[Baltimore, MD, August 27, 2020] The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded $843,988 to the Baltimore region to conduct emergency housing and shelter planning through the FY 2020 Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant Program (RCPGP) on August 19, 2020. Through a partnership between the City of Baltimore and the Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC), the grant will fund regional housing and shelter planning at BMC in collaboration with a committee of local emergency management agencies in the Baltimore region known as the Baltimore Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI). The project will produce individually tailored plans for each jurisdiction as well as one regional plan; and will support training and exercises for emergency management personnel.
The seven jurisdictions of the Baltimore UASI are: Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Carroll County, Harford County, and Howard County. Collectively, the population of these counties and municipalities accounts for approximately 2.7 million of the 6.4 million residents of the state of Maryland.
“Access to stable shelter is essential to protecting our health and wellbeing — especially in a time of crisis,” said Johnny Olszewski, Baltimore County Executive and BMC Board Chair. “I applaud the Baltimore UASI and BMC for working together to secure funding that will expand our region’s ability to provide regional housing and shelter planning.”
In 2019, the Baltimore region received a grant award from the RCPGP to hire two planners at BMC to conduct food and water disaster supply chain planning, training, and exercise activities.
The RCPGP-funded planners have been actively engaged in the COVID-19 response by providing subject matter expertise to the region’s emergency food distribution planning operations. These funds have allowed the Baltimore UASI to collaborate, share best practices, and document procedures and training.
“BMC has been instrumental in the response to COVID-19 in the region,” said Stephen Wantz, Carroll County Commissioner and BMC Board Vice-Chair. “Their work in providing resources, guidance and standards in food and water distribution throughout the pandemic has been extremely valuable.”
The FY 2019 RCPGP provided resources to address mass care operations in relation to food and water supply chain distribution efforts. The new FY 2020 RCPGP award will allow the region to continue to build upon the current mass care work and expand to address sheltering needs as it relates to all hazards.
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To ensure the safety of riders, BMC is gearing up for a COVID-safe Bike to Work 2020 from September 21-27. Combined with participation in the Love to Ride Cycle September Global Challenge as part of the Central MD community, the usual rallies and pit stop gatherings will be replaced with online networking and encouragement for all riders, and even more prizes!
Cyclists who register for Bike to Work 2020 and ride during the week of September 21-27 can pick up a free t-shirt at over a dozen area bike shops (open to the first 2,500 registrants) AND have a chance to win prizes.
Not commuting to work? No problem! The Cycle September Global Challenge is a fun, friendly, and free competition between workplaces, clubs, and individuals to see who can get the most people cycling in September – especially new riders.
Riders can earn points for every mile they ride, every day they ride, and every new person they encourage to ride. Individuals only have to ride for ten minutes anytime, anywhere (for fun, fitness, transportation or even indoors) to be eligible for prizes and help their team climb the leaderboard.
Register for Bike to Work 2020 from August 7 – September 19 @ biketoworkmd.com
Join the Cycle September Global Challenge as a member of the Love to Ride Central MD community by following these 3 easy steps:
- Register at lovetoride.net/centralmd
- Join your company or group or register a new group for Cycle September
- Log rides via the website or app or link to your favorite bicycling app to win prizes
Sign up for Cycle September before it starts on September 1, and you'll be in the drawing for an early bird prize. You can win an e-bike from Charge or a local prize pack!
About Bike to Work Week
The Baltimore Metropolitan Council organizes an annual Bike to Work Day celebration in the region. The event, which was previously scheduled for May 15th, was postponed, then converted to a virtual event, in light of COVID-19 restrictions.
Bike to Work Week is a campaign that celebrates bicycling as a healthy commuting option, while promoting public awareness of its safety and environmental benefits. Bike to Work Week helps raise awareness of the rules of the road for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, and highlights the need to improve bicycle facilities to improve safety.
About Love to Ride Central MD
The Baltimore Metropolitan Council has partnered with Love to Ride to bring more fun, more community, and more inspiration to get more people riding. Love to Ride is a biking encouragement website and app free to anyone who lives or works in the Central MD region.
BALTIMORE, MD (July 21, 2020) – The Baltimore Metropolitan Council (“BMC”) officially launched its Baltimore Regional Recovery Dashboard to help policymakers understand and track the impacts of COVID-19 on the seven county metropolitan area. Hosted on BMC’s website, the dashboard features data from across the organization’s areas of focus, including unemployment claims, impacted industries and transportation ridership. The dashboard utilizes Tableau, a data visualization tool, to provide information in an interactive format.
“To effectively combat this crisis across our region and state, it’s critical that leaders have the ability to look at the full picture and have the best data available to plan for our ongoing response — as well as our recovery,” said Baltimore County Executive and BMC Board Chair Johnny Olszewski. “This new dashboard will serve as a wide-angle lens, providing a range of data to help inform our long-term strategies so that we can emerge as a stronger, more resilient, and greater Baltimore.”
The dashboard presents unemployment insurance claims for all U.S. states, Maryland counties, and Maryland counties by industry at the 2-digit NAICS code level. Additional charts provide data on the sectors most exposed to economic impacts from COVID-19. “Exposed” sectors include those that have experienced significant reductions in demand, such as restaurants and bars, travel and transportation, entertainment, personal services, as well as certain types of retail and manufacturing. These dashboards compare the most exposed sectors across jobs, gross regional product, payrolled business locations, and median hourly wages.
The data shows, for example, that the Baltimore region is reliant on a larger share of exposed sector employment within its economy than its neighbors to the south in the Capital region. This suggests that the economic impact of the pandemic may be more acute in greater Baltimore than other regions with more diversified economies.
“COVID-19 has taken a toll on our region’s residents and threatens to have a protracted impact on our economy,” said BMC Executive Director Michael B. Kelly. “As a planning organization, our goal is to present the data and bring together the partners to frame our post-pandemic future.”
The dashboard also displays transportation data, including regional transit ridership and the percentage of people staying home by county. As of early July, transit ridership was still down 60% year over year, though it had improved from the low point of nearly -78% in late April. Similarly, Maryland Transportation Institute data shows that Baltimore City and Howard County residents stayed home at significantly higher rates than their counterparts in Queen Anne’s and Carroll Counties in the first week of July. The fewer people traveling has a corresponding impact on economic activity, such as retail and restaurant sales.
In the coming weeks, BMC aims to add additional data points around new building permits, as well as housing delinquencies and homelessness.
BMC staff are proud to participate in the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s (CBF) ‘Walk the Watershed’ event this year. Throughout the month of June, our team will work toward a goal of traveling 200 miles in support of a healthier waterway. This target represents the approximately 200-mile-long Chesapeake Bay. Staff will also seek donations on behalf of CBF as an element of this campaign.
Team members contribute to the 200-mile goal by tracking and reporting their individual walking, bike riding, and running distances. Photos and videos document and share this experience publicly.
To date, the team has reached its 200-mile goal and raised over $600 in donations.
Part of BMC's mission is to improve our region’s quality of life – of which the health of the Bay plays an important role. A clean Chesapeake Bay provides a healthy place for fish and shellfish to grow, and a more beautiful and safe place to boat and recreate. The Bay’s waters also provide vital economic benefits to the tourism and seafood industry that are entrenched in our region’s history and future.
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The Maryland Highway Safety Office (MHSO) organized a safety seminar on Thursday, April 30, for members of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Region 3, which includes Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. BMC staff presented the LOOK ALIVE regional pedestrian and bike safety campaign and law enforcement training in support of the education campaign. Over 120 participants from across the region attended the online seminar.
Jeff Dunckel with the MHSO provided an overview of statewide pedestrian fatalities, which have been on an increasing trend since 2015, rising from 99 to 133 in 2018. During the same period, the Baltimore region went from 48 to 68 pedestrian fatalities. Between 2014 and 2018, three jurisdictions in the Baltimore region (Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County) were among the top five for number of pedestrian involved injury/fatal crashes in Maryland. The same three are also among the top five for pedestrian involved fatalities by jurisdiction.
Bala Akundi, Principal Transportation Engineer at BMC, and Kenna Swift Williams of Sherry Matthews Group, provided an overview of the development of the LOOK ALIVE campaign starting in early 2019 through its launch in June and over the fall/winter. The campaign began as two video-spots featuring signal woman – a personification of the walk signal – and conveyed messages to drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. The 2020 campaign included media pitches for law enforcement activations in November that garnered significant media coverage including a WBAL feature with BMC Executive Director Mike Kelly.
The COVID-19 pandemic postponed elements of the campaign, such as the spring enforcement wave. One of the last Look Alive events was on March 7 at the B’More Healthy Expo at the Baltimore Convention Center. This joint event with Baltimore City DOT and MDOT SHA featured a Virtual Reality (VR) challenge.
BMC, in partnership with Baltimore County Police Department and MHSO, organized four law enforcement-training workshops between May 2019 and February 2020 and trained over 100 officers from across the region/state on how to conduct pedestrian enforcement activations. Following each of these sessions were multiple waves of enforcement that resulted in positive media coverage, citations and warnings.
BMC is looking forward to working with MHSO and local partners in continuing the LOOK ALIVE campaign during the rest of the year and into 2021.
BMC staff works with stakeholders from member jurisdictions to support regional emergency preparedness programs coordinated through the Baltimore Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) and by the Baltimore Urban Area Homeland Security Work Group (UAWG).
In response to COVID-19, our emergency Preparedness team sprang into action to support local jurisdictions during the crisis.
COVID-19 has caused significant disruption to the food supply chain in our region, leaving many individuals in danger of going hungry. In response to this challenge, many local governments and non-profits in the region coordinated boxed lunch distribution sites to serve those in need. Persons deemed “food insecure” could include children and families, older adults and other residents who need access to free meals during the coronavirus outbreak. Our staff provided critical food distribution supply chain support to our region’s emergency management agencies in support of this effort.
Our planners provided resources to streamline assessment of food distribution locations and analyzed data to support identification and selection of sites. BMC also worked with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) to share food distribution efforts and strategies that were useful in the Baltimore UASI region. We also collaborated with each jurisdiction’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) within the Baltimore UASI region to work with their designated Food and Water Disaster Supply Chain point of contact to collect plans, templates, checklists, and knowledge sharing resources. We then disseminated these tools to local jurisdictions to aide in their food site selection processes.
Once the food sites were operational, BMC staff researched and shared Federal documents to help guide safe food distribution operations, and troubleshoot some of the issues that arose as food distributions efforts were implemented, such as funding, procurement, site assessment and local/ state coordination.
Beyond food distribution support, BMC provided data collection and reporting, along with resources and best practices in this unprecedented time. BMC staff:
- Collected data to create a GIS representation of the area covered by the food distribution efforts. This bird’s eye view offers an easy to read visual representation of coverage, helping local officials to assure they are reaching all areas in need.
- Supported local jurisdictions’ Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and emergency management activities through EOC brief outs, drive through testing site visits, and pop up testing site execution.
- Developed a Virtual Emergency Operations Center (EOC) Guidance document that reviews suggestions and considerations for implementing a virtual EOC.
- Shared best practices, lessons learned, and regional procurement opportunities between the UASI jurisdictions.
- Researched temporary medical staffing companies and procurement opportunities to support hospital surges.
- Facilitated UASI Emergency Management Directors calls to review current guidance, actions, and strategies for regional missions such as recovery planning in coordination with the Maryland Emergency Management Agency (MEMA).
The BMC emergency preparedness team will continue to support the Baltimore region through the COVID-19 outbreak, doing its part to move the region toward recovery.
As COVID-19 causes our workforce climate to shift from traditional brick and mortar offices and daily commutes, to virtual and telework options, working from home has quickly become the new standard.
Many organizations and professionals find the transition to this new norm challenging, primarily because of how quickly these shifts became necessary in response to the current health crisis.
BMC has gathered resources designed to help offices quickly develop and implement an effective telework program. These tools are available immediately for usage related to the current pandemic. They may also aid businesses in taking advantage of the long-term benefits associated with offering more permanent telework options.
Considering ongoing teleworking options beyond the pandemic offers benefits to both employers and employees. After implementing a telework program, organizations often report improved employee retention, reduced recruiting and training costs, improved productivity, reduced need for office space and reduced overhead as results. In addition, the reduction of cars on the road due to a decrease in daily commutes improves air quality for our region and beyond. There is value in considering long-term telework program offerings as temporary emergency options are established.
In light of the ongoing COVID-19 public health emergency, the Baltimore Metropolitan Council and its partners have decided to postpone Bike to Work Day 2020 (originally scheduled for May 15th) until this coming fall.
The health and safety of our participants and the community at large is our number one priority. While disappointing, this decision was necessary given the severity of this pandemic. The organizers will work to ensure that the rescheduled event is as fun, engaging and impactful as in years prior.
A reschedule date and registration procedures will be announced in the coming weeks. Please refer to biketoworkmd.com for updates.
Until that time, please follow the guidance of public health officials and stay safe.
By now, every household in the U.S. should have received an invitation to reply to the 2020 Census online, by phone or by mail.
Federal, state and local governments are encouraging responses from everyone in the U.S., including those deemed hard to count.
BMC’s GIS team developed an app that tracks 2020 Census self-response rates, based on Census Bureau data.
This app allows quick access to response rates by county and Census tract. It also allows users to click on layers, adjust transparency, search by address, view data tables, and create maps to print.
This app, best suited as a tool for government agencies, planners, and community activists, can assist in tracking Census participation by neighborhood. It allows users to identify low response rates as they develop, so community leaders can take early action to further encourage Census participation.
Updates to data for the app occur automatically each day to keep it current and will continue in this vein through Summer 2020, as the Census deadline approaches. After which, the app will stay in place to serve as a resource and reference point to review data and results. This may be useful in evaluating outreach strategies and results by neighborhood.
The app can be found here: https://arcg.is/1buC1f
For more information on the 2020 Census, please visit Census.Maryland.gov or 2020Census.gov.
The Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC) convened the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Group (BPAG) on Wednesday, January 15th. The purpose of the meeting was to hold elections for the advisory group chair and vice chair positions and to discuss the BPAG’s 2020 goals for the Baltimore Region and upcoming tasks and studies to be included in the FY 2021 update of the Unified Planning Work Program (UPWP). BPAG members also heard presentations from representatives of the Maryland Department of Transportation.
A state level overview of the Complete Streets program helped kick-off BPAG’s work program for 2020. Complete Streets are designed and operated to enable safe use and to support mobility for all users: people of all ages, abilities and modes whether traveling as pedestrians, bicyclists, micro mobility users, public transportation riders or drivers. MDOT is currently working on a state level to develop a Complete Streets policy that will define the approach for effective implementation of enhanced network connectivity, safety and access.
Details from MDOT’s new guide, Context Driven: Access & Mobility for All Users was also shared during the meeting. This Guide is a planning and design resource that offers practitioners new techniques and solutions to achieve safety, accessibility, and mobility goals framed by the surrounding land-use. This new approach accounts for the unique characteristics of different areas in Maryland that ultimately affect roadway design and resulting safety. The guide is not prescriptive, however it encourages up-to-date tools based on current community feedback, proven solutions rooted in the surrounding context, and flexibility to encourage innovation and community-specific solutions.
Following the presentations, the BPAG members discussed exciting bicycle and pedestrian activities happening in their jurisdictions including: bicycle and pedestrian master plan updates in Anne Arundel and Harford Counties; construction of new segments of the Broadneck Peninsula Trail in Anne Arundel County; funding for design of two segments of the 35-mile loop trail in Baltimore City; development of new trail mapping in Carroll County; a new website developed by Maryland Department of Planning and MDOT where users can gather data on Transit Oriented Development; and new bicycle and pedestrian grant application cycles through several MDOT initiatives.
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