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The creation of a voluntary registry of landlords willing to rent housing to people with mental illnesses who may also have criminal backgrounds was approved for recommendation to the General Assembly at a work session of the Joint Committee on Access to Mental Health Services Tuesday.

For people with mental illnesses, finding housing sometimes is about more than affordability. A second stumbling block occurs when landlords aren’t willing to rent to people with criminal records, said Lori Doyle, director of public policy at the Community Behavioral Health Association of Maryland.

A lot of the individuals with mental illness who are served by the agencies that make up the Community Behavioral Health Association have a criminal background, said Doyle.

But even if the criminal record involves something minor that occurred years ago, it can be the basis for a denial of housing, and more and more landlords are doing background checks and becoming more stringent about who they accept as tenants, Doyle said.

Providers of mental health services currently use informal methods of finding housing, such as keeping lists of places where they’ve previously had success placing people, she said. Because tenants are supported by providers, who develop relationships with landlords, the results of such relationships are often positive.

“It’s just getting in the door,” Doyle said.

A state registry would be a valuable resource to providers and those they serve by making it easier to find suitable housing, “rather than having to knock on 20 doors” trying to find landlords who are open to working with them, Doyle said.

- By Capital News Service’s Megan E. Gustafson.

Industrial facilities in Maryland dumped more than two million pounds of toxic chemicals into the Chesapeake Bay in 2007, according to a report released Wednesday by Environment Maryland, an advocacy group. It’s the first time in the last decade the amount of toxic chemicals has increased from one year to the next.

The report outlines possible adverse health effects from exposure to water or contaminated wildlife from the bay, ranging from reduced fertility to cancer. But Heath Kelsey, a scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said recently that bay water is only dangerous for 48 hours after a heavy rainstorm. Otherwise, the bacteria and pollutants are mostly harmless, he said.

Regardless of the safety aspect, the bay should have been free of toxic chemicals by 1985, according to the 1972 Clean Water Act. Tommy Landers, a field organizer with Environment Maryland said the goal now is to know exactly what is going into the bay and how it affects life in and around the waters. Most chemicals from facilities are untested and assumed harmless, he said.

“This clearly aggravates the already fragile state of the Chesapeake Bay,” said Landers. “Overall, we want to go from an innocent-until-proven-guilty mindset to a guilty-until-proven-innocent mindset.”

- By Capital News Service’s James B. Hale.