Community Group

Community group to meet tomorrow The Carroll County Community Association will meet at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Westminster library branch meeting room, 50 E. Main St. The speaker will be Richard Klein, president of the Community & Environmental Defense Services. He will discuss how to win battles involving proposed highways, landfills, shopping centers, airport expansion, dam building or housing projects. He also will explain how to preserve all or part of a property before development construction begins, and will compare Carroll's growth management plans with other jurisdictions.

COMMUNITY associations have every right to demand that their members honor their covenants, even if homeowners are prevented from painting a front door the color they want.Likewise, people who enter agreements with community associations are right to demand that the groups hold up their end of the bargain, regardless of how long ago the deal was signed.The Crofton Civic Association is showing utter disregard in this vein. It is trying to interfere with plans by a landowner to build a six-story hotel near the entrance to the western Anne Arundel County community on commercialized Crain Highway.

The hulking eight-story Anne Arundel Medical Center tower has, for as long as anyone can recall, been an outcast on the leafy, residential blocks of old Annapolis.The bustle of nurses in scrubs, the flash of ambulance lights and the building itself -- drab and boxy -- have looked entirely out of place in a neighborhood where misty mornings greet residents in slippers, walking their dogs past century-old homes to the waterfront.So when hospital officials announced they would be moving to Parole after 99 years in downtown Annapolis, residents began hoping for a replacement that would blend in -- some muted, tasteful homes, unassuming townhouses, perhaps a few small shops.

In Baltimore CityCommunity group backs Stokes in mayor's raceA 500-member community group concerned about vacant houses and slumlords in Baltimore endorsed mayoral candidate Carl F. Stokes yesterday for the city's top political job.Members of the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) said they believe Stokes is committed to helping the city eliminate vacant housing and to enforcing housing laws on landlords who fail to maintain their properties.The group also endorsed Nathan C. Irby for City Council president; Stephanie Rawlings, Helen Holton, Rochelle "Rikki" Spector for 5th District council seats; and Catherine Pugh and Roscoe Herring for the 4th District council seats.

Despite pressure from the Ruppersberger administration, the day care class at St. Clement's school building in Lansdowne won't be moving to the former county library a half-mile away -- and Jamie Davis is happy about that."

Owners of the vacant Peabody Book Shop and Beer Stube want members of the Mount Vernon-Belvedere Association to put up or shut up.Directors of the community group voted last week to oppose a request by the establishment's owners to demolish the book shop and tavern at 913 N. Charles St., which was frequented by H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and musicians, poets and artists. Association members want the owners, 913 North Charles Street Limited Partnership, to save at least the facade, and repair or reconstruct the rest.

The area along U.S. 1 in North Laurel-Savage is a nondescript mishmash of pit beef barbecues and motels, tiny used-car operations and strip malls nestled near sprawling industrial parks.It sits on the southeastern edge of Howard County, eclipsed by the big-name, planned community Columbia to the northwest and lacking the festive and bustling atmosphere of historic Laurel city in nearby Prince George's County to the south.But a group of residents is hoping a beautification project will give the area between Route 32 and the Prince George's County line what it lacks: a sense of place.

Consensus is not a favorite word in Little Italy these days.Warring neighborhood leaders can't even agree on whether they have a president for a community group that represents 500 people in this historic enclave east of downtown.A controversy, brewing for months over unpaid legal bills and a $5 million lawsuit, erupted this month when three officers of the Little Italy Community Organization resigned.The group's president, Roy Eppard, insists he's still in power."I know I'm still president," said Eppard, who was elected in September 1994 to a two-year term.

A community group has been formed to unite and represent the residents of Baltimore's Little Italy, a neighborhood long divided over parking problems and legal disputes."

Lower Park Heights residents have done this before -- meet at a church sanctuary and pledge to push drug dealers off the corners and drive crime statistics downward.Yet, drug dealers continue to dominate many intersections, and children and elderly people often are afraid to leave their homes because of the danger.Despite these persistent frustrations, residents of the Northwest Baltimore community last night launched a new effort to fight crime at a forum at New Fellowship Christian Community Church, 5202 Park Heights Ave., and promised better results.

No one was more delighted by the recent ACORN pimp 'n' prostitute, hidden-camera sting than Marcel Reid, the former ACORN board member who was booted in summer 2008 when she tried to examine the organization's books. "If we'd known all it took was a half-naked 20-year-old, we'd have done this a year and a half ago," Ms. Reid said. By now most Americans are familiar with ACORN - the un-pithily named Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - and all its attendant problems: charges of voter registration fraud, embezzlement, tax arrears, corruption and, now, accusations of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, prostitution, tax evasion and child abuse.

Rita Virginia McCurley, a Southwest Baltimore community activist and family matriarch, died of Alzheimer's disease Wednesday at St. Elizabeth's Rehabilitation and Nursing Center. She was 80. Born Rita Murphy on Kossuth Street in Irvington, she attended St. Benedict's Parochial School. Family members said she took her brother's birth certificate, changed the name from Joseph to Josephine and got a job at a paint brush factory to help support her family. She was later fired when she addressed a black co-worker as "Sir."

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon met yesterday with members of a community group north of Little Italy who said they felt angry and "ambushed" over the city's decision to open a homeless shelter in their neighborhood tomorrow. Dixon and eight members of her senior staff tried to reassure the Albemarle Square Community that the shelter for 275 people in an empty city-owned building at 1001 E. Fayette St. would only be open for up to 90 days. Then the former check processing center, located across from the city's main post office, will be occupied by the 250 professional employees of the Baltimore Health Department, which is moving its headquarters from 210 Guilford Ave. near City Hall, Dixon said.

Bill Lagna doesn't feel he's leading a coup. As the first president of a community group created in the wake of a divisive plan to build condominiums at a weathered marina in Bowleys Quarters, Lagna says the goal is to unify residents on the eastern Baltimore County peninsula. "The intent of the group is to try to come up with acceptable developments that will fit in with the general theme of the existing neighborhood," says Lagna, president of the new Bowleys Quarters Community Association.

By 11 a.m., they started coming, a crush of purple-clad fans descending, but for a moment, on the tiny neighborhood of Sharp-Leadenhall as they made their way toward the beckoning stadium. The residents here are accustomed to this, used to the strangers who invade their park and streets every Sunday, come football season. Fans from across the city and state - and even out-of-state - pour in from all sides on their way to M&T Bank Stadium, a sports facility that has been their neighbor for years, but one many residents have never visited.

Community group to meet tomorrow The Carroll County Community Association will meet at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Westminster library branch meeting room, 50 E. Main St. The speaker will be Richard Klein, president of the Community & Environmental Defense Services. He will discuss how to win battles involving proposed highways, landfills, shopping centers, airport expansion, dam building or housing projects. He also will explain how to preserve all or part of a property before development construction begins, and will compare Carroll's growth management plans with other jurisdictions.

CHERRY HILL -- Residents of this rural community just a few miles outside Elkton are rallying their forces and plotting their strategy with hopes of halting, or at least trimming, one of the biggest residential development projects in the history of Cecil County. Windsor Development Co. of Freehold, N.J., wants to build 749 housing units on a peach orchard surrounded by homes on 1- to 5-acre lots. "This is like putting a little city in the middle of our community, and it doesn't fit," said Lindsie Carter, chairwoman of Cherry Hill Alliance for Responsible Growth and Expansion, which is opposed to the project.

After months of acrimony over insurance coverage and related issues, the YMCA of Central Maryland and a Northeast Baltimore community group have reached a tentative agreement that will allow a playground to be built on the site of the former Memorial Stadium on East 33rd Street. The neighbor group, Community-built Playground Inc., agreed to turn over daily management of the playground to the YMCA, which clears the way for the YMCA to obtain liability insurance, officials said yesterday.

Concerns about insurance have jeopardized plans to build a community playground on a parcel of the cleared Memorial Stadium site, where a YMCA and senior housing are being constructed. The YMCA of Central Maryland, one of two redevelopers of the 30-acre property, had agreed to allow a Waverly-based community organization, Community-Built Playground Inc., to build the children's play area on 1 acre. However, the YMCA said this week that it requires control of the playground's governing board to obtain adequate liability insurance and that the community group has balked at relinquishing that control.

Angering many, activists gathered petition signatures yesterday in Towson during an outdoor ceremony to observe the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the United States. Actions by the activists, who said they represented the Holly Neck Conservation Association in eastern Baltimore County, drew harsh words from the spokesman for Baltimore County Executive James T. Smith Jr. and the head of the county firefighters union. But the president of the Holly Neck group said no one from the group was sent to the event.