Gov. Martin O’Malley heralded progress in the mammoth State Center project, saying construction crews will break ground at the long delayed office complex by the fall, Baltimore Sun colleague Annie Linskey reports.

In Baltimore Tuesday afternoon, the governor called the giant collection of parking lots and office buildings on the western edge of Mount Vernon a “concrete wasteland” that will be soon revamped with retail shopping area and housing anchored by a new grocery store.

“Neighborhoods have been separated by a giant dead zone,” said O’Malley. Hewing to a theme of his reelection campaign, O’Malley stressed that the project will create work: He promised 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 “ongoing permanent jobs.”

The State Center project, which was first conceived in 2004, when Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. was governor, is intended to revitalize a 26-acre area of the city that goes dark after 5 p.m. and on weekends, when state employees who work there leave for the day.

The project has been stalled in part because of its complexity — on Wednesday, the Board of Public Works will vote on only the first of five phases — but also because lead developer Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse dropped out as the economy soured.

The board is expected to approve a complex land deal Wednesday that will extend a 75-year lease for two parcels of land to the private development team State Center LLC. In return, the state will receive a 7 percent share of profits in addition to the lease payments, said Christopher Patusky, director of the Maryland Department of Transporation Office of Real Estate.