Greater Baltimore Committee

THE GREATER BALTIMORE Committee, at 41, is a boomer that has achieved great things but is going through a mid-life crisis. First Maryland Bankcorp. chief Frank P. Bramble, who took over the chairmanship of the 600-member business group last week, promises renewal of the business group by establishing benchmark goals. He wants a "new Broadway-style theater by the year 2000." He wants an end to "Baltimore bashing." He wants to practice regionalism."Some regions in this country recognize the value of business.

There were few laugh lines in U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's Thursday morning address to Baltimore's business community. But one of the biggest resulted from a bizarre off-script non sequitur Geithner made early in his speech. Setting: Fourth-floor conference room at the Marriott Waterfront Hotel in Harbor East. Three hundred of Baltimore's most influential business and political leaders are seated at round, white-clothed tables.

William Boucher III, a businessman who influenced the city's downtown redevelopment as executive director of the Greater Baltimore Committee under 12 chairmen, six Baltimore mayors and as many governors, died Monday of a heart attack at Harbor Hospital Center.Mr. Boucher, who was 76, had been stricken at the state Motor Vehicle Administration in Glen Burnie.The Butler resident retired in 1981 from the GBC.During a 26-year career with the GBC, he left his mark on the Charles Center, Inner Harbor Civic Center and Jones Falls Expressway projects, development of mass transit and the Maryland Port Authority and passage of the city's open housing law."

Speaking to hundreds of Baltimore's business leaders in Harbor East on Thursday morning, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner praised President Barack Obama's handling of the recession and outlined his boss' financial reform wish list, which includes cutting small business taxes and maintaining the federal student loan interest rate. The quickly organized event, suggested last week to the Greater Baltimore Committee, served as a platform for Geithner to attack presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's economic policies.

The Baltimore they knew was a city in despair. Its retailers and residents were fleeing to the suburbs, property values were in free fall, and signs of urban decay were everywhere. There was no Charles Center, no Jones Falls Expressway, no Harborplace, no convention center, no Metro subway, no Ravens and no National Aquarium. Marshalling their economic star power, a who's who of Baltimore business leaders formed the Greater Baltimore Committee 50 years ago today and threw their weight behind all of those revitalization projects and more.

For anyone who still doubts information has become one of the hottest commodities in America, consider this: Maryland's four fastest growing technology companies make their money by transmitting, analyzing or organizing information.Their revenue growth is "pretty good" in the understated words of one company executive. Yes, the company he works for has at least doubled its staff and its revenues every year since 1991. This year, Rapid Systems Solutions, which has 275 employees, is expected to have revenues of $30 million.

Baltimore's leading business group is touting the economic benefits of bringing casino gambling to Maryland, but has stopped short of endorsing such a move.The Greater Baltimore Committee released a study yesterday suggesting that 10 casinos in Maryland -- including five in the Baltimore area -- would generate $435 million in tax revenues and create more than 12,000 new jobs statewide."There is strong evidence it would have a major economic impact," said GBC Chairman Frank P. Bramble, chief executive of First Maryland Bancorp.

Donald C. Fry, executive vice president and general counsel of the Greater Baltimore Committee, will become the group's president next month, officials said yesterday. Fry, 47, who has worked at the GBC for 3 1/2 years, will replace Donald P. Hutchinson when Hutchinson steps down Nov. 1 to become president and chief executive of SunTrust Bank's Maryland division. "He knows the organization inside and out," GBC Chairman Francis B. Burch Jr. said of Fry. "Over the past three years, he's become increasingly known to the business community.

As the Board of Estimates approved the Wyndham Inner Harbor East Hotel yesterday, an influential business group told the mayor that he has his priorities backward and should instead first develop a hotel next to the expanded Baltimore Convention Center.The Greater Baltimore Committee, in a letter to the mayor signed by GBC Chairman Frank Bramble, argued that the lack of a closer hotel endangers the $151 million public investment in the expanded center and seriously jeopardizes the city's relationship with the state legislature.

In the parlance of bureaucracy, the GBA is moving from the BMC to the GBC.In layman's terms, the Greater Baltimore Alliance, a nonprofit regional economic development and marketing program, is being shifted from under the Baltimore Metropolitan Council to the Greater Baltimore Committee."

Elizabeth McKenrick Winstead, an award-winning knitter and Bryn Mawr School graduate who established a scholarship fund there, died Tuesday of cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. She was 73. Mrs. Winstead, who went by the nickname Libby, was born in Baltimore in 1939. She was the eldest of three girls. Her father, a lawyer, served in the armed forces during World War II. During his absence, the girls and their mother moved to Pennsylvania to live with relatives. In early 1946, Mrs. Winstead's family returned to Baltimore, settling on North Charles Street near the city-county border.

Employment in the Baltimore area has held up better in the last few difficult years than it has in other, similar regions, thanks largely to the strength of the education, health care and government sectors, according to a new study. The 2011 State of the Region report, produced for the Greater Baltimore Committee, says the Baltimore area's loss of 1.6 percent of its jobs between 2008 and 2010 was the fifth-smallest drop among 20 metro areas studied. Austin, Texas, had the best performance, with a drop of about half a percent, while Tampa's 3.6 percent job loss ranked the Florida city dead last.

The recent article about the Baltimore recreation not receiving many bids to operate them and the prospect of closing some ("City gets few third-party bids to run rec centers," Oct. 13), indicates how disconnected our elected officials are, especially when the day before Donald Fry of the Greater Baltimore Committee asked the state for $2 million to $3 million to do a feasibility study for a new convention center expansion. This is the same Mr. Fry who heads the slots commission and can't seem to get slots built in Baltimore because of the cost to the bidders to create revenue for the city.

Backers of a proposed Inner Harbor arena linked to an expanded convention center expect to ask the state to provide funds for preliminary planning and design for the project's $420 million public portion. The Greater Baltimore Committee, the business group leading the effort to expand the Baltimore Convention Center and link it to a new, privately financed 18,500-seat arena — as well as a 500-room hotel — plans to ask Gov. Martin O'Malley to include $2 million to $3 million in next year's capital budget, Donald C. Fry, president and chief executive of the GBC, said Monday.

The Greater Baltimore Committee's proposed concept for building a new 18,500-seat arena and a 500-room hotel on Conway Street and connecting the arena to an expanded convention center has generated a deluge of media "buzz. " Reactions to the idea of combining the construction of a $500 million, privately funded new arena and hotel with an adjacent $400 million, publicly funded, expanded convention center have been largely positive. However, we should not be surprised that some naysayers are voicing concern about the need for expanding the convention center and questioning its value as a business generator.

Expecting a convention center to lead to job growth is like expecting a diet of double bacon cheeseburgers to lead to weight loss. Pretty much every person who lives in a city with a convention center and every economist knows it — except for people in organizations like the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) and Visit Baltimore. They are the ones pushing the nearly $1 billion public-private expansion of the Baltimore Convention Center, arena and Sheraton hotel. Take Baltimore, where 53,000 jobs exited the city over the past decade, along with 30,000 residents.

There were few laugh lines in U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's Thursday morning address to Baltimore's business community. But one of the biggest resulted from a bizarre off-script non sequitur Geithner made early in his speech. Setting: Fourth-floor conference room at the Marriott Waterfront Hotel in Harbor East. Three hundred of Baltimore's most influential business and political leaders are seated at round, white-clothed tables.

It is against the law of Maryland to burn something o someone else's property, unless you do it for hate and intimidation, in which case it is constitutionally protected.The transformation of the Greater Baltimore Committee from city club to county club was complete when a former county executive was asked to run it.Cheer up. The president is back on the job.

On the same day the Greater Baltimore Committee unveils transformative plans for a new downtown arena, we receive word of a shooting of a 12-year-old boy who was watching an NBA playoff game on a television set perched in the window of a house on Cliftview Avenue — and this just a day or so after the FBI again affirmed Baltimore as one of the most violent cities in the country. On Thursday, the boy, Sean Johnson, died of his injuries. That's the way it goes around here: Big visions and bold ideas for buildings in the places attractive to tourists, violence and frustrations out in the neighborhoods where Baltimoreans of modest means reside, along with their children.

While the city reviews proposals to invigorate the Inner Harbor, the Greater Baltimore Committee unveiled a vision of its own, highlighted by a pedestrian bridge that would link the north and south shores, allowing visitors for the first time to walk a complete circle around the downtown waterfront. Leaders of the business group also proposed light and water shows for the harbor, and three different ideas for turning Rash Field on the south shore into a world-class park. The bridge would be built high enough above the water that most sailboats and water taxis could travel underneath.