The Board of Public Works on Wednesday unanimously green-lighted work to begin on the $215 million first phase of a massive public-private partnership designed to revitalize central Baltimore, improve government office space and create jobs.

The revitalization of State Center project (rendering above) will give a boost to the ailing construction industry at a time when commercial development is hurting, and will cost state taxpayers little because of low interest rates and the risks borne by private developers.

Planning for the 28-acre area of outdated office buildings and surface parking lots next to Bolton Hill dates back to when Gov. Martin O’Malley, now chair of the Board of Public Works, was mayor of Baltimore.

Federal health care reform signed by President Obama this year is expected to save Maryland $829 million in 10 years, but those savings are expected to be wiped out by rising costs.

“I won’t sugarcoat it,” said Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown Monday in releasing a report on the impact of the health care changes. In a decade, “health expenditures in Maryland will exceed the $829 million in savings.”

The health care overhaul passed by Congress is also intended to reduce the ranks of the uninsured. Yet despite cutting the number of uninsured citizens in half, from 14% of Marylanders now to 7% in 2017, there will still be 415,000 uninsured Marylanders in seven years.

The correctional facilities in Jessup housing about 2,700 prisoners need to improve record keeping on finances and equipment, state auditors say.

A new report from the Office of Legislative Audits on the Jessup Region of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services – including a maximum security prison and a medium security prison for adult men – found that shoddy record keeping caused problems in fund and equipment balances.

While the findings did not indicate any major problems, Legislative Auditor Bruce Myers said that the correctional district still has some things to work on. “We’ve had other prisons that were certainly worse,” Myers said.

Is the person on the other side of that Facebook account really the candidate for senator or governor?

Voters hooked into Web 2.0 social media technologies will be able to find out easily under new emergency rules passed Tuesday by the General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Administrative, Executive, and Legislative Review.

The new set of rules, proposed by the State Board of Elections, requires that official candidate social media accounts – such as Facebook – and micro-blogs – such as Twitter – include prominent “authority lines” on their home pages that state the name of the campaign committee and treasurer. The rules also require that online campaign advertisements take people to “landing pages” that clearly feature authority lines.