Merit

Officials of a New Jersey health care company said yesterday that state Sen Larry Young's consulting firm has been paid a total of $46,300 since September 1996, not the $84,000 estimate published by The Sun yesterday.Mafalda Arena, a spokeswoman for Merit Behavioral Care Corp, said yesterday that company records showed Young's firm, the LY Group, has been paid $26,300 during the current year at a monthly fee of $7,000. Last year, she said, records show he was paid $20,000 for four months work at the $5,000 per month rate.

This NFL offseason represents the 10-year anniversary of the inception of the "Rooney Rule. " The rule, named after Pittsburgh Steelers' Chairman Dan Rooney, requires teams to interview minority candidates for all head coaching and senior football operation positions. Initially, the rule showed some signs of success, but the coaching moves from this offseason have even Dan Rooney's son, Steelers' President Art Rooney II, wondering "whether we are really reviewing minority coaches in a satisfactory manner.

The question for today, readers, is whether merit can survive politics.The idea was this: Aspiring Russian capitalists would move into a brand new hotel with a Russian restaurant to be constructed on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park.Arriving in classes of 20 to 30, the Russians would learn about the market economy from professors, bankers, factory managers and others.All of this was to be paid for by the U.S. and Russian governments and by the state of Maryland.Then came politics.

St. James Academy offers two merit scholarships, the Elizabeth I. Legenhausen Scholarship and the F. Karl Adler Scholarship. Kaitlyn Sydnor, entering sixth grade, was awarded the Elizabeth I. Legenhausen Scholarship. Kaitlyn is a well-rounded student with a passion for athletics. She brings a positive presence to our school community. To apply for the F. Karl Adler Scholarship, please submit application materials by April 15. Both scholarships were established for new students entering third through eighth grade to honor academic excellence and are for one half of tuition.

The Fountainhead Title Group, one of the largest title companies in the Baltimore metropolitan area, announced that it has merged with Merit Title Co. Fountainhead, which has headquarters in Columbia and operates 14 offices in Maryland, Delaware and Northern Virginia, is absorbing the Bel Air-based company as well as its employees and business, said William Yerman, who founded Merit in 1990. Yerman will be an executive vice president with Fountainhead. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The student: Beth Baniezewski, 16 Special achievement: Beth was one of three students from Wilde Lake High School recognized as a National Merit semifinalist. Educational goals: She would like to study mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Favorite subject: Science. How she describes herself: Persistent, helpful, ambitious. Hobbies: She enjoys swimming, writing and completing three-dimensional puzzles.

The student: Neeraja Murali, 17 School: River Hill High School Special achievement: Neeraja is one of two River Hill seniors to be recognized as a National Merit semifinalist. College: She plans to attend a competitive four-year school. Her top choice is Brown University. Career choice: She is planning to pursue a career in medicine. Favorite subject: Biology. How she describes herself: Hard-working, friendly, well-rounded. In her spare time: Neeraja enjoys singing in choirs and performing.

The student: Alex Von Hagen-Jamar, 18. School: Howard High School. Special achievement: One of 18 Howard County high school students named a finalist in the 2001 National Merit Scholarship competition. Activities: He participates in the choir, Madrigals, drama and soccer. Most enjoyable to him is singing. "I plan on continuing to sing in college, mostly for fun," he says. Goals: He plans to study engineering, theater or history in college, and has narrowed his search to Brown, Amherst and Princeton.

From auditors to housing inspectors, some key Baltimore County government jobs are being removed from the civil service "merit system" in the name of flexibility, speed and economy.The idea is not new. Federal money for years has funded scores of jobs outside the merit system, and appointive, patronage jobs -- such as the county's only full-time liquor inspector -- occasionally are created.But the impetus for the most recent changes is new -- to make government more like private business.

Angry Baltimore County employees vowed yesterday to wage an aggressive campaign against the Ruppersberger administration's proposal to strip 75 top jobs out of the county's merit system, saying the move is only the latest assault on the system's integrity.Workers say County Executive C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger already has sidestepped the county's laws by replacing merit system workers -- ranging from public works bureau chiefs to code enforcement inspectors -- with so-called part-time appointees.

There were two odd things about Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's presentation Wednesday at the Walters Art Museum to introduce "Change to Grow," her ambitious plan to put Baltimore's budget on a sustainable path, cut taxes and increase investments in infrastructure. First: the trivial. As her PowerPoint ended, music swelled in the background, specifically the opening guitar riffs to U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name," which includes the lines, "City's aflood/And our love turns to rust/We're beaten and blown by the wind/Trampled in dust.

Last week, top Maryland Democrats announced their intention to make it more difficult to put statewide policy referenda on the ballot. The move is a clear response to Republicans' success last year in putting to referendum policy questions in the hope of achieving victories the GOP couldn't win in the legislature. The Republicans' ballot plans backfired, most notably the surprising approval by voters of same-sex marriage. But the Democrats, who dominate state politics thanks to large legislative majorities, took notice of the potential threat to their legislative monopoly.

Most of us have probably seen or heard the ubiquitous ads promoting domestic natural gas drilling. While they don't tend to use the word "fracking," their message about hydraulic fracturing of shale is clear enough - little kids playing happily on green patches of grass and the promise of bountiful clean energy, jobs and all-around happiness all rolled into one. Two things can be inferred from the ads. First, that those in the oil and gas industry...

The letter from Steve Everley, a member of a research organization supported by the Independent Petroleum Institute of America ("Fracking gets an unfair rap," Sept. 21), is a bit misleading when it says that the moratorium on fracking "is just another way to obscure the fact that hydraulic fracturing has been examined, studied, assessed, and closely scrutinized for decades. " While it's true that hydraulic fracturing has been used and studied for decades, high-volume slick-water fracturing has been used only in about the past dozen years, and only in 2011 did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency begin to respond to concerns that fracking was causing problems when they received many complaints from Pennsylvanians who were badly impacted by it. On Feb. 28, 2011, Ian Urbana, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, wrote that he found never-reported studies by the EPA and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.

Its incredible that with all of the articles on HIV and AIDS, the fact that the FDA has finally approved of a 15-minute over-the-counter test for HIV has barely been mentioned ("Rapid at-home HIV test gains federal approval," July 4). You talk about unprotected sex, you talk about abstinence, you talk about condoms, etc., but here we have a method to "privately and immediately " determine whether your partner is HIV positive. One would think this would be a strong deterrent for unprotected sex, but it seems like it's a taboo subject.

Congressman Elijah Cummings did two things recently that merit his defeat in November. He continues to be the lead defender of Attorney GeneralEric Holder'sdeliberate arming of Mexican drug cartels, which has led to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and one U.S. Border Patrol agent - Brian Terry. This action alone merits his defeat. Second, he led the effort in committee to gut Congressman Ron Paul's bill to audit the Federal Reserve. The actions of the Fed in recent years have served to protect big Wall Street banks while impoverishing his constituents by drastically eroding the value of the dollars in our pockets.

Columbia's Green Spring Health Services Inc. stands to double in size as its parent company, Magellan Health Services Inc. of Atlanta, announced plans yesterday to buy Merit Behavioral Care Corp. for $560 million in cash and assumed debt.The New Jersey-based Merit will be merged into Green Spring, said Dr. Henry T. Harbin, Green Spring's president and chief executive officer. That would create a Maryland-based company with more than $1 billion of annual revenue, providing managed-care mental health services for 40 million people by contracting with more than 50,000 clinicians and mental health facilities.

Howard County Executive Charles I. Ecker says the County Council has given him the means to reduce the number of personnel layoffs to something under a projected 200 in order to balance the county budget."

Howard County school board member Allen Dyer testified Friday in the case brought by the board to remove him, stating that despite being at odds with some fellow members he has "contributed to a better board of education. " The Howard school board requested in June 2011 that the state board remove Dyer in a resolution that accused him of such infractions as breaching confidentiality requirements, undermining the board's function and bullying. Throughout the administrative law hearings, Dyer has contended that the grounds for dismissal are vague and without merit.

When will the people of the U.S.A. wake up to the fact that the grand impostor President Obama will keep on ignoring Congress and issuing imperial edicts to accomplish his reelection effort ("Obama to halt deportation of some illegal immigrants," June 15)? Time for Congress to act and start impeachment proceedings. F. Cordell