Office Staff

It's a common refrain in Gia D'Anna's office: Extra inches that childbirth or time left around the middle are resisting diet and exercise. D'Anna is the office manager for a Lutherville plastic surgeon, and, as a mother, she sympathizes with the patients. She just got her own flat tummy back last year. Her boss, Dr. Ronald H. Schuster, had bought a machine that aimed to zap muffin tops and love handles via low temperatures. He was looking for volunteers on the staff before he rolled out the service to patients.

The Blast's failure to make the Major Soccer League playoffs is taking a harder toll than imagined.It was learned last night that the Blast has laid off three people in its front office: Tim Donelli, assistant vice president/general manager; Art Sinclair, director of corporate sales and broadcasting; and receptionist Leah Miller.Miller definitely will be rehired this fall, Blast general manager John Borozzi said last night. Sinclair and Donelli, however, are in a different situation. They were given four days notice and will be permanently laid off, without benefit of severance pay or accrued vacation time.

A group of Baltimore school administrators and staff members protested at a public hearing yesterday a proposed cut in positions in the central office they say will hurt teaching. The administrators and employees - all from the school district's curriculum instruction office - said the proposed reductions would be unwise, particularly at a time when the system is facing a reform of its high schools and a new state test next year. Those who write the curriculum taught in schools and give new teachers training in how to teach it are among the employees whose positions may be eliminated.

Not long ago, Annapolis police ventured into Harbour House only to arrest suspected drug dealers or investigate violent crimes. The 279-unit public housing complex in Eastport, the largest in the city, was notorious for crack houses, corner drug markets and open hostility toward police.But with the opening of a satellite police station in a basement apartment there in June 1991, the community has been transformed. Residents have taken control of the streets again, and once-strained relations with police have improved.

The Orioles announced several changes to the front office staff Thursday, including the hiring of long-time Orioles outfielder Brady Anderson as a special assistant to executive vice president Dan Duquette. Anderson, 48, was a three-time all-star in his 15-season career as a big-league outfielder, which included 14 years with the Orioles. Anderson worked the past two years in an informal, ad hoc capacity helping with the conditioning and development of players such as Nolan Reimold and Brian Matusz.

On a smoke break outside Baltimore school headquarters, system employees huddled near each other yesterday on North Avenue, talking in hushed voices about the one thing on all their minds - the layoff letters, perhaps hundreds of them, that are scheduled to go out today, two days before Thanksgiving. "People have been sick to their stomachs ever since day one of this [layoffs] business," said a school system employee who has worked in the district's information technology department for 20 years.

Marna McLendon, Howard County's first Republican state's attorney in more than 15 years, took the office by storm last December.Two weeks before she was sworn in as the county's top law-enforcement official -- and a few days before Christmas -- she fired six of the office's 22 prosecutors and reassigned two others.She oversaw her staff's successful prosecution of two high-profile murder cases: Curtis Aden Jamison, who killed Columbia teen-ager Tara Allison Gladden; and Daniel Harney, who killed his estranged wife, Shirley Scott Harney.

In a day that featured addition and subtraction, Baltimore's NFL team completed the formation of its coaching staff yesterday and announced it was laying off more than half of its full-time, front-office staff in Cleveland.About 30 of the team's approximately 50 front-office staff members have been given pink slips and severance pay packages, which will take effect April 1. By that time, the team intends to have its Baltimore operation running at full strength."I'm saddened by it. It's very unpleasant, particularly as it relates to people with many years of service here [in Cleveland]

Disputes over cost overruns and unfinished projects drove a wedge between former school board member Thomas R. Twombly, his colleagues and school officials, and helped lead to his resignation June 19.Twombly has maintained his silence since his two-word letter of resignation to state School Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick, but critics and supporters of Twombly say he felt increasingly isolated by those who run the Anne Arundel school system.In interviews last week with board members and school administrators, a picture emerges of a turbulent two years of infighting, uneasy truces and a shaky alliance that led to Twombly's resignation.

After nearly seven years, the state fire marshal's office has resumed its role of providing fire safety inspections at new commercial buildings and reinspections of older ones in Carroll County with the hiring of new personnel this spring. Two civilian inspectors, John Wagner and Brian Quick, will be in charge of fire safety inspections at commercial buildings. Wagner will concentrate on new development, and Quick is assigned to work on buildings that were previously inspected by the county.