JAYMI STERLING: Good morning. Thank you for being here. I’m Jaymi Sterling, assistant attorney. It was my honor to serve alongside such an exceptional group of experts. These advocates and I served on the Maryland Asian American Hate Crimes Workgroup. This is a passionate group of leaders who represent a diverse cross‑section of our state.
In just a moment I’m going to turn it over to our chairman, former U.S. attorney Rob Hur, but first I would like to introduce my fellow workgroup members joining the governor and first lady today.
Pastor Daniel Beck, Bethel Korean Presbyterian church since 2015.
Latisha Bar, teacher in the Montgomery County public schools serving on the educational advisory board for responsibility.org.
Dr. Eugenia Henry, founder of president of H²O clinical LLC, a company that performs data management and statistics for clinical trials. Currently serves as commissioner representing Baltimore County on the Maryland Commission of Women. Captain Jeffrey Clobber, 24‑year veteran with the Maryland State Police. Currently serves as the commander of the criminal intelligence section and deputy director of the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center.
Shawn Park, director of congressional affairs for Microsoft Corporation and a former assistant United States attorney.
Lynn Colistzer worked in medical management at Med Star Georgetown University Hospital and several private practices.
I would like to acknowledge contributions of the members who could not be here today.
The president of the national Asian Pacific Islander American Chamber of Commerce in entrepreneurship, founding president of the international leadership foundation. Officer first‑class of the Howard County police department. Marcus Wong, co‑founder of the cytogenetic global genetics institute and member of the Maryland healthcare commission. And Professor Janell Wong, University of Maryland College Park.
Asian Americans across this country are under attack. Physically and emotionally. The women and men who have had the courage to come forward and share their stories deserve to be heard. Just talking about these challenges and bringing them out in the open is so important. But we want the victim of these crimes to know, we see you. We hear you. And we are here and we’re standing with you.
With that, I would like to turn it over to Rob.
ROB HUR: Thank you very much, Jaymi.
Good morning, everyone. I am so grateful to Governor Hogan and the first lady for focusing attention on the important issue of the bias and violence against members of the Asian American community in our nation. And I’m also so thankful for the opportunity to be part of the solution. As the governor and first lady had made clear, attention to these issues is not enough. To make things better, to reduce ignorance and hate, we need concrete action that is informed by careful thought, analysis and c of different perspectives. That was the charge that Governor Hogan gave to me and fellow workgroup members to present concrete recommendations for him to consider. And the initial steps you will hear about today are just the first fruits of the governor’s commitment to action. I have been privileged to work with and learn from the members of the workgroup. They brought invaluable experience and perspectives from academia, business, both large and small, education, to create community and law enforcement. I thank each and every one of them for their inspiring dedication to the task.
Now, as a group, we can meet a dozen times since May. to study and discuss different sets of potential recommendations and solutions. As the governor asked, the workgroup leveraged our members extensive range of expertise, and developed recommendations in a wide span of subject matter areas, including data, tracking anti‑Asian incidence and crimes, education, law enforcement, outreach and media, grants, and the business community.
The workgroup’s recommendation served as a catalyst and starting point for the governor’s actions today. And we are proud to have contributed to this process.
After considering the workgroup’s recommendations and consulting with his own advisers and policy team, the governor decided upon the initial actions he’s announcing today. Now, I emphasize initial actions, because issues like this one require sustained effort and commitment to achieve real and lasting change. And I’m confident that the governor and his team will continue to build on the momentum that we see here today.
I also want to note that the work ahead is not just for government and our elected leaders. Government has an important role, of course, but it’s on all of us to educate, inspire, discuss, and progress. I am particularly heartened by the work being done by non‑profit organizations, including the Asian American foundation, which First Lady Hogan helps to lead as a member of the advisory council, stop AA hate. And Asian American justice, pro bono initiate that provides free legal services for victims of anti‑Asian hate. Step by step we will work together to make Maryland and our nation a safer and more tolerant and more respectful place for all.
At this time, it’s my pleasure to turn it over to Governor Larry Hogan.
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Good morning. Thank you very much, Rob. I want to sincerely thank you for serving as the chairman of the Asian American Hate Crimes Work Group and spearheading this important undertaking. I want to thank two people who inspired this effort, my prosecutor daughter Jaymi, who was our emcee this morning, and the First lady. It was actually Jaymi’s idea to create this workgroup to address the alarming rise of racist rhetoric, vitriol and harassment against Asian Americans. And Maryland’s first lady has become a national and global voice, bravely and forcefully speaking out about the crisis. I’m proud of her passion, courage, and dedication. Also I want to sincerely thank all the members of the workgroup for agreeing to serve on this important mission in such a critical time. And this was a workgroup that really put in a lot of hard work. They came up with some real suggestions for solutions.
Nearly one‑third of all Asian Americans say that they have experienced some type of discrimination since the beginning of the COVID‑19 pandemic last year. In Maryland, hate groups ‑‑ hate crimes targeting Asian Americans have more than doubled since 2018. And they rose by 150% nationwide just last year.
In April, I announced the creation of this Asian American Hate Crimes workgroup, which I believe is the first of its kind in the nation, and as Chairman Hur just laid out, their hard work over the past seven months have culminated in a thorough set of recommendations to address the rise in anti‑Asian activity and prevent acts of violence and to support victims and witnesses.
Today we’re announcing a series of immediate statewide actions to combat incidents of hate and bias against Asian Americans and to empower victims to fall into three main categories. Enhanced safety and effectiveness measures, increased access to community resources, and additional tools for educators and students. First to enhance enforcement efforts across the state, we’re going to update hate and biased training for law enforcement agencies to include reporting procedures for incidents of hate and bias as well as hate crimes.
To encourage further cooperation between the Asian American community and law enforcement, we are designating a Maryland State Police commander to act as a liaison for hate crimes and racially biased incidents and launching a partnership between the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center and the governor’s Office of Community Initiatives, to share data on these incidents. To promote diversity in the police force, we’re encouraging law enforcement to prioritize recruiting commensurate with the population served and offer incentives for recruits that speak multiple languages. To help police officers communicate more effectively with members of the Asian American community, we are also providing $1 million in the new grant funding to the governor’s office of crime, prevention, youth and victim services to fund translation and app‑enabled devices for law enforcement and victims services organizations. And we will be calling on Attorney General Garland at the U.S. Justice Department to issue clear guidance to the states on the federal COVID‑19 Hate Crimes Act. The second series of actions will ramp up the community resources available to Asian Americans in Maryland. We will increase protecting against hate crimes funding from 3 million to $5 million, and we will direct the governor’s Commission on Asian Pacific American affairs to conduct outreach and aggressively publicize the availability of funds to the Asian American community. Because too many incidents continue to go unreported and unpunished, we’re publishing “How to Report Hate Crimes and Incidents” document, which will be available in Asian languages, and which will be widely distributed to community members and posted online. We also will utilize 2‑1‑1 Maryland for the reporting of hate and bias incidents and provide information about services and resources in Asian languages. Early this morning we launched an integrated full service website, which links to dozens of critical national state and local resources, as well as a comprehensive collection of important information for the Asian American community. This is now available at governor.Maryland.gov /resource center.
It will create a pilot program to develop alternative reporting channels for victims of hate or bias incidents, including community centers, nonprofits and churches, with plans for statewide distribution and American job centers. The third set of actions we announcing today will empower educators and students across the state to reach Asian American communities and encourage reporting to law enforcement, we are directing the Maryland Center for School Safety to develop new resources for educators, parents and students on how to report and identify a hate and bias incident.
We will provide education resources for teachers and members of the public, which will be available on the workgroup website. We’re tasking the Maryland State Department of Education with developing continuing professional development course offerings for Maryland teachers on Asian American history. And the governor’s office will be working with our university system to explore potential scholarships and fellowships through the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland to encourage Asian American participation in journalism. Our Asian American community has faced challenges worse than they have seen in decades. The actions we’re announcing today at the beginning, we will use every tool at our disposal to help provide additional protection to those who are impacted by these crimes.
In closing, I want to again express my sincere appreciation to Robert Hur and all of the members of the Asian American Hate Crimes. And I’m calling to leaders across the country in both public and private sectors and across the political spectrum to use their voices to speak out clearly and forcefully to condemn attacks against the Asian American community.
But words are not enough, which is why today we’re turning words into real passion. Thank you and with that we are happy to take questions.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: It certainly has gotten much worse over the past year, the past couple years, and I guess the hope and the desire of all the folks who have been working is that we can try to take steps that will keep it from getting worse and hopefully make it better. Anybody else?
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Let’s just wait and see if anybody has on topic questions for either Chairman Hur or myself on this topic and then I’ll be happy to come back on infrastructure.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
SPEAKER: Well, there are a number of different aspects to getting an accurate sense of how bad the problem is. The first is to take a look at the data nationwide. And if you look at that, numerous sources, including official law enforcement statistics, survey data of the Asian American communities across the nation have seen a very significant increase in number of hate crimes and hate‑based incidents since 2019. And so nationally there is certainly an increase. And if you narrow the scope down to Maryland, we also have seen a similar increase if you look at the data for 2019 to 2020. Now, the data so far for 2021 are still incomplete. If you look at the trajectory, we look on a trajectory for a slight decrease this year, depending on how the data is going to pan out. But the data from 2019 to 2021 so significant increase in the state of Maryland. And that is added focus in particular parts of the state where it’s more of a critical mass of significant size in the community, including Howard County and Montgomery County. That’s really where the incidents, according to statistics kept by Maryland State Police are focused. But it’s a problem. And so looking at it in terms of the statistics is one lens to look at it through, but also anecdotally. In today’s day and age, cell phone videos capture things that decades ago we could not have seen. And so we have seen since the beginning of the pandemic very, very powerful video of victims, oftentimes elderly in broad daylight getting attacked brutally and senselessly. That is part of the reality that we live in today and it’s also part of the way that we all perceive these issues and part of why the workgroup members behind me, we were so passionate in responding to the governor’s call to help him figure out solutions to this problem.
SPEAKER: Any other questions?
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
SPEAKER: First of all, as you know, this is something we have been focused on for a long time. Not only the past seven years have we been making progress on infrastructure in the state, but 2019 when I became chairman of the National Governors Association, we started an initiate on rebuilding America’s infrastructure. We came up with a set of recommendations agreed to by all the governors which we submitted to former and current president, former and current Secretary of Transportation. Almost all of that is included in this current infrastructure bill. As you know, I hosted a summit here in April where we brought together Democratic and Republican governors, senators and congressmen and crafted and arrived at the size and scope of this bill. It truly is a bipartisan bill on something we’ve been talking about fixing for decades, and I was happy to be part of it. And I’ll be at the White House later for the bill signing. This was not Republican versus Democrats. This was critically important to the nation that we came together on and got done and passed overwhelmingly with 69 votes in the Senate and happy to have the president on board and happy to get Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate to work together. That rarely ever happens.
I think it’s going to mean a lot not just for Maryland but the rest of the country and help us put more bridges and roads and tunnels and airports into broadband and into cybersecurity defenses and a lot of things that we pushed for. It includes public private partnerships that we’ve been championing. We had the largest transit project in North America under construction and approved the larger P3 highway project in the country. So really very happy to be moving forward on this. We believe that potentially we don’t have the final numbers on timing and how much, but we believe it’s going to mean about $6 billion to state of Maryland and will enable to ‑‑ and we already invested tons in both roads and bridges and tunnels, but this is going to help us get to some of the projects that we had not yet been able to do and/or help us move at a faster pace than we planned to do. So we’re very pleased.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: They’re going to continue to see massive increases in our transportation infrastructure and they’re going to see, you know, be able to finish out the final remaining broadband across the state so that every single person is going to have access to high speed Internet. But for us, you know, we’re moving forward on the Howard Street Tunnel, doubling production, double stacking trains, we already dredged the depth to 50 feet. We were with the president last week there talking about the successes we have had. We’re going to continue to build roads. We’re going to continue to invest in transit and we’re going to move ‑‑ put a lot of people to work and turn the economy around.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: You know, very focused on this problem for seven years, and from afar here, we’re doing everything we possibly can to fix the problem, but it really is going to take immediate action by the leaders in Baltimore to try to solve those problems. The basic problem we discussed is that we’re not arresting enough people, we’re not prosecuting them, and we’re not taking them off the streets. So we have repeatedly over and over again introduced legislation to do something about that. Two years ago we passed through the Senate and the House failed to act. We continually try to press the leaders involved in our city to take more action. We have invested in the state, accept state resources into the system, and we still have a problem with a prosecutor that doesn’t want to prosecute crime and offenders continue to shoot people over and over again on the streets of Baltimore. And so I don’t know if that’s going to get solved by the weekend. They are going to have ‑‑ we see it every week. You know, we have an off‑duty police officer who had to fire his gun after people came and started shooting in the barber shop. We had a priest walking down the street in the middle of broad daylight and accosted.
We have to get to the bottom of it. Not happening in the rest of the state. Baltimore city. They have to take some responsibility. So we try to assist them in every way we can. Anybody else?
Thank you all… I’m sorry.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I’m sorry, the citation?
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I don’t really have an update. For those unfamiliar, there were some people that were copying governor citations and handing them out. It certainly is something that we’ll be looking into it, but I don’t have an update on that. We’re happy to provide governor citations repeatedly for people that do good things in the community, and it’s really a ceremonial thing to recognize good hard work, like the members of this workgroup, serve citations to thank them for their effort. But I’m not sure who was printing the governor citations and why, but it’s a problem. I don’t know any more details about that.
Thank you.
In just a moment I’m going to turn it over to our chairman, former U.S. attorney Rob Hur, but first I would like to introduce my fellow workgroup members joining the governor and first lady today.
Pastor Daniel Beck, Bethel Korean Presbyterian church since 2015.
Latisha Bar, teacher in the Montgomery County public schools serving on the educational advisory board for responsibility.org.
Dr. Eugenia Henry, founder of president of H²O clinical LLC, a company that performs data management and statistics for clinical trials. Currently serves as commissioner representing Baltimore County on the Maryland Commission of Women. Captain Jeffrey Clobber, 24‑year veteran with the Maryland State Police. Currently serves as the commander of the criminal intelligence section and deputy director of the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center.
Shawn Park, director of congressional affairs for Microsoft Corporation and a former assistant United States attorney.
Lynn Colistzer worked in medical management at Med Star Georgetown University Hospital and several private practices.
I would like to acknowledge contributions of the members who could not be here today.
The president of the national Asian Pacific Islander American Chamber of Commerce in entrepreneurship, founding president of the international leadership foundation. Officer first‑class of the Howard County police department. Marcus Wong, co‑founder of the cytogenetic global genetics institute and member of the Maryland healthcare commission. And Professor Janell Wong, University of Maryland College Park.
Asian Americans across this country are under attack. Physically and emotionally. The women and men who have had the courage to come forward and share their stories deserve to be heard. Just talking about these challenges and bringing them out in the open is so important. But we want the victim of these crimes to know, we see you. We hear you. And we are here and we’re standing with you.
With that, I would like to turn it over to Rob.
ROB HUR: Thank you very much, Jaymi.
Good morning, everyone. I am so grateful to Governor Hogan and the first lady for focusing attention on the important issue of the bias and violence against members of the Asian American community in our nation. And I’m also so thankful for the opportunity to be part of the solution. As the governor and first lady had made clear, attention to these issues is not enough. To make things better, to reduce ignorance and hate, we need concrete action that is informed by careful thought, analysis and c of different perspectives. That was the charge that Governor Hogan gave to me and fellow workgroup members to present concrete recommendations for him to consider. And the initial steps you will hear about today are just the first fruits of the governor’s commitment to action. I have been privileged to work with and learn from the members of the workgroup. They brought invaluable experience and perspectives from academia, business, both large and small, education, to create community and law enforcement. I thank each and every one of them for their inspiring dedication to the task.
Now, as a group, we can meet a dozen times since May. to study and discuss different sets of potential recommendations and solutions. As the governor asked, the workgroup leveraged our members extensive range of expertise, and developed recommendations in a wide span of subject matter areas, including data, tracking anti‑Asian incidence and crimes, education, law enforcement, outreach and media, grants, and the business community.
The workgroup’s recommendation served as a catalyst and starting point for the governor’s actions today. And we are proud to have contributed to this process.
After considering the workgroup’s recommendations and consulting with his own advisers and policy team, the governor decided upon the initial actions he’s announcing today. Now, I emphasize initial actions, because issues like this one require sustained effort and commitment to achieve real and lasting change. And I’m confident that the governor and his team will continue to build on the momentum that we see here today.
I also want to note that the work ahead is not just for government and our elected leaders. Government has an important role, of course, but it’s on all of us to educate, inspire, discuss, and progress. I am particularly heartened by the work being done by non‑profit organizations, including the Asian American foundation, which First Lady Hogan helps to lead as a member of the advisory council, stop AA hate. And Asian American justice, pro bono initiate that provides free legal services for victims of anti‑Asian hate. Step by step we will work together to make Maryland and our nation a safer and more tolerant and more respectful place for all.
At this time, it’s my pleasure to turn it over to Governor Larry Hogan.
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Good morning. Thank you very much, Rob. I want to sincerely thank you for serving as the chairman of the Asian American Hate Crimes Work Group and spearheading this important undertaking. I want to thank two people who inspired this effort, my prosecutor daughter Jaymi, who was our emcee this morning, and the First lady. It was actually Jaymi’s idea to create this workgroup to address the alarming rise of racist rhetoric, vitriol and harassment against Asian Americans. And Maryland’s first lady has become a national and global voice, bravely and forcefully speaking out about the crisis. I’m proud of her passion, courage, and dedication. Also I want to sincerely thank all the members of the workgroup for agreeing to serve on this important mission in such a critical time. And this was a workgroup that really put in a lot of hard work. They came up with some real suggestions for solutions.
Nearly one‑third of all Asian Americans say that they have experienced some type of discrimination since the beginning of the COVID‑19 pandemic last year. In Maryland, hate groups ‑‑ hate crimes targeting Asian Americans have more than doubled since 2018. And they rose by 150% nationwide just last year.
In April, I announced the creation of this Asian American Hate Crimes workgroup, which I believe is the first of its kind in the nation, and as Chairman Hur just laid out, their hard work over the past seven months have culminated in a thorough set of recommendations to address the rise in anti‑Asian activity and prevent acts of violence and to support victims and witnesses.
Today we’re announcing a series of immediate statewide actions to combat incidents of hate and bias against Asian Americans and to empower victims to fall into three main categories. Enhanced safety and effectiveness measures, increased access to community resources, and additional tools for educators and students. First to enhance enforcement efforts across the state, we’re going to update hate and biased training for law enforcement agencies to include reporting procedures for incidents of hate and bias as well as hate crimes.
To encourage further cooperation between the Asian American community and law enforcement, we are designating a Maryland State Police commander to act as a liaison for hate crimes and racially biased incidents and launching a partnership between the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center and the governor’s Office of Community Initiatives, to share data on these incidents. To promote diversity in the police force, we’re encouraging law enforcement to prioritize recruiting commensurate with the population served and offer incentives for recruits that speak multiple languages. To help police officers communicate more effectively with members of the Asian American community, we are also providing $1 million in the new grant funding to the governor’s office of crime, prevention, youth and victim services to fund translation and app‑enabled devices for law enforcement and victims services organizations. And we will be calling on Attorney General Garland at the U.S. Justice Department to issue clear guidance to the states on the federal COVID‑19 Hate Crimes Act. The second series of actions will ramp up the community resources available to Asian Americans in Maryland. We will increase protecting against hate crimes funding from 3 million to $5 million, and we will direct the governor’s Commission on Asian Pacific American affairs to conduct outreach and aggressively publicize the availability of funds to the Asian American community. Because too many incidents continue to go unreported and unpunished, we’re publishing “How to Report Hate Crimes and Incidents” document, which will be available in Asian languages, and which will be widely distributed to community members and posted online. We also will utilize 2‑1‑1 Maryland for the reporting of hate and bias incidents and provide information about services and resources in Asian languages. Early this morning we launched an integrated full service website, which links to dozens of critical national state and local resources, as well as a comprehensive collection of important information for the Asian American community. This is now available at governor.Maryland.gov /resource center.
It will create a pilot program to develop alternative reporting channels for victims of hate or bias incidents, including community centers, nonprofits and churches, with plans for statewide distribution and American job centers. The third set of actions we announcing today will empower educators and students across the state to reach Asian American communities and encourage reporting to law enforcement, we are directing the Maryland Center for School Safety to develop new resources for educators, parents and students on how to report and identify a hate and bias incident.
We will provide education resources for teachers and members of the public, which will be available on the workgroup website. We’re tasking the Maryland State Department of Education with developing continuing professional development course offerings for Maryland teachers on Asian American history. And the governor’s office will be working with our university system to explore potential scholarships and fellowships through the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland to encourage Asian American participation in journalism. Our Asian American community has faced challenges worse than they have seen in decades. The actions we’re announcing today at the beginning, we will use every tool at our disposal to help provide additional protection to those who are impacted by these crimes.
In closing, I want to again express my sincere appreciation to Robert Hur and all of the members of the Asian American Hate Crimes. And I’m calling to leaders across the country in both public and private sectors and across the political spectrum to use their voices to speak out clearly and forcefully to condemn attacks against the Asian American community.
But words are not enough, which is why today we’re turning words into real passion. Thank you and with that we are happy to take questions.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: It certainly has gotten much worse over the past year, the past couple years, and I guess the hope and the desire of all the folks who have been working is that we can try to take steps that will keep it from getting worse and hopefully make it better. Anybody else?
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Let’s just wait and see if anybody has on topic questions for either Chairman Hur or myself on this topic and then I’ll be happy to come back on infrastructure.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
SPEAKER: Well, there are a number of different aspects to getting an accurate sense of how bad the problem is. The first is to take a look at the data nationwide. And if you look at that, numerous sources, including official law enforcement statistics, survey data of the Asian American communities across the nation have seen a very significant increase in number of hate crimes and hate‑based incidents since 2019. And so nationally there is certainly an increase. And if you narrow the scope down to Maryland, we also have seen a similar increase if you look at the data for 2019 to 2020. Now, the data so far for 2021 are still incomplete. If you look at the trajectory, we look on a trajectory for a slight decrease this year, depending on how the data is going to pan out. But the data from 2019 to 2021 so significant increase in the state of Maryland. And that is added focus in particular parts of the state where it’s more of a critical mass of significant size in the community, including Howard County and Montgomery County. That’s really where the incidents, according to statistics kept by Maryland State Police are focused. But it’s a problem. And so looking at it in terms of the statistics is one lens to look at it through, but also anecdotally. In today’s day and age, cell phone videos capture things that decades ago we could not have seen. And so we have seen since the beginning of the pandemic very, very powerful video of victims, oftentimes elderly in broad daylight getting attacked brutally and senselessly. That is part of the reality that we live in today and it’s also part of the way that we all perceive these issues and part of why the workgroup members behind me, we were so passionate in responding to the governor’s call to help him figure out solutions to this problem.
SPEAKER: Any other questions?
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
SPEAKER: First of all, as you know, this is something we have been focused on for a long time. Not only the past seven years have we been making progress on infrastructure in the state, but 2019 when I became chairman of the National Governors Association, we started an initiate on rebuilding America’s infrastructure. We came up with a set of recommendations agreed to by all the governors which we submitted to former and current president, former and current Secretary of Transportation. Almost all of that is included in this current infrastructure bill. As you know, I hosted a summit here in April where we brought together Democratic and Republican governors, senators and congressmen and crafted and arrived at the size and scope of this bill. It truly is a bipartisan bill on something we’ve been talking about fixing for decades, and I was happy to be part of it. And I’ll be at the White House later for the bill signing. This was not Republican versus Democrats. This was critically important to the nation that we came together on and got done and passed overwhelmingly with 69 votes in the Senate and happy to have the president on board and happy to get Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate to work together. That rarely ever happens.
I think it’s going to mean a lot not just for Maryland but the rest of the country and help us put more bridges and roads and tunnels and airports into broadband and into cybersecurity defenses and a lot of things that we pushed for. It includes public private partnerships that we’ve been championing. We had the largest transit project in North America under construction and approved the larger P3 highway project in the country. So really very happy to be moving forward on this. We believe that potentially we don’t have the final numbers on timing and how much, but we believe it’s going to mean about $6 billion to state of Maryland and will enable to ‑‑ and we already invested tons in both roads and bridges and tunnels, but this is going to help us get to some of the projects that we had not yet been able to do and/or help us move at a faster pace than we planned to do. So we’re very pleased.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: They’re going to continue to see massive increases in our transportation infrastructure and they’re going to see, you know, be able to finish out the final remaining broadband across the state so that every single person is going to have access to high speed Internet. But for us, you know, we’re moving forward on the Howard Street Tunnel, doubling production, double stacking trains, we already dredged the depth to 50 feet. We were with the president last week there talking about the successes we have had. We’re going to continue to build roads. We’re going to continue to invest in transit and we’re going to move ‑‑ put a lot of people to work and turn the economy around.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: You know, very focused on this problem for seven years, and from afar here, we’re doing everything we possibly can to fix the problem, but it really is going to take immediate action by the leaders in Baltimore to try to solve those problems. The basic problem we discussed is that we’re not arresting enough people, we’re not prosecuting them, and we’re not taking them off the streets. So we have repeatedly over and over again introduced legislation to do something about that. Two years ago we passed through the Senate and the House failed to act. We continually try to press the leaders involved in our city to take more action. We have invested in the state, accept state resources into the system, and we still have a problem with a prosecutor that doesn’t want to prosecute crime and offenders continue to shoot people over and over again on the streets of Baltimore. And so I don’t know if that’s going to get solved by the weekend. They are going to have ‑‑ we see it every week. You know, we have an off‑duty police officer who had to fire his gun after people came and started shooting in the barber shop. We had a priest walking down the street in the middle of broad daylight and accosted.
We have to get to the bottom of it. Not happening in the rest of the state. Baltimore city. They have to take some responsibility. So we try to assist them in every way we can. Anybody else?
Thank you all… I’m sorry.
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I’m sorry, the citation?
SPEAKER: [ off microphone ]
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I don’t really have an update. For those unfamiliar, there were some people that were copying governor citations and handing them out. It certainly is something that we’ll be looking into it, but I don’t have an update on that. We’re happy to provide governor citations repeatedly for people that do good things in the community, and it’s really a ceremonial thing to recognize good hard work, like the members of this workgroup, serve citations to thank them for their effort. But I’m not sure who was printing the governor citations and why, but it’s a problem. I don’t know any more details about that.
Thank you.