Relief payments are a success, but unemployment still a mess

One week ago, Gov. Larry Hogan signed into law a $1 billion COVID-19 relief bill that guaranteed low-income Maryland taxpayers a direct payment to help them survive these difficult times. Four days later, an estimated 98% of those eligible for payments of $300 to individuals and $500 to families had received their funds, in a majority of cases directly deposited into their bank accounts. The $175 million disbursement didn’t happen by accident. Comptroller Peter Franchot is justifiably proud of the planning and preparation that went into the task, as state employees prepared for the pandemic relief payments before the law authorizing them even existed. And, as his staff is quick to note, all this took place during the beginning of income tax season, the busiest time of year for Maryland’s chief tax collector.

Now, contrast that to those unfortunate residents of this state who have struggled to receive unemployment benefits from the Maryland Department of Labor. The delays have become legend from those who can’t get through the state’s call center to laid off workers stuck in denials and appeals. Thousands have been trapped in this bureaucratic hell, created when a system that clearly wasn’t designed to function smoothly and efficiently confronted historic increases in claims, as whole industries were temporarily shuttered by the pandemic beginning nearly one year ago. Lawmakers in Annapolis report that they continue to receive desperate calls from people struggling to collect what is rightfully due to them.

Here’s what they hear: “Help. I’ve applied online for unemployment insurance benefits. I’ve been told they’ve been approved but no money has shown up and now I can’t get through by phone to anyone who can help me.” That was almost exactly the complaint received just weeks ago by a legislator representing Baltimore’s District 46. The woman who reached out has been waiting for benefits since July 13. That is seven months. Now, multiply her miserable experience by 4,000, which is the number of calls lawmakers have reportedly received in recent weeks. And that’s believed to be only one-tenth of the number of Marylanders still stuck in benefits limbo.

Granted, it’s undoubtedly easier to send out checks to people who received an earned income tax credit in 2019, as the comptroller’s office did last week, than to arrange for unemployment benefits. Exactly when someone lost their job, why they lost a job, how much they earned, and whether they have outside income today all can play a role. Sometimes there are disputes between employer and employee over those specifics. And the money involved is substantially larger, too. Over the past year, the Labor Department has processed 1.4 million new unemployment insurance claims and paid out more than $9 billion in benefits. Agency officials claim the vast majority are handled without a hitch.

But even allowing for the greater challenges of responding to unemployment claims, the state appears to have done a miserable job with the task. One of the problems is that the Department of Labor just wasn’t prepared for an emergency like COVID-19, when layoffs spiked in a manner that no one had seen before. Clearly, officials were caught flat-footed.

They did not have a plan to quickly expand the system for reviewing applications. That was a mistake but one that can be rectified now: Among the proposals in a sweeping package of reforms pending before the General Assembly is a requirement that the Department of Labor have a disaster plan for the future.

Legislators have come up with some other welcome ideas, too. They include providing unemployment benefits by direct deposit, requiring caller ID at the call center (so applicants know a returned call regarding benefits is legitimate), and permanently increasing the amount beneficiaries can receive in outside income, from $50 per week to $150, before it lowers their benefits check. Further, lawmakers would create a better system for tracking laid off workers, as well as metrics to determine how well applicants are being served (or not served).

Gov. Hogan would be smart to endorse any or all of these ideas and stop treating criticism of how badly the unemployment benefits system has performed as a political attack by Democrats against a Republican governor. Here’s a better response: A lot of states have struggled with unemployment claims this past year; Maryland just needs to stop being one of them. Perhaps he could hire some of the comptroller’s staff.

The tiny enclave of East Towson is home to 503 subsidized or Section 8 rental units. But Baltimore County officials want to add another 56-unit rent-controlled apartment building on the last remaining bit of open space in the historic Black village.

Red Maple Place, a Soviet-era style building, is planned for the only wooded parcel in the neighborhood, a 2.5-acre, sloping site. If built, the apartments will block sunlight to neighboring homes, brightly illuminate the night with light pollution and likely exacerbate existing flooding problems.

The picturesque community is already boxed in by a large industrial complex on the east; an entertainment complex, government buildings, apartment towers and other commercial enterprises on the south and west; and Joppa Road, with its mishmash of small shops, high rise apartments and a regional mall, to the north.

Meanwhile, the small vernacular style homes in historic East Towson — many built by formerly enslaved Black people who were freed by the owner of nearby Hampton Plantation almost 200 years ago — have steadily been demolished in the name of “progress.”

East Towson has increasingly been encircled by commercial structures and towering multifamily housing buildings and has been a dumping ground for noxious uses no other neighborhood would allow: a BGE substation, a half-built highway and other environmentally racist uses that were poorly conceived and badly designed.

Baltimore County has a long history of systemic inequity in East Towson. A 1964 Towson rehabilitation and redevelopment report, written and compiled at the request of former Baltimore County Executive Spiro Agnew, claimed that “socio-economic deficiencies are more obvious in East Towson” because of its “large number of low-income households … made up of Negro families whose members are unskilled.” Clearly, Baltimore County officials wanted to rid Towson of its problematic Black citizens.

One of the recommendations in this report was to split the neighborhood in two with a Towson bypass highway; another was to construct luxury high-rise apartments along Joppa Ridge. Agnew was not only a crook who excoriated anyone who dared to cross him as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” he actively encouraged racial disharmony.

Today, the majority of these recommendations have been realized, mostly at the expense of longtime residents of

East Towson. The noose of development, commercialism and wrongheaded solutions to Towson’s traffic woes has slowly tightened around the residents over the years, reducing the once thriving self-sufficient village to a mere six blocks of homes.

County government officials should not repeat the mistakes of the past; they must find the political will to do the right thing by the citizens of East Towson. A countywide plan should be designed to satisfy the ACLU’s and NAACP’s worthy demand for affordable housing in Baltimore County. The solution should not be to shoehorn this inappropriate, ill-conceived project into a stable community.

East Towson has already sacrificed most of its open space and has lost many of its homes and families due in part to callous landlords, lack of county services and developers seeking to maximize profit. What the neighborhood doesn’t need is another eyesore, more traffic and worsening flooding issues.

Public policy determines which people get to live in a good community with public services, good schools and little traffic versus those who must live in the shadow of power plants, encroaching commercial and industrial uses, flooding, bright lights and cut-through traffic. These policies can be either implicit or explicit but they are there just the same targeted at neighborhoods of people of color and their children who will inherit these problems.

It is up to County Executive Johnny Olszewski and his office of Ethics and Accountability to reexamine their choice of siting the oversize Red Maple Place in the tiny community. Otherwise, its deleterious effects on the fabric of East Towson will persist into future generations.