Property

Suffered storm damage on your property? Here are some things you should do: • Contact your insurance company immediately. • Take photos or video. Wait to remove damaged property until after an insurance adjuster sees it. • If you must relocate, make sure your insurance company knows how to reach you. • Keep receipts from emergency repairs and temporary living expenses. • Make only repairs needed to prevent further damage. Do not make permanent repairs before consulting with your insurance company to avoid expenses that will not be reimbursed.

If the woman described in your asset forfeiture article did not know about the illegal drug business in her basement, prosecutors could not forfeit her house ("Seizing assets to take profits from crime," Feb. 17). The law is clear: "An innocent owner's interest in property shall not be forfeited under any civil forfeiture statute. " Federal courts supervise asset forfeiture cases. If someone makes an innocent owner claim, the court will evaluate the evidence to determine whether she knew about the criminal activity on her property and whether she tried to stop it. A property owner can tell her side of the story in a written affidavit or an oral deposition.

The Baltimore County Planning Board voted unanimously Thursday to allow the former Solo Cup property in Owings Mills to be redeveloped as an office and retail hub called Foundry Row. The 385,000 square foot development is expected to be anchored by a Wegmans grocery store, a fitness chain, and a sporting goods store. There will also be restaurants, more retail stores and 40,000 square feet of office space. The re-development of the 52-acre property will cost $140 million, according to a Thursday statement from project developer Greenberg Gibbons.

A top aide to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake received more than $14,000 in homestead property tax breaks on an East Baltimore rental property he owns, records show, even though only owner-occupied homes qualify for the subsidy under Maryland law. State officials recognized the issue several months ago, and in January the city sent a bill to Khalil Zaied, the mayor's deputy chief of operations, demanding repayment of more than $5,000 for the tax...

— Hundreds of industrial buildings in Maryland owned by the federal government — from warehouses at the Antietam National Battlefield to a machine shop in Curtis Bay — would be sold or demolished under a White House initiative to dispose of excess government property. In an effort to save billions of dollars annually in upkeep and energy costs on the often-vacant buildings, the Obama administration proposed last year ditching 14,000 properties the government no longer needs.

St. Agnes Hospital said Friday that it has no plans to acquire the property of the neighboring Cardinal Gibbons School or to expand beyond its current footprint. The hospital's supposed interest in the Cardinal Gibbons property has been the subject of longstanding rumors that resurfaced this week when the Archdiocese of Baltimore announced that the high school for boys would close at the end of the school year. Cardinal Gibbons is the only high school among the 13 schools the archdiocese plans to shut down in June.

The Supreme Court has ruled that a state's refusal, on environmental grounds, to allow someone to build a beach house on his own property may require the state to pay the owner the full value of his land. This ruling is being hailed by property-owner groups. Some say the ruling flatly forbids states from stopping development along waterfronts and on non-tidal wetlands without paying compensation.If that interpretation of the court's ruling were correct, virtually all land-use planning as well as environmental protection laws and policies would be seriously compromised.

Karl Marx got a couple of things right. He warned early Communists against taking power in Russia because the country was too backward for successful utopian experimentation. He also preached that political and social institutions derive their forms from the underlying economic circumstances in which they exist. Today's Soviet Union illustrates how painful it is when both the economic conditions and institutions are changing.In much Western analysis, recent tensions between the Kremlin and the 15 Soviet republics have been interpreted almost exclusively on ethnic grounds.

For a number of years, Chief Justice William Rehnquist has tried to make economic rights as fundamental as the rights of free speech and religion, a fair trial and other Bill of Rights guarantees. Now he has succeeded.In an opinion for a court split 5-4, he wrote that when a government "takes" land from a private owner in certain situations, it must accept a greater obligation to pay for it. Property owners have always been able to sue for compensation in such cases, but governments have had more leeway than they will now have to prove the property owner need not be compensated.

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's administration has proposed a bill in the City Council that would raise property taxes in 90 commercial blocks of downtown Baltimore to pay for increased security and sanitation services there. The tax would not exceed 30 cents for each $100 of assessed valuation of the property in a large area deemed unsafe. Under the bill, the area would be bounded roughly by Greene Street, Centre Street, the Jones Falls Expressway and the south shore of the Inner Harbor.The Evening Sun would like to know what you think.