For a decade, a 50-foot-deep berth at Seagirt Marine Terminal has been on top of the wish list for Baltimore’s port. Good things — including 2,700 permanent jobs — must come to those who wait because it’s beginning to look at lot like Christmas has finally arrived in South Baltimore.

In a first-of-its-kind arrangement for the port, state officials have negotiated a contract to lease Seagirt to a private company, Ports America Chesapeake, for the next 50 years. In return, Ports America would build the much-anticipated berth at a cost of $105 million.

But wait, there’s more. The company has also agreed to invest $500 million to maintain and improve the terminal over time and to give the Maryland Transportation Authority (which has financed Seagirt’s development) $100 million once the deal is approved.

As Seagirt’s sole operator, Ports America would also make payments to the Maryland Port Administration depending on the volume of container traffic. The amount would increase once the volume hits 500,000 containers a year (from the current 350,000).

And in one more important trade-off in the deal, Ports America would surrender 65 acres at Dundalk Marine Terminal so the MPA could expand the importing of cars and trucks. Right now that potentially lucrative trade is at a roadblock because the port lacks sufficient space to temporarily park the vehicles.

The MPA has been looking for a public-private partnership deal for years, but this, at least at first glance, would seem to exceed expectations. In unveiling the arrangement Friday, Gov. Martin O’Malley envisioned it creating a total of 5,700 jobs. That includes the 3,000 temporary jobs made possible by construction at the port and on whatever projects the Transportation Authority chooses to pursue.

Just as importantly, the investment means the port can attract the much-anticipated massive container vessels made possible by upgrades to the Panama Canal that are expected to be completed by 2014. Baltimore’s shipping channel is deep enough to serve such mega-ships, but its current berths are not, nor are the existing cranes large enough to reach across their oversized decks.

Bigger ships mean lower shipping costs for trade from Asia to the East Coast (and then connected by rail to the Midwest). Baltimore is uniquely situated to take advantage of the opportunity. But financing the 50-foot berth through traditional means — the Maryland Transportation Trust Fund — was all but impossible given the competing highway and transit needs.

Still, there are risks involved, too. As trade grows, Ports America will be able to set licensing and stevedoring rates to the company’s advantage, for instance. The contract ended up attracting only one bidder, and the MPA has had to rely on outside experts to help negotiate the high-stakes arrangement.

Is it the best possible arrangement? Lawmakers have two weeks to review the details before the contract goes before Board of Public Works on Dec. 16.

Carefully scrutiny will be required, but prospects for the deal look good. The port’s work force, Maryland companies that depend on foreign trade, the local economy and taxpayers all stand to benefit from the new facility and the jobs that would be created. After such a brutal economic recession, that’s enough to make the holidays a bit happier all around.

The recommendation by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that mammograms not be given routinely to women under 50 and that the teaching of self-exams be de-emphasized has sparked a spirited debate among doctors, researchers, advocates and ordinary women. That’s a good thing. The questions of when such screenings are most effective and what benefits and risks they provide are too seldom considered in a medical culture that tends to assume more tests are always better. There are thousands of examples of women whose potentially deadly cancers were caught early because of mammograms, and many others in which women suffered unnecessary consequences ranging from anxiety to needless treatment because the tests raised false alarms. It’s a debate worth having.

But using that question of medicine and public health policy as a talking point to oppose reforms of the health care system that will result in vastly greater access to medical care for millions of people is nothing but scaremongering. Opponents of President Obama’s effort to reform the nation’s health care system, from conservatives in Congress to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, are ominously pointing to this recommendation by a previously obscure panel as proof positive that health reform will result in the rationing of care and that people will die as government bureaucrats scramble to cut costs.

This line of reasoning ignores the fact that rationing already exists in the American medical system. Millions of low- and middle-income women are rationed out of mammograms because they lack health insurance. Others find treatment for breast cancer rationed by insurance company bureaucrats who scramble to increase profits by denying coverage, sometimes on the flimsiest of pretexts. And the extent to which private insurance companies now offer coverage for screening tests is often determined by state mandates that they do so. Those mandates, incidentally, are also something many conservatives oppose; when they talk about allowing the sale of health insurance across state lines, what they mean is that they would like people to be able to purchase lowest-common-denominator policies from states that take a minimalist view on what kinds of tests, procedures and treatments ought to be covered. (According to the New York Times, all states except Utah require mammogram coverage for women in their 40s.)

What’s getting lost is any serious discussion of a set of recommendations that even those making them acknowledge are a difficult call. The task force studied new data from England and Sweden and found that the risks associated with breast cancer screening are much higher for women in their 40s but the chance of detecting cancer is much lower, making for a lopsided risk/reward ratio. Seven years ago, when the same panel recommended mammograms for women under 50 and that screenings be given annually, as opposed to once every two years, members said that, too, was a tough call. We seem stuck in a place where no data is likely to tip the scales conclusively to one side or another. That suggests we need to put resources into developing new, more accurate screening techniques that offer greater benefits at less risk of harm. That would be the proper response to these findings, not a set of politically motivated attacks.

The economic downturn that has caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs, homes and sense of financial well-being has also produced a dramatic increase in the number of people who go to bed hungry at night. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last week that nearly 50 million Americans -- including almost a quarter of the nation’s children -- lacked consistent access to enough to eat in 2008. That was the highest figure recorded since the department began keeping such statistics in 1995.

In Maryland, by most measures the one of the wealthiest states in country, as many as 456,000 residents are at risk of hunger for at least part of the year, according to the Maryland Food Bank, which collects and distributes foodstuffs to needy families and individuals.

Food bank officials say that 205,000 children and 73,000 senior citizens in Maryland are at risk, and that the USDA statistics are already a fact of life for workers at local food pantries and soup kitchens: Since the recession began, demand for such services has gone up 50 percent in some areas, with the biggest increases coming among the working poor and the newly unemployed, many of whom would have been considered middle class just a year ago.

At the same time, the recession has wreaked havoc on donations from food producers and private individuals. This year food bank officials began renting trucks to haul foodstuffs from as far away as Rochester, N.Y., after local supplies fell short. They’ve also revived a classic strategy of the poor: Asking farmers to let them collect the gleanings from a field after the harvest comes in.

Even so, charitable groups are having a hard time keeping up. Demand is growing fastest in Baltimore County and in Kent County on the Eastern Shore. Meanwhile, there’s persistent need in Baltimore City and in the state’s rural areas. Last year the food bank distributed some 18.6 million pounds of food across the state, and that was only enough to satisfy a fraction of the need. Officials estimate the food bank would have to distribute nearly 80 million pounds of foodstuff a year to end hunger in Maryland.

Such programs are an enormously effective use of limited funds. Every dollar donated to the food bank buys three pounds of foodstuffs, and every five-dollar contribution pays for two week’s worth of school lunches.

Still, the need is profound, despite the fact that in a state as affluent as Maryland it often goes unrecognized. Yet for those willing to see, it’s as close as the face of the child sitting next to yours in school, as familiar as the laid-off worker next door or the elderly neighbor forced to choose between the paying the electric bill and buying groceries.

There have been days this year when the Maryland Food Bank closed to volunteers at 11 a.m. because it was already out of food for them to sort and pack. It’s a reminder that while the holidays traditionally are the busiest time of year for charitable groups, hunger never takes a holiday. We hope Marylanders will remember the state’s neediest in their holiday giving this season, as well as the fact that the need will still be there long after the holidays have passed.

Baltimore, long a center of African-American culture on the East Coast, is a natural home for the region's first Negro League Baseball museum, and from a historical perspective, the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor is the perfect place to put it. That area was the center of black culture in Baltimore for decades, and the plan moving forward with the city's blessing calls for the museum to be built next to a refurbished Sphinx Club, which once played host to the likes of Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway.

From a marketing perspective, though, the location is a bit of a risk. Dedicated community members are working to revitalize the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor, but it is most certainly a work in the early stages of progress. A Negro League museum downtown, near Camden Yards, the Sports Legends Museum and the Babe Ruth House Museum, would be a guaranteed smash hit, but getting tourists up to Pennsylvania Avenue, which never recovered after the riots of the late 1960s, is going to take some work. We hope that this development, along with the recent reforms in Baltimore's live music regulations, could help restore the area to its former glory, but for that to happen, the city will need to expand its commitment to the area and enlist marketing partners such as the Orioles to make sure this museum is a success.

(Looking for the poll on this topic? Click here.)

When Gov. Martin O’Malley brought his latest package of budget cuts to the Board of Public Works on Wednesday, some of the loudest objections came from Maryland’s private colleges and universities, which faced a $9 million reduction in the funding they have traditionally received to help pay for financial aid for Maryland students and to support educational programs that public universities don’t offer. They succeeded in knocking the cut to what is known as the Sellinger program down to $7 million, but even that, college officials say, is an extreme hardship. The recession is squeezing families’ finances and forcing students to seek more financial aid than ever at a time when college endowments have taken a beating, and the drop in state aid will only exacerbate a bad situation.

Even so, Gov. Martin O’Malley was perfectly justified under the circumstances in reducing the flow of state funds to private institutions. He has cut more than $1 billion from this year’s operating budget, affecting the operation of every state agency. Drug addiction treatment, mental health care, social services, assisted living for seniors, HIV prevention and homeless services were all cut in this round of budget reductions alone. The private colleges are lucky they didn’t fare worse.

According to an analysis by the Department of Legislative Services, Maryland has historically funded private colleges and universities more generously than any other state, both in terms of the percentage of the state budget devoted to them and in raw dollar terms. Under state law, Maryland is supposed to give private colleges and universities 16 percent of what it would spend on an equivalent number of students at a public university, though that standard hasn’t been met in recent years. If Sellinger were fully funded, it would amount to $66 million this year.

Only 14 states provide any money at all to private colleges, and only two states with which Maryland competes economically — New York and New Jersey — provide money through a formula like Maryland’s. Most just support specific programs that public institutions don’t offer in those states. In fiscal 2007, the most recent year for which Department of Legislative Services statistics were available, Maryland spent 3.4 percent of its higher education budget on private institutions. Pennsylvania was the nearest competitor at just 2.2 percent.

Still, there is a reason Maryland supports private institutions of higher education. When the state comes out of this recession, it should look carefully at all of the things that were cut to find ones that need not be restored. But Sellinger funds shouldn’t be one of them. About 80 percent of the money goes toward financial aid, which is limited to Maryland residents. Helping pay for more Maryland students to stay in state for college is an excellent investment; the $38 million in remaining Sellinger funding probably does as much to help secure Maryland’s economic future as anything the Department of Business and Economic Development does with its nearly $100 million budget.

Maryland has concluded that it should focus its economic development efforts on biotechnology, research, medicine, engineering, computer science and other high-tech fields that take advantage of our already highly educated work force. We may not be able to afford it now, but in the years to come, the state needs to maintain and expand its investments in higher education — including aid to private colleges — if that strategy is to succeed.

Correction: An earlier version of this editorial included an incorrect figure for the budget of the Department of Business and Economic Development. The Sun regrets the error.

Now that the prosecution and defense have rested in Mayor Sheila Dixon's trial on charges she stole gift cards meant for the poor, at least one thing is certain: The case has painted an unflattering picture of how charity is handled at City Hall. Let's look at some of the facts not in dispute:

Mayor Dixon called developer Patrick Turner, whose projects benefit from millions in city tax breaks, and asked him to donate gift cards for her to give away to city children. He bought the cards and had them sent to City Hall. Some of them ended up being used by the mayor for her personal use. Her attorney claims they arrived in an unmarked envelope, and she didn't realize they were from Mr. Turner. Of course, she never followed up to find out whether Mr. Turner had sent in the cards, and never acknowledged them in any of the times they've seen each other since. (Mr. Turner said on the stand that she may have sent a thank-you note, but he's not sure.) Yet, a year later, when she called Mr. Turner to make the same request again, he immediately got one of his business partners to comply.

Every year, Mayor Dixon and other city officials conduct a Holly Trolley tour of the city in which they drive to poor neighborhoods and hand out gift cards to the people they meet there, whether they're needy or not. Stacks of gift cards purchased with city funds were handed to Mayor Dixon and others to distribute with no way of knowing whether they actually wound up in the hands of city residents or, as prosecutors discovered, in a Victoria's Secret bag in the mayor's house.

In at least one case, a city employee who helped run the Holly Trolley tour did succumb to the temptation of all those gift cards. Lindbergh Carpenter Jr., an assistant housing commissioner who helped organize the Holly Trolley, had about 20 Toys "R" Us gift cards left over after the event. He returned them to his office safe but, later, took some of them to purchase a Nintendo Wii. Had state prosecutors not been investigating Mayor Dixon, his theft would likely have never been discovered. He pleaded guilty and lost his job and is still unemployed.

If the mayor wants to augment the municipal charity with private funds, she needs a much more transparent system than calling up people with millions at stake in business with the city and expecting envelopes of gift cards to show up at her office. How could Mr. Turner, whose Westport project is receiving the largest tax incentive Baltimore has ever approved, say no to the woman with the sole power to make or break the deal? How can the public be assured that the mayor is making decisions about developments and tax breaks based on their merits if she is requesting and receiving thousands of dollars in plastic from the people proposing them? Even if she never used gift cards intended for charity for her personal use, she certainly gets political benefits from playing Santa Claus on the back of the Holly Trolley.

Solicitations like this need to be handled with an arm's length distance between the mayor and people who might do business with the city. They need to be subjected to proper accounting rules and public disclosure through a recognized charitable organization. (We would suggest the Baltimore City Foundation if not for The Sun's report last month exposing inexcusably lax financial controls there, too.)

No matter what decision the jury makes on the question of Mayor Dixon's legal culpability, the public needs to render a verdict on the sloppy way business is conducted at City Hall.

It's hard to decide which is worse: the notion that dozens of Baltimore City parking lots might not be paying the taxes they owe, or the fact that the city is so disorganized that it's not sure whether they are.

Sun reporter Julie Scharper reported today on a preliminary audit of tax records showing that city workers were unable to find records of tax payments in a city database for 52 parking lots that were advertised online or elsewhere or which they found on walking tours of the city. Are they scofflaws and tax cheats? Maybe, maybe not. Auditors say the lots may be paying the taxes and having them credited to different addresses or different accounts. More than 100 other lots that are listed as inactive might be skipping taxes, or they might now have buildings on them. The city doesn't know, and at a time when government workers are losing their jobs, services are being cut back and municipal offices are being closed for furlough days, that's simply unacceptable.

If there are two groups of people held in disregard these days it’s anyone who works for an insurance company or the government. That makes those employed by the Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund, the state’s quasi-public auto insurer of last resort, something of a two-fer in the public’s eye.

One can only imagine that reaction of people when the term, "bonus," is tossed in there, too. But that’s what happened recently when state legislative auditors chided MAIF for rewriting bonus plan rules in the middle of 2008 so its workers could remain eligible for $1.4 million in end-of-year pay-outs.

What happened exactly? For years, MAIF has operated an employee incentive plan, something made possible because the organization is not truly a state agency but is funded entirely by insurance premiums. Drivers come to MAIF when they’ve been turned down by private companies either because they have a bad driving record or a poor financial one.

The theory is that MAIF can operate more like a private company. When it does well, the employees get a modest boost – the average MAIF salary last year was $57,500 and the average bonus $3,400.

But how to measure performance to justify the incentive payments? That’s the rub. MAIF doesn’t turn a profit so it’s used two major criteria in recently years – surveys that monitor customer satisfaction and the organization’s financial posture as measured by its expenses compared to receipts. If employees find ways to reduce expenses and improve efficiency, the theory went, that ratio usually improves.

That’s fine in a normal year but 2008 proved far from average. MAIF’s financial situation worsened as the economy slid into recession. That obviously had little, if anything, to do with employee performance and much more to do with fewer people buying MAIF policies and rising costs of claims.

By mid-year, MAIF’s board saw that the bonus criteria was unrealistic and decided to change it. In doing so, they clearly ignored the plight of the state budget which was simultaneously in the process of substantial reductions and employee furloughs.

But so what? If MAIF is truly independent, that shouldn’t matter. Yet at the request of the O’Malley administration, MAIF made furloughs, too. And that was kind of silly since salary reductions at MAIF don’t provide one thin dime to the state treasury, only less in state taxes collected from MAIF employees who had their salaries cut.

This year, the matter is moot as the legislature instructed MAIF not to offer bonuses of any kind. So much for independence.

Admittedly, bonuses may not be the best way to compensate employees, particularly at a non-profit. When MAIF has to tap its reserve funds (as last year’s $20 million shortfall required), it may reflect more on the cyclical nature of the business than employee performance but it’s not exactly a positive indicator either.

The most expensive bonus paid out last year was the $13,000 given to MAIF’s executive director. That’s a lot less than the private industry standard regardless of the earnings situation. If the General Assembly wants MAIF to be run like a private company, lawmakers can’t be terribly shocked when it acts like one.

For those who may have missed it last week, Mr. Steele decided to drop abortion coverage from the health insurance plan covering RNC employees. Apparently, the health plan has covered abortion as an elective procedure since 1991. That struck the former Catholic seminarian as an inappropriate use of "money from our loyal donors."

Perhaps, but that puts the party in a peculiar moral quandry. What other sacrifices will RNC employees be required to make? Must they all attend a certain church? Are they banned from donating money to stem-cell research? One assumes benefits for same-sex partners is pretty much out of the question.

For all the talk of broadening membership in the GOP, Mr. Steele seems more interested in a stricter adherence to a narrow political faith. And he's headed down a very exclusive path -- only five states restrict private health coverage of abortion.

But denying such coverage to their own employees suggests the GOP finds leaving the abortion question to women too abhorent to contemplate. That's not a good way to attract young women to the ranks.

Now, the question is to what other medical procedures might donors object? Genetics testing? In utero fertility treatments? Birth control pills? The GOP would likely be better off simply by choosing to offer benefits competitive with other DC-based employers and chalk it up to the free market. But, of course, that would be heresy.

Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian federal court in New York raises many potential pitfalls, such as whether interrogators' use of waterboarding will taint too much evidence and whether trying the case in open court will reveal too much classified material. But the argument that emerged over the weekend from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and others that trial would put New York at too great a risk from retaliatory terrorist attacks is the worst possible reason not to seek justice in court. The moment we allow an imagined threat to dictate how our criminal justice system operates is the moment we surrender to terrorism.

Our precedent in handling terrorism cases, such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, is that we try them in federal court. In particular, the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York has the most experience in such matters, making New York a natural choice for this trial. The move during the Bush years to treat terrorism cases as military matters, to be handled off U.S. soil and in secret, was part of a dangerous miscalculation that we could trade away a portion of our civil guarantees to justice and the rule of law in exchange for security. Proponents of that point of view tended to argue that Islamic extremists wanted to destroy our values -- and then immediately to bargain them away, through everything from torture at Guantanamo Bay to warrantless wiretaps.

Mr. Holder's decision is a crucial step in restoring our credibility in the world. There is no greater blow we can strike against extremists than to demonstrate the power of our open, fair and transparent criminal justice system.

Carbon monoxide poisoning killed three members of the Wiley family in July 2005 after the colorless, odorless gas built up to astronomical levels in their Eastern Baltimore County rental home in the Cove Village complex, apparently as a result of faulty installation of the unit's furnace or other appliances. It's not so surprising, then, that immediately after Cove Village management installed carbon monoxide detectors in all the other homes in the complex that firefighters got a string of false alarms from nervous residents.

What's harder to figure is that more than four years later, after Sawyer Realty Holdings LLC, the College Park-based company that owns the complex, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to correct problems in the homes, the number of elevated carbon monoxide readings there -- including the most serious kind -- is higher than ever in 2009. Sun reporters Robert Little and Nick Madigan reported in Sunday's edition that county officials have found elevated CO levels 39 times so far this year, up from 20 last year. In fact, in the years since the Wileys' deaths, the number of false alarms has steadily dropped and the number excessive or potentially lethal readings has been on the rise.

According to the investigation by Little and Madigan, Sawyer officials have completed complex-wide improvements to address most, though not all, of the problems that likely contributed to the Wileys' deaths, and the company deserves credit for that. But its efforts belie its initial unwillingness to act sooner on many of the problems with the installation and venting of furnaces and hot water heaters that were found by a consultant hired by attorneys for the Wiley family as part of a lawsuit that Sawyer settled out of court in 2007. The company has acted defensively on this point, saying it won't use findings by plaintiffs in a lawsuit as a roadmap for its conduct. But if it had done so in 2005, when it was first briefed on the problems, how many hospitalizations, evacuations and calls to the fire department could have been avoided?

County officials, too, could have acted sooner, and they need to think carefully about what they did and did not detect about the problems in Cove Village. This summer, county permit officials beame fed up with the persistent problems at the complex and threatened to shut down the entire complex. A subsequent sweep of the complex by county officials and Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. technicians found 20 of this year's 39 elevated readings, begging the question of how many elevated levels were still going unreported. Sawyer has made more improvements and replaced more appliances since then, but at least two elevated readings have been made since the summer, including one last week. Permits and Development Manager Timothy Kotroco acknowledged that the county could have acted sooner if it had studied the records of carbon monoxide alarms more closely.

County Executive James T. Smith Jr. is introducing legislation at tonight's County Council meeting to require carbon monoxide detectors in every rental property in Baltimore County. Given the danger posed by buildups of the gas, it makes just as much sense as requiring fire alarms in every home, perhaps even more so given that the gas may not be apparent to residents until it's too late. But if thousands of new detectors are going to be instaled, the county needs to develop a robust system for tracking the alarms and looking for patterns. Fire officials say the number of carbon monoxide calls countywide has been on the rise in recent years, and in some cases, firefighters found potentially lethal levels of the gas. The county needs to make sure it can track patterns of carbon monoxide alerts and spot problems before they turn deadly.