Baltimore And Washington

Redskins football owner Jack Kent Cooke has a novel view of the world, one that often differs sharply from reality. This was clearly on display in an interview Mr. Cooke gave to Sun reporters this week at his team's Virginia practice headquarters.He gave a glowing account of his plans to build a football stadium in Laurel. Yet a number of Mr. Cooke's statements don't ring true. It's time to set the record straight:* He said he had the authority under National Football League rules to block a team from relocating to Baltimore.

Baltimore's downtown buildings and streets stood in this week as substitutes for Washington for a new Die Hard film. Movie companies take liberties all the time, and when the films are completed, it's fun to see how the sleight-of-hand works. But could the two cities, Baltimore and Washington, be more different? The things that separate Baltimore and Washington are far larger than 38 miles. I spent four undergraduate years at the Catholic University of America in Northeast Washington (the part of the capital no tourist visits)

The mayors of Baltimore and Washington pledged yesterday to turn the region's failed bid for the 2012 Olympics into a new standard of cooperation between the neighboring cities, as both men struggled to find solace in an announcement that clearly caught them and their staffs by surprise. Seconds after the defeat was announced, Mayor Martin O'Malley called the dual-city bid the greatest cooperative effort between Baltimore and Washington since the War of 1812. "When people look back years from now, they'll say that these relationships started with the process of this bid," O'Malley told Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams in a phone call, shortly after their cities were eliminated from contention to host the Olympic games.

Members of the Washington-Baltimore Regional Association received a strong dose of economic castor oil yesterday as they gathered to celebrate in advance the region's consolidation into a single metropolitan area.Economist Charles McMillion,president of the McMillion Business Group, told the gathering in Columbia that the region faces a sharp dichotomy between "incredible opportunity" and "very real structural problems" in the 1990s.Mr. McMillion said the 1980s were just as "fabulous" as they seemed for the Baltimore-Washington economy, but that the past two years have been every bit as bad as they have appeared.

Representatives from Baltimore's major cellular telephone providers say they are confident the expected surge of people trying to make phone calls at tomorrow's Preakness Stakes won't cause problems to their networks, but recent history isn't on their side. Just two weeks ago, at the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, a high number of customers trying to place calls simultaneously resulted in widespread failures to connect. BellSouth Mobility, the region's largest provider, had placed C.O.W.

WASHINGTON - Baltimore and Washington are among the worst cities in the nation for suburban sprawl and are on pace to consume 40,000 acres of Maryland farmland for housing by the year 2006, according to a report released recently by the Sierra Club.The report said Washington was the third-highest "sprawl-threatened" city in the nation, behind Atlanta and St. Louis. Baltimore was 12th on the list.The environmental group said the effects of sprawl in the Baltimore-Washington region are already being felt.

Baltimore's City Council received a sneak preview yesterday of how a proposed high-speed maglev train could one day benefit the city and region with thousands of new jobs and millions in investments. Also yesterday, the Maryland Transit Administration began a series of hearings to garner public opinion on the embattled project proposing to connect Baltimore and Washington by way of a 250-mph levitating locomotive. Maglev "is not a dead issue," said Phyllis M. Wilkins, executive director of the Baltimore Development Corp.

BALTIMORE'S mayor and Maryland's lieutenant governor know how to mix business with pleasure. Look at their travel itineraries. Mayor Martin O'Malley, just back from Germany, leaves next week for Ireland, the last stop on Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's just-concluded two-nation tour. But it's not the mayor's best stop: Soon he will take in the Olympics, in Australia. All in the name of economic development. Most of this is legitimate business promotion and flag-waving. Ms. Townsend's trip to Scotland, with Maryland biotechnology executives, was a blur of events.

Olympic silver medalist Jair Lynch and Morgan State University President Earl Richardson are among 10 community and business leaders named to the Washington-Baltimore Regional 2012 Coalition by those cities' mayors.Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke named five people to that board, which is working to bring the 2012 Olympics to the region:Richardson, John A. Moag Jr., chairman of the Maryland Stadium Authority; Ioanna Morfessis, president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Alliance; Ron Shapiro, a Baltimore attorney, and William L. Jews, president and chief executive officer of CareFirst, which was formed by the combination of the Maryland and District of Columbia Blue Cross Blue Shield plans.

Regional business leaders, hoping to land the 2012 Summer Olympics, commenced last night the politically delicate task of melding the competing bids by Washington and Baltimore."