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.

Robert Keller, The Evening Sun's first metropolitan editor and later executive director of the Greater Baltimore Committee, died May 12 of complications from Crohn's disease at Harbor Hospital. He was 71. The son of a banker and a bookkeeper, Robert Keller was born in Trenton, N.J., and raised in Baltimore's Howard Park neighborhood. He earned his high school diploma and bachelor's degree in 1963 from St. Mary's Seminary & University in Roland Park. Mr. Keller was a reporter for The Catholic Review from 1963 until 1965, when he joined the staff of the Delmarva Dialog in Wilmington, Del. In 1967, he joined The Evening Sun as a reporter and in 1972 became city editor.

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."

City leaders hope that by this time next year they'll have returned from Annapolis with funds to put toward making the Inner Harbor what its original designers intended it to be - "a playground for Baltimoreans. " "The city has changed so much since the original development of the Inner Harbor," said Laurie Schwartz, executive director of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore Inc., a nonprofit that manages and advocates for the city's waterfront. It's time to evaluate the Inner Harbor and decide what needs to be done to sustain it as a vibrant part of the city, she said.

Robert Keller, The Evening Sun's first metropolitan editor and later executive director of the Greater Baltimore Committee, died May 12 of complications from Crohn's disease at Harbor Hospital. He was 71. The son of a banker and a bookkeeper, Robert Keller was born in Trenton, N.J., and raised in Baltimore's Howard Park neighborhood. He earned his high school diploma and bachelor's degree in 1963 from St. Mary's Seminary & University in Roland Park. Mr. Keller was a reporter for The Catholic Review from 1963 until 1965, when he joined the staff of the Delmarva Dialog in Wilmington, Del. In 1967, he joined The Evening Sun as a reporter and in 1972 became city editor.

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.

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.

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.

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 1987, The Sun's editorial board decided to bestow upon the Johns Hopkins University's then-president, Steven Muller, a newly created award: Marylander of the Year. The distinction was meant to honor the person who "contributed the most to Baltimore and Maryland and to the lives of our people," and the man who was in the midst of a rapid expansion of Hopkins' medical and academic empire got the nod as the leading "puller of strings, guide, coach, motivator, spokesman, cheerleader, tambourine-shaker, master of ceremonies and world traveler.

Baltimore's Fraternal Order of Police is celebrating what is, at most, a Pyrrhic victory in its effort to reverse the pension reforms Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the City Council enacted two years ago. Federal Judge Marvin J. Garbis' ruling that a key provision of the reform plan was unconstitutional appears to mean that the entire law has been struck down. But his ruling also made clear that the vast majority of the provisions in the law are permissible and that even in the part he objected to, a slight change in the plan's design could meet the city's fiscal objectives without violating the Constitution.

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.

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.

T. Rowe Price senior executive Brian C. Rogers is to become the chairman of the Greater Baltimore Committee at its meeting Tuesday. Rogers, chairman and chief investment officer at the Baltimore money manager, has served on the GBC board of directors since 2007. He will succeed the outgoing GBC chairman, Charles O. Monk II, managing partner at Saul Ewing's Baltimore office. Hanah.cho@baltsun.com Text BUSINESS to 70701 to get Baltimore Sun Business text alerts

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.

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."

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.

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.