More News

The Banner School celebrated its permanent home in Frederick last week by "Raising the Banner High" at the unveiling of its new sign.

The sign ceremony marked the purchase of the land the school has been located on since 1998 from the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

The school recently purchased the three buildings and 7 acres of land at 1730 N. Market St., in Frederick, from the Odd Fellows.

The private school, which offers classes for preschool through grade eight, didn't plan on staying in Frederick. It had planned to build a new facility on Biggs Ford Road in Walkersville and inhabit it by fall 2008.

But Walkersville commissioners voted in late 2008 not to grandfather-in the school regarding a zoning ordinance that blocked any school's existence on town farmland. This was just five weeks after the school obtained approval for a sewer connection in Walkersville from the Frederick Board of County Commissioners.

Since 2006, the school's proposal had repeatedly been approved by both Frederick County's and Walkersville's governments, and the school had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars toward the move.

NAACP celebrates 100 years

The Frederick chapter of the NAACP will look back at the past 100 years of the national organization defending civil rights on Saturday.

The organization will host a Freedom Fund Banquet from 6 to 9 p.m., at Frederick Elks Lodge, 289 Willowdale Drive. Tickets — $40 for adults, $30 for students — are still available by calling Paula Prak 301-682-3937.

The keynote speaker will be Chief Judge Robert Bell, who serves on the Maryland Court of Appeals and has a long history in the civil rights movement. As a Baltimore high school student in the 1960s, he participated in lunch counter sit-ins to protest segregation in restaurants.

Towing law challenge doesn't fare well in court

Efforts to stop the City of Frederick from enforcing a recently enacted towing ordinance failed in court last week, as a Frederick County judge found that the legal challenges posed to the ordinance by two city towing companies were not strong enough to suspend it.

Frederick County Circuit Court Judge Edward Dwyer denied the requests of legal injunction filed by Republican mayoral candidate Clint Hoffman, who owns Discount Towing, and the owners of Dorsey Towing.

The two companies filed a complaint in February challenging five provisions outlined in the city's towing ordinance, most notably signage and payment requirements, notification requirements and fines.

The key complaints were that having signs be readable from every parking spot — as mandated by the ordinance — was overly burdensome; that requiring that towing companies notify out-of-state motorists of their vehicle's impounding in four days was impractical; and that requiring that companies accept Visa and MasterCard would encourage charge-backs from unhappy motorists.

Hoffman has come before Frederick's Board of Aldermen to contest some of the requirements, and the city is set to vote on amending the ordinance at a meeting tonight.

In previous meetings, the mayor and aldermen agreed that the ordinance could be tweaked to make those statutes less burdensome on towing companies and homeowners associations. Other complaints will ride out in a permanent injunction hearing at a later date, according to the city's attorneys.

"A lot of the complaint is a misunderstanding or turning a blind eye to what the statute actually says," assistant city attorney Scott Waxter said. "Even though the judge says that the ordinance is fine as it stands, that doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be tweaked."

City retirees' pensions cut

The first consumer price index flux in at least two decades could have city pensioners seeing a slight reduction in their benefits payments.

City leaders learned that they would need to either change the city's current pension policy or that the city's retirees would have to take a decrease in annuity payments imposed by a drop in the consumer price index, which the city uses to gauge its pension plan. Retirees will see a reduction of 90 cents per every $100 of annuity payments.

The index, reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fell for the first time in at least 28 years, Kathryn Nicolato, head of the city's human resources department told the aldermen, and it would affect the cost of living adjustments afforded to the city's retirees starting July 1.

"This is really unprecedented and it's due to the economic conditions," Nicolato said.

Board members could opt to rewrite the city's pension plan to set a 0 percent floor for the city's pension plan, which currently has a cap of 3 percent, or take the temporary adjustment.

The majority of the board said that they were in favor of upholding the decrease.

"The fiscally responsible thing for the city to do is to go with the flow," said Alderman C. Paul Smith (R). "I have felt the effects of this when the economy goes up and down, and to me, it's the easiest and fiscally responsible thing to do."

E-mail Erica L. Green at egreen@gazette.net.