Baltimore Project

Witten Technologies' radar-enhanced imaging has searched for Captain Kidd's ship in the Indian Ocean, helped solve the mystery of rolling blackouts in New York City and combed beneath San Diego to find a suitable site for a new baseball stadium. The Washington-based company was in Baltimore this week hoping to land a new job: mapping miles of underground downtown to assist a two-year, $30 million project to bury high-speed fiber-optic cable. Companies developing the Baltimore project, known as Harborlink, asked Witten for a demonstration of what it calls computer-assisted radar tomography, or CART.

WASHINGTON -- If the idea of Baltimore as an ecological system sounds foreign, you're not alone.Ecologists, who make it their business to study the interaction between living organisms and their environment, have long conducted their fieldwork far from urban centers."

Laurie B. Schwartz, Baltimore's deputy mayor for economic and neighborhood development, is leaving her post to take charge of day-to-day operations for the much-heralded east-side revitalization effort centered around a biotechnology park. Schwartz, who has shepherded the project through a nearly two-year planning stage from her office at City Hall, will become interim chief executive officer Dec. 2 of the nonprofit corporation created to oversee the development of the biotech park. The project is north of the Johns Hopkins medical complex and includes hundreds of new and renovated housing units.

A special $6 million fund to provide long-term financial stability for Baltimore's largest arts institutions is nearing completion, key participants in the project said yesterday.The fund is to consist of $4 million from local corporations and foundations and $2 million from the National Arts Stabilization Fund, a private organization that has helped with similar programs in five other U.S. cities.Likely recipients include the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Baltimore Opera Company, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Center Stage, the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Walters Art Gallery.

After pushing a risky $305 million convention center hotel deal through a divided City Council last night, Mayor Martin O'Malley is poised to harvest political rewards from labor unions that will fill the more than 500 construction jobs the Baltimore project would create. The project is just the most recent example of the mayor's patching his sometimes bumpy relationship with organized labor as he prepares a Democratic bid for governor next year. "A large portion of our members still live in the city," said Ron DeJuliis, president of the Baltimore Building and Construction Trades Council.

After months of publicly saying it was on the verge of a deal, the developer of the $156 million Ritz-Carlton hotel and condominium project proposed for Baltimore's Inner Harbor has hired a new broker to search through a sinking economy for lenders for the project. It's unclear if economic conditions, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington or legal entanglements of previous brokers affected past attempts at a deal. Those potential lenders have not been identified. The new broker, Las Vegas-based Asset Management Financial Corp.

The five-star Ritz-Carlton proposed on Baltimore's waterfront more than three years ago has broken more construction dates than ground, but its developer said yesterday that he will soon have $190 million needed to build the hotel and condominium project. The project is more than a year behind its original schedule and is on its third developer. But Edward V. Giannasca II, who officially took over the Ritz in recent months, said a deal has been reached with three private European companies that will fund the project through sale of bonds.

Opponents of a Baltimore football stadium were handed new ammunition yesterday with the release of an analysis projecting economic benefits much lower than those projected by the Glendening administration.The Department of Fiscal Services, which serves as the legislature's economic analyst, concluded that the $200 million stadium will create no more than 689 jobs -- well below the nearly 1,400 projected by the state's Department of Business and Economic Development.And while the governor has estimated that the project will generate $9.3 million in state and local taxes, the legislature's analysis says the number will probably fall between $5.1 million and $7.5 million.

State officials are moving forward with implementation of an embattled computer system to track child welfare cases despite warnings from child advocates and social workers who say dramatic improvements are needed before it is expanded to Baltimore. Members of the Coalition to Protect Maryland's Children are urging Department of Human Resources Secretary Christopher J. McCabe to roll back Baltimore's planned Nov. 13 start date to give technicians more time to correct glitches. "It's becoming difficult to determine what the situation with [the new system]

A developer of Baltimore's Ritz-Carlton Residences who has been accused of fraud by his partners filed a lawsuit in return yesterday, saying they cheated him out of his ownership interest in the $250 million luxury condo project under construction at the foot of Federal Hill. Edward V. Giannasca II's suit in federal court in Baltimore accused owners of Midtown Equities LLC of New York and its Midtown Baltimore LLC unit of fraud, breach of contract, invasion of privacy, interference with business and contractual relationships and civil conspiracy, two attorneys said.