Oversight

Haven't paid your city property taxes? Then you're on the city's list of owners whose properties could end up in tax sale this May, along with nearly 27,000 others who (as of last week) were behind on taxes, water bills or other city tabs. That's more than 10 percent of city properties, located in neighborhoods as varied as Poppleton and the Inner Harbor . If previous years are any judge, many owners will pay up quickly and avoid tax sale altogether. Here's an interactive map that shows where all the properties are. You can click on the dots for more details, including the address, who owns and how much the city says they owe. (Keep in mind that some may have paid already -- and at least one is an error .)

Outraged education, community and political leaders have called for increased oversight of spending in the Baltimore City school system, amid revelations that about $500,000 was spent to upgrade offices at the district headquarters while city and state leaders fought for funding to fix dilapidated school buildings. Since January 2011, the school system has undertaken 11 renovation projects in eight departments, The Baltimore Sun reported this week. Half of the money went to renovation of a single department: The information technology office, which has spent $250,000 largely to transform an executive suite with new amenities such as interactive white boards.

State auditors say Maryland's office of financial regulation has a backlog of mortgage firms overdue for examinations, a problem officials have been grappling with for years but believe will be fixed soon. The office, part of the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, is required by law to put each mortgage lender, servicer and broker firm under the microscope once every three years to make sure no rules are being broken. More than 360 of the state's 2,090 licensed firms were overdue for a visit as of early November, some by years, legislative auditors said.

Maryland pet owners would receive a description of the procedures their animals undergo and a cost estimate before their veterinarian provides treatment, under a proposed regulation set to take effect before the end of the year. The Maryland Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners discussed the new informed-consent standards at Thursday's meeting as a way to head off disputes over bills. Board President Chris H. Runde said many veterinarians already ask customers to sign such forms, but the regulation will make it a requirement.

The Rev. David Sul's Korean Seventh-day Adventist Church was supposed to be in business in Columbia by now. The church's 150 members signed a deal, put money down and watched bulldozers roll. But construction stopped in late 2008 and the congregation never recouped its investment — thanks in part, church officials say, because a bond that was supposed to insure the project didn't pay off. The worshippers now borrow a building from a sister church, meeting in the afternoon after the other congregation worships in the morning.

The often-contentious 26-year-old lawsuit that attempted to provide equality for Baltimore's special-education students but ultimately helped to change the course of the public school system is nearing an end after a federal judge agreed Monday to end his oversight. U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis accepted an agreement from the school system and the Maryland Disability Law Center, which had filed suit in 1984 on behalf of several special-education students, saying they were not being offered adequate services.

For two decades, the Maryland Stadium Authority has been something of a golden child within state government. Set up as a quasi-public agency, the authority built downtown Baltimore's showplace stadiums quickly and efficiently with less red tape and more flexibility. The results were a huge success. Even 15 years after its opening, Oriole Park at Camden Yards is still considered one of Major League Baseball's finest venues. But a critical legislative audit released last week has tarnished the MSA's image.

Federal regulators investigating an automatic plant shutdown in February of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant have found a safety issue deemed of low to moderate significance that may spur additional oversight. Both reactors at the Lusby plant, owned by Constellation Energy Nuclear Group, shut down after an electrical malfunction caused by melting snow on a leaky roof, a company spokesman said at the time. Inspectors for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said they found some equipment at the plant had been used longer than the manufacturer recommended and hadn't been tested to determine whether it was still reliable, according to an NRC spokesman.

As they cast ballots for governor, senator and other offices on Tuesday, Baltimore voters will also decide whether to allow city officials to make more purchases with less oversight. The measure, which proponents say will increase efficiency, is one of three proposed changes to the city charter that will appear on Tuesday's ballot. Voters will also determine whether to create a fund for sustainability projects and whether to grant city officials wider latitude in how they spend surplus funds.

After nearly a dozen years at the helm of Baltimore County Public Schools, Joe A. Hairston has decided to retire from his post after the end of the current school year. It was the right decision and ensures that the superintendent will be remembered more for his educational achievements and less for the controversies of the last two years. Few current Baltimore County public school students have gone to school on a day when Mr. Hairston was not leading the system, encouraging high achievement but also raising the standards for less-successful schools to bridge the disparity gap. As we wrote when his contract was last renewed, in 2008, he has accomplished much in his leadership of a large, diverse system - from insisting that advanced placement courses be available at all high schools to graduating African-American male students at rates well above the national average.

A day after the lack of oversight at Maryland race tracks came to light in a hearing before the Maryland Racing Commission at Pimlico Race Course , the commission's executive director, Mike Hopkins, said steps are already being taken to improve the situation. One of the biggest issues in the hearing that resulted in upholding the disqualification of the Rick Dutrow Jr.-trained King and Crusader from the Dec. 17 Maryland Juvenile Championship at Laurel Park was the disregard for a regulation mandating slips for each horse being treated before a race to be reviewed by the stewards or their representatives within an hour of each race.

Maryland horse racing got exposed for a lack of oversight Tuesday during an appeal to have the Rick Dutrow-trained King and Crusader reinstated as the winner of the $75,000 Maryland Juvenile Championship at Laurel Park. Dutrow and his horse's owner James Riccio lost the appeal, but Maryland horse racing may have lost more, as officials at Laurel Park were found to have not followed all of the proper procedures on the night of that December race. "I'm stabled at Laurel Park," said John Robb, the trainer of Glib, the second-place finisher who was declared the winner of the Juvenile Championship.

When William Gunn sought medical care for his pit bull-Labrador retriever mix Smokey on a Sunday morning, one of her front paws was bleeding uncontrollably. The family's regular veterinarian was closed that day, and he didn't know where else to go, so he paged through the phone book and wound up at the Catonsville practice of Badr Oweis. Gunn, a city wastewater supervisor who lives in Poppleton, told the vet that he had been walking Smokey when she cut the paw, probably on glass.

Apparently it is OK for Prince George's County Sen. Ulysses Currie to accept $250,000 from the grocery store chain Shoppers Food Warehouse, and nothing really happens to him if he fails to report it on his financial disclosure form. The FBI charged him with bribery, but the good ol' boys in Annapolis thought it was just five years of clerical oversight. This shows that we get what we deserve when we refuse to vote incompetent incumbents out of office. Dan Griffin, Perry Hall

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureauhas the power to oversee big debt collectors and credit bureaus. Before it can do so, it has to define “big.”  The agency released its proposed rule that defines the size of institutions it will supervise. The proposal: Debt collectors with more than $10 million in annual revenue from collection activities would be under the CFPB's supervision. That's about 175 debt collection firms. It includes those that collect on behalf of others, those that buy debt and then try to collect, and lawyers who collect through lawsuits.

The Maryland Health Care Commission sent recommendations Wednesday to the General Assembly on stepping up oversight of coronary stent placements. They come amid accusations that three doctors were performing unnecessary procedures, but the recommendations were meant to deal more generally with the state's outdated review process for hospitals offering angioplasty and cardiac surgery. Authorities had given some hospitals waivers to offer angioplasty when a patient was having a heart attack, even though the facilities did not have on-site cardiac surgical backup, because research showed it was safe.

Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that the Westminster City Council, at the request of Mayor W. Benjamin Brown, met behind closed doors to discuss the need for greater public oversight of the Carroll County Narcotics Task Force? The political sensitivity of the issue is not one of the criteria under state law that allows elected officials to have secret talks. The only appropriate place to vigorously debate the creation of an oversight committee for the drug task force is the public arena.

For four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has resisted routine oversight of his office's handling of classified information, and when the office in charge of overseeing classification in the executive branch objected, the vice president's office suggested that the oversight office be shut down, according to documents released yesterday by a Democratic congressman. The oversight office, a unit of the National Archives, appealed the issue to the Justice Department, which has not yet ruled on the matter.

A state advisory group on Thursday recommended legislative changes to bolster oversight of coronary stent placements amid widespread concerns about unnecessary medical procedures, but it stopped short of proposing that state law regulate physician reviews in hospitals. The omission drew sharp criticism from two national cardiology groups, which noted in a joint letter to the Maryland Health Care Commission that "inadequate, voluntary, internal review" was to blame for the failure at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson.

After Dr. Mark Midei was accused of implanting unnecessary heart stents in hundreds of patients at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, a Maryland Health Care Commission committee began developing safeguards to prevent a repeat situation. But now, one of the committee's members - Dr. John Chung-Yee Wang, a former colleague of Midei's who heads the cardiac catheterization lab at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore - is himself accused of improper stenting in three separate legal claims.