A possible cure for the Baltimore City Budget shortfall
Last night I couldn’t sleep as I was concerned over the City’s financial shortfall.  It then came to me, in the middle of the night, that there is a solution to this problem and the solution is very sustainable.  Part of the shortfall will most likely mean the closure of recreation facilities in the City and, while our Mayor was depending on philanthropic assistance from our 1%, apparently she is having difficulty enticing them to take over some of the rec centers that the city has determined it can no longer afford.  My solution is simple.
The City, State and Federal Government gave approximately $28,000,000. (that's $28 Million!) to reconstruct 4 blocks along North Charles St. from 29th to 33rd as a new entrance to the Johns Hopkins University  that will almost equal Versailles in scope and design.  Additionally, along with a prince from the UAE and an alumni of JHU, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City, Baltimore City, the State of Maryland and the Federal Government gave JH another roughly $1,100,000,000. to build the new hospital in East Baltimore.  These are not small projects but enormous undertakings that are using, in good part, our tax money to support JH Inc., et al, and now, as they say, “it is time to give back to the community.”  I think with this $1,128,000,000. public investment in JH Inc., that it is only fair for JH, Inc. to help Baltimoreans, who are paying grandly for JH Inc.'s projects, by taking over one, two or possibly three of the recreation centers and to run them without cost to the public in neighborhoods where these recreation centers are slated for closing.

Stephen Gewirtz, a former Board Member of the CVCBDMA and current Court Reporter on crimes important to our neighborhood has offered up this commentary on an article posted in the Charles Villager, which we believe is important to the neighborhood and quoted hereunder:

Page 5 of the Charles Villager that I just received today contains a piece by David Hill entitled: "CVCBD Seeks Rate Increase for Services."  It is basically a description of the presentation by CVCBD at its March 27 public hearing on its financial plan (budget).  It omits any mention of the response from the residents of Charles Village who attended the public hearing.

PI KAPPA ALPHA and Other Heroes:

Thanks to the efforts of Ms. Carrie Bennett, JHU's Student-Community Liason, and the Johns Hopkins University's fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, we received a delivery yesterday of 30 backpacks of food which will provide a total of 540 meals in the coming spring and summer months.  This is the second such delivery of food made by the young men of Pi Kappa Alpha for the program to feed the homeless children of Charles Village.

Unsung Heroes:
Our community has a great deal of "Unsung Heroes", people who in their everyday life in our community accomplish many wonderful things for the benefit of us all but who are unknown to most of us because they are not part of the Village “clique” that rewards its own group members with praise and awards even when some of those accomplishments are of questionable or little value.

Crime in Charles Village
Our community has been lulled into a misconception that the area north of 25^th Street is safer than the area below that mythological dividing point for some reason, perhaps because north of 25th St. is closer to Hopkins.  A former shop owner one block below 25th St. angrily reported to us that students told him that they were warned not be travel below 25th St. because of the high crime rate there. This simply is not true and a review of the statistics provided by the Baltimore City Police Dept. (BCPD) will clearly show that there is as much crime north of 25th Street as there is south of it.  One needs to consider the fact that in all of the areas within the Charles Village community there is crime, both by way of physical confrontations and by way of break-ins.  Now there is an opportunity to help reduce this crime and yet the CVCBDMA (the Charles Village Community Benefits District's Management Authority or Board of Directors) does not want to support the opportunity to provide considerable additional protection for this community.  Why?