Welcome to 2008! This will be an interesting year, both looking ahead and looking back.
For starters, many of the same themes that dominated the news in Harford County and surrounding areas in the previous year, will undoubtedly be on the front pages of The Aegis and on our web site in 2008.
Chief among them is crime and, in particular, the Edgewood crime situation. The police haven't got a handle on it yet, and they may not, unless county officials start doing some serious soul searching about the conditions which have caused this community to become a magnet for the criminal element, in particular the young, minority group with gang ties. Until steps are taken to make the housing situation and the courts less hospitable to this element, all the street cameras, community policing and political posturing amounts to nothing but a finger in the leaking dam.
What happens in Edgewood, good or bad, affects similar local pockets of trouble - Perrywood, Aberdeen, Havre de Grace, Joppatowne. Remember, cleaning up one mess, usually means the trouble finds the next path of least resistance. The various police agencies involved need to be more in synch, more willing to cooperate and not worry who gets the glory. The courts need to be tougher and, to be fair, the state's attorney's office needs to be less willing to bargain and quick to bring adult charges against juvenile offenders with records of past violence.
Crime as a quality of life issue will continue to have an impact on another big story from last year which will continue throughout 2008 - BRAC. The estimates of job gains, population growth, housing and commercial space needs, continue to bounce around like Ping-Pong balls in a lottery jug. Harford County has every reason to fear BRAC, because it's going to get all the traffic, all the water demand and all the housing sprawl associated with the boom and little, if any, financial support in return. And, that doesn't even take into account how our public schools may be impacted.
If you really expect the state to help out, let's be realistic. When was the last time our county legislative delegation to the Maryland General Assembly ever delivered anything in terms of meaningful state financial support for a vital - and the emphasis is on vital - Harford County public works project? The toll lanes on I-95 don't count, either. It took 20 years to get Route 24 built, and it's going on 20 years since that project was finished. We just built a new high school - Patterson Mill - for $62 million, and thus far, less than $4 million has been reimbursed from the state. The most the county can expect to get is $14 million, according to what school and county fiscal officials have said in the past, a measly 22.5 percent. Expect similar stinginess when it comes to the equally expensive Bel Air and Edgewood high school replacement projects. There are no state plans to build new roads around Aberdeen to speed the flow of traffic between I-95 and Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Even with a new state senator and new delegate coming on board, Barry Glassman and Wayne Norman, respectively, our legislative delegation is woefully inept at "bringing home the bacon," in the words of one former longtime legislator who did, Bill Cox. Conservative Republicans like Sen. Nancy Jacobs, Sen. Andy Harris (who hopes to be in Congress next year at this time) and Dels. Pat McDonough and Rick Impallaria haven't shown they can work with the liberal Democratic majorities in their respective houses to get anything for the folks back. The more moderate Republicans like Glassman and Dels. J.B. Jennings and Susan McComas are caught between their conservative brethren on one side and the liberal Democrats like Dels. Mary-Dulany James and B. Dan Riley on the other. Perhaps Del. Donna Stifler, with a year in Annapolis, and the incoming Norman will wake up and see this group of three senators and eight delegates needs to put ideological differences aside and unite for a common good, namely the folks back home. It's not unlike the police. It's time to quit worrying about who gets the glory and start thinking about producing results.
As for water, the city of Aberdeen doesn't have any to spare and may not have any financially viable places to turn to get more. Harford County government isn't in a good position to cut deals with Baltimore City for Big Inch aqueduct water to hedge against the county's own future needs, let alone Aberdeen's. Some political fence mending is in order between Harford officials and Baltimore officials. Let's see if it happens. Otherwise, both Aberdeen and Harford County could see much drier times ahead.
The BRAC lottery in the private sector continues to be a high stakes game, with all sorts of trial balloons being floated concerning tax breaks, alternative tax payments and outright tax giveaways. Beware of BRAC being invoked so the already beleaguered and overtaxed Harford homeowner ends up paying more taxes, so the folks coming to town from New Jersey and elsewhere don't have to pay so much.
BRAC will also be invoked in the name of how the county's zoning code will be rewritten in the coming months, as will be the case with the comprehensive rezoning to follow next year. It's another chance for the land speculators to profit and the expense of the people who are already paying the price for crowded schools, crowded schools and crime spiraling out of control.
This is also a big year for anniversaries, and, like the issues of the day, we will be writing much more about these in the coming 12 months. Fifty years ago the last Ma & Pa Railroad train chugged through Harford County, and this year also marks the golden anniversary of one of the most bitter political campaigns in Harford's history, the 1958 State Senate Democratic primary between William S. James and Thomas Hatem. Later this month we will observe the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, which has significance for more than one local family. This year is also the 25th anniversary of the opening of the new courthouse, the Boniface family's victory with Deputed Testamony in the 1983 Preakness, Cal Ripken Jr.'s only World Series appearance and, for those keeping score at home, the last time the county's property tax rate was raised.
We look forward to bringing it all to you and much more.
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