Consent Decree

Under threat of a lawsuit from state regulators, Constellation Energy Corp. said yesterday that it will stop dumping fly ash from coal at a mine in Anne Arundel County while it negotiates and carries out a plan to clean up neighbors' contaminated drinking water. By Monday, Constellation will no longer drop off truckloads of fly ash, a byproduct of its coal-fired plants, at an 80-acre site in Gambrills owned by BBSS Inc., said Rob Gould, a Constellation spokesman, but he declined to say where it would deposit the debris instead.

The prospective owner of Sparrows Point steel mill told workers yesterday that he plans to run the Baltimore County plant at full capacity and invest in new facilities, which could lead to more jobs and construction on the 3,000-acre site. Craig Bouchard, who heads the global investment group that is buying the plant, said future projects could include developing an iron ore processing plant and building a new coal-fired power plant. Excess power from the power plant could be sold into the regional power grid, generating profits and helping to alleviate the region's growing power shortage.

Thirty black Baltimore middle school pupils and their chaperons on a class trip to Walt Disney World have filed suit in federal court against Denny's restaurants, claiming they were mistreated at one of the chain's Florida outlets because of race.A spokeswoman for the chain -- which has been operating under a consent decree not to discriminate since it reached a $46 million agreement with the federal government five years ago -- denied the allegations yesterday and said the company would vigorously contest the suit.

WASHINGTON -- Lockheed Martin Corp. said yesterday that the government has asked it to agree to "unprecedented divestitures" or face a court battle over its planned $11 billion merger with aerospace rival Northrop Grumman.The two companies have been given until Monday morning to offer a plan that meets government demands.Lockheed said the Justice Department, the government's lead antitrust regulator, and the Pentagon, which has said it is opposed to allowing the two defense titans to merge unchecked, informed the company that they would both participate in the suit.

FMC Corp. has agreed to a consent decree that requires the company to re-evaluate its process for manufacturing Command, a popular herbicide.The consent decree represents an agreement between FMC's 92-acre South Baltimore plant and the Maryland Department of Environment that will stop state enforcement action.The decree signed last week stems from a May 15 accident in which a poorly calibrated flow meter caused a batch of Command to overheat, sending 600 pounds of gas into the air. Residents of nearby Wagner's Point said they saw a gas cloud and complained of watery eyes, bloody noses and sore throats.

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court gave Microsoft Corp. a generally sympathetic hearing yesterday as the software giant sought relief from a ruling barring the company from tying its Internet Explorer browser to its Windows 95 software.U.S. Circuit Judges A. Raymond Randolph and Stephen F. Williams appeared receptive to Microsoft's argument that the Windows operating system installed with the Internet browser was an integrated product. The third member of the panel, Judge Patricia Wald, seemed more hostile to Microsoft's position but also criticized a key aspect of the government's case.

THE Justice Department last week charged Microsoft Corp. with violating a 1995 consent decree and asked a federal judge to impose a $1 million-a-day fine.The government contends that by requiring personal computer makers to include its Internet Explorer Web browser software when they install its Windows 95 operating system, the company is unfairly exploiting its near-monopoly on PC operating systems and seeking to dominate the browser market. While Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator software is still the leading browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is gaining fast.

Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s new multimillion-dollar environmental DTC cleanup plan isn't likely to deliver a quick boost to a long-awaited Sparrows Point industrial park, a project designed to bring hundreds of jobs to the area.Baltimore County officials say they must study an agreement among Bethlehem Steel and state and federal environmental agencies before deciding whether to take possession of 313 acres of company property earmarked for the park. The county has held off because of fears of contamination at the site, which could include metals, chemicals and solvents.

A joint House panel gave preliminary approval to Baltimore's aid-for-accountability schools deal yesterday, but not before including a possible killer amendment as the legislation finally began to move through the General Assembly.A section of the bill was changed to make it difficult -- if not impossible -- for city officials to accept it and could send the schools issue back into court.The panel, made up of members of the Ways and Means and Appropriations committees, spent hours going over the details of the deal, which would give the state a role in running the city schools in exchange for providing an additional $254 million in aid over five years.

With a Monday deadline looming for the sale of the Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s Sparrows Point shipyard, Peter Angelos and Bethlehem Steel yesterday failed to resolve differences over the handling of possible environmental contamination at the shipyard.Angelos and Bethlehem wouldn't comment on the talks, which included representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice."The deal is there except for the EPA issue," Angelos said.A source familiar with the negotiations who insisted on anonymity said: "The purchasers find the environmental issues are formidable and difficult to resolve and pose a potential threat to consummating the transaction."

African-American motorists are three to four times more likely to be stopped by police on Maryland roads than other drivers, yet they are no more likely to be carrying drugs or contraband. That suggests a pattern of illegal racial profiling, and in 1998 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Maryland State Police to stop the practice. The case was settled by a federal consent decree in 2003 after Maryland agreed to change some procedures and investigate drivers' complaints of racial profiling.

The Baltimore Sun's August 5 editorial "A Breach of Trust" reflected several inaccurate conclusions about the state's continued commitment to reforming the foster care system in Baltimore City; the legal duties of attorneys; and the level of public accountability for the Maryland Department of Human Resources (DHR). Shortly after Gov. Martin O'Malley appointed me Secretary of DHR in February of 2007, I began implementing a comprehensive child welfare reform agenda called Place Matters.

Maybe it was too good to be true. Two weeks ago, leaders of the state agency responsible for Maryland's foster care system came to The Sun's editorial board with the attorneys who have spent more than two decades in federal court trying to make sure that Baltimore's most threatened children receive appropriate care. In a stunning turnaround, they announced a consent agreement that resolved longstanding issues with the management of the Department of Human Resources and promised an end to federal oversight in as little as 18 months.

A federal judge said Wednesday that he intends to approve a carefully constructed settlement agreement in L.J. v. Massinga, a decades-old case over the treatment of Baltimore foster children, but he delayed his decision to consider the state's new argument that the long-standing court oversight should end altogether. U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz called the exit strategy, crafted over eight months by Department of Human Resources officials, state attorneys and lawyers representing the city's more than 5,000 foster children, "not only fair but commendable."

A hard-fought agreement that promised to settle a decades-old lawsuit over the way Maryland treats Baltimore's foster children is in jeopardy as state lawyers now push for an outright dismissal of the federal oversight. A federal court hearing today was expected to make official a carefully constructed exit strategy in the case, marking a major turning point in the case. It was the first time since 1988, when a consent decree placed the Maryland Department of Human Resources under judicial watch, that the agency and attorneys representing more than 5,000 city children in foster care were in harmony.

A Baltimore-based lawyer, who for six years worked as a court-appointed monitor overseeing Detroit police reforms, resigned last week after disclosure of a "personal relationship" with disgraced Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Text messages obtained by FBI agents and turned over to a federal judge revealed an 18-month relationship between Kilpatrick and Sheryl Robinson Wood, whose husband is campaigning for a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates. Detroit newspapers reported Monday that the text messages span a period from 2003 to 2005 and document Kilpatrick and Wood meeting in Washington and other places for meals and at hotels that were not related to her role as a federal monitor.

A year after the state announced a legal settlement requiring cleanup of long-standing pollution problems at a chemical plant near Chestertown on the Eastern Shore, the work remains stalled by disputes with the plant's owner. Genovique Specialties Corp. has balked at demands from the state Department of the Environment that it do more testing of soil and groundwater for toxic and potentially cancer-causing chemicals at its manufacturing facility, which sits beside an unnamed stream that ultimately flows to the Chesapeake Bay. The company, based in Rosemont, Ill., first submitted a plan last August for investigating contamination at its Kent County plant, which manufactures "plasticizers" - substances that make plastics flexible.

For a quarter-century, lawyers for Baltimore foster children have been telling a judge horrific stories of abuse and neglect and indifference. The child welfare system itself, the attorneys said, failed these children time and again by shrugging off reforms it was ordered to make as a result of a federal lawsuit. That has changed, the lawyers said Tuesday. Convinced that the state Department of Human Resources, which oversees child welfare and the city's more than 5,000 foster children, has finally made enough progress on changes first ordered by a judge in 1988, the lawyers on Monday filed a motion that could eventually end federal court oversight.

A state audit has found significant improvement in the Baltimore school system's delivery of services such as speech therapy and counseling to students with disabilities. State auditors examined the files of 358 special-education students who were entitled to 678 sessions of services between August and December. Twenty-five of the 358 students had a problem with service delivery, a noncompliance rate of 7 percent, down from 30 percent when a similar audit was done a year ago. But the consent decree in a decades-old lawsuit involving the city's special-education program requires that no more than 2 percent of students with disabilities have their services interrupted over the course of a school year.

Make Exxon do more to ensure clean water While I am pleased that the state has required ExxonMobil to write a check as a penalty for releasing gasoline into my neighborhood's groundwater, I am disappointed in some of the provisions and omissions in the recent consent decree ("Exxon fined $4 million for gas leak," Sept. 17). The agreement, which requires ExxonMobil to develop a corrective action plan (CAP) for restoring the health of our groundwater, is incredibly vague. It contains no map or other indication of what physical area is covered by the consent decree and no mention of how deep the restoration of groundwater quality must go. The CAP is subject to review and approval only by the Maryland Department of the Environment.