Bureaucracy

Glen H. Footman would appear to be the perfect candidate to get a check from Maryland's Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. He was shot in September 2008 while walking hand-in-hand with his longtime partner, Alex Chavarria, on Howard Street in Mount Vernon. Witnesses told police that a young man, previously overheard saying, "I'm going to kill myself a gay tonight," stopped to ask Footman a question or bum a cigarette, and then shot him twice. Baltimore police classified the shooting as a possible hate crime but have not made any arrests.

The pictures in the newly painted hallway of the Robert C. Marshall Recreation Center on Pennsylvania Avenue tell the sad "before" - clutter, broken computers, old TVs, dirty floors, an old stove. Coming Thursday : Efforts by a West Baltimore community to reopen a closed PAL Center are met with continued delays and bureaucracy.

It might be the biggest cover-up in Baltimore. And the most unsuccessful. For decades, the hollow shells of vacant rowhouses have served as the most visible and poignant reminder of city blight, a "Welcome" sign to addicts, dealers and criminals. The 16,400 abandoned buildings mar the landscape, their sagging brick and Formstone walls outnumbering livable and lived-in homes on blocks throughout the city. Tired residents and overwhelmed city officials - stymied by delayed court hearings, held up by lengthy foreclosure proceedings, frustrated by absent and uncaring owners, hampered by urban scavengers and waylaid by a plodding bureaucracy - have struggled to find innovative ways to make the boarded-up homes look palatable.

The Environmental Protection Agency's order this week that the Army clean up 17 hazardous-waste sites at Fort Meade and the nearby Patuxent Research Refuge has more to do with a bureaucratic entanglement than the continuing $100 million decontamination effort, several officials on both sides said. Army officials, who have long argued that the cleanup of four parcels should be enough for the regulatory agency to take the base off its Superfund list of the nation's most polluted sites, said Wednesday that they have until the middle of September to respond to the order.

Howard County government appears headed toward having a stronger, higher-profile environmental presence, but a group of volunteers is struggling with the question of what form such an agency should take. Pushing ideas to improve the environment is one thing, but having the power to make them happen is another, which is why members of the Commission on the Environment and Sustainability were examining the options this week at a meeting in the George Howard Building in Ellicott City. Should county government have a new, full-fledged Department of the Environment?

At a congressional hearing at Walter Reed hospital yesterday, Cpl. Dell McLeod's wife, Annette, described how he had spent a befuddled year as an outpatient at the hospital following a head injury in Iraq, prone to panic and unable, virtually, to put two and two together. His cognitive abilities are shot - but Army doctors are challenging his claim that this has anything to do with the injury he received while serving his country. It's the same story the McLeods told to The Washington Post, which last month reported that wounded soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq are left largely to fend for themselves in moldy, vermin-infested outpatient housing, where they are shamefully neglected by the Army's medical bureaucracy - except for those moments when one doctor or another is trying to dismiss any connection between their battlefield wounds and their current conditions.

The biggest shock about all the spying that has been going on at Hewlett-Packard is that everyone finds it so shocking. After all, the company was only taking its cues from a White House that has decreed that anything goes when it comes to maintaining security. Want to steal phone records? Go ahead. Need to snoop and spy? Please do. No court order required, much less an act of Congress. Only those with something to hide need worry, right? Presumably the next item on HP's agenda would have been torture - excuse me, make that "robust interrogation."

Tonight at 7:30, the Maryland Film Festival offers a rare movie going experience at the Charles Theatre, 1711 N. Charles St. San Francisco's Beth Custer Ensemble performs its new score for My Grandmother, a rarely seen, an archic 65-minute Russian movie that makes fun of the Soviet bureaucracy. Tickets are $8 to $10. Call the Maryland Film Festival office at 410-752-8083 for more details.

BATON ROUGE, La. -- When he could finally leave his post guarding a nuclear power plant after Hurricane Katrina struck, Richard George Reysack III sped to the flooded home of his 80-year-old father east of New Orleans. Slogging through the muck, he found his father's corpse face-down in the hallway. As devastating as that discovery was, at least Reysack had his father's remains. Then even that was taken away. The authorities who moved the corpse to a temporary morgue not only won't return it to Reysack for burial, he said, but they won't even confirm that they have it. Reysack's family has published an obituary and held a memorial service - all without a body.

Frustrated by the federal government's response to the crisis in New Orleans, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley and the leaders of at least several other big cities are taking it upon themselves to bypass bureaucratic hurdles and directly assist victims of Hurricane Katrina. O'Malley said yesterday that city officials will also need to rethink their emergency plans, assuming a slower response time from the National Guard and other federal agencies. "Having the National Guard here in 48 hours is not a planning reality any more," said O'Malley, a homeland security expert for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.