City Funds

The Major Soccer League's Kansas City Comets may be revived next season if the Kansas City (Mo.) City Council votes Thursday to give financial help to the organization."

The Baltimore City Council approved a deal Monday in which the city will sell up to $35 million in bonds to fund infrastructure projects around Under Armour's Tide Point corporate headquarters. Company officials sought the city's support as they planned to double the size of the Locust Point campus. Activists, including members of Occupy Baltimore, protested the deal, saying the $1 billion international athletic wear brand does not need financial assistance from the cash-strapped city.

To prevent the debt-ridden Avenue Market from having its power turned off, the Board of Estimates approved $200,000 in city funds yesterday to help the faltering operation pay its utility bills and other debts.Half of the money will be held until the market provides city officials with its audited financial reports from fiscal year 1999, which ended June 30. The city will allocate $100,000 immediately to help the market pay for security personnel and a $50,000 utility bill that had accumulated in the last three months.

A youth counselor for a city-funded organization that worked to reduce crime in West Baltimore was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in prison for leading a gang and organizing drug dealing, money laundering and robberies, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney's office. Federal prosecutors described Todd Duncan, 36, as the "citywide commander" of the Black Guerrilla Family, a gang founded in California in the 1960s that authorities say is responsible for selling heroin in Baltimore.

After being closed on Tuesdays for more than two years due to budget cuts, the Baltimore Museum of Art will reopen Tuesdays beginning today and running at least through the end of the current fiscal year June 30. Hours will be 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.BMA director Arnold L. Lehman said yesterday the city would be funding the cost of the Tuesday opening, which involves added expenditures for security and custodial services, among others.

MOVE over, PILOTs. Make way for TIFs. In the acronymic world of Baltimore's economic development, tax increment financing bonds are supplanting payments in lieu of taxes as a subsidy of choice. The city is poised to approve its fourth TIF bond - which pledges expected additional property tax revenues from a specific project, not current tax dollars, to pay off the debt - in seven months. This one is to fund $5.5 million worth of improvements to spur the conversion of the mostly vacant 19th-century factory Clipper Mill site in Woodberry in North Baltimore into a $55 million residential and office community.

Arundel police find missing teenager 3 Anne Arundel County police found a teenager early Tuesday who had been missing from his Severna Park home since Saturday. Alexander Stevens, 17, was found about 1 a.m. at a convenience store at Route 2 and Earleigh Heights Road, police said. He was with friends and appeared to be in good health, according to police. Sunday afternoon, Stevens' mother told officers that she last saw the teen when he left home on his bike about 8:30 a.m. Saturday. - Brent Jones Child with lighter caused Balto.

The city has approved a $25,000 emergency appropriation for the Council for Equal Business Opportunity, a private non-profit group whose federal funding was frozen after U.S. officials questioned $2 million of the group's expenditures.CEBO was created to provide loans and financial advice to small, minority-owned businesses.But last November, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered the city to cut off CEBO's federal grant of more than $600,000 because CEBO could not prove the money was being used to help low- to moderate-income people or to eliminate urban blight, as required by HUD regulations.

Hundreds of poor and elderly city residents may have to endure leaky roofs, crumbling bricks and shifting foundations this winter now that two of the city's three home rehabilitation loan and grant programs are out of money.After a year of record requests, housing officials have stopped considering all but dire emergency applications for the city housing rehabilitation loans and grants. The problem was brought to light this week by the plight of 99-year-old Upton resident Helen E. Wilson, who has been unable to secure city funds to repair her West Lanvale Street home.

Nearly two years after they unsuccessfully sought a developer for the Pier 4 power plant, Baltimore redevelopment officials are trying again.The Baltimore Development Corp. has set June 8 as the deadline for proposals from groups interested in recycling the cavernous three-building complex overlooking the Inner Harbor.City officials last issued a request for power plant proposals in August 1990 but decided that none of the seven bids was strong enough. They said they would try again when the economy got better.

Councilman Bill Henry's proposal to exclude non-union laborers from working on city-funded construction projects is already causing great concern among the small business community, particularly for those of us whose companies are black or minority owned. Mr. Henry introduced a bill March 22 that calls for mandatory community partnership agreements (more commonly called project labor agreements or PLAs) on all taxpayer-supported city construction projects of more than $5 million.

Baltimore will use $1.5 million in state funds toward construction of a headquarters and other facilities for a parks advocacy group -- but some of that money could have shored up the city's Recreation and Parks Department, decimated by cuts in a preliminary budget released by Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake last week. The spending, approved by a city oversight panel on Wednesday, will help refurbish a dilapidated mansion in Druid Hill Park to serve as headquarters for the Parks and People Foundation, and construct an eco-friendly building with classrooms and exhibit space.

The city's top officials are scheduled to vote on automatic pay raises for themselves tomorrow — the same day that Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake is slated to unveil a grim budget that includes deep cuts to city services. But the mayor, Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young and Comptroller Joan Pratt said they plan to decline the raises and to have the money deducted from their pay checks and returned to the city's general fund. "Because of the economic and financial difficulties that we're facing in the city of Baltimore, I think it's only right that we give it back," said Young.

Annapolis Mayor Josh Cohen has redirected funding from a city-financed cultural exchange into the city's general fund, citing an estimated $6.5 million budget deficit. Cohen said he has redirected the $27,500 remaining in the account of the Sister Cities program into the general fund for this fiscal year. "Now is not the time to be spending $27,500 on the Sister Cities program when we are struggling even to fund essential services," Cohen said. The mayor also has convened a group of community stakeholders to review the program, which in recent years, under former Mayor Ellen O. Moyer, has come under scrutiny by some City Council members as a waste of city resources.

The long-planned revitalization of the area surrounding Oldtown Mall in East Baltimore inched forward Wednesday, as city officials approved funds to help relocate merchants and make way for mixed-use development. The Board of Estimates, the city's spending panel, approved more than $256,000 in moving expenses for seven small shops or businesses, among them a hair salon, a car wash and a tailor's shop, that occupy buildings the city has acquired. The city has been buying up property around the mall south of Monument Street at Orleans and Ensor streets as part of a deal to turn over a 5-acre parcel to a development group led by Continental Realty Corp.

Seeking to restore a vital source of funding, Baltimore submitted documents Friday to Department of Justice officials who have frozen some of the city's stimulus money because of poor recordkeeping a decade ago. Sheryl Goldstein, director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, said she believes the city's response will be enough to take Baltimore off the Justice Department's "high-risk" list - clearing the way for as much as $8.2 million that can...

The District of Columbia is facing a series of crises that threaten not only fiscal disaster but also diminution of Washington's hard-earned home-rule granted by Congress more than two decades ago. At issue is whether the federal government will have to step in and bail out the financially strapped city or -- worse -- whether Congress will simply strip Washington of much of its autonomy.Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, who is up for re-election this year, has lobbied the White House on the District's behalf and is scheduled to appear before a congressional subcommittee to defend her administration's handling of city affairs.

The city Board of Estimates has approved a $50,000 federal grant for the Council for Equal Business Opportunity even though federal housing officials ordered the city not to award any more federal money to the non-profit group.In November, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered the city to stop awarding federal money to CEBO because it was not being spent in accordance with federal guidelines.Those guidelines say the money should be used to create permanent jobs or to eliminate urban blight.

I Can't We Can, a Northwest Baltimore-based drug treatment program founded 13 years ago by a former heroin addict, has lost its major source of funding because of "grave concerns" about the way it is being run, according to the agency that distributes the money. Israel Cason, a popular community leader and vocal advocate of substance abuse treatment, estimates he has helped about 10,000 addicts over the years with housing, counseling and work training. A decade ago, city leaders were so enamored of the program that they declared Aug. 29 "I Can't We Can Day."