Mayor

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said Wednesday she's pressing her Department of Transportation to ensure speed camera accuracy after officials acknowledged that 590 erroneous tickets were issued by the city's new multimillion-dollar camera system. At the same time, the mayor said, she's committed to a program that she believes helps protect children from drivers who speed in school zones. "I'm going to continue to put pressure on the Department of Transportation to continue to improve the program and to get it right," Rawlings-Blake said.

The funeral procession for Matthew Hersl crawled through the tight streets of Southeast Baltimore, moving past the Milan restaurant, the Inner Harbor Travel agency and the Little Italy parking garage. Steve Hersl, Matt's brother, blared his car horn as he inched along. A blue passenger van with a Baltimore Orioles hat resting on the dashboard led the convoy through the 45-year-old city finance supervisor's neighborhood. As the procession passed his home, Steve leaned out his black Hyundai and yelled, "I love you, Matt!"

Gov. Martin O'Malley told The Sun on Wednesday that he would be open to political accountability for the state of city schools, according to our Statehouse Reporter Erin Cox.  In an interview with Sun editors, the governor said that he would back a measure similar to one lawmakers voted in for Prince George's County giving the county's executive an unprecedented level of authority over the long-troubled (though the district outperformed Baltimore...

W.E.B. DuBois High School is the latest to win the Mayor's Attendance Campaign competition, after its ninth-grade class increasing its daily attendance by nearly 11 percentage points. The school was surprised with the honor--which includes a dance party staffed by a 92Q DJ at The Grille at Peerce's Landing--with a visit from Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake city schools CEO Andres Alonso, and Jonathon Rondeau, of the Family League of Baltimore.  The ninth-grade class increased its daily attendance from 63.42 percent to 74.05 percent, according to a release.

Richard Oare, an attorney who successfully defended the the mayor of York, Pa., on a decades-old murder charge dating to a 1969 race riot, died of prostate cancer March 26 at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. The White Hall resident was 68. Born John Richard Oare Jr. in Baltimore and raised in Baynesville on Hillendale Road, he was the son of a builder who constructed homes in northern Baltimore County. His mother was a homemaker. He attended Immaculate Conception School and was a 1962 graduate of Towson Catholic High School, where he played baseball and was named to an All Metro baseball team.

The Rawlings-Blake administration and Baltimore's fire unions are battling over the city's proposal to require firefighters to work longer hours — 24 hours straight, every three days. The mayor says the move — which mirrors staffing trends in other large U.S. cities — will save millions for cash-strapped Baltimore while giving its 1,300 firefighters a huge pay raise by creating a longer work week. The fire unions, however, say the move would represent a cut to their hourly pay and is unfair to employees who have built their lives around a work schedule that's been in place for 20 years.

Former Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon should not re-enter the political world. If not for a particularly egregious lapse of common sense (thieving gift cards intended for less fortunate people), people would very likely remember her in a more positive light. She could have murdered another, and I believe I would not see her in a lesser light. If memory serves me correctly, Ms. Dixon pilfered the gift cards around the Christmas and Kwanzaa season. For me to think that she literally and figuratively stole Christmas or Kwanzaa from a child makes me nauseated.

The board of the Baltimore Development Corp. is recommending the city approve a developer's request for $107 million in tax increment financing to pay for roads, utilities and parks for the $1 billion mixed-use Harbor Point development on the waterfront between Harbor East and Fells Point. The board of the BDC, the city's development agency, voted Thursday to send a recommendation to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for consideration. The financing, a way to fund construction of public infrastructure for new development, also requires City Council approval.

I live in Otterbein. I believe in shopping locally. Rather than shopping at the big box stores in the suburbs where I would save money, I shop almost exclusively in the city. The mayor's office emphasizes the importance of Baltimore's "Main Streets. " The Baltimore City Council encourages shopping downtown. Why, then, are the parking meter fees in Federal Hill so high? I pay $2 an hour to shop on Charles and Light Streets in Federal Hill. I often stay 90 minutes and therefore pay $3 or more just to park.

Former Mayor Sheila Dixon plans to kick off a local foundation's speaker series next month as she weighs a possible return to politics, having completed probation on the criminal conviction that forced her from office. "This is the year I'm going to decide," Dixon said of her desire to run for office again. "I'm not going to hide the fact that I enjoyed what I was doing during my 27 years in public office. " Dixon, who in 2009 was convicted of stealing gift cards intended for the poor, is scheduled to launch this year's Associated Black Charities speaker series April 16. The series, now it its fourth year, also will feature talks in subsequent months by former Legg Mason CEO Mark Fetting and Robert M. Bell, the chief judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals.