QUOTE OF THE
WEEK: “[W]e … convene to remember that the
Charter of this United Nations, like
- Israel Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, at the U.N.’s commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps
Friday Footnote #13 … January 28, 2005
A
publication of The Baltimore Jewish Council.
5750 Park Heights Avenue. Baltimore MD 21215.
Phone:
(410) 542-4850.
Visit
our website: www.baltjc.org.
Contents
1. Manhattan Park grant
4. Worth a read
4. 60th anniversary of the liberation
…And click here for our archive of previous
Friday Footnotes.
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W |
elcome, friends, to another edition of the Friday Footnote,
a weekly letter about Maryland politics and the Jewish community.
Yes, Annapolis has gotten more rancorous and more
partisan. But you’d be amazed at how
much still gets done, most of it never reported in major newspapers, which face
severe space constraints. For a listing
of all the legislation dealing with an issue you care about, from abandoned
property to zoning, click on this General Assembly website location: http://mlis.state.md.us/cgi-win/subnew32.exe.
And while you’re clicking, please visit the Baltimore Jewish
Council’s new website, at www.baltjc.org. And if you know
anyone who might be interested in the BJC’s Leadership Program, you can click here for a description
of the program, a brochure and an application.
As always, I hope you and your family have a pleasant and
peaceful Shabbat.
- David
Manhattan Park grant
Residents of the aging Manhattan
Park Apartments, on Park Heights Avenue, received some welcome news this week:
Governor Ehrlich announced he had included a $1 million capital grant to help
Comprehensive Housing Assistance Inc. (CHAI) renovate the 30-year-old building,
located across the street from the Jewish Community Center.
The Associated acquired the building not long ago, and is
preparing a $4 million repair job, adding a sprinkler system, upgrading the HVAC
systems, repair cracks, upgrade the lighting and create a new community room,
among other changes. The building is
occupied by about 125 people, most of them seniors, many from the Former Soviet
Union. Nearly all pay below-market rents.
The supply of decent, affordable housing facilities like Manhattan Park
is less than the need statewide, and far less than the demand we’ll see in
coming years (see related article below).
We’re grateful to the Governor
for recognizing the need to help maintain the stock of existing affordable
rental housing, and hopeful
that the Legislature will agree to keep it in the budget. There will be tremendous competition for capital funds,
particularly to increase the amount spent on K-12 school construction – another
pressing need, which we support fully. We hope to persuade the Legislature to
find the funds for both needs.
Here is the Jewish
Times’ story on this worthy grant.
The capital budget
Last week the buzz was the release
of the operating budget (and it continues to buzz, as analysts develop a more
thorough picture of what is in and out of the budget). This week Governor Ehrlich released the
proposed Maryland
Consolidated Capital Bond Loan of 2006, otherwise known as the FY 06
Capital Budget (here’s a county-by-county
listing of projects). It is a $670
million plan that would provide $155 million in K-12 public school
construction, up from about $100 million last year. The Governor excluded, most notably, the annual $5 million
appropriation to hospitals, a group that opposed him on the ultimate question
of overriding his veto of the medical malpractice legislation; and he excluded
the usual $15 million for legislative initiatives, known as bond bills. His reasoning, announced at a Wednesday
press conference, was that he directed this money into school construction in
response to legislative leaders’ calls for more school funding.
The Jewish community was treated
very well by the Governor’s capital budget.
Along with Manhattan Park, the budget includes:
- A $640,000 grant to help the Jewish Social Service
Agency of Greater Washington acquire and renovate a new headquarters
building;
- A $40,000 grant to Jewish Family Services of Baltimore
to help renovate a house for several individuals with disabilities.
Again, we will need your help to
persuade the Legislature to retain these grants in the budget for these worthy
initiatives.
Legislative update
Three weeks into session, and 10 to go and
we’re already working on a variety of bills. Some have yet to “drop,” in
legislative lingo, including the Ronald Reagan and Christopher Reeve Stem Cell
Research Act – which will be a priority of the Maryland Jewish Alliance this
session, and the Life Insurance – Freedom to Travel Act. If
you have been denied life insurance because of past travel, please contact us.
Many others are in, and we’re following a wide variety of
issues, including criminal justice, child abuse, the integrity of the election
system, health care, and affordable housing.
Here are some of the bills on our list so far (click on the bill number
in blue to go to its web page for more information):
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Status as of January 19,
2005: Bill is in the Senate - First Reading Judicial Proceedings |
No Hearing |
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Sponsored By |
Senators Kelley, Britt,
Brochin, Exum, Forehand, Gladden, Grosfeld, Hollinger, Hooper, Hughes,
Jacobs, Jones, Middleton, and Teitelbaum |
|||||||||||||
|
Entitled |
Family Law - Child Abuse or
Neglect - Failure to Report - Penalty |
|||||||||||||
|
Committee |
Senate: Judicial
Proceedings |
|||||||||||||
|
Status as of January 19,
2005: Bill is in the Senate - First Reading Judicial Proceedings |
No Hearing |
||||||||||||||
|
Sponsored By |
Senators Garagiola, Britt,
Conway, Currie, Exum, Forehand, Frosh, Gladden, Grosfeld, Hollinger, Hughes,
Jones, Kasemeyer, Kelley, Kramer, Lawlah, McFadden, Miller, Pinsky, Ruben,
and Teitelbaum |
||||||||||||||
|
Entitled |
Assault Weapons Criminal
Penalty Enhancement Act of 2005 |
||||||||||||||
|
Committee |
Senate: Judicial
Proceedings |
||||||||||||||
|
Status as of January 19,
2005: Bill is in the Senate - First Reading Judicial Proceedings |
Heard |
||||||||||||||
|
Sponsored By |
Senators Forehand and Frosh
|
||||||||||||||
|
Entitled |
Crimes and Criminal
Procedure - Victim and Witness Intimidation |
||||||||||||||
|
Committee |
Senate: Judicial
Proceedings |
||||||||||||||
|
Status as of January 27,
2005: Bill is in the Senate - First Reading Finance |
No Hearing |
||||||||||||||
|
Sponsored By |
Senator Middleton |
||||||||||||||
|
Entitled |
Senior Prescription Drug
Program - Sunset Extension |
||||||||||||||
|
Committee |
Senate: Finance |
||||||||||||||
|
Status as of January 12,
2005: Bill is in the House - First Reading Ways and Means |
No Hearing |
||||||||||||||
|
Sponsored By |
The Speaker and Delegates
Hixson, Rosenberg, Barkley, Bobo, Boschert, Bozman, Burns, Cane, G. Clagett,
V. Clagett, Conroy, Conway, DeBoy, Donoghue, Feldman, Frush, Gilleland,
Gutierrez, Haynes, Healey, Heller, Holmes, Howard, Hubbard, Jones, Kach,
Kaiser, King, Krysiak, Leopold, Levy, Love, Madaleno, Malone, Mandel, Menes,
Montgomery, Niemann, Patterson, Pendergrass, Petzold, Rosenberg, Ross, Stern,
Vallario, Vaughn, and Zirkin |
||||||||||||||
|
Entitled |
Voters Rights Protection
Act of 2005 |
||||||||||||||
|
Committee |
House: Ways and Means |
||||||||||||||
|
Status as of January 24,
2005: Bill is in the House - First Reading Ways and Means |
No Hearing |
||||||||||||||
|
Sponsored By |
Delegates Hixson, Bozman,
C. Davis, Gordon, Healey, Howard, Marriott, and Patterson |
||||||||||||||
|
Entitled |
Income Tax Credit for
Services Donated by Health Care Professionals |
||||||||||||||
|
Committee |
House: Ways and Means |
||||||||||||||
|
Status as of January 26,
2005: Bill is in the House - First Reading Ways and Means |
Hearing |
||||||||||||||
|
Sponsored By |
Delegates King, Barkley,
Boschert, Cardin, G. Clagett, Dumais, Feldman, Gutierrez, Hixson, Kaiser,
Lee, Montgomery, and Murray |
||||||||||||||
|
Entitled |
Property Tax - Valuation -
Affordable Housing |
||||||||||||||
|
Committee |
House: Ways and Means |
||||||||||||||
That last item is an effort to help developers of affordable
housing, such as CHAI, create projects that work better financially. At a briefing before the House Environmental
Matters Committee yesterday, the leaders of the Governor’s Housing Policy Commission
laid out the commission’s major recommendations. Environmental Matters Chairman Maggie McIntosh (D-Baltimore)
warned the assembled, and particularly local government officials, that she and
her committee take very seriously the growing problem of a lack of “workforce
housing”. “I’m not talking about SSI
or low-income housing,” she said. “I’m very concerned that we have counties
where the firemen, the policemen, the teachers the county workers have to drive
60 or 90 miles to work. And that’s what
contributes to sprawl more than anything else.” [Here’s a recent report
on workforce housing.]
She said legislation will be forthcoming to require the
locals to develop their own housing policies, including addressing the
workforce housing need.
Deputy Housing Secretary Jacqueline Phillips, speaking on
the need for more senior housing, noted that there are 800,000 seniors living
in Maryland now, a number that will grow by about 500,000 in the next few
years. “A great majority of them will
need affordable housing.” She said the administration will strongly support the
inclusion of senior housing in those local government housing policies.
We couldn’t agree more, and would point out this further
highlights the need for projects like Manhattan Park.
60th anniversary of the
liberation
The U.N. General Assembly met in special session on Monday
to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi
concentration camps. Our friends at the
Jewish Council for Public Affairs note that the speakers included
Secretary General Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize winner and U.N. messenger of
peace Elie Wiesel, and the foreign ministers of
“We
convene here today for those who remember, for those who have forgotten, and
for those who do not know,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom.
“But we also convene to remember that the Charter of this United Nations, like
Other
actions to commemorate the liberation:
President
George W. Bush has issued a Presidential Proclamation on the 60th Anniversary
of the Liberation of Auschwitz. The President proclaimed “January 27,
2005, as the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of the Auschwitz
Concentration Camp” and called “upon all Americans to observe this occasion
with appropriate ceremonies and programs to honor the victims of
The U.S.
House of Representatives passed 393-0 a resolution “Expressing the sense of
Congress that the people of the United States should observe the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp during World War
II, and honor all the victims of the Holocaust.”
Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), a Holocaust survivor, wrote an op-ed piece in Newsday on the importance of addressing anti-Semitism today. His piece can be seen here.
And for
those who missed it, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy wrote this piece for The Sun’s OpEd page on Monday, on “Arabs
and the Holocaust.” (my thanks to alert reader “J. in Towson” for pointing
out that one.)
Worth
a read
“It's a political embarrassment of riches: with the
long 2006 Maryland gubernatorial race in its earliest stages, Jewish voters are
already being feverishly wooed by an incumbent and two major challengers with
longstanding ties to the community.”
That’s how veteran political reporter Jim Besser begins his Jewish Times
cover story this week, “Three’s
a Crowd,” about the role the Jewish community is beginning to play in the
next gubernatorial election.
Want a more in-depth analysis of Maryland’s budget challenges
looking ahead? Click
here for this Sun story.
With Montgomery County Executive
Doug Duncan looking at a run for the State House next year, the race to succeed
him is shaping up as a contest between Montgomery County Councilman Steven A.
Silverman and former Councilman and former state Democratic Party Chairman
Isiah “Ike” Leggett. Read all about it
in this
Gazette piece.
We had a feeling that freshman
Delegate Murray Levy (D-Charles) would make a mark in Annapolis quickly,
primarily for his budget diligence (he actually reads the fine print). After a major budget briefing on Monday
during which Del. Levy demonstrated a bit of accounting prowess, The Gazette in
its Reporters
Notebook, wrote, in part: “Top budget officials and lawmakers --
Republican and Democrat -- told us afterward that the budgetary expertise Levy
gained through his accounting background, years of mastering Charles County's
budget and years with MACo conjures up images of Bobby Neall, a former Anne
Arundel County senator and the legislature's sharpest budget hawk.”
Finally, yasher koach to
Sen. Lisa Gladden and Del. Melony Griffith (and the Ehrlich Administration) for
their relief efforts, recounted this week by Gazette reporter Catherine
Dolinski:
Transcending politics
The rancor of partisanship may be loud in Annapolis, but people were able to come together in support of the tsunami victims in Asia.
This week, the General Assembly announced that a fund-raising effort led by Del. Melony Griffith and Sen. Lisa Gladden has yielded $5,000 in contributions from members of both parties, in both chambers, to the American Red Cross in support of tsunami disaster relief.
The Ehrlich administration has done its own fund-raising, gathering more than $16,000 so far from state employees for the Maryland State Employee Tsunami Relief Fund.
Finally, you know what they say about Jewish actor Ben
Stiller: you either love him or you hate him, or you feel nothing much about
him at all. Whatever you feel, here’s a
short (no pun intended) look at the actor in the New York Jewish Week: “There’s
Something About Ben Stiller.”
Presidential proclamation
60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF THE
- - - - - - -
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE
A PROCLAMATION
At the
In places like
During the Holocaust, evil was systematic in its
implementation and deliberate in its destruction. The
60th anniversary of the liberation of
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty‑fifth
day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand five, and of the
GEORGE W. BUSH