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Maryland
Funds shifted by MD for roads that received federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law cash
Money for Interstate 81 was in the plans of multiple governors, the Washington County delegation to the Maryland General Assembly said thanks, and the state’s new transportation secretary acknowledged both the “partnership” with local officials and their safety concerns.
Yet millions of dollars, $68 million to be exact, has been scheduled by the state Department of Transportation to be reduced on the project, designed to widen a 3.5 mile stretch of the highway.
The decision, coming after about $90 million in federal funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by President Joe Biden were originally allocated by the state towards the project, represents a step towards fulfilling a worry that the area’s state senator expressed months ago.
More: State and local officials talk safety as funds discussed for I-81 project completion
“There’s not a shovel in the ground yet,” said Sen. Paul Corderman, R-Washington/Frederick, referring to phase II of the four-part project, during an interview Oct. 5 after Maryland Department of Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld met with officials south of Hagerstown. “The state could very easily take that money and move it to another project, and that’s the concern.”
In a news release about the proposal on Wednesday, Corderman said that the “Moore Administration’s ‘Leave No One Behind’ promise is not being fulfilled.” Washington County’s senior state senator also said: “Western Maryland is suffering as a result.”
State commission working on increasing transportation revenue
The shift, coming as a state commission searches for ways to raise transportation revenue, was detailed in a Maryland Department of Transportation overview document released on Tuesday. The department’s budget, known as the Fiscal Years 2024-2029 Consolidated Transportation Program (CTP), is scheduled to be released in January, the same month as Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s proposed budget.
A draft of the CTP document, which included full funding for the I-81 project, had been circulated earlier this year as Wiedefeld and department officials traveled the state. The Tuesday release from the department said: “In recent weeks, revenue projections have declined further.”
More: With gas tax revenue diminishing, Maryland commission meets to find new revenue for roads
Corderman, the top Republican on the state Senate’s Budget & Taxation Committee, indicated after the secretary’s October visit to Washington County that a priority for him was the “preservation of that funding” for I-81. “It’s just a number on a piece of paper at this point,” said the senator, after the secretary told the officials in the room about a more than $2 billion transportation budget shortfall created in part by diminishing gas tax revenues.
The project to improve Maryland’s roughly 12-mile portion of the road, which carries around than 19,400 trucks per day, according to state officials, has spanned multiple decades. The funding was also a topic of conversation between the governor’s chief of staff and a state delegate representing Hagerstown earlier this year.
A third of proposed ‘Major Expansion Project Reductions’ in 6th district
The road, part of a “critical freight corridor,” as deemed in a letter from the full Maryland congressional delegation to the previous presidential administration, has been a topic of interest over the years for congressmen and both of the state’s Democratic U.S. senators, Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen.
U.S. Congressman David Trone, D-6th, who currently represents the district that includes Maryland’s portion of I-81 and who is running to replace Cardin, who is not seeking reelection in the Senate, highlighted his vote for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in connection to I-81 funds for the state in a news release earlier this year.
A third (4 of 12) of the state’s proposed “Major Expansion Project Reductions” are projects that Trone highlighted his vote on in news releases in 2022 and 2023 about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, also known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The most sizeable proposed decrease of the state’s “Major Expansion Project Reductions” was in the district he represents, $105.6 million originally allocated to U.S. 15 in Frederick. There were proposed reductions, too, for road projects in Allegany and Garrett counties, also in the district Trone currently represents.
There were no “Major Expansion Project Reductions” proposed on the Eastern Shore.
Other transportation administration budgets proposed to be cut too
In addition to the major expansion project cuts, which represent construction funding after 2023, the State Highway Administration is slated to reduce roadway cleaning, mowing and litter pickup as a cost saving measure.
The Maryland Transit Administration, Port Administration, Aviation Administration, Motor Vehicle Administration, and the secretary’s office are all listed in the document as receiving 8% cuts to their respective operating budgets.
“We must tighten our belts and make tough decisions now to create a sustainable, balanced budget that affirms our transportation priorities and makes key investments to grow Maryland’s economy,” said Wiedefeld, in a release.
More: State moves up 20 spots in economic momentum, but are Western MD, Eastern Shore seeing it?
Also in the release, the department indicated its intent to develop a prioritization system for highway and transit expansion projects to “evaluate project benefits in terms of meeting state transportation goals relative to cost,” adding that the system will be used to help prioritize projects included in the future Consolidated Transportation Program budgets.
“The Maryland Department of Transportation is maintaining planning, design, and engineering funding for all major and minor expansion projects listed,” said a department spokesperson, in an email, referencing page 17 of the overview document. “Most of these projects were not projected to begin construction for several years (e.g., I-81 was not projected to begin construction until FY26).
“These projects will be evaluated for construction funding as they advance through the design and engineering phases and additional Transportation Trust Fund revenue is available,” he said.
January 17, one week after the Maryland General Assembly is scheduled to convene, is the final day for the governor to introduce the budget and capital budget bills.
Dwight A. Weingarten is an investigative reporter, covering the Maryland State House and state issues. He can be reached at dweingarten@gannett.com or on Twitter at @DwightWeingart2.
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Maryland
The rich and controversial history of Maryland’s clown ministers
We are fools for Christ’s sake.
So believed the apostle Paul when he penned a letter to the Corinthian church. And so, too, believed Maryland’s pioneering clown ministry.
This niche style of Christian outreach is as outrageous as it is earnest, and traces some of its roots back to Columbia. It’s perhaps a legacy that James Rouse never imagined when he founded the Howard County town, with its distinctive urban plan, efficient use of land and commitment to diversity. Rouse included a series of interfaith centers intended to bring people of different beliefs under one roof. The model inspired one local pastor at Abiding Savior Lutheran Church to pursue his own experiment blending liturgy with laughter.
These days, Rev. Floyd Shaffer is remembered by some as the “clown father” of modern Christian clowning. Though liturgical clowning already had a history in Europe, Shaffer spent his time in Columbia in the 1970s dabbling in clown ministry and eventually became known as a leader of the movement in the United States. He died three years ago, his wife Marlene Shaffer confirmed.
Even though the whimsical ministry’s heyday was in the 1980s and ’90s, some Christians continue to answer the call to clown. And the practice has captivated new audiences on TikTok and YouTube.
Earlier this year, the Columbia Maryland Archives put together an online exhibit about the town’s nondenominational clown ministry, called Faith and Fantasy, which Shaffer founded in 1974. Archivist Erin Berry said staffers were inspired after stumbling across a popular YouTube channel’s episode on Christian clowning.
Shaffer’s idea for a clown ministry came to him in 1964 on a beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The pastor was in town for a Bible study and leafing through some books when he stumbled across the etymology of the word clown. He connected it with Jesus’ command to be a servant.
That same year, Lutheran church leaders were getting creative with clowns — and it wasn’t going over well.
The National Lutheran Council produced the short film “Parable,” which depicted Jesus as a white-faced clown and the world as a circus.
The film’s 1964 debut at the New York World’s Fair roiled event organizers, some of whom resigned in protest. One “disgruntled minister threatened to riddle the screen with shotgun holes if the film was shown,” the Library of Congress noted when it announced that it had selected “Parable” for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2012.
Six years later, Shaffer debuted as a clown minister for the opening day of Abiding Savior’s vacation Bible school, according to a news article preserved in Columbia’s archives.
“I don’t think that something that’s so controversial — I don’t know what other word to use — as clowning ministry could flourish in another place other than Columbia,” Berry said. “You could just try what you wanted to try.”
Other leaders within Columbia’s interfaith centers encouraged Shaffer to keep at it, said 86-year-old Marge Goethe. Her husband, Rev. Jerry Goethe, the pastor for Kittamaqundi Community Church, suggested to Shaffer that he teach a class on clown ministry. Together, the two men designed a seven-week course that covered theology, the history of clowning, skits and games to encourage playfulness.
Many local residents, including Marge Goethe, enrolled in the classes, embraced clown ministry and set out to visit children’s hospitals, retirement homes and domestic violence shelters. She learned how to silently deliver sermons with gestures and humor, but never mockery. Goethe used lipstick to draw a red circle — a symbol of the liturgical clown — on her cheek.
Goethe developed her clown persona and named him Harry, after a man she knew as a child who lived on the streets. He was a reminder that she could either be the kind of person who brushed him off or helped him out.
Howard County’s clown ministry eventually grew to include as many as 300 clowns, The Baltimore Sun reported in 1994. Members of the Faith and Fantasy ministry went on to teach clown ministry around the country and internationally.
Not every audience loved the routine.
During a worship service at a Virginia college’s youth convention, Goethe and other clown ministers offered to draw the mark of the clown on people’s cheeks.
“What is that, the mark of the devil?” one man asked.
Goethe couldn’t reply while she was in character.
“All I had to do was accept what he was feeling at the time and hope it changed at some point,” Goethe said.
Goethe still attends Kittamaqundi services and performs clown ministry. When people ask her about the decades she spent cheering up strangers, she worries she won’t find the right words to explain how rich clown ministry turned out to be.
“I did more good for people being silent,” Goethe said.
Shaffer eventually moved to Ohio and authored several books with titles such as “If I Were A Clown” and “Clown Ministry.” He produced instructional videos on clown ministry that lately have found a rapt audience on the internet.
Jen Bryant realized she had a personal connection with clown ministry while putting together an episode on the subject for her YouTube channel, Fundie Fridays, which features cultural commentary on aspects of fundamentalist Christianity in the United States. The Missouri resident’s grandfather, a Catholic, performed for a time as a clown minister under the name “George-o.”
Every community seems to have its subcultures, Bryant said, and she found that was also true for clowns. There are classical clowns like Joseph Grimaldi, a Regency-era entertainer who introduced the white face makeup. There are dark clowns like Juggalos, a nickname for fans of the hip-hop group Insane Clown Posse. And there are scary clowns like Pennywise, the shapeshifting antagonist in Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel “It.”
At first, Christian clowns sounded like a meme to Bryant. The full story, she said, turned out to be “way more interesting.”
Bryant and her husband James Bryant ordered copies of Shaffer’s books and collected a variety of research on clown ministry for their episode, which posted in April. The hourlong segment earned an “overwhelmingly positive” response from their audience, many of whom are in the midst of deconstructing their faith and understanding of Christianity, Bryant said.
“Everyone just thought this was just the most pleasant little novelty,” James Bryant said.
Maybe Christian clowns are even the original deconstructors.
“They’re people who went, ‘faith wasn’t working exactly how we wanted it to, so we broke it down and changed it,’” he said. “It worked. It has a legacy.”
Appearing in a video on Kittamaqundi’s YouTube page, Shaffer said clown ministry gives people a new way to live out and enjoy theology, “instead of being so glum and gloomy and solemn, as much of the church has become.”
Many Bible stories defy rational thought and that’s sort of the point, Floyd said in the video.
Scripture, Floyd noted, often suggests that God has a sense of humor.
Maryland
Calmer weather and milder temperatures in store for Maryland on Christmas
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Maryland
Where To Celebrate New Year’s Eve 2024 In Annapolis
ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY, MD — New Year’s Eve will feature fireworks over the Annapolis Harbor, six Arundel Mills celebrations at Maryland Live! Casino & Hotel and the annual Charm City Countdown party at Hilton Baltimore BWI Airport Hotel.
Here is a look at some events happening in Anne Arundel County. Click on any event to learn more.
Annapolis
The transition from one year to the next is often marked by the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” a Scottish folk song whose title roughly translates to “days gone by,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica and History.com.
The tradition of New Year’s resolutions dates back 8,000 years to ancient Babylonians, who made promises to return borrowed items and repay debts at the beginning of the new year, which was in mid-March when they planted their crops.
According to legend, if people kept their word, the pagan gods would grant them favor in the coming year. However, if they broke their promises, they would lose favor with the gods.
Many secular New Year’s resolutions focus on imagining new, improved versions of ourselves.
The failure rate of New Year’s resolutions is about 80 percent, according to U.S. News & World Report. There are many reasons, but a big one is they’re made out of remorse — for gaining weight, for example — and aren’t accompanied by a shift in attitude or a plan for coping with the stress and discomfort that comes with changing a habit or condition.
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