Local
‘Strategic blunder of monstrous proportions’
Insiders rip HRC, Gill decision to cancel Maryland vote on marriage
(Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
The decision to cancel a March 11 vote on a same-sex marriage bill in the Maryland House of Delegates was a mistake that could hurt rather than help the chances for passing the bill within the next several years, according to Maryland-based advocates who lobbied for the bill.
The advocates who expressed this view, some of whom spoke on condition that they not be identified, said at least four national LGBT groups put pressure on lawmakers through Equality Maryland, the statewide LGBT group, to withdraw the bill rather than risk a losing vote.
One of the advocates called the national groups and their political operatives who came to Maryland to lobby for the bill well intentioned but unfamiliar with the nuances and “rhythms” of the Maryland Legislature.
“I think this was a strategic blunder of monstrous proportions,” said Mark McLaurin, political director of Maryland’s Local 500 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which lobbied for the bill.
McLaurin, a gay man who has lobbied the Maryland Legislature for progressive causes for more than 15 years, said many insiders familiar with the legislature don’t think a losing vote by a close margin would hurt the bill’s chances in the future.
On the other hand, McLaurin and others who favored taking a vote on the marriage bill said the legislature has a history of not taking up highly controversial bills two years in a row. McLaurin said he fears that the bill won’t come back for a vote until 2015, even though Speaker of the House Michael Busch (D-Anne Arundel County) said he would try to bring the measure back in 2012.
Busch said supporters appeared to fall just a few votes shy of the 71 votes needed to pass the bill in the 141-member House. However, he said wavering delegates might have chosen to vote “yes,” raising the possibility that the bill could have passed.
Several knowledgeable sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed with McLaurin’s assessment.
“Gill and HRC decided it was detrimental to the larger movement to have the vote go down,” one source said. “Gays and lesbians in Maryland deserved a debate and a vote on legislation that we waited years for.”
Another source criticized Busch’s handling of the bill.
Maryland House of Delegates Majority Leader Kumar Barve and Maryland House Speaker Michael Busch (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
“[Speaker Michael] Busch could have squeezed harder but didn’t. This is a new House of Delegates and this man didn’t bother to take the temperature of the new House of Delegates. I was shocked. I thought House leadership was more strategic, intelligent and powerful than this and it all evaporated.
“God forbid we put our swing vote Democrats on the line to take a vote for our families. Or maybe the Speaker has lost control of his chamber.”
There was also criticism of Gov. Martin O’Malley, who the sources faulted for not taking a more public stand in support of the bill.
“O’Malley stopped by Friday for a photo op with marriage supporters,” one source said. “What a vacant gesture at the 11th hour. You couldn’t write an op-ed the week before?”
The Civil Marriage Protection Act won approval in the Maryland Senate earlier this month. It died last Friday for at least this year when the House of Delegates approved by voice vote a motion to send it back to committee.
All of the bill’s sponsors, including seven openly gay members of the House of Delegates, appeared to support the motion, a development that stunned LGBT activists watching the proceedings from the visitors’ gallery.
The motion to recommit the bill to committee came after supporters and opponents engaged in an emotional, two-and-a-half hour debate over the bill. Most of the activists for and against the bill watching from the galleries didn’t know that the bill’s sponsors had decided beforehand to cancel the vote.
McLaurin said he learned from those attending strategy meetings that the eight-member LGBT Caucus of the legislature was divided over whether to postpone the House vote.
The caucus includes Sen. Richard Madaleno (D-Montgomery County), and House of Delegates members Maggie McIntosh, Mary Washington, and Luke Clippinger, each Democrats from Baltimore; Heather Mizeur, Bonnie Cullison, and Anne Kaiser, each Democrats from Montgomery County; and Peter Murphy, a Democrat from Charles County.
Spokespersons for Equality Maryland, the statewide LGBT group that led the lobbying effort for the bill, and officials with the national groups Freedom to Marry and Human Rights Campaign defended the decision to withdraw the bill.
They said the decision was made jointly by the bill’s lead sponsors, including the one gay male and six lesbian delegates, who determined it was better to postpone the vote than to risk a losing vote, which they said would be perceived as a defeat.
“This is a strategic effort to give ourselves more time to make the case and win,” said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry. “And all of us believe we can win. It’s just a matter of nailing down the votes and getting there.”
HRC spokesperson Fred Sainz said the decision to cancel the vote came after it became clear that supporters didn’t have the votes to pass it.
“This was a shared decision by all the stakeholders – Equality Maryland, the state’s LGBT Caucus, Gill Action, Freedom to Marry, and HRC,” he said. “It was the consensus belief that the best way to win marriage in Maryland was by a delay and not by losing a vote.”
Officials with Gill Action, a philanthropic group founded by gay businessman Tim Gill in Colorado that funds LGBT rights causes, did not return a call seeking comment.
An official with the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, Robin Brand, also pushed for postponing the vote, activists familiar with the legislature said. Brand told the Blade she discussed the issue with the gay delegates in the Victory Fund’s role of working with openly gay elected officials. She said she left it up to them to decide on whether or not a vote should be taken.
McLaurin, a former member of the Equality Maryland board, said the advocates who wanted the vote to go forward believe it would have been worth “a roll of the dice” to determine if supporters had the 71 votes needed to pass the bill.
“In the worst case scenario we would have come up two or three votes short,” he said. “And I think that a loss by two or three votes would be much more galvanizing to the community of supporters that we’re going to need to rally and accomplish this goal.”
McLaurin added, “Either way it was going to get billed as a failure. I’d rather have on record who’s with us and who’s against us.”
Another former Equality Maryland board member, David Toth, wrote in a Facebook posting that the group was deleting messages left on its own Facebook page that were posted by a large number of supporters who expressed outrage over the decision not to have a vote on the bill.
“Anyone who is asking questions of EqMD or its staff is having their posts deleted like crazy,” he wrote. “After donating thousands of dollars and working on the board for over six years I simply find this appalling.”
Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry (Blade photo by Michael Key)
Wolfson of Freedom to Marry cautioned that a public fight over the decision not to have a vote could hurt efforts to bring the bill back next year.
“This is a temporary pause in the voting and it’s not a pause in the work,” he said. “So we don’t need finger pointing and recriminations, we need redoubling the effort to win.”
Although Equality Maryland, led by executive director, Morgan Meneses-Sheets, was billed as the lead organization calling the shots, insiders say field workers from the national groups like Freedom to Marry, HRC and Gill Action Fund far outnumbered Equality Maryland’s staffers working the halls of the legislature in Annapolis.
It was the national groups, rather than Equality Maryland, that had the ear of supportive lawmakers, including the LGBT Caucus members, during the days leading up to the scheduled vote on the bill in the House, McLaurin and other insiders said.
In a March 10 e-mail sent to LGBT Caucus members and other lawmakers supporting the bill, representatives of Freedom to Marry, Gill Action and HRC urged the lawmakers to postpone the vote.
“With the rights of so many Marylanders on the line, we wanted to flag our serious concern about going to a floor vote tomorrow when it’s not been confirmed we have 71 votes,” the e-mail says. “Various counts have us at 69 or 70 but not 71 or beyond.”
The e-mail adds, “The decision on whether to ask the leadership to move forward or postpone the vote rests with our openly LGBT legislators and other sponsors (in consultation with EQMD) who know their colleagues far better than we do, and who have so courageously led the way.”
The e-mail was signed by Bill Smith and Sarah Vaughn, national political director and deputy political director of Gill Action; Marty Rouse and Sultan Shakir, the lead officials at HRC’s field office; and Marc Solomon, national campaign director for Freedom to Marry.
In a separate e-mail sent the next day to most of the same people, HRC’s Rouse warned of serious political consequences if a vote on the marriage bill were to be taken.
“I plead with you to please delay this vote,” he said. “It would be devastating to suffer a huge loss. There will be vitriol and pain that may take years to soothe.”
Rouse said he also feared that a losing vote would damage relationships between the LGBT community and lawmakers who voted against the bill.
“I am sure that relationships are already frayed, but, if there are impassioned speeches on the floor, and tears shed, and we still lose, those relationships will be damaged even more. The air in the chamber will be toxic for months if not years,” he said.
McLaurin said at least some of the strained relations that Rouse mentioned have already come about, in part, because of the impassioned debate on the House floor that took place on March 11. He said he was puzzled over why those making the decision chose to have the debate and not go one step further to allow a vote to take place.
According to McLaurin, Speaker Busch left it up to the bill’s supporters and Equality Maryland to make the final call on whether to have a vote.
“From what I’ve been told by people in the know, he said, ‘What’s your pleasure? I’ll defer to you.’”
“And so from my understanding, there was a lot of pressure from the national organizations not to pull the trigger on a vote unless you are certain you had 71 votes because apparently it would demoralize our [same-sex marriage] efforts in Rhode Island and New York,” said McLaurin.
“I say poppycock. Pulling the bill from the floor is a defeat every bit as much as a losing vote is,” he said.
McLaurin said he thinks some of the national LGBT officials pushing for a delay in the Maryland vote had a fundamental misunderstanding that the Maryland House of Delegates would act like the New York State Senate acted in 2008, when it defeated a same-same marriage bill by a 38-24 vote.
Most supporters of the New York bill thought the vote would be much closer. Gay State Sen. Tom Duane (D-Manhattan) said he believed he had lined up enough votes to pass the measure. But when a roll-call vote started, a few wavering senators voted no, causing what observers called a cascading or “avalanche” effect, prompting others whose support was shaky to vote no.
McLaurin said such a development could not happen in the Maryland House of Delegates because all votes are cast electronically at the same time. No one knows who votes which way until the final tally is released seconds after the votes are cast. Pages on the floor then distribute a printout showing how the delegates voted.
“That’s why one of my underlying themes is you’ve got to know the Maryland Legislature,” he said. “We can’t have national groups fly in from L.A. and New York and train in from D.C. and conduct this campaign because we’re fundamentally different. We’re a different body.”
If some of the national group representatives had been in Annapolis at the time the legislature debated a highly contentious bill to repeal the state’s death penalty in 2007 or during several abortion related debates in the 1990s they would have seen a great reluctance to revisit these issues a second time, McLaurin said.
“What I fear is next year there’s just not going to be the stomach to do this again,” he said in discussing the marriage bill. “If you listened to the debate on the floor, everyone spoke of how deeply divided the House was, how deeply emotional this was, how it frayed relationships, how people weren’t speaking to each other.
“Do you think they will have the stomach to do that again next year without any reasonable expectation of a different outcome because they’re still pitching the same ideas to the same audience?”
“No one would be happier to be wrong about this than me,” he said. “But I just don’t think that I am. And I know I’m not alone. Some of the chief strategists behind this bill feel the same way I do.”
Wolfson of Freedom to Marry disputes that assessment.
“Anyone who is making comments to you or to anyone else suggesting that somehow this is over and it’s now a cause for finger pointing has failed to understand that it’s not over,” he said. “We’re in the midst of the work and we all should keep our eye on the prize of doing what we can to round up the last few votes and win.”
District of Columbia
Catching up with the asexuals and aromantics of D.C.
Exploring identity and finding community
There was enough commotion in the sky at the Blossom Kite Festival that bees might have been pollinating the Washington Monument. I despaired of quickly finding the Asexuals and Aromantics of the Mid-Atlantic—I couldn’t make out a single asexual flag among the kites up above. I thought to myself that if it had been the Homosexuals of the Mid-Atlantic I would’ve had my gaydar to rely on. Was there even such a thing as ace-dar?
As it turned out, the asexual kite the group had meant to fly was a little too pesky to pilot. “Have you ever used a stunt kite?” Bonnie, the event organizer asked me. “I bought one. It looked really cool. But I can’t make it work.” She sighed. “I can’t get the thing six feet off the ground.” The group hardly seemed to care. There was caramel popcorn and cookies, board games and head massages, a game of charades with more than its fair share of Pokémon. The kites up above might as well have been a coincidental sideshow. Nearly two dozen folks filtered in and out of the picnic throughout the course of the day.
But I counted myself lucky that Bonnie picked me out of the crowd. If there’s such a thing as ace-dar, it eludes asexuals too. The online forum for all matters asexual, AVEN, or the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, is filled with laments: “I don’t think it’s possible.” “Dude, I wish I had an ace-dar.” “If it exists, I don’t have it.” “I think this is just like a broken clock is right twice a day type thing.” What seems to be a more common experience is meeting someone you just click with—only to find out later that they’re asexual. A few of the folks I met described how close childhood friends of theirs likewise came out in adulthood, a phenomenon that will be familiar to many queer people. But it is all the more astounding for asexuals to find each other this way, given that asexual people constitute 1.7% of sexual minorities in America, and so merely .1% of the population at large.
To help other asexuals identify you out in the world, some folks wear a black ring on their middle finger, much as an earring on the right ear used to signify homosexuality in a less welcoming era. The only problem? The swinger community—with its definite non-asexuality—has also adopted the signal. “It’s still a thing,” said Emily Karp. “So some people wear their ace rings just to the ace meet-ups.” Karp has been the primary coordinator for the Asexuals and Aromantics of the Mid-Atlantic (AAMA) since 2021, and a member of the meet-up for a decade. She clicked with the group immediately. After showing up for a Fourth of July potluck in the mid-afternoon, she ended up staying past midnight. “We played Cards against Humanity, which was a very, very fun thing to do. It’s funny in a way that’s different than if we were playing with people that weren’t ace. Some of the cards are implying, like, the person would be motivated by sex in a way that’s absurd, because we know they aren’t.”
Where so many social organizations withered during the pandemic, the AAMA flourished. Today, it boasts almost 2,000 members on meetup.com. Karp hypothesized that all the social isolation gave people copious time to reflect on themselves, and that the ease of meeting up online made it convenient as a way for people to explore their sexual identity and find community. Online events continue to make up about a third of the group’s meet-ups. The format allows people to participate who live farther out from D.C. And it allows people to participate at their preferred level of comfort: while many people participate much as they would at an in-person event, some prefer to watch anonymously, video feed off. Others prefer to participate in the chat box, though not in spoken conversation.
A recent online event was organized for a discussion of Rhaina Cohen’s book, “The Other Significant Others,” published in February. Cohen’s book discusses friendship as an alternative model for “significant others,” apart from the romantic model that is presupposed to be both the center and goal of people’s lives. The AAMA group received the book with enthusiasm. “It literally re-wired my brain,” as one person put it. People discussed the importance of friendship to their lives, and their difficulties in a world that de-prioritized friendship. “I can break up with a friend over text, and we don’t owe each other a conversation,” one said. But there was some disagreement when it came to the book’s discussion of romantic relationships. “It relegates ace relationships to the ‘friend’ or ‘platonic’ category, to the normie-reader,” one person wrote in the chat. “Our whole ace point is that we can have equivalent life relationships to allo people, simply without sex.” (“Allo” is shorthand for allosexual or alloromantic, people who do experience sexual or romantic attraction.)
The folks of the AAMA do not share a consensus on the importance of romantic relationships to their lives. Some asexuals identify as aromantic, some don’t. And some aromantics don’t identify as asexual, either. The “Aromantic” in the title of the group is a relatively recent addition. In 2017, the group underwent a number of big changes. The group was marching for the first time in D.C. Pride, participating in the LGBTQ Creating Change conference, and developing a separate advocacy and activism arm. Moreover, the group had become large enough that discussions were opened up into forming separate chapters for D.C., Central Virginia, and Baltimore. During those discussions, the group leadership realized that aromantic people who also identified as allosexual didn’t really have a space to call their own. “We were thinking it would be good to probably change the name of the Meetup group,” Emily said. “But we were not 100% sure. Because [there were] like 1,000 people in the group, and they’re all aces, and it’s like, ‘Do you really want to add a non-ace person?’” The group leadership decided to err on the side of inclusion. “You know, being less gatekeep-y was better. It gave them a place to go — because there was nowhere else to go.”
The DC LGBT Center now sponsors a support group for both asexuals and aromantics, but it was formed just a short while ago, in 2022. The founder of the group originally sought out the center’s bisexual support group, since they didn’t have any resources for ace folks. “The organizer said, you know what, why don’t we just start an ace/aro group? Like, why don’t we just do it?” He laughed. “I was impressed with the turnout, the first call. It’s almost like we tapped into, like, a dam. You poke a hole in the dam, and the water just rushes out.” The group has a great deal of overlap with the AAMA, but it is often a person’s first point of contact with the asexual and aromantic community in D.C., especially since the group focuses on exploring what it means to be asexual. Someone new shows up at almost every meeting. “And I’m so grateful that I did,” one member said. “I kind of showed up and just trauma dumped, and everyone was really supportive.”
Since the ace and aro community is so small, even within the broader queer community, ace and aro folks often go unrecognized. To the chagrin of many, the White House will write up fact sheets about the LGBTQI+ community, which is odd, given that when the “I” is added to the acronym, the “A” is usually added too. OKCupid has 22 genders and 12 orientations on its dating website, but “aromantic” is not one of them — presumably because aromantic people don’t want anything out of dating. And since asexuality and aromanticism are defined by the absence of things, it can seem to others like ace and aro people are ‘missing something.’ One member of the LGBT center support group had an interesting response. “The space is filled by… whatever else!” they said. “We’re not doing a relationship ‘without that thing.’ We’re doing a full scale relationship — as it makes sense to us.”
CJ Higgins is a postdoctoral fellow with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
District of Columbia
Bowser budget proposal calls for $5.25 million for 2025 World Pride
AIDS office among agencies facing cuts due to revenue shortfall
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed fiscal year 2025 budget includes a request for $5.25 million in funding to support the June 2025 World Pride celebration, which D.C. will host, and which is expected to bring three million or more visitors to the city.
The mayor’s proposed budget, which she presented to the D.C. Council for approval earlier this month, also calls for a 7.6 percent increase in funding for the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, which amounts to an increase of $132,000 and would bring the office’s total funding to $1.7 million. The office, among other things, provides grants to local organizations that provide services to the LGBTQ community.
Among the other LGBTQ-related funding requests in the mayor’s proposed budget is a call to continue the annual funding of $600,000 to provide workforce development services for transgender and gender non-conforming city residents “experiencing homelessness and housing instability.” The budget proposal also calls for a separate allocation of $600,000 in new funding to support a new Advanced Technical Center at the Whitman-Walker Health’s Max Robinson Center in Ward 8.
Among the city agencies facing funding cuts under the mayor’s proposed budget is the HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, Sexually Transmitted Disease, and Tuberculosis Administration, known as HAHSTA, which is an arm of the D.C. Department of Health. LGBTQ and AIDS activists have said HAHSTA plays an important role in the city’s HIV prevention and support services. Observers familiar with the agency have said it recently lost federal funding, which the city would have to decide whether to replace.
“We weren’t able to cover the loss of federal funds for HAHSTA with local funds,” Japer Bowles, director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, told the Washington Blade. “But we are working with partners to identify resources to fill those funding gaps,” Bowles said.
The total proposed budget of $21 billion that Bowser submitted to the D.C. Council includes about $500 million in proposed cuts in various city programs that the mayor said was needed to offset a projected $700 million loss in revenue due, among other things, to an end in pandemic era federal funding and commercial office vacancies also brought about by the post pandemic commercial property and office changes.
Bowser’s budget proposal also includes some tax increases limited to sales and business-related taxes, including an additional fee on hotel bookings to offset the expected revenue losses. The mayor said she chose not to propose an increase in income tax or property taxes.
Earlier this year, the D.C. LGBTQ+ Budget Coalition, which consists of several local LGBTQ advocacy organizations, submitted its own fiscal year 2025 budget proposal to both Bowser and the D.C. Council. In a 14-page letter the coalition outlined in detail a wide range of funding proposals, including housing support for LGBTQ youth and LGBTQ seniors; support for LGBTQ youth homeless services; workforce and employment services for transgender and gender non-conforming residents; and harm reduction centers to address the rise in drug overdose deaths.
Another one of the coalition’s proposals is $1.5 million in city funding for the completion of the D.C. Center for the LGBTQ Community’s new building, a former warehouse building in the city’s Shaw neighborhood that is undergoing a build out and renovation to accommodate the LGBTQ Center’s plans to move in later this year. The coalition’s budget proposal also calls for an additional $300,000 in “recurring” city funding for the LGBTQ Center in subsequent years “to support ongoing operational costs and programmatic initiatives.”
Bowles noted that Bowser authorized and approved a $1 million grant for the LGBTQ Center’s new building last year but was unable to provide additional funding requested by the budget coalition for the LGBTQ Center for fiscal year 2025.
“We’re still in this with them,” Bowles said. “We’re still looking and working with them to identify funding.”
The total amount of funding that the LGBTQ+ Budget Coalition listed in its letter to the mayor and Council associated with its requests for specific LGBTQ programs comes to $43.1 million.
Heidi Ellis, who serves as coordinator of the coalition, said the coalition succeeded in getting some of its proposals included in the mayor’s budget but couldn’t immediately provide specific amounts.
“There are a couple of areas I would argue we had wins,” Ellis told the Blade. “We were able to maintain funding across different housing services, specifically around youth services that affect folks like SMYAL and Wanda Alston.” She was referring to the LGBTQ youth services group SMYAL and the LGBTQ organization Wanda Alston Foundation, which provides housing for homeless LGBTQ youth.
“We were also able to secure funding for the transgender, gender non-conforming workforce program,” she said. “We also had funding for migrant services that we’ve been advocating for and some wins on language access,” said Ellis, referring to programs assisting LGBTQ people and others who are immigrants and aren’t fluent in speaking English.
Ellis said that although the coalition’s letter sent to the mayor and Council had funding proposals that totaled $43.1 million, she said the coalition used those numbers as examples for programs and policies that it believes would be highly beneficial to those in the LGBTQ community in need.
“I would say to distill it down to just we ask for $43 million or whatever, that’s not an accurate picture of what we’re asking for,” she said. “We’re asking for major investments around a few areas – housing, healthcare, language access. And for capital investments to make sure the D.C. Center can open,” she said. “It’s not like a narrative about the dollar amounts. It’s more like where we’re trying to go.”
The Blade couldn’t’ immediately determine how much of the coalition’s funding proposals are included in the Bowser budget. The mayor’s press secretary, Daniel Gleick, told the Blade in an email that those funding levels may not have been determined by city agencies.
“As for specific funding levels for programs that may impact the LGBTQ community, such as individual health programs through the Department of Health, it is too soon in the budget process to determine potential adjustments on individual programs run though city agencies,” Gleick said.
But Bowles said several of the programs funded in the mayor’s budget proposal that are not LGBTQ specific will be supportive of LGBTQ programs. Among them, he said, is the budget’s proposal for an increase of $350,000 in funding for senior villages operated by local nonprofit organizations that help support seniors. Asked if that type of program could help LGBTQ seniors, Bowles said, “Absolutely – that’s definitely a vehicle for LGBTQ senior services.”
He said among the programs the increased funding for the mayor’s LGBTQ Affairs office will support is its ongoing cultural competency training for D.C. government employees. He said he and other office staff members conduct the trainings about LGBTQ-related issues at city departments and agencies.
Bowser herself suggested during an April 19 press conference that local businesses, including LGBTQ businesses and organizations, could benefit from a newly launched city “Pop-Up Permit Program” that greatly shortens the time it takes to open a business in vacant storefront buildings in the downtown area.
Bowser and Nina Albert, D.C. Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, suggested the new expedited city program for approving permits to open shops and small businesses in vacant storefront spaces could come into play next year when D.C. hosts World Pride, one of the word’s largest LGBTQ events.
“While we know that all special events are important, there is an especially big one coming to Washington, D.C. next year,” Bowser said at the press conference. “And to that point, we proposed a $5.25 million investment to support World Pride 2025,” she said, adding, “It’s going to be pretty great. And so, we’re already thinking about how we can include D.C. entrepreneurs, how we’re going to include artists, how we’re going to celebrate across all eight wards of our city as well,” she said.
Among those attending the press conference were officials of D.C.’s Capital Pride Alliance, which will play a lead role in organizing World Pride 2025 events.
Maryland
Health care for Marylanders with HIV is facing huge cuts this summer
Providers poised to lose three-quarters of funding
BY MEREDITH COHN | By the end of June, health care providers in Maryland will lose nearly three-quarters of the funding they use to find and treat thousands of people with HIV.
Advocates and providers say they had been warned there would be less money by the Maryland Department of Health, but were stunned at the size of the drop — from about $17.9 million this fiscal year to $5.3 million the next. The deep cuts are less than three months away.
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
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