ed degrange Archives - Baltimore Post-Examiner

No refuge from gambling craze in the heat of a special session

August 10, 2012 Maryland Reporter

There’s no escaping the gambling craze, whether in the dripping heat of Annapolis in August or the sunny beaches of a cooler Rhode Island.

Last Saturday, barely 15 minutes after setting up my beach chair in Bonnet Shores, R.I., a plane dragging an advertising sign flew over this lovely cove where the Atlantic meets Narragansett Bay. “Vote Yes on 1,” the sign said. “Table Games = R.I. Jobs.”

Even little Rhody is into the latest jobs scheme. If you can’t gin up jobs in manufacturing – say at a decades-old steel mill – expand gambling and create other jobs.

Maryland Reporter

Teacher pension shift would cost counties $500 million over next four years

March 9, 2012March 12, 2012 Maryland Reporter

In the Senate’s proposed budget plan, some of the costs of teacher retirement would be shifted to county school boards over the next four years, not to the county governments next year, as Gov. Martin O’Malley had proposed. But the approved proposal would ultimately force counties to give their school boards $500 million more over the next four years.