The Trump administration closed a civil rights review of Gov. Larry Hogan’s decision two years ago to cancel Baltimore’s Red Line, drawing a rebuke Friday from a prominent Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.
In a letter this week to the Hogan administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation wrote that “the appropriate course of action is to administratively close the complaint, without finding.” The letter did not explain why the case was closed.
Hogan, a Republican, canceled the proposed 14-mile, $2.9 billion rail line in June 2015. He called the project — which would have run across Baltimore from Woodlawn to Bayview — a boondoggle. The state shifted the money that would have been spent in Baltimore to projects in other parts of the state that opponents note have higher concentrations of white residents.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union filed the complaint with the federal transportation department in 2015, alleging that the decision had a disparate impact on African-Americans in Baltimore. The Obama administration opened the review in early 2016.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by John Fritz over at the Baltimore Sun