The election is behind her and Mayor Sheila Dixon is looking ahead to perhaps her most looming task: appointing a top cop for Baltimore.
"I'm going to make a decision very soon because we need to have the police department focused and not worried about who's going to be the commissioner," Dixon said.
A biotechnology park next to Johns Hopkins is already in the works and now the mayor wants to focus on developing the east side of the city around it, with businesses, housing and a new charter school. In all, it's a project that requires some creative financing, borrowing $85 million.
"So that whole area is going to be stimulated by helping families in the community one, be able to have opportunities for jobs and training, two, quality housing, and then three, a great K-8 school that's going to focus on medical and bio to prepare our kids to get in that arena," she said.
City council members have priorities of their own. Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, fresh off her election victory, is targeting heroin addiction, hoping to push for more doctors in the city to prescribe the treatment drug buprenorphine.
"Heroin addiction is a terrible problem in the city and if we make inroads in heroin addiction, we would slow the engine that is our criminal justice system down," Rawlings-Blake said.
Among the dozens of other bills high on the administration's priority list: regulating valet parking services in the city and reserving some city parking spaces for car-sharing vehicles.
The mayor has a deadline. These bills must be acted on by the first week in December, when the new councilmembers take office. If not, those bills will have to be introduced all over again.(CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment