep growth controls.

Planning and Zoning Committee Chairman Thomas R. Winebrener recommended the annexation of the Phillips property at Monday's council session.The council will review the recommendations before voting on the proposal. The committee and developers of the 171 acres north of town have scheduled a public hearing at 7 p.m. April 8 at the Community Center."We still need time to study the recommendations," said Councilman Jeff Six.The council also heard a report on curbside recycling from Gary M. Grimes Sr., vice president of Haden Trash Removal, the town's contract trash hauler.

Eighteen years ago, the eastern Carroll County town of Hampstead laid claim to a little piece of neighboring Baltimore County.By annexing the Roberts Field subdivision into the town's corporate limits, Hampstead's town fathers at that time grabbed about 232 acres of land that were located east of the Carroll line in Baltimore County.Baltimore County officials discovered this infringement on the county's sovereignty wholly by accident during the last session of the General Assembly. A sharp-eyed legislative analyst pointed out this anomaly to the county's lobbyist in Annapolis.

New Windsor officials are in the final annexation stages for about 7 acres of Brethren Service Center property, while the county begins its annexation request for another parcel for the new middle school on Route 75.During the portion of Wednesday night's council meeting that was devoted to a public hearing on the Brethren Center land annexation, no one commented on the issue.The hearing was continued until the next council meeting to give the town and county agencies time to exchange paperwork on the property.

The Sykesville town manager has made public a local group's interest in annexing several hundred Eldersburg residences into the town.At the council session Monday, Town Manager James L. Schumacher read a letter from the South Carroll Coalition acknowledging a recent meeting with town officials."

On a breezy September afternoon, Jerry Queen invited some friends over for a cookout on his front lawn, which overlooks a golf course that the city of Aberdeen wants to annex to help make way for more than 1,000 homes. After throwing some hot dogs on the grill, he pulled his pickup truck onto the grass and opened the hood - to maximize the sound of his horn when he blared it into a golfer's backswing. He decided against actually laying on the horn, on the advice of his attorney, but the golf course owner who is pushing the development likely got the message anyway: All the attendees at his party were wearing red shirts, the uniform of those opposed to the proposed annexation that has riven this Harford County community.

Mayor Craig Moe and members of the City Council will attend a special service Sunday, Oct. 7, at 11 a.m., at Oaklands Presbyterian Church, 14301 Laurel Bowie Road, for World Communion Sunday and to celebrate the church's annexation into the city of Laurel. After the service, there will be a dedication of the Heart Labyrinth behind the church, which will be for congregational and community use and enjoyment.

A carbon monoxide incident closed an annex at Baltimore City's Main Post Office Monday and sent two people to University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Fire crews responded at about 8:30 a.m. to the one-story annex at Colvin and Lexington streets, near the main building in the 900 block of East Fayette Street. They found one person who had suffered a head injury from a fall and several other employees complaining of dizziness. A hazmat unit conducted air monitoring and determined that there were 38 parts per million of carbon monoxide inside the 35,000-square-foot building.

Just as squirrels will keep attacking a squirrel-proof bird feeder until they demonstrate that no bird feeder is truly squirrel-proof, developers can be expected to keep seeking permission to build on property that they've been told they can't build on, if they think they can sell houses. So it is in Aberdeen, where a developer is again seeking to get piecemeal what other developers have thus far not been able to secure: permission to build houses in the area of Gilbert Road in the general area of the Wetlands Golf Course.

The VA Maryland Health Care System will open an annex next spring in the former world headquarters of Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore to help keep up with an increase in its patient population, fueled largely by a new generation of veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Health system officials said the eight-level building on West Fayette Street in downtown Baltimore will be renovated starting later this summer or early fall and will contain a mix of outpatient services for veterans and administrative offices for the health system.

The Aberdeen planning commission has recommended single-family dwellings for a development that had originally sought to build more than 1,600 homes and condominiums. Several members of the city's Planning and Zoning commission said the petition to build the dwellings on 497 acres, which would be annexed by Aberdeen, was too dense. Christopher Michaels, management director of the project called Glengarry, said last week it was unclear what the property owners would pursue next. "I don't mean to sound ambiguous," he said.

As anyone who has tried to navigate the junction of Interstates 70 and 270 in the late afternoon knows, the city of Frederick has no shortage of drivers on its roads. That congestion is just one reason why proposals to annex land for commercial development and thousands of new homes have some people in the area nervous. Nevertheless, Frederick, which grew like gangbusters during the 1990s, is on track for more growth and development now that the city has secured access to millions of gallons a day of Potomac River water.

TANEYTOWN - The City Council tomorrow night will conduct a public hearing on its proposed annexation of Taneytown Elementary School.The annexation, considered to be legal housekeeping, will mean lower water and sewer rates for the Trevanion Road school. The hearing, scheduled for 8 p.m., comes in the middle of the council's regularly scheduled board meeting.City officials last month announced that they intended to annex the 7-acre parcel because of the prime development property that lies across Trevanion Road from it. Should that piece of property be annexed, it would have left the school site as a municipal island, something that is illegal in Maryland.

FREDERICK - The clustered church spires immortalized in a famous Civil War poem still anchor the downtown skyline of this historic city. But the "green-walled hills" cradling the town are likely to sprout walls of brick, concrete and vinyl siding if a bevy of developers gets its way. Municipal officials are weighing no fewer than 14 requests to annex nearly 2,300 acres - much of it farm fields and horse pasture - so that developers can build millions of...

Headlights beaming through front windows. Gunfire in the neighborhood. Some who live in the Locksley Manor subdivision just outside Aberdeen's city limits say it's happening again. The owner of a neighboring golf course at the center of a dispute over annexation was charged in November after shots were fired in the neighborhood. The annexation issue came up again last week at a city meeting -- along with, several residents said, commotion in their subdivision. Paul Burkheimer said he called police after a truck that was parked across from his house beamed its headlights through his front window about 11:30 p.m. Saturday.