Maryland District

And then there was one.Westminster will not field a team in the American Legion's Western Maryland District this season, leaving Mount Airy Post 191 as the only Carroll team remaining in the baseball league for players ages 16 to 18.Randy Biden, who coached the squad from 1987 until last year, said there were insufficient players to form the team this season.Legion officials said the lack of players also was responsible for the breakup of Taneytown's Legion team two years ago and the failure of Sykesville's post to start its own team around the same time.

Whenever proponents of Maryland's new congressional districts make their pitch, there is something missing: the map itself. The gerrymandered map of Maryland's congressional districts produced by Gov. Martin O'Malley and a majority of the General Assembly is so outrageous that proponents of the new map are embarrassed to show it in public. That's because when most people see the map and its bizarrely shaped districts, they cannot believe that anyone in their right mind would have voted for it. Maryland's new Third Congressional District, represented by Congressman John Sarbanes, a Baltimore County Democrat, is so disjointed it looks like blood spatter from a crime scene (www.planning.maryland.gov/PDF/Redistricting/2010maps/Cong/Dist_3.pdf)

Manchester woman joins Md. Farm Bureau staffManchester resident Laura Kaminski has joined the Maryland Farm Bureau staff as a field representative for the Western Maryland District.She will work the nine Western Maryland counties.She is a 1993 graduate of Villa Julie College, with a bachelor of science degree in paralegal studies.Ms. Kaminski previously was an administrative assistant with a realty company and human resources assistant with the Maryland Port Administration.She is a partner in K&K Business Services, a temporary employment firm providing office duties and cleaning services.

A dozen Maryland school districts have stated their intent to vie for up to $40 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education, which has launched a new phase of its Race to the Top competition, started in 2010 to infuse $4 billion into radical educational reforms. The Baltimore-area public school systems that plan to apply for the grant are Baltimore city, Baltimore County and Howard County, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly 900 school systems from across the country will compete for district-based grants that the federal department says will focus on providing resources for innovative and individualized instruction and fostering teacher-student relations in the classroom.

More than 500 state tennis players will participate in theUnited States Tennis Association's Maryland District Championships, today through Sunday at the University of Maryland in College Park. The amateur players represent clubs, parks and recreational departments. Their teams have finished at the top of their local leagues and are competing for a chance to represent Maryland at the USTA League Tennis Mid-Atlantic Sectional Tournament. Finals in the different divisions will be Sunday from 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.BTC

The stage has been set in the State House for a prolonged standoff between House and Senate leaders over re-drawing Maryland's congressional boundary lines. The two chambers yesterday put forward conflicting proposals, neither of which stands much chance of final passage. Finding a way out of this gridlock will take considerable flexibility on both sides.Of the two bills approved yesterday, the House proposal is preferable. It is seriously flawed, though, in that it, too, mutilates Baltimore County, sending slivers of the county's populace to districts controlled by the Eastern Shore, Western Maryland and Anne Arundel County.

An audit of the District Court recordkeeping process could find no evidence of wrongdoing in the loss last month of drunken driving charges against a veteran prosecutor, but it did recommend beefed up security measures and tighter supervision of traffic charges.Robert F. Sweeney, chief judge of the Maryland District Court, said yesterday that procedural flaws may have led to the loss of the charges filed against deputy state's attorney Gerald K. Anders after he was involved in an automobile accident July 27."

What Representative Beverly B. Byron called the flavor of Western Maryland won't be spoiled, should a redistricting proposal hammered outlast week become reality."

It seems like good news: The number of drunken driving cases brought into Maryland's district court system has plunged. But some caution that drivers may not be as sober as the figures suggest.The number of cases filed during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1992, dropped 7.3 percent, according to the recently released Annual Report of the Maryland Judiciary.An advocacy group, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in Maryland, questions whether police are becoming lax in their enforcement of DWI laws.

WESTMINSTER - For the third time in two years, Carroll County is searching for a judge.Gov. William Donald Schaefer named Carroll District Judge Francis M.Arnold to the Circuit Court on Saturday, creating a vacancy on the district bench.Arnold, 61, will fill the seat opened by the September retirement of Judge Donald J. Gilmore.A similar search was conducted last year, when the General Assembly created a third seat on the Carroll Circuit Court. That seat was filled by former state Sen. Raymond E. Beck.

The drive to throw out Maryland's new congressional district maps by petitioning them to referendum is, in all likelihood, something of a futile gesture. Even if the opponents can muster the necessary signatures - battling in the process referendum fatigue from parallel efforts on same-sex marriage - the new, convoluted maps will still be in effect this November. And if the critics of the maps prevail at the ballot box, all they will succeed in doing is getting the same people who brought us the current mess to draw the maps all over again.

The chairwoman of the commission Gov. Martin O'Malley appointed to draft new congressional district maps for the state said that the members had attempted to respect natural and jurisdictional boundaries and communities of interest in drawing the lines. That is true, insofar as the group isn't proposing that the districts cross the Potomac into Virginia at any point. Otherwise, it's hard to find much in the Rorschach test-worthy map they produced that conforms to any standard of compactness or continuity.

Editor: I live in Belcamp which is in Congressional District 2. I would like to note that the closest Congressional District Office to my home is nine miles away in Bel Air, but that office is for District 1. The second closest Congressional District Office to my home is 26 miles away in Towson, but that office is for District 3. The third closest Congressional District Office to my home is 28 miles away in the city, but that office is for District...

The Baltimore City school system ranks slightly below the state average when comparing its education spending to student achievement, according to a report compiled by a progressive Washington think tank that examined the efficiency of Maryland's school districts. The Center for American Progress released the findings last week of the first-ever attempt to tie school districts' expenditures and test scores to gauge "educational productivity. " "It always feels like we're talking about achievement on one hand, and expenditures on the other, and we need to be having that conversation at the same time," said Ulrich Boser, senior fellow at the center and author of the study.

At Padonia International Elementary School, 5-year-old Yarasheila Sanjuan flung her arms around her mother's neck and cried when the time came for parents to leave the kindergarten classroom. At Cedarmere Elementary, teacher Cindy Littman's 17 new third-graders stood in a circle and reminisced about horseback riding, camping trips and other summer activities. And at Catonsville High, freshman Jillian Curtis, 14, was grateful to have a day to get lost without the embarrassment of upperclassmen watching.

Howard County District Judge James N. Vaughan, a 19-year veteran who has ordered criminals to read Les Miserables and invented a "maxim of red lights" for traffic cases, was named chief judge of Maryland's District Court system yesterday. Vaughan, 66, was appointed to one of the state's top three judicial positions by Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell. Vaughan takes his new post today, replacing Martha F. Rasin, who resigned to return to her previous job as a trial judge in Anne Arundel County.

Two Baltimore judges have emerged as the top candidates for a pair of vacancies on the U.S. District Court for Maryland.President Clinton has sent the names of U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine C. Blake and Baltimore Circuit Judge Andre M. Davis to the FBI for background checks, according to sources on Capitol Hill. The next step would be formal nominations by the White House, although that is not expected before earlysummer, sources said.The two were recommended from a field of more than 40 candidates who applied to U.S. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes.

Managing District Court Commissioner Salvatore N. Butta has retired from the front lines of Baltimore County's criminal justice system after 26 years, leaving murder and mayhem to chase punk pigeons from his backyard bird feeder.At 5 feet 4 inches -- some liken him to actor Danny DeVito -- Mr. Butta has plenty of tales to tell, including the time he confronted an angry juvenile almost a foot taller."He was young -- from the old Maryland Training School. There were no police and we didn't have a cage -- just a room with a metal door.

While politicians all over Maryland nervously wait to see Gov. Parris N. Glendening's redistricting plan in January and how it will change their futures, one officeholder says he is unaffected -- U.S. Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett Jr. Speculation abounds about what the state's dominant Democrats may do to squeeze out moderate Republicans such as U.S. Reps. Constance A. Morella and Robert L. Ehrlich, who might run for governor. But the 75-year-old Bartlett, the state's most conservative Republican, said he's not a target and he's not worried.