Review Process

Developers seeking to build in Baltimore County must go through months of bureaucratic and public scrutiny before they can begin.Then, even though the project has been approved, they have to endure another review for each home's individual building permit. County officials say this second step is needless duplication -- and it's going to stop.Starting Jan. 1, the second review will be dropped, and developers' engineers will be held responsible for certifying compliance with county policies.

The Maryland Health Care Commission yesterday gave unanimous approval to plans by Washington County Hospital to build a replacement facility just outside the city of Hagerstown. The hospital still needs to resolve a variety of local issues - zoning approval, water and sewer service and road improvements - before it can move ahead with the new, 267-bed, $235 million facility at the Robinwood Medical Center, a medical office complex it already owns. The city government, which favored a new site near the current one inside the city, had opposed the hospital's plans through state review for two years - a virtually unprecedented action by a local government.

President Obama has done what Congress has not: Extend whistleblower protections to national security and intelligence employees. A new presidential policy directive says employees "who are eligible for access to classified information can effectively report waste, fraud, and abuse while protecting classified national security information. It prohibits retaliation against employees for reporting waste, fraud, and abuse. " With this directive, issued last week, Obama hands national security and intelligence community whistleblowers and their advocates an important victory in their frequently frustrating efforts to expand protection against retaliation for federal employees who expose agency misconduct.

WASHINGTON - Maryland's top insurance regulator fears that federal legislation designed to protect HMO patients from being denied necessary medical care could eliminate rights most Marylanders already have under state law. Maryland Insurance Commissioner Steven B. Larsen said in an interview that legislation being debated by the U.S. Senate could benefit state residents by granting them new rights to sue managed care companies for economic and punitive damages...

As soon as they could, Baltimore police launched proceedings to fire Officer Christopher M. Bielecki, convicted of misconduct in office in the beating of a Northeast Baltimore man. With Bielecki's appeal denied in March, the Police Department scheduled a hearing last month. On June 27, instead of facing a department tribunal, Bielecki resigned. Bielecki, who has moved on to a new career -- he will not disclose what it is -- condemned the department's review process. Department officials say his case was handled fairly and that the speed with which his case was dispatched shows that efforts to revamp the department's disciplinary system are working.

Seven months ago, the state agency that provides workers' compensation insurance to thousands of Maryland businesses was engulfed in controversy when it attempted to extend for yet another year a $21 million no-bid managed care contract with a private firm.Yesterday, the state Injured Workers Insurance Fund tried to end that controversy by buying the company.Under the apparently unprecedented agreement disclosed yesterday, IWIF officials said the fund will pay $6.5 million to purchase the assets of Statutory Benefits Management Corp.

A wooded area at the edge of a sprawling Pikesville cemetery becomes the site of a proposed townhouse community. In Towson, developers seeking to expand a retail complex add a wrinkle that its neighbors don't like: plans for a 600-bed college dormitory. And in Bowleys Quarters, the parking lot behind an aging strip mall is staked out for a new Wal-Mart. All were proposed in Baltimore County, and all were allowed to move forward - without a requirement for public hearings. They were instead granted "exemptions" to the full review process by the county's Development Review Committee.

The Board of Estimates approved $216,540 yesterday to tear down and redesign parts of a new municipal parking garage that the city started building in a flood plain of the Jones Falls without getting necessary permits from the state.The Maryland Department of Natural Resources ordered construction of the garage halted on March 14 after it learned that city public works officials had completed the foundation and three stories of the $7.7 million, eight-story garage without a state waterways construction permit.

In an unprecedented move, Baltimore County officials have substantially streamlined the environmental permit phase for a major employment center planned along the Route 43 extension linking White Marsh and Middle River. Layers of federal, state and county review -- a comprehensive process that typically takes up to nine months -- have been consolidated into a single set of guidelines to be administered by the county Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management. As a result, the review process is expected to take three months.

That's nice, Martin O'Malley wanting to promote offshore wind energy. And that's nice, the governor wanting to give a $3,000 tax credit to businesses that hire the unemployed. In tough economic times, and an election year, Maryland's governor demonstrates both progressive thinking on energy and empathy with people out of work. It would be nice if he threw a little of that Mark Farley Grant's way. Just to recap - because it has been five months and six days since I first told you about this - an investigation by the Innocence Project at the University of Maryland School of Law concluded that Mr. Grant, a 41-year-old prisoner serving a life sentence in Hagerstown, did not commit the murder for which he was convicted when he was 15. The students and professors involved in the Innocence Project took on Mr. Grant's case, which goes back to West Baltimore in January 1983 and the fatal shooting of a teenager named Michael Gough.