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This Storm-Battered Town Voted for Trump. He Has Vowed to Overturn the Law That Could Fix Its Homes.

1 month ago

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Cynthia Robertson could be forgiven for feeling that the banner was aimed at her. Its white-on-black lettering — “FUCK BIDEN AND FUCK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM” — hung from the wooden house right across the street from her own.

Hostility toward the outgoing Democratic president is no surprise in Sulphur, Louisiana, a red town in a red state in a country that has handed the White House and Congress to Republicans. Yet the message felt like a poke in the eye at a time when Robertson was seeking funding through Biden’s signature climate law so her nonprofit organization could repair and retrofit hurricane-battered houses in the area — including her neighbor’s. Not even a fraying tarp, a tar patch or the piece of corrugated metal tacked on the roof could keep the rain from pouring inside.

Donald Trump has vowed to overturn the law that would provide the funding, the Inflation Reduction Act, which he has referred to as the “new green scam.”

If he follows through once he assumes office, Trump would be rolling back a law that has disproportionately benefited red areas like Sulphur that make up his base.

Though not a single Republican legislator voted for the law, an outsized portion of its historic $1 trillion in climate and energy provisions has benefited red congressional districts and states that voted for Trump, according to a report by E2, a group tracking the effects of the law. Red districts had the biggest growth in green jobs, the report said. Red states, including Nevada, Wyoming, Kentucky and Georgia, have seen the biggest jumps in clean energy investments, according to an August report from the Clean Investment Monitor, which tracks public and private investments in climate technology. Texas has received $69 billion in clean investments since the law passed, second only to California.

Not all of the money has been spent yet. And several provisions are vulnerable to rollbacks, among them tax credits for home energy improvements and certain alternative fueling sites. Billions hang in the balance, including, to Robertson’s chagrin, more than $100 million for disadvantaged communities, like Sulphur, to combat pollution and better weather the effects of climate change.

An ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church, Robertson, 66, wears her wavy white hair short, cusses freely and greets by name the homeless of Sulphur, a city of some 20,000 people. Miss Cindy, as she’s known in her neighborhood, named her nonprofit organization, Micah 6:8 Mission, after an old testament verse about caring for the poor.

Cynthia Robertson and her neighbor, Nate, at home with her goats in Portie Town. Robertson is seeking funding through President Joe Biden’s signature climate law so her nonprofit organization can repair and retrofit hurricane-battered houses in the area.

Last summer, she and other community leaders worked around the clock to submit the grant proposal seven weeks in advance of a fall deadline. Among her partners is Build Change, which specializes in creating housing that can withstand natural disasters in the developing world. The organizations have sought more than $19 million for their local improvement plan, which includes shoring up roofs, remediating mold and mildew, providing homes with solar-powered air conditioning and building a community center where residents can find refuge during emergencies.

But in mid-December, an email from the Environmental Protection Agency explained it didn’t have enough time to make a decision on her application before the inauguration.

It will be up to the Trump EPA to determine whether Sulphur and some 2,000 other communities get the grants they applied for.

Now, Robertson said, all she can do is pray that Republicans will see that the investment is in everyone’s best interest, including their own.

As her small staff gathered for a weekly meeting in December, she bowed her head. “Dear Lord,” she said, “if it’s your will, may we get this damn grant, please.”

Average life expectancy in Portie Town is 69, nine years short of the national average. A Storm-Battered Community

Sulphur is near the beating heart of the extremely profitable petrochemical industry. Huge multinational corporations — including Westlake Chemicals, Citgo Petroleum, LyondellBasell and Phillips 66 — have plants just a few miles from Robertson’s home and the office of her environmental nonprofit. But Portie Town, the crisscross of streets lined with low-slung homes on the north side of Sulphur where she lives, seems to have gained little for its proximity to these engines of wealth.

Named for a widow who moved to the area with her eight children in the early 1900s, Portie Town (pronounced Por-shay) remains a place of struggle. Median annual income is around $40,000 and life expectancy is 69, nine years short of the national average. Climate change has added another layer of challenge. The hurricane risk in Calcasieu, the parish where it is located, is in the top 3% in the country, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which rates the expected annual loss from storms in the area as high and the resiliency as low.

With its shore on the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana has always been vulnerable to storms, but the threat has unquestionably worsened in recent years. Climate change has raised temperatures, causing the air and water to warm. Storms intensify as they travel across the warmed oceans, pulling in more water vapor and heat, which makes hurricanes stronger and more intense.

When Hurricane Laura hit in August 2020 — its eye passing directly over Sulphur — it was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the state’s history, killing at least 30 people and knocking out the power in Portie Town for weeks. Many residents couldn’t afford generators or the fuel to run them and went without air conditioners and refrigerators even as the temperature soared above 90 degrees. Shortly after the power was restored, it was knocked out again by Hurricane Delta, which was followed by a deep freeze caused by Winter Storm Uri. The next year, Hurricane Ida tied Laura’s record for the strongest winds measured in Louisiana.

“The storms have been getting closer and closer together, more and more active,” said Jessica McGee, who lives with her adult son in a small, cream-colored house a few blocks from Robertson in Portie Town. The McGees haven’t had gas since Hurricane Laura; they have used electric space heaters and cooked their meals in a microwave oven for the past three years. Boards nailed over their windows before the 2020 storm remain there.

Jessica McGee hasn’t been able to repair damage to her home from Hurricane Laura in 2020.

McGee, who lives on disability benefits, said she has neither the strength nor the money to repair the hurricane damage. “It’s my water, it’s the pipes, it’s the floor…,” she said. “The next one, our roof is going to be gone.”

If Robertson’s nonprofit is awarded the grant it is seeking, McGee’s house may also benefit. She brightens at the thought that government funding could bring her home back from the brink of inhabitability, but remains skeptical of politics.

“I don’t vote,” McGee said, shrugging. “It’s not for me.”

A Political Lightning Rod

The sprawling Inflation Reduction Act had many goals, including funding the Internal Revenue Service and lowering health care costs, but its main aim was to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change through tax credits, customer incentives and grants. Despite its purpose, its authors conspicuously omitted the word “climate” from its name in an effort to get bipartisan support for it.

The benefits of the law were felt widely, spurring clean energy projects in almost 40% of the country’s congressional districts; 19 of the 20 that got the most funding were led by Republicans.

In August, as he was standing on a corn and bean farm next to the deputy administrator of the Biden EPA, Jim Pillen enthused about his state’s grant. Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, called the agency’s $307 million IRA grant “a once-in-a-lifetime, extraordinary opportunity.” In Pocatello, Idaho — a town in a red county that is still recovering from the 2012 Charlotte Fire — “folks are pretty excited” about the planned greenway path that will decrease wildfire risks and allow residents to bike by the river, Hannah Sanger, the city’s science and environment administrator, told me. And in Alaska, where Trump also won handily, the recipients of a grant of more than $47 million to electrify two ports described themselves as “ecstatic” about the money.

Still the law remains a political lightning rod. Republicans in Congress have tried to repeal parts of it dozens of times, and Trump railed against it on the campaign trail. “My plan will terminate the Green New Deal,” Trump told a group assembled at the Economic Club of New York in September. “It actually sets us back, as opposed to moves us forward. And [I will] rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”

Robertson passes the Westlake Chemical plant in Sulphur.

Clay Higgins, the Republican who represents Sulphur in Congress, voted against the IRA, which he attacked as a “monstrosity of a bill” that “wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on Green New Deal subsidies.” Higgins, who receives campaign funds from the oil and gas industry, notes on his website that “fossil fuels are the lifeblood of our modern society.” He did not respond to questions about Robertson’s hope to use IRA money to shore up the houses in his district.

In November, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a report that attacked the EPA’s IRA grants as a “green group giveaway” and characterized some of the recipients as “extremist organizations.” The lawmakers criticized funding groups that educate the public about climate change, or “environmental activist organizations that work to influence public and elected officials to adopt their often-extreme views, such as completely eliminating the use of fossil fuels.”

Despite the fiery rhetoric, a full repeal of the law seems unlikely, in part because it would require a majority of the House and Senate to agree on it. In August, 18 House Republicans wrote to Speaker Mike Johnson urging him to preserve the IRA’s energy tax credits, which are already funding projects. And it will be extremely difficult for the new administration to claw back grant money that has already been awarded.

Even if he fails to get the congressional support necessary to repeal the law, Trump could reverse the executive order that grants the authority to implement it. He could also cut short its longer term provisions, some of which were supposed to extend through 2029 and beyond. He can interfere with the funding that now flows through more than 12 federal agencies. And he can put a halt to the two dozen proposed rules that would carry out the law’s goals, according to the Brookings Institution. Congress could also severely undermine the law by targeting the rules that have been issued since Aug. 1 — and can thus be overturned through the Congressional Review Act.

A Looming Decision

Soon after the IRA was signed into law in 2022, Robertson began looking for ways it could benefit Portie Town.

Robertson at home before heading to church. Her charity and several other organizations together received $407,000 in Inflation Reduction Act funds in 2023.

Her charity had already been distributing food, clothing and “hurricane buckets” filled with mosquito repellant, canned ham, batteries and other supplies to locals when it and several other organizations together received $407,000 in IRA funds in 2023. The grant pays for the groups to distribute “evidence-based materials” about pollution, climate change and public health, according to its application. It also paid for two air monitors, which regularly document dangerously elevated levels of particulate matter in the air, pollution that is associated with premature death and breathing problems.

The IRA’s Community Change Grants, designed to provide approximately $2 billion for climate-related projects in disadvantaged communities, offered more direct help.

Robertson despaired on the December day when she learned that the Trump administration, not Biden’s, would be deciding whether Portie Town will get the grant.

“This community needs this so badly,” she said through tears. “Damn it.”

Just that morning, she had visited with Janet Broussard, 82, who lives by herself a few blocks away. The two had stood outside Broussard’s trailer imagining how the grant might improve it. Broussard’s roof had come off more than four years ago during Hurricane Delta. It was replaced, but, within two years, the new one was damaged by a tornado. She had no insurance that would pay to repair the damage and catches the rain in a bucket that she empties after storms.

Broussard has not been able to repair the roof of her trailer that was damaged during a tornado.

But Robertson said that if the grant came through, Micah 6:8 Mission would be able to help fix the roof. “We’ll also be able to take the siding off, insulate, put new siding on, take the windows out, put in double-paned insulating windows,” Robertson had said.

Zealan Hoover, a senior adviser to the EPA administrator who oversaw the IRA grant programs, said the agency made a herculean effort and managed to distribute more than 95% of the money. But agency officials didn’t have time to give the proposals that were submitted in the final weeks of the application period the careful reads they deserved, he said, and so they decided to reserve some funds so the next administration can finish the process. “We are going to give those 2,000 applicants who came in at the very end, you know, some hope and chance of being selected,” said Hoover, who pointed out that, under any administration, “the agency’s mission is to protect human health and the environment.”

What it decides will matter to Tony Rodriguez, who hung the “FUCK BIDEN” banner outside his home in the fall. A slight man with a graying beard who goes by Burnout, Rodriguez said he hung the banner to raise awareness about “all the bad stuff” Biden did. He had heard on the news — he can’t remember the exact source — that the president was to blame for children being sex trafficked, repeating a false conspiracy theory, and had sold out our country.

Tony Rodriguez said he hung this banner outside his home to raise awareness about “all the bad stuff” Biden did. (Courtesy of Cynthia Robertson)

Still, he said he would be grateful if Miss Cindy would use some of the money she is hoping to get from the law championed by the outgoing president to stop the rain from coming into his bedroom.

“At least then he’d have done something good,” he said.

Correction

Jan. 22, 2025: This story originally misidentified the owner of an industrial plant near Sulphur, Louisiana. That plant is owned by Phillips 66, which was spun off from ConocoPhillips; it is not owned by ConocoPhillips.

by Sharon Lerner, photography by Annie Flanagan for ProPublica

ProPublica Releases New Private School Demographics Lookup

1 month ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Join us Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. Eastern for a live demonstration of this database’s features.

Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter than public schools, with fewer Black, Hispanic or Latino students. This may not be a surprising statistic because private schools can often be expensive and exclusionary, but it’s not a simple one to pin down. There is no central list of private schools in the country, and the only demographic data about them comes from a little-known voluntary survey administered by the federal government.

While reporting our project on Segregation Academies in the South last year, we relied on that survey to find private schools founded during desegregation and analyzed their demographics compared to local public school districts. Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white.

In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data.

Today, we are releasing the Private School Demographics database. This is the first time anyone has taken past surveys and made them this easy to explore. Moreover, we’ve matched these schools to the surrounding public school districts, enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public systems.

Until now, much of this data was difficult to analyze: While the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects the data, provides a tool to view the most recent year of Private School Universe Survey data, there was no easy way to examine historical trends without wrangling large, unwieldy text files.

As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever. The information is self-reported, but we have attempted to flag or correct some obvious inaccuracies wherever possible.

How to Use the App

Searching: You can search for private schools or public school districts by name and drill down on results using several filter options.

For schools, you can filter results by state, religious affiliation, school type and enrollment range. For some schools, you can also filter by founding year. By default, we only show results for schools that have responded to the survey at least once in the last few years, but you can turn off this filter to also include older data in your search results.

For public school districts, users can filter by state and sort results to see where the most students are attending private schools, as well as the gap between the district’s largest racial group and the school’s share of those same students. Because private schools can draw students from different districts, comparing their racial composition to a single district’s public schools is imperfect. Still, these comparisons can offer valuable insights into broader patterns of segregation and access.

Looking up a private school: On each private school’s page, you’ll find basic information about the school (its name; location; the type of school and its religious affiliation, if any; and what grades it teaches), and we’ve also included a summary and visualization of how the school’s demographics compare to the public school district’s.

There’s also a compilation of the demographic data the school provided to the survey, which you can download for your own analysis:

Exploring a district or state: On district and state pages, you’ll find more general information about private schools in those areas. (Search for districts here, and see links for each state here.)

You can find areas where private schools aren’t out of step demographically with their nearby public schools. In Osceola County, Florida, south of Orlando, both the local public school district and the private schools are mostly Hispanic or Latino.

Both state and district pages include breakdowns of private schools by religious orientation and school type, and a list of all private schools in the state or district. State pages also show a list of all school districts in the state.

District pages include some additional features, such as:

  • A searchable map of private schools in the district’s boundaries, color coded by the predominant race of each school’s student body. (Use the lookup tool next to the map to search for schools by name, or click on the “Use Your Current Location” button to zoom in on schools near you. Clicking on a school’s address will fly the map to its location, and clicking on a school’s name will take you to that school’s page.)

  • An interactive line chart that shows how public and private school enrollment have changed over time for each race category. Use the dropdown to change race categories and explore trends for different groups.

If you find something notable, we’d love to hear about it. We’d also like to hear your ideas for improving the app, including new features or data you’d like to see. And if you spot something you believe is an error, each page has a button you can use to report that to us.

by Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash and Ken Schwencke

Private School Demographics

1 month ago

Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter, less Black and less Hispanic or Latino than public schools.

With our new Private School Demographics database, we’re enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public schools.

As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever.

🔎 Look up private schools near you.

by Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash and Brandon Roberts

Hydroelectric Dams on Oregon’s Willamette River Kill Salmon. Congress Says It’s Time to Consider Shutting Them Down.

1 month ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it could make hydroelectric dams on Oregon’s Willamette River safe for endangered salmon by building gigantic mechanical traps and hauling baby fish downstream in tanker trucks. The Corps started pressing forward over objections from fish advocates and power users who said the plan was costly and untested.

That was until this month, when President Joe Biden signed legislation ordering the Corps to put its plans on hold and consider a simpler solution: Stop using the dams for electricity.

The new law, finalized on Jan. 4, follows reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica in 2023 that underscored risks and costs associated with the Corps’ plan. The agency is projected to lose $700 million over 30 years generating hydropower, and a scientific review found that the type of fixes the Corps is proposing would not stop the extinction of threatened salmon.

The mandate says the Corps needs to shelve designs for its fish collectors — essentially massive floating vacuums expected to cost $170 million to $450 million each — until it finishes studying what the river system would look like without hydropower. The Corps must then include that scenario in its long-term designs for the river.

The new direction from Congress has the potential to transform the river that sustains Oregon’s famously lush Willamette Valley. It is a step toward draining the reservoirs behind the dams and bringing water levels closer to those of an undammed river.

“There’s a very real, very viable solution, and we need to proceed with that as soon as possible,” said Kathleen George, a council member for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, which have fished the Willamette for thousands of years. They’ve urged the Corps to return the river closer to its natural flow.

George credited OPB and ProPublica’s reporting, and said she believes that without additional public pressure, the Corps would have continued to stall on already overdue studies.

“Our salmon heritage is literally on the line,” she said.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers biologist Doug Garletts carries an anesthetized Chinook salmon to a loading chute where it will slide into a holding tank before being drained into a tanker and trucked upstream to the other side of Oregon’s Cougar Dam. It’s one of many methods the Corps has tried to keep threatened fish from dying because of hydroelectric dams on the Willamette River system. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

Asked about how the Corps planned to respond to Congress, spokesperson Kerry Solan said in a statement that the agency was still reviewing the bill’s language.

The 13 dams on the Willamette and its tributaries were built for the main purpose of holding back floodwaters in Oregon’s most heavily populated valley, which includes the city of Portland. With high concrete walls, they have no dedicated pathways for migrating salmon.

Emptying the reservoirs to the river channel would let salmon pass much as they did before the dams. It would leave less water for recreational boating and irrigation during periods of normal rain and snow, but it would open up more capacity to hold back water when a large flood comes. And the power industry says that running hydropower turbines on the Willamette dams, unlike the moneymaking hydroelectric dams on the larger Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest, doesn’t make financial sense.

The dams generate less than 1% of the Northwest’s power, enough for about 100,000 homes. But lighting a home with electricity from Willamette dams costs about five times as much as dams on the Northwest’s larger rivers.

Congress asked the Corps in 2020 and 2022 to study the possibility of shutting down its hydroelectric turbines on the Willamette. The agency missed its deadlines for those studies while it proceeded with a 30-year plan for river operations that included hydropower.

Oregon Rep. Val Hoyle, a Democrat whose district includes much of the Willamette River Valley, said in an emailed statement it was “unacceptable” for the Corps to move ahead without first producing the thorough look at ending hydropower that lawmakers asked for.

“Congress must have the necessary information on-hand to decide the future of hydropower in the Willamette,” Hoyle said.

The bill also requires the Corps to study how it can lessen problems that draining reservoirs might cause downstream.

Because of a 2021 court order to protect endangered salmon, the Corps has tried making the river more free-flowing by draining reservoirs behind two dams each fall. The first time the reservoirs dropped, in 2023, they unleashed masses of mud that had been trapped behind the dams. Rivers turned brown and small cities’ drinking water plants worked around the clock to purify the supply.

Congress wants the Corps to study how to avoid causing those problems downstream. That could include engineering new drinking water systems for cities below the dams.

The Corps has the authority to engineer infrastructure for local communities and cover 75% of the cost for such improvements, but it has never used this provision in Oregon.

A week before Biden signed the new bill, biologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published their own 673-page report saying the Corps’ preferred solution for the Willamette — the one involving fish traps — would jeopardize threatened salmon and steelhead.

NOAA proposed more than two dozen changes for the Corps, ranging from better monitoring of the species to altering the river flow to better accommodate migrating salmon. Solan said the agency is still reviewing NOAA’s opinion and deciding what action to take.

George, who has served on the council of the Grand Ronde tribes since 2016, said she was encouraged that the latest developments on the Willamette pointed to a future where salmon and people could coexist.

“In those darkest days of our families living here on the Grand Ronde reservation, it was truly returning to the Willamette to get salmon that helped keep our people alive,” George said. “It is our time and our role to speak up for our relatives and to say that a future with people and Willamette salmon is essential.”

Correction

Jan. 23, 2025: A photo caption with this story originally misidentified a dam. It is the Detroit Dam on the North Santiam River, not the Lookout Point Dam on the Middle Fork of the Willamette River.

by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza

1 month ago

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In early November, a small group of senior U.S. human rights diplomats met with a top official in President Joe Biden’s State Department to make one final, emphatic plea: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

So-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool for the world’s most powerful nations. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

The failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences, current and former U.S. officials said. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. When Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad launched rockets with chemical gas and killed hundreds of civilians anyway, Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade, a move critics say allowed the civil war to spiral further while extremist groups took advantage by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

President Joe Biden Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet in the White House last July. By then, Biden’s administration had issued multiple public warnings to the Israeli but did not follow through. During his visit, Netanyahu gave a fiery defense of Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas. (Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Blinken disagreed and said Netanyahu has listened to him by softening Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also argued there was a cost to even questioning the IDF openly. “Whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel,” Blinken said, “Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

He acknowledged that not enough humanitarian assistance has been reaching civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food and medicine into Gaza — which would be a war crime — but Netanyahu relented in response to U.S. pressure behind the scenes. Blinken backtracked later in the interview and suggested that the blocking of aid was not Israeli policy. “There’s a very different question about what was the intent,” he told the Times.

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

The State Department did not make Blinken available for an interview, but the agency’s top spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and has incorporated it into his policymaking. “The Department continues to encourage individuals to make their opinions known through appropriate channels,” he added. Miller denied that the agency has classified material for any reason other than national security.

Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. At one point early in the conflict, UNICEF said more than 10 children required amputations every day on average. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said, “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”

Israel’s defenders, including those on the National Security Council, acknowledge the devastating human toll but contend that American arms have helped Israel advance western interests in the region and protect itself from other enemies. Indeed, Netanyahu has significantly diminished Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of the groups’ leaders. Then Iran’s “axis of resistance” received its most consequential blow late last year when rebel groups ousted Assad from Syria.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”

“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions for the United States and the region will play out for years. Protests have erupted outside the American embassies in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, while polls show Arab Americans grew increasingly hostile to their own government stateside. Russia, before its black eye in Syria, and China have both sought to capitalize by entering business and defense deals with Arab nations. By the summer, State Department analysts in the Middle East sent cables to Washington expressing concerns that the IDF’s conduct would only inflame tensions in the West Bank and galvanize young Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. Intelligence officials warn that terrorist groups are recruiting on the anti-American sentiment throughout the region, which they say is at its highest levels in years.

The Israeli government did not answer detailed questions, but a spokesperson for the embassy in Washington, D.C., broadly defended Israel’s relationship with the U.S., “two allies who have been working together to push back against extremist, destabilizing actors.” Israel is a country of laws, the spokesperson added, and its actions over the past 15 months “benefit the interests of the free world and the United States, creating an opportunity for a better future for the Middle East amid the tragedy of the war started by Hamas.”

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

The southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who the IDF had forced from their homes in the north at the start of the war. When Biden learned that Netanyahu intended to invade the city this spring, he warned that the U.S. will stop sending offensive arms if the Israelis went through with it.

“It is a red line,” Biden had said, marking the first high-profile warning from the U.S.

Netanyahu invaded in May anyway. Israeli tanks rolled into the city and the IDF dropped bombs on Hamas targets, including a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. Biden responded by pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs but otherwise resumed military support.

There were numerous civilian casualties during the Israeli military’s attack on the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The Biden administration had said invading the city would cross a “red line.” (Jehad Alshrafi/Anadolu/Getty Images)

In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its assault on the city, citing the Geneva Conventions. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah. “There is room to argue that more scaled back/targeted operations, combined with better humanitarian efforts, would not meet that threshold,” the lawyers said in a May 24 email. While it’s not unreasonable for government lawyers to defend a close ally, critics say the cable illustrates the extreme deference the U.S. affords Israel.

“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”

The administration says that it restrained Israel’s attack in Rafah. In a recent interview, Lew told the Times of Israel the operation ultimately resulted in relatively few civilian casualties. “It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel,” he added, “but also led to a much better outcome.”

Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. “American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it is convenient,” said Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations. “The U.S. does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners,” he added, “not just Israel.”

Miller and others note that the barbarity of Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, galvanized domestic support for Israel and made it significantly easier for Biden to avoid holding the Israelis accountable as they retaliated.

There are other likely reasons for Biden’s unwillingness to impose any realistic limitations on Israel’s use of American weaponry since Oct. 7. For one, his career-long affinity for Israel — its security, people and the idea of a friendly democracy in the Middle East — is shared by many of the most powerful people in the country. (“If this Capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation — with Israel,” Nancy Pelosi said in 2018, weeks before resuming her role as House speaker.) That rationale aligned with the Democrats’ political goals during an election when they were wary of taking risks and upsetting large portions of the electorate, including the immensely powerful Israel lobby.

Humanitarian aid trucks wait on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip last year. (Ali Moustafa/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Immediately after the ICJ’s order about the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements to acknowledge the importance of the court and express concern over civilians in the city. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

That was an early sign that the State Department was taking a back seat in shaping war policy. In its place, the NSC — largely led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein — assumed a larger role. While the NSC has grown significantly in size and influence over the decades, State Department officials repeatedly told me they felt marginalized this past year.

“The NSC has final say over our messaging,” one diplomat said. “All any of us can do is what they’ll allow us to do.”

The NSC did not make its senior leaders available for an interview or respond to questions from ProPublica. Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser and brother to the State Department’s counselor, said recently it was difficult, for much of the past year, “to get the Israeli government to align with a lot of what President Biden publicly has been saying” about Gaza.

Sullivan said too many civilians have died there and the U.S. was frequently required to publicly and privately pressure Israel to improve the flow of humanitarian aid. “We believe Israel has a responsibility — as a democracy, as a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law — that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.”

During another internal State Department meeting in March, top regional diplomats voiced their frustrations about messaging and appearances. Hady Amr, one of the government’s highest-ranking authorities on Palestinian affairs, said he was reluctant to address large groups about the administration’s Israel policy and he took issue with much of it, according to notes of the conversation. He warned colleagues that the sentiment in Muslim communities was turning. From a public diplomacy perspective, Amr told them, the war has been “catastrophically bad for the U.S.” (Amr did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another attendee at the meeting said they had been effectively sidelined by the NSC. A third said it was a huge amount of effort to even get permission to use the word “condemn” when talking about Israeli settlers demolishing Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank.

Palestinians rush out of their home after Jewish settlers set it on fire in the town of Turmusaya in the West Bank last June. About 400 Jewish settlers launched an attack on the town and burned homes, cars and property. Officials within the State Department said it was difficult to get permission to publicly condemn instances of settlers destroying Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank. (Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)

Such sanitizing language became common. Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that at one point the State Department distributed NSC’s list of phrases that he and others weren’t allowed to use on internal presentations. Instead of “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem,” for example, they were meant to say “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem.” Another official told Smith in an email, “I would recommend not discussing [international humanitarian law] at all without extensive clearances.”

A USAID spokesperson said in an email that the agency couldn’t discuss personnel matters, but the list of terms was given to the agency by the State Department as early as 2022, before the war in Gaza. The list, the spokesperson added, includes the “suggested terms that are in line with U.S. diplomatic protocol.”

Deference to Israel is not new. For decades, the U.S. has repeatedly looked the other way when Israel is accused of human rights abuses.

One of the most conspicuous paper tigers in American foreign policy is the Leahy Law, experts say. Passed more than 25 years ago, the law’s authors intended to force foreign governments to hold their own accountable for violations like torture or extrajudicial killings — or their military assistance would be restricted. The law allowed precision targeting of individual units that faced credible allegations, so that the U.S. didn’t need to cut off entire countries from U.S.-funded weapons and training. It’s essentially a blacklist.

Almost immediately, Israel got special treatment, records show. In March 1998, IDF soldiers fired on journalists covering demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron. Congress asked the State Department, then led by Madeleine Albright, to take action under the new law. “An Israeli official informed the U.S. Embassy that the soldiers were disciplined after the incident, but was unable to provide further information,” State Department officials responded in a letter — more than two years later — to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the law’s namesake. “It is the Department's conclusion that there are insufficient grounds on which to conclude that the units involved committed gross violations of human rights.”

While the country took action across the globe in South America, the Pacific Rim and elsewhere, the U.S. government has never disqualified an Israeli military unit under the law — despite voluminous evidence presented to the State Department.

In 2020, the agency even set up a special council, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to assess accusations against the country’s military and police units. The forum is composed of State Department officials with expertise in human rights, arms transfers and the Middle East who review public allegations of human rights abuses before making referrals to the Secretary of State. While it had ambitious goals to finally hold Israeli units accountable, the forum became widely known as just another layer of bureaucracy that slowed down the process and protected Israel.

Current and former diplomats told me that U.S. leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, they have created multiple processes that give the appearance of accountability while simultaneously undermining any potential results, the experts said.

“It’s like walking toward the horizon,” said Charles Blaha, a former director at the State Department who served on the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. “You can always walk toward it but you will never ever get there.”

“I really believed in the Israeli military justice system and I really believed that the State Department was acting in good faith,” he added. “But both of those things were wrong.”

A review of the vetting forum’s emails and meeting minutes from 2021 through 2022 shows even the most high-profile and seemingly egregious cases fall into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the IDF was accused of killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, videos circulated on the internet of Israeli police units beating pallbearers at her funeral. “It is indeed very difficult to watch,” a deputy assistant secretary wrote in an email to a member of the forum. Another member told colleagues, “I think this would be what is actionable for the funeral procession itself as we wait for more info on circumstances of death and whether this would trigger Leahy ineligibility.”

Neither Akleh’s killing, nor the funeral beatings, led to Leahy determinations against Israel.

Israeli security forces beat protesters and pallbearers at the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed during an Israeli raid in the West Bank in 2022. Neither her killing, nor the clashes at her funeral, resulted in discipline from the State Department under the Leahy Law, despite the recommendations from an internal panel of experts. (Muammar Awad/Xinhua/Getty Images)

For years, lawmakers pushed the U.S. government to take action on Akleh’s case. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide who helped draft the Leahy Law, recently held a meeting with State Department officials to discuss the case again. The officials in the meeting again punted. “We’re talking about an American journalist who was killed by an Israeli soldier and nothing happened,” he said. “They are walking out the door on Jan. 20th and they haven’t implemented the law.”

In another case considered by the forum, a 15-year-old boy from the West Bank said he was tortured and raped in the Israeli detention facility Al-Mascobiyya, or Russian Compound. For years, the State Department had been told about widespread abuses in that facility and others like it.

Military Court Watch, a local nonprofit organization of attorneys, collected testimony from more than 1,100 minors who had been detained between 2013 and 2023. Most said they were strip searched and many said they were beaten. Some teens tried to kill themselves in solitary confinement. IDF soldiers recalled children so scared that they peed themselves during arrests.

At the Russian Compound, a 14-year-old said his interrogator shocked and beat him in the legs with sticks to elicit information about a car fire. A 15-year-old said he was handcuffed with another boy. “An Israeli policeman then walked into the room and beat the hell out of me and the other boy,” he said. A 12-year-old girl said she was put into a small cell with cockroaches.

Military Court Watch routinely shared its information with the State Department, according to Gerard Horton, one of the group’s co-founders. But nothing ever came of it. “They receive all our reports and we name the facilities,” he told me. “It goes up the food chain and it gets political. Everyone knows what’s going on and obviously no action is taken.”

Even the State Department’s own public human rights reports acknowledge widespread allegations of abuse in Israeli prisons. Citing nonprofits, prisoner testimony and media reports, the agency wrote last year that “detainees held by Israel were subjected to physical and sexual violence, threats, intimidation, severely restricted access to food and water.”

In the summer of 2021, the State Department reached out to the Israeli government and asked about the 15-year-old who said he was raped at the Russian Compound. The next day, the Israeli government raided the nonprofit that had originally documented the allegation, Defense for Children International — Palestine, and then designated the group a terrorist organization.

As a result, U.S. human rights officials said they were prohibited from speaking to DCIP. “A large part of the frustration was that we were unable to access Palestinian civil society because most NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — “were considered terrorist organizations,” said Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem who resigned last year. “All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them.”

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said in his statement that the agency has not “blanketly prohibited” officials from speaking with groups that document allegations of human rights abuses and they continue to work with organizations in Israel and the West Bank.

After the raid on DCIP, a member of the forum emailed his superior at the State Department and said the U.S. should push to get an explanation for the raid from the Israelis and “re-raise our original request for info on the underlying allegation.”

But almost two years went by and there were no arrests, while those on the forum struggled to get basic information about the case. Then, in the early months of the Israel war on Hamas, another State Department official reached out to DCIP and tried to reengage, according to a recording of the conversation.

“As you can imagine, it’s been a bit touchy here,” the official said on the call, explaining the months without correspondence. “The Israeli government’s not going to dictate to me who I can talk to, but my superiors can.”

The IDF eventually told the State Department it did not find evidence of a sexual assault but reprimanded the guard for kicking a chair during the teenager’s interrogation. To date, the U.S. has not cut off the Russian Compound on Leahy grounds.

In late April, there was surprising news: Blinken was reportedly set to take action against Netzah Yehuda, a notorious ultraorthodox IDF battalion, under the Leahy law.

The Leahy forum had recommended several cases to him. But for months, he sat on the recommendations. One of them was the case of Omar Assad.

On a cold night in January 2022, Netzah Yehuda soldiers pulled over Assad, an elderly Palestinian American who was on his way home from playing cards in the West Bank. They bound, blindfolded and gagged him and led him into a construction site, according to local investigators. He was found dead shortly after.

After the killing, DAWN, an advocacy group founded by the slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, compiled a dossier of evidence on the case, including testimony from family and witnesses, as well as a medical examiner’s report. The report found Assad had traumatic injuries to the head and other injuries that caused a stress-induced heart attack. The group delivered the dossier to the State Department’s Leahy forum.

The dossier also included information about other incidents. For years, Netzah Yehuda has been accused of violent crimes in the West Bank, including killing unarmed Palestinians. They have also been convicted of torturing and abusing detainees in custody.

By late 2023, after the Oct. 7 attacks, the experts on the forum decided that Assad’s case met all the conditions of the Leahy law: a human rights violation had occurred and the soldiers responsible had not been adequately punished. The forum recommended that the battalion should no longer receive any American-funded weapons or training until the perpetrators are brought to justice.

ProPublica published an article in the spring of 2024 about Blinken sitting on the recommendations. But when he signaled his intention to take action shortly after, the Israelis responded with fury. “Sanctions must not be imposed on the Israel Defense Forces!” Netanyahu posted on X. “The intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low.”

The pressure campaign, which also reportedly came from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Lew, the ambassador, appears to have worked. For months, Blinken punted on an official decision. Then, in August, the State Department announced that Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off from military aid after all because the U.S. had received new information that the IDF had effectively “remediated” the case. Two soldiers involved were removed from active duty and made ineligible to serve in the reserve, but there is no indication that anyone was charged with a crime.

Miller, the spokesperson, said the IDF also took steps to avoid similar incidents in the future, like enhanced screening and a two-week educational seminar for Netzah Yehuda recruits.

Palestinian relatives mourn during the funeral of Omar Assad, who died while in custody of the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion. The State Department was set to disqualify the unit from future military assistance but ultimately decided not to after Israeli leaders pressured the secretary of state to change course. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images)

“In seven and a half years as director of the State Department office that implements the Leahy law worldwide,” Blaha wrote shortly after the announcement, “I have never seen a single case in which mere administrative measures constituted sufficient remediation.”

In its statement to ProPublica, the Israeli government did not address individual cases, but said, “All of the incidents in question were thoroughly examined by the American administration, which concluded that Israel took remedial measures when necessary.”

Last summer, CNN documented how commanders in the battalion have been promoted to senior positions in the IDF, where they train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. A weapons expert told me the guns that Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been photographed holding were likely made in the U.S.

Later in the year, Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who runs a popular account on X, posted videos showing IDF soldiers who recorded themselves rummaging through children’s clothing inside a home and demolishing a mosque’s minaret. Tirawi said the soldiers were in Netzah Yehuda. (ProPublica could not independently verify the soldiers’ units.)

Hebrew text added to one of the videos said, “We won’t leave a trace of them.”

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

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Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Brett Murphy

New York Attorney General Launches Investigation of Guardianship Providers

1 month ago

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New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating about a half dozen guardianship organizations and how they manage the health and financial affairs of hundreds of elderly and infirm New Yorkers deemed incapable of looking after themselves, according to people familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, which is being conducted by lawyers in the office’s charities bureau, follows a yearlong series by ProPublica that revealed how some guardians neglected the vulnerable clients entrusted to their care, while others used their court-appointed positions to enrich themselves at their wards’ expense.

Judges often rely on guardianship companies to care for the so-called unbefriended, people who don’t have friends or family able to look after them. Oversight of these guardians, however, is scant, with officials rarely visiting wards to check on their care. Meanwhile, the courts that appoint the guardians rely largely on financial paperwork to determine a person’s well-being. That dynamic, the news organization found, has resulted in fraud, abuse and neglect of the state’s most vulnerable.

Among the groups investigators are scrutinizing is New York Guardianship Services, which was featured in ProPublica’s work, said one of the people familiar with the state probe, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement action.

ProPublica found NYGS had failed to meet the needs of more than a dozen people entrusted to its care, including an elderly woman whom the company placed in a dilapidated home with rats, bedbugs and a lack of heat. NYGS collected $450 a month in compensation from the woman’s limited income while stating in reports to the court that her living situation was “appropriate” — even as internal company records and her own emails showed that she’d repeatedly complained about the conditions.

After ProPublica’s first story was published, a judge ordered NYGS to pay back that ward $5,400, representing about a year’s worth of fees, writing that the company had provided “minimal services, if any” during that time.

In another instance, ProPublica reported that the company collected monthly fees from an elderly man even after he’d left the country — and also after he died.

Company executives have declined to answer questions about specific clients but previously told ProPublica that NYGS was accountable to the court and that its work was scrutinized by examiners, who are empowered to raise any issues.

But ProPublica’s investigation found that there are too few examiners in the system to provide timely and thorough oversight. There are just 157 examiners responsible for reviewing the reports of 17,411 New York City wards, according to the court’s most recent data. And there are roughly a dozen judges to check their work. As a result, ProPublica found that annual assessments detailing wards’ finances and care can take years to complete, depriving judges of critical information about people’s welfare.

The courts have similarly taken a light touch to vetting guardianship providers. ProPublica found that though NYGS presented itself as a nonprofit, it hadn’t registered as such with state and federal authorities.

The attorney general’s investigation is not the office’s first foray into the guardianship world. A decade ago, the same unit investigated a nonprofit guardian called Integral Guardianship Services, ultimately finding the group had improperly loaned its top officials hundreds of thousands of dollars while its wards unnecessarily sat in nursing homes, according to court records. To settle the case, Integral agreed to various reforms, paid back the loans and brought on a management consultant, the Harvard Business School Club of New York, to review its systems, operations and finances.

Even so, Integral shut down just a few years later, stranding hundreds of wards whose cases were absorbed by other nonprofit groups and private lawyers. Among them was NYGS, which was founded, in part, by Integral’s former director of judicial compliance, Sam Blau, who wasn’t named in the attorney general’s lawsuit. Other Integral employees also remained in the guardianship business, starting their own groups or working as court-appointed fiduciaries, court and tax records show.

Some of those successor businesses are now among the entities state investigators are examining, the people familiar with the attorney general’s investigation said.

NYGS executives Sam and David Blau did not respond to an email seeking comment. Neither did the attorney general’s office.

News of the attorney general’s investigation comes as court administrators and Albany legislators face increased pressure to fix the guardianship system. Court officials have said they need more money to address the problems and announced last fall that they were appointing a dedicated special counsel, as well as a statewide coordinating judge, to oversee reforms.

Advocacy groups have mounted their own lobbying campaign, pressing Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders to commit $15 million annually to support a statewide network of nonprofits experienced in handling government contracts to serve the unbefriended. Another proposal, put forth by an advisory committee to the state court system, has advocated for the creation of a $72 million independent statewide agency to serve as a public guardian.

It’s not clear what Hochul, a Democrat, foresees for guardianship ahead of the upcoming legislative session. She’ll present the executive budget later this month. Last year’s $229 billion spending plan included just $1 million to fund a statewide guardianship hotline. A spokesperson for her office did not respond to questions about her funding plans or for comment on the AG’s probe.

Guillermo Kiuhan, an attorney for the former NYGS ward who has since died, said he was encouraged to hear the company may have to answer for what he said was outright theft. He has been trying to get NYGS to reimburse the ward’s heirs for the thousands of dollars the company took as compensation while his family provided for his care in Colombia. So far, the efforts have been unsuccessful. The Blaus didn’t respond to questions about Kiuhan’s claims.

“We are very frustrated,” he said in an interview. “Hopefully this is an opportunity to get the authorities involved … and not have more people with the same problem.”

by Jake Pearson

Tribal Lenders Say They Can Charge Over 600% Interest. These States Stopped Them.

1 month ago

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A decade ago, strange billboards started showing up, including in New York’s Times Square. They weren’t advertising a product. They were vilifying Connecticut’s then-governor, Dannel Malloy.

And they could be traced to that state’s unusual effort to stop an Oklahoma tribe from offering Connecticut residents short-term consumer loans at exorbitant interest rates.

“Gov. Malloy, Don’t take away my daddy’s job,” read one of the billboards, alongside a picture of a Native American child with braids and traditional garb.

But Malloy was not dissuaded by what he called a “scare tactic.” He said he felt the state’s banking regulations were on his side. The Oklahoma tribe was claiming sovereign immunity as it flouted Connecticut law — charging over 400% interest annually, though the state capped rates on such loans at 12%.

“We knew we could win,” Malloy said. “We knew they were harming people in Connecticut.”

He said he came to believe that the sums Native American tribes were making were paltry compared with the money flowing to the outside investment organizations that had linked themselves to the tribes because of the protections that can come with sovereign status.

Connecticut officials spent years fighting in court, but their eventual victory on behalf of the state’s citizens proved a crucial point about regulation at the local level.

Even as federal authorities have struggled to make an impact on this controversial form of lending, a handful of states have upended the notion that tribes’ sovereign immunity must keep state regulators on the sidelines. The lesson: a little pushback can go a long way.

In addition to Connecticut, five other states — Arkansas, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia — have been remarkably effective at eliminating most tribal loans, which are made online. A ProPublica review of the fine print on more than 80 tribal lending websites shows that the vast majority of tribal lenders now don’t lend in those states.

And a sample of cases filed in federal bankruptcy court bolsters the findings, with few filers in those states listing tribal lenders as creditors. Complaints, too, funneled to the Federal Trade Commission were minuscule in number in these states in recent years.

The six states tend to have strong consumer protection laws overall. Arkansas’ Constitution, for example, limits consumer loans to 17% interest annually. But, more significantly, the states have had aggressive attorneys, working for public agencies or private law firms, who have stepped in to protect consumers from high rates.

“They’d rather stay out than offer a product at a lower rate,” Connecticut Sen. Matt Lesser said of tribal lenders.

“They saw that Connecticut was aggressive in enforcing the law,” said the senator, who helped pass a bill to make such high-interest loans uncollectable in the state.

Minnesota is the latest state to confront tribal lenders.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Minnesota’s attorney general filed a consent agreement in federal court in which the president of Wisconsin’s Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians promised that their tribal businesses would never again lend to Minnesotans at rates that violate the state’s usury — or lending — laws, which caps many consumer loans at 36% interest annually. The attorney general found LDF companies lending at annual rates between 200% and 800%.

The LDF tribe, which is a leading player in the industry, has said its lending business helps people without access to credit, while the profits provide critical funding for tribal government services. It also has defended a common industry practice of partnering with nontribal entities that conduct many of the day-to-day operations, likening it to outsourcing.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison succeeded in bringing two enforcement actions in 2024 against tribal lenders catering to Minnesota borrowers. Ellison is one of a handful of state officials bringing cases against usurious lenders. (Charles Krupa/AP Photo)

It was the second enforcement action Minnesota had secured against tribal loan executives in 2024. Earlier in the year, a Montana tribal lending operation agreed to the state’s demands to stop making loans in Minnesota.

Loans from tribal lenders can carry astronomical rates because the operations claim that the tribes’ sovereign immunity allows them to be governed by federal but not state laws. There is no federal interest rate limit, aside from a 36% cap on loans to active-duty military members and their families.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office had watched case law develop around tribal lending to the point where the state felt assured that it could enforce its interest rate caps against a sovereign entity offering loans to Minnesota residents.

In a March interview with ProPublica, Ellison said his office would share its knowledge with other states looking to crack down on tribal lending. “If people want to talk, we would love to see more enforcement action around the country,” he said.

Yet there are limits to what states can accomplish. Courts have ruled that states can only obtain injunctions to stop collections and prevent future harm, but they cannot collect fines or claw back money already lost by consumers. Their enforcement actions do not prevent tribes from making loans in other states. And they are only able to sue tribal leaders, not the tribes themselves.

Tribal Lending Has Largely Ceased in Six States Note: States are categorized as “all or nearly all” if 85% or more of tribal lending websites indicated that they do not lend in that state as of October. “Most” is defined as 51-84% who do not lend there, “some” is 15-50% and “few or none” is less than 15%. Source: ProPublica review of 81 tribal lending websites that listed states they do not do business in. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

And these legal battles can be lengthy and contentious, as exemplified by what happened in Connecticut.

In October 2014, Connecticut’s banking regulator ordered websites associated with the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma to stop providing loans to Connecticut residents, citing the state’s cap on interest rates and deeming the loans illegal.

The following spring, the Institute for Liberty, a pro-business organization in Washington, D.C., announced a campaign against Malloy. In social media posts, ads and mailings, the institute alleged that Connecticut’s actions were an affront to tribal sovereignty.

It further argued that the enforcement effort against the Oklahoma-based tribe would deprive Native American families of income for health care, education and employment.

But leaders of two Connecticut tribes uninvolved in lending joined state leaders in a press conference to reject the institute’s claims and to call on tribal lenders to stop taking advantage of the state’s consumers. Only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes have engaged in online lending.

The Institute for Liberty posted appeals like these on Facebook as part of its campaign against Connecticut’s then-Gov. Dannel Malloy. “What Connecticut is trying to do is to ignore hundreds of years of legal precedent and threatening the basic human rights of tribal people — rights guaranteed by our Constitution,” the institute’s president said in a 2015 press release.

As a political entity organized as a nonprofit, the institute did not have to publicly disclose its donors and so was considered a dark-money group. IRS records available online show its tax-exempt status has lapsed. Andrew Langer, the institute’s president, declined ProPublica’s request for an interview. “I have absolutely no comment,” he said in a phone call.

John Shotton, chair of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians, said in an email to ProPublica: “We did not financially support the campaign, the Institute for Liberty, or their executive director in any way. We had no knowledge of the campaign before learning about it from media sources.”

The Oklahoma tribe stopped lending in Connecticut but initiated a long court battle. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the tribe’s chair could not face civil penalties but could be subject to an injunction preventing future lending. The state also issued cease and desist orders to three other tribally affiliated lenders, which exited the state as well.

Forceful actions by state officials in New York and Pennsylvania targeting short-term lending also pushed out tribal operations.

In 2013, the New York Department of Financial Services sent cease and desist letters to dozens of online payday lenders, including some tribal lenders, and warned banks to cut off access to lenders operating in violation of state law. Two tribes sued the state to stop the crackdown, but were unsuccessful.

In 2014, Pennsylvania’s attorney general brought an ambitious case against Think Finance Inc., a hedge-fund-backed financial technology firm that was allied with three tribes. The state alleged that the arrangement was designed to enable Think Finance to profit from abusive loans by evading state lending laws. In court papers, Think Finance denied wrongdoing and said that it was not the actual lender on the tribal loans, arguing that it was providing “perfectly lawful services” to the tribes.

The litigation spurred additional private lawsuits, ultimately leading Think Finance to declare bankruptcy and resulting in multimillion-dollar settlements with borrowers.

“This is a model of how aggressive enforcement by one state can lend itself to nationwide relief for consumers,” Gov. Josh Shapiro, then attorney general, said in a press release.

In a 2019 deposition in a consumer lawsuit, an attorney previously involved in the tribal lending industry provided insight into tribal lenders’ avoidance of states where they may draw attention. Asked why a tribe might be advised not to lend in certain states, he replied “to avoid the headache of having to deal with an AG that was being aggressive.”

The attorney, Daniel Gravel, noted that the companies in the case believed that they were “engaging in perfectly legal activities” but “it wasn’t worth the time and effort of having to deal with state regulators who disagreed with us.”

In certain states, it’s not attorneys general or banking officials who are forcing out tribal lenders. The feat has largely been accomplished by private attorneys bringing consumer lawsuits, including sweeping class-action claims.

Most settlements remain confidential, but ProPublica tallied at least $2.9 billion in canceled loans and more than $360 million in restitution from class-action suits since 2019. The major settlements were all filed in federal courts in Virginia and were largely driven by consumer attorneys there.

The class-action cases are highly complex because of the difficulty in unraveling the layers of entities and people involved, which is why the circle of private lawyers challenging the tribal lending industry is small. In addition, private attorneys can be stymied by arbitration clauses in loan agreements, which aim to prevent consumers from going to court.

“This is rocket science. This is among the most complicated litigation you can do,” said Margot Saunders, a senior attorney with the National Consumer Law Center who has served as an expert witness in cases.

Tribal lenders now largely steer clear of making loans in Virginia.

They also largely avoid neighboring West Virginia, ProPublica found. That state has strong consumer protection statutes, and private attorneys and a previous attorney general have used them effectively in lawsuits against tribally affiliated lenders.

Bren Pomponio, a West Virginia attorney for Mountain State Justice Inc., a nonprofit legal services firm that brought a lawsuit against a tribal lender and its business partners in 2020, said that the past decade of litigation has cut through the “myth” that sovereign immunity enables tribal lenders to charge excessive interest rates.

“They thought they had a model to avoid state law, but they don’t really,” he said.

by Joel Jacobs and Megan O’Matz

The Second Trump White House Could Drastically Reshape Infectious Disease Research. Here’s What’s at Stake.

1 month ago

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Lifesaving HIV treatments. Cures for hepatitis C. New tuberculosis regimens and a vaccine for RSV.

These and other major medical breakthroughs exist in large part thanks to a major division of the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet.

For decades, researchers with funding from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have labored quietly in red and blue states across the country, conducting experiments, developing treatments and running clinical trials. With its $6.5 billion budget, NIAID has played a vital role in discoveries that have kept the nation at the forefront of infectious disease research and saved millions of lives.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.

NIAID helped lead the federal response, and its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, drew fire amid school closures nationwide and recommendations to wear face masks. Lawmakers were outraged to learn that the agency had funded an institute in China that had engaged in controversial research bioengineering viruses, and questioned whether there was sufficient oversight. Republicans in Congress have led numerous hearings and investigations into NIAID’s work, flattened NIH’s budget and proposed a total overhaul of the agency.

More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, has said he wants to fire and replace 600 of the agency’s 20,000 employees and shift research away from infectious diseases and vaccines, which are at the core of NIAID’s mission to understand, treat and prevent infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases. He has said that half of NIH’s budget should focus on “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.” He has a particular interest in improving diets.

Even the most staunch defenders of NIH agree the agency could benefit from reforms. Some would like to see fewer institutes, while others believe there should be term limits for directors. There are important debates over whether to fund and how to oversee controversial research methods, and concerns about the way the agency has handled transparency. Scientists inside and outside of the institute agree that work needs to be done to restore public trust in the agency.

But experts and patient advocates worry that an overhaul or dismantling of NIAID without a clear understanding of the critical work performed there could imperil not only the development of future lifesaving treatments but also the nation’s place at the helm of biomedical innovation.

“The importance of NIAID cannot be overstated,” said Greg Millett, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. “The amount of expertise, the research, the breakthroughs that have come out of NIAID — It’s just incredible.”

To understand how NIAID works and what’s at stake with the new administration, ProPublica spoke with people who have worked for NIAID, received funding from it, or served on boards or panels that advise the institute.

Decisions on Research Funding and Grants

The director of NIAID is appointed by the head of the NIH, who must be approved by the Senate. Directors have broad discretion to determine what research to fund and where to award grants, although traditionally those decisions are informed by recommendations from panels of outside experts.

Fauci led NIAID for nearly 40 years. He’d navigated controversy in the past, particularly in the early years of the HIV epidemic when community activists criticized him for initially excluding them from the research agenda. But in general until the pandemic, he enjoyed relatively solid bipartisan support for his work, which included a strong focus on vaccine research and development. After he retired in 2022, he was replaced by Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, an HIV researcher who was formerly the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has spent much of her time in the halls of Congress working to restore bipartisan support for the institution.

NIH directors typically span presidential administrations. But Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, and current director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli told staff this week that she would resign on Jan. 17. A Stanford professor, Bhattacharya has spent his career studying health policy issues like the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the efficacy of U.S. funding for HIV treatments internationally. He also researched the NIH, concluding that while the agency funds a lot of innovative or novel research, it should do even more.

In March 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the death toll from the pandemic would likely be far lower than predicted and called for lockdown policies to be reevaluated. That October, he helped write a declaration that recommended lifting COVID-19 restrictions for those “at minimal risk of death” until herd immunity could be reached. In an interview with the libertarian magazine Reason in June, he said he believes the COVID-19 epidemic most likely originated from a lab accident in China and that he can’t see Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which led to the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines at unprecedented speed, as a total success because it was part of the same research agenda.

Bhattacharya declined an interview request from ProPublica about his priorities for the agency. A recent Wall Street Journal article said he is considering how to link “academic freedom” on college campuses to NIH grants, though it’s not clear how he would measure that or implement such a change. He’s also raised the idea of term limits for directors and said the pandemic “was just a disaster for American science and public health policy,” which is now in desperate need of reform.

Money to Support Jobs and Advance Medicine

Grants from NIAID flow to nearly every state and more than half of the congressional districts across the country, supporting thousands of jobs nationwide. Last year, nearly $5 billion of NIAID’s $6.5 billion budget went to U.S. organizations outside the institute, according to a ProPublica analysis of NIH’s RePORT, an online database of its expenditures.

In 2024, Duke University in North Carolina and Washington University in Missouri were NIAID’s largest grantees, receiving more than $190 and $173 million, respectively, to study, among other things, HIV, West Nile vaccines and biodefense.

Over the past five years, $10.6 billion, or about 40% of NIAID’s budget to external U.S. institutions, went to states that voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the analysis found. Research suggests that every dollar spent by NIH generates from $2.50 to $8 in economic activity.

That money is key to advancing medicine as well as careers in science. Most students and postdoctoral researchers rely on the funding and prestige of NIH grants to launch into the profession.

New Drugs and Global Influence

The NIH pays for most of the basic research globally into new drugs. The private sector relies on this public funding; researchers at Bentley University found that NIH money was behind every new pharmaceutical approved from 2010 through 2019.

That includes therapies for kids with RSV, COVID-19 vaccines and Ebola treatments, all of which have key patents based on NIAID-funded research.

Research from NIAID has also improved treatment for chronic diseases. New understandings of inflammation from NIAID-funded research has led to cutting-edge research into cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and a growing body of evidence shows how viruses can have long-term impacts, from multiple sclerosis to long COVID. When private companies turn that research into blockbuster drugs, the public benefits from new treatments, as well as jobs and economic growth.

The weight of NIAID’s funding also allows it to play quieter roles that have been essential to advancing science and the United States’ role in biomedicine, several people said.

The institute brings together scientists who are normally competitors to share findings and tackle big research questions. Having that neutral space is essential to pushing knowledge forward and ultimately spurring breakthroughs, said Matthew Rose of the Human Rights Campaign, who has served on multiple NIH advisory boards. “Academic bodies are very competitive with one another. Having NIH pull the grantees together is helpful to make sure they talk to one another and share research.”

NIAID also funds researchers internationally, ensuring the U.S. continues to have an influential voice in global conversations about biosecurity.

NIH has also been working to improve representation in clinical trials. Straight, white men are still overrepresented in clinical research, which has led to missed diagnoses for women and all people of color, as well as those in the LGBTQ+ community. Rose pointed to a long history of missing signs of heart conditions in women as an example. “These are the type of things commercial companies don’t care about,” he said, noting that NIH helps to set the agenda on these issues.

Nancy Sullivan, a former senior investigator at NIAID, said that NIAID’s power is its ability to invest in a broad understanding of human health. “It’s the basic research that allows us to develop treatments,” she said. “You never know which part of fundamental research is going to be the lynchpin for curing a disease or defining a disease so you know how to treat it,” she said.

Sullivan should know: It was her work at NIAID that led four years ago to the first approved treatment for Ebola.

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester

How Many Cars Have Connecticut Towing Companies Sold? The DMV Can’t Tell Us.

1 month ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror and originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

In the summer of 2022, a source called me with a tip about towing. “The details of how this works,” he said, “your head’s gonna spin.”

It turns out Connecticut has a more than 100-year-old law that allows tow truck companies to sell someone’s car 15 days after they haul it away, if they can convince the Department of Motor Vehicles that the vehicle is worth $1,500 or less.

The time frame, we learned by calling every state, is one of the shortest in the country.

So I set out to answer what I thought was a simple question: How many cars have towing companies sold?

I submitted a request to the DMV under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act.

Two-and-a-half years later, it seems the DMV doesn’t even know the answer — and we’re still waiting for thousands of records.

In the fall of 2022, the DMV told me it would cost us $47,000 to get the documents. Not only did it sound like the sticker price for a new car, but I realized we were in for a long fight. (The DMV now says the estimate was an error.)

The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles’ initial estimate for the cost of obtaining documents (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)

We had sought one-page forms called H-100s that tow truck companies must submit to the DMV to get permission to sell someone’s car. Those forms could help us find out a lot of information — which companies are trying to sell cars quickly and what the DMV does with those requests.

Getting the documents was key to learning about towing practices in Connecticut and the real impact they have on people’s lives.

After asking the DMV to produce an itemized accounting of the $47,000 bill, we asked our attorney to appeal to the Freedom of Information Commission. Our attorney negotiated a compromise in April 2023. We agreed to pay $1,900 to cover the agency’s costs of redacting thousands of documents our request entailed.

The next month, we got our first group of forms, and it finally felt like we were on our way, until I opened the first batch and saw this:

(Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)

In addition to being heavily redacted, many forms were handwritten, and the DMV didn’t seem to have a database or a system for keeping track of them. Agency officials initially told us there were 11,700 documents. Then they told us there were more than 7,000 for 2022 alone. Now they say there are about 4,100 for that year. The DMV hasn’t been able to explain the discrepancies. Officials also said the request has taken time because they have to manually redact thousands of documents.

The DMV’s slow drip of providing the forms made us have to look for other ways to find people whose cars were towed and then sold without their consent.

My colleague Ginny Monk, who covers housing, had heard complaints from renters about tow truck companies that had contracts with their apartment complexes. People were getting towed for not backing into their parking spaces or failing to properly display their parking stickers. Many people couldn’t get to the tow lot, which was at least a half-hour away, and others just didn’t have the money to pay the fees.

Under the law, towing companies must notify the local police within two hours of removing a car. So we submitted public records requests to several police departments for their call logs.

We also requested incident reports from the police department where one tow lot was located and found dozens of complaints, most from people who said they either couldn’t get their cars back or were being overcharged.

The police records also referenced DMV investigations into some of the same incidents. So we submitted a FOIA request to the DMV in February for investigations into several towing companies. That took four months but gave us more insight into the problem.

“It may be just a car to some,” Melissa Anderson of Hamden, Connecticut, wrote in her complaint, “but for my family it was sanity, peace of mind stolen from us.”

As we got closer to publishing our story last fall, the DMV began to send us more forms. We now have roughly 4,200. But the agency’s lawyer has told us there are still thousands more it has yet to turn over.

Just days after our story was published, at least two bills were introduced in the state legislature to address some of the issues raised in our reporting. The DMV said it would undertake a “comprehensive review” of towing practices, and the speaker of the House promised that fixing the towing laws will be a “priority” this legislative session.

We hope the interest generated by our story will induce the DMV to release the remaining records soon. Meanwhile, if you’ve had your car towed in Connecticut, we hope you’ll take some time to fill out this questionnaire.

Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.

Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror, contributed reporting.

by Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

After the Palisades Fire, What Can We Really Rebuild?

1 month ago

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In the last years before the fires that destroyed Pacific Palisades, California, the great civic debate in my hometown was over the meaning of a shopping mall.

Some residents feared that the Palisades Village, a 3-acre archipelago of posh boutiques and restaurants that opened in 2018, was driving a gleaming stake through the heart of the place where we grew up. That “Old Palisades” was a mythologized, upper-middle-class community where people knew one another, raised happy families and tempered even the old, analog status-seeking of Malibu and Beverly Hills.

The Village, with its Gucci and Saint Laurent stores and its nouveau-McMansion architectural style, marked our final conquest by overly tanned, overly toned immigrants from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Who else would stroll into the Erewhon grocery and tap down $20 for a Hailey Bieber Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie?

But plenty of people did. They liked the “bespoke, walkable village,” as the developers advertised it, seeing it as an overdue upgrade from Mort’s Deli and the family-run stores that the developer (and later mayoral candidate) Rick Caruso bulldozed away. They seemed happy to pay $27 for a seat in the Bay Theatre, a luxury multiplex that pirated its name and iconic facade from the long-closed movie house on Sunset Boulevard where my friends and I snuck into films like “Billy Jack” and “Big Wednesday.”

On either side of the mall debate, people rarely paused to note that these were rich people’s problems.

Unlike neighboring Santa Monica, an incorporated city with a spirited government, the Palisades didn’t raise its own taxes or run its own services. We call it a town, but it’s really a neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles. Still, there is a community council and a couple of local newspapers, and none of them worried more than occasionally about the threat that catastrophic wildfires might sweep down on us as they had on so many other California towns.

We had been lucky, and we knew it.

Wildfire ravaged a building on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

On New Year’s Day, a handful of my old friends from Paul Revere Junior High were texting to that effect. “We have it so good,” my lawyer friend Eric wrote. He was looking out at the Pacific from the deck of his new home, having moved triumphantly back to the Palisades after years away.

It went without saying that our blessings included having grown up in a place where we could spend blissful days at the beach, attend very good public schools, learn how to work at miserable after-school jobs and get into trouble with minimal consequences.

Homes in that bygone Palisades could still be had for less than $100,000. We didn’t want to be Malibu or Brentwood. There were many wealthy Palisadians even then, but our baroque teenage hierarchies had little to do with who had money and who had less. There were Reagan Republicans and liberal Democrats, but the prevailing political vibe was tolerant and democratic.

The Palisades was still very white. There were separate beach clubs for WASPs and Jews; for years, some did not admit Blacks. But about a third of our classmates at Palisades High were bused from heavily African American neighborhoods like Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills. Whatever its failings, that integration shared what was arguably the city’s best public high school with thousands of less-privileged students. It also taught the white kids something about living in a more diverse society.

An impressive proportion of my classmates from those varied backgrounds went on to build meaningful lives. There are professors and social workers and doctors and film people. A star defensive tackle on the football team, who also sang in the chorus, became the actor and director Forest Whitaker. The businesspeople include a couple of zillionaires. For some, the ultimate marker of success was to afford a home in the neighborhood and send their kids to our old schools.

The Palisades changed a lot after I left for college. Despite the dangers, wealthier people built bigger, fancier homes, pushing out over the canyons and higher into the hills. We had long understood that we were living our nice lives in defiance of some powerful forces. I can still see the terror on my mom’s face one afternoon in the fall of 1978, as a wildfire swept toward us from Mandeville Canyon and we frantically packed the car with the most precious possessions we could gather up.

Even as they leveled quaint, old bungalows to build lot-to-lot monstrosities, many of the Hollywood people who flocked to the Palisades came for the sort of things that had always brought us together — the 10K runs and the Fourth of July parade; the beaches and parks and schools; the great hiking trails that wove into the Santa Monica Mountains from almost every hillside in town.

On New Year’s Day, my friend Eric closed our text conversation with a photograph of the evening’s spectacular sunset. The next images in the chat came a week later, in a video shot from the other side of his deck. A wall of gray-black smoke was billowing behind the ridge, not far from the home where my family lived for almost 50 years.

Less than an hour after he took the picture, Eric, his wife and their son fled down Chautauqua Boulevard, named for the high-minded Methodist educational movement that established the Palisades in the 1920s. Their home, along with the one my parents built and those of many friends, soon burned to the ground.

In photographs, the remains of the Palisades now evoke the streets of Aleppo or Homs, in Syria. Unlike most of my hometown friends, I’ve seen streets like those before. In Mexico City and San Salvador after devastating earthquakes in the 1980s. In Gaza. In the wastelands of Kabul, where American largesse never quite bandaged the scars of the Soviet war.

The ruins of buildings on Sunset Boulevard are reflected in the window of a Saint Laurent store that is part of the largely undamaged Palisades Village mall. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Imagery might be the only valid comparison between our tragedy and those in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Many Palisades residents displaced by the fire have enviable resources; they are reported to be filling four- and five-star hotels from Montecito to Laguna Beach. Compared with Syrians or Gazans or refugees from the Ukraine, the Palisadians have a far better shot at rebuilding their lives.

But the trauma remains overwhelming. To have our past so violently erased makes me wonder what we can really rebuild. Big developers are likely to snap up the burned-out lots of people who were uninsured or underinsured. What takes their place will inevitably be bigger and more generic construction, much of it in the nouveaux-McMansion style.

Even my friends in their early 60s have been weighing whether they will have the time and fortitude to rebuild their homes. And whose Palisades, they wonder, will be rebuilt around them? For now, the only section of the town center that stands somewhat unscathed is the Palisades Village mall, where Caruso called in private firefighters and water trucks to protect his investment.

As a young foreign correspondent, I spent a lot of time in Managua, a city that had been leveled by an earthquake in 1972. After years of war and revolution, Nicaragua was destitute; there was no money for street signs. But the Nicaraguans had a powerful collective memory, and I came to understand it as one of their great strengths.

In those days, a typical Managua address might be, “Del arbolito, tres cuadras hacía el lago,” or, “From the old tree, three blocks toward the lake.” The old tree hadn’t existed for years. But everyone remembered.

by Tim Golden

On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools

1 month ago

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This story is exempt from our Creative Commons license until March 14.

On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted.

After some prayer and singing, the center’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced Husted, asking him to “share with us about faith and intersecting faith with government.” Husted, a youthful 57-year-old, spoke intently about the prayer meetings that he leads in the governor’s office each month. “We bring appointed officials and elected officials together to talk about our faith in our work, in our service, and how it can strengthen us and make us better,” he said. The power of prayer, Husted suggested, could even supply political victories: “When we do that, great things happen — like advancing school choice so that every child in Ohio has a chance to go to the school of their choice.” The audience started applauding before he finished his sentence.

The center had played a key role in bringing about one of the most dramatic expansions of private school vouchers in the country, making it possible for all Ohio families — even the richest among them — to receive public money to pay for their children’s tuition. In the mid-1990s, Ohio became the second state to offer vouchers, but in those days they were available only in Cleveland and were billed as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools. Now the benefits extend to more than 150,000 students across the state, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion, the vast majority of which goes to the Catholic and evangelical institutions that dominate the private school landscape there.

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

The voucher movement has been aided by a handful of billionaire advocates; it was also enabled, during the pandemic, by the backlash to extended school closures. (Private schools often reopened considerably faster than public schools.) Yet much of the public, even in conservative states, remains ambivalent about vouchers: Voters in Nebraska and Kentucky just rejected them in ballot referendums.

How, then, has the movement managed to triumph? The campaign in Ohio provides an object lesson — a model that voucher advocates have deployed elsewhere. Its details are recorded in a trove of private correspondence, much of it previously unpublished, that the movement’s leaders in Ohio sent to one another. The letters reveal a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families — a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate. As one of the movement’s progenitors put it, “Government does a lousy job of substituting for religion.”

In the early 1990s, Ohio’s Catholic bishops faced a problem. For more than a century, religious education had been deeply entrenched in the state; in Cleveland, the parochial system was one of the largest in the country. For decades, though, the Church’s urban schools had been losing students to suburban flight. To keep up enrollment, many were admitting more Black students, often from non-­Catholic families. But these families typically could not afford to pay much, which put a strain on church budgets.

Catholic leaders elsewhere faced the same challenge, but Ohio’s bishops had an advantage. The new Republican governor, George Voinovich, was a devout Catholic who went to Mass multiple times a week, an expression of a faith that was inherited from his Slovenian American mother and deepened by the loss of his 9-year-old daughter, who was struck by a van that ran a red light. An unpretentious Midwesterner who loved fishing in Lake Erie, Voinovich had worked his way up from state legislator to mayor of Cleveland before becoming governor in 1991.

“If we could reconstitute the family and get everyone into Church,” the late Ohio Gov. George Voinovich told the bishop of Columbus in a private letter years ago, “60% of the problems we are confronted with would go away.” (Najlah Feanny/Corbis/Getty Images)

In office, Voinovich corresponded frequently with the state’s most prominent bishops, in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. Their letters, which are collected in Voinovich’s papers at Ohio University, show a close and collaborative relationship. The bishops wrote to thank Voinovich for the regular donations that he and his wife made to the church, which ranged as high as $2,000. They traded get-well wishes and condolence notes. “The last two times I’ve seen you you looked a little tired,” Voinovich once wrote to Anthony Pilla, the bishop of Cleveland. “Please take care of yourself.”

Most of all, they strategized about increasing state funding for Catholic schools. As a legislator, Voinovich had worked to launch a set of programs that helped private schools pay for administration, special education, transportation and other services. His support for these expenditures, which by the early ’90s amounted to more than $100 million, stood in contrast with his aggressive efforts to cut the rest of the budget. At one point, he banned peanuts and other snacks from official state flights. Legislators passed around a story about seeing him pluck a penny out of a urinal.

But Voinovich saw spending on parochial schools as fundamentally different, driven by his belief in the value of a Catholic upbringing. “If we could reconstitute the family and get everyone into Church, about 60% of the problems we are confronted with would go away,” he wrote to James Griffin, the bishop of Columbus. “I can assure you that the money you spend to deal with all the problems confronting the community is much better spent than the way government would spend it.”

Soon after Voinovich became governor, he and the bishops began discussing another way to fund Catholic schools: vouchers. The notion of publicly funded subsidies for private schools wasn’t totally new. After courts ordered school integration in the South, in the 1950s, some municipalities helped finance “segregation academies” for white students. At around the same time, the economist Milton Friedman argued that education should be subject to market forces, in part by paying parents to send their children to a school of their choosing. But no city or state had funded a true voucher initiative.

For the state government, there was an obvious risk to funding Catholic schools; the Ohio Constitution says that “no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society.” Voinovich and his aides worried not only about political repercussions but also about the potential for legal challenges from groups like the ACLU. In April 1991, Voinovich intimated to Pilla that he was recruiting proxies who could obscure their alliance. “We are quietly lining up ‘heavy hitters’ in the business community and are trying to identify someone in the legislature who would be willing to become our advocate,” he wrote.

Voinovich had an ideal partner in David Brennan, a well-connected local businessman. A towering presence at 6-feet-5 (not counting his customary cowboy hat), Brennan had attended Catholic school in Akron before earning degrees in accounting and law, and made a fortune forming corporations for doctors seeking tax benefits. When Voinovich ran for governor, Brennan was a major fundraiser for the campaign. Now he started cultivating allies, donating heavily to a Republican from the Cincinnati suburbs who was a promising sponsor of voucher legislation, as reported by the Akron Beacon Journal, which covered the early voucher push.

In May 1991, Voinovich and Brennan met to discuss creating a commission on school choice, which Brennan would chair. Soon afterward, the bishops provided 18 suggestions for possible members. Six of them ended up on the commission — with no mention of the fact that they had been selected by the church.

As word of the commission spread, it raised concerns. The following spring, an executive at Procter & Gamble, one of the state’s largest employers, urged Voinovich to couch “this sensitive issue” in a broader effort at school reform. “Vouchers on their own could lead to unnecessary divisiveness,” he wrote. The head of the Ohio teachers’ union warned that unilateral action “could explode any chance at building a statewide consensus.” Voinovich responded that he was prepared for discord: “I am confident that whatever recommendations they come back with, it will be difficult for the Ohio Federation of Teachers to support.”

The commission was moving fast. Brennan “is doing an outstanding job,” Voinovich wrote to Pilla. “He is on a mission from God.” Voinovich and Brennan took care to disarm political objections. One briefing document argued that any plan the commission produced “must be substantially tilted in favor of low income ­parents and children” and must require private schools to administer the same ­proficiency tests as public schools. By year’s end, the commission produced its recommendation: Ohio should create a voucher pilot program.

Representative C.J. Prentiss monitored the commission’s work with foreboding. Elected to the Ohio House in 1991, Prentiss had distinguished herself as a leading defender of public education and was steeped in the struggle for school integration. Her father had belonged to the Congress of Racial Equality, and after Prentiss graduated from Cleveland’s Marshall High School — where she was one of six Black students — she attended the 1963 March on Washington. Later, she joined local battles against school segregation, during which she met Michael Charney, a white teacher and union activist who became her third husband. She taught for a while in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights and served on the State Board of Education. In 1993, she and other Black officials in Cleveland condemned Voinovich’s plan. “It is difficult to see how subsidizing private schools will improve public education,” she said. “Private schools have selective entrance requirements, serve only private purposes, and are not accountable to the public.”

Brennan deflected the criticism, noting that the plan was still provisional: “We believe when the education choice bill reaches the final stages, these fine legislators will feel differently than they do today.” In fact, he and Voinovich knew that it would be tough to secure backing for a stand-alone voucher bill; school board members, teachers and administrators were already sending letters to legislators to object. In May 1994, Voinovich contacted Brennan to strategize about how to slip a voucher pilot into the next state budget. “We are going to have to crawl before we walk,” he wrote. “I believe if we can really get it underway in one or two districts during my second term, we will have accomplished more than what [has] been accomplished thus far.”

A few weeks later, Voinovich’s assistant for education policy, Tom Needles, sent him a strategy brief on a forthcoming lunch with the bishops. “The Catholic Conference will continue to maintain a low profile in terms of its formal position on voucher legislation,” Needles wrote. “At the same time, the Conference recognizes that parent organizations in each diocese will play a very active role in lobbying for its passage.” On the last day of January 1995, voucher proponents paid for six buses to carry some 300 children and parents from Cleveland to the Capitol in order to lobby legislators. As parents walked from office to office in the Statehouse, one declared, “The public schools are preparing Black children for prison, the welfare office or the graveyard. As a Black parent, that’s unacceptable.”

Prentiss and a state senator from Cleve­land decided to address the throng. With the parents visibly angry, she knew better than to dismiss concerns about their children’s schooling. “There is a crisis,” she acknowledged. “The question before us is, how do we improve the public schools?”

The bishops, though, were far more organized, with efforts unfolding parish by parish across the state; a list in Voinovich’s papers records hundreds of phone calls and letters to legislators, making the case for vouchers and inviting them to visit local parish schools. Voinovich urged them to do still more. “I really need your help and would appreciate being kept informed as to what is being done so I can convey that to the leadership in both the House and Senate,” he wrote to Daniel Pilarczyk, the archbishop of Cincinnati, in February 1995. The next month, Pilarczyk responded with another list of the church’s actions, including some 20,000 letters sent to ­legislators.

Two weeks later, Voinovich let Pilarczyk know that the House had not only increased funding for Catholic schools but also authorized a “limited scholarship program in the City of Cleveland.” The program would start small, with several thousand vouchers worth about $2,200 apiece. Yet Voinovich recognized that it was a “significant pilot project.” At the time, the only other city that allowed private ­school vouchers was Milwaukee, and the initiative there had initially barred religious schools from participating. Cleveland’s program, in contrast, had been designed from the start to benefit Catholic schools.

In June, the budget won final approval. Six bishops wrote Voinovich to express their gratitude. “Everything we asked you to do was included in your budget,” they told him. “Without your leadership and gentle nudging of legislative leaders, none of this would have been possible.”

Prentiss and Charney quickly grasped the pilot’s import. “This is the beginning of the end for public education,” he told her, only half joking. Prentiss resolved to monitor the program to make sure that the money was spent as intended. After one voucher recipient, an Islamic school, was found to have housed students in unsafe buildings, she successfully sponsored a bill requiring schools that received vouchers to meet the same minimum standards as public schools.

Meanwhile, Prentiss kept pushing for public school reforms: all-day kindergarten, smaller classes, mentorships for at-risk boys. She and Charney were encouraged by test results showing that kids in public schools were performing at least as well as those with vouchers at Catholic schools.

“There is a crisis,” the late Ohio state legislator C.J. Prentiss, a key opponent of vouchers, acknowledged in 1995. “The question before us is, how do we improve the public schools?” (Gus Chan/AP Images)

In 1998, Voinovich was elected to the United States Senate; Needles, his aide, went to work as a lobbyist for Brennan. And the push for vouchers entered a new phase, as an aggressive generation of proponents took up a battle in the courts.

In both Ohio and Wisconsin, opponents, led by teachers’ unions, were challenging the programs on the grounds that they violated the separation of church and state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld vouchers; a federal appeals court in Ohio ruled against them.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up a First Amendment challenge to vouchers, based on one of the Ohio cases, in February 2002. Robert Chanin, a lawyer for the National Education Association, told the court, “Under the Cleveland voucher program, millions of dollars in unrestricted public funds are transferred each year from the state treasury into the general coffers of sectarian private schools, and the money is used by those schools to provide an educational program in which the sectarian and the secular are interwoven.” Chanin noted that ­virtually all the students in the voucher program were attending religious schools, rather than secular private schools.

But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the likely swing vote in the case, interrupted to pick up on a point made by a state attorney who’d defended the vouchers. In evaluating Cleveland’s choice program, shouldn’t the court consider not only private schools but also other options available to students, such as public magnet schools and charter schools?

The question caught Chanin off guard. The issue was the constitutionality of private school vouchers, yet O’Connor was evoking public school options. The state pressed its advantage, with its lawyer stressing the limited scope of the pilot: “It didn’t take too much money away from the public schools, but gave enough for a limited program that is targeted to the most needy, to the poorest of the poor.”

On June 27, 2002, the Court announced that it had ruled, 5-4, in favor of the Ohio program, arguing that it was “part of a broader undertaking by the State to enhance the educational options of Cleveland’s school children.” Clint Bolick, a leading lawyer on the pro-voucher side, declared on the Supreme Court plaza, “This was the Super Bowl of school choice, and the children won.” Later, he and others gathered at the office of the Institute for Justice, a conservative organization, and toasted with Dom ­Pérignon.

Protesters gathered in February 2002 when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about the constitutionality of Ohio’s voucher program. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Prentiss was on vacation with Charney in Washington state when she got word of the ruling. “PBS NewsHour” invited her to come to a studio in Vancouver and record a response, but she was too upset to think about what she would say on camera. “I’m not going to be the one,” she told Charney. “Let them get a lawyer.”

After the Supreme Court ruling, the momentum in seeking alternatives to traditional public schools shifted to charter schools — publicly funded institutions that are administered separately from school districts. Many Democrats had championed charters in the ’90s as a more palatable way to offer school choice, and Republicans had adopted the idea, too; Brennan, the chairman of Voinovich’s school choice commission, launched a for-profit charter ­school venture.

In 2005, with charters threatening to cut into parochial school enrollment, Ohio’s Catholic bishops secured a crucial expansion of vouchers beyond Cleveland: a new statewide program called EdChoice, which offered vouchers to students assigned to schools that were judged to be failing, many of them in Columbus and Cincinnati.

Prentiss stayed in the legislature until 2006, becoming the second Black woman to serve as Senate minority leader. Up until the end, she led the resistance to vouchers. As she left the legislature, though, an impassioned advocate for vouchers came in: a Republican representative named Matt Huffman.

Huffman was a lawyer from Lima, a small industrial city in western Ohio. Like Prentiss, he had grown up among activists, but with different political aims. His father, a lawyer and a county prosecutor, took a case against a local cinema that was showing “obscene” movies all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; his mother co-founded one of the state’s first pregnancy ­crisis centers after abortion was legalized.

Huffman was the fifth of nine children, all of whom went to Catholic schools. This was possible, he said later, because the parish schools were so affordable in those days. But, as tuition climbed (partly to cover the salaries of lay teachers who replaced nuns), the student body skewed wealthier. “The middle class was pretty much shut out of alternatives in education,” he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2022.

One of Huffman’s brothers became the principal of a Catholic elementary school. Huffman, after following his ­father into law, served as a fundraiser for Lima Central Catholic High. He also got involved in local politics, rising to president of the City Council. In 2000, he endorsed a young former Ohio State wrestling coach named Jim Jordan as he ran for the state Senate. Jordan, who is now one of the most stridently conservative members of the U.S. House of ­Representatives, later returned the favor by backing Huffman’s campaign for the state legislature.

By this point, school choice was becoming Huffman’s overriding priority. In Lima, he participated in a standing gin rummy game with the Rev. David Ross, a local Catholic priest, and Leo Hawk, the owner of a metal-forming company, who, in Ross’ recollection, repeatedly pressed Huffman on the issue. “Leo Hawk was very influential in terms of trying to inculcate him with ‘Let the parents decide where to spend their tax dollars,’” Ross told me. “Leo was very forceful in those gatherings.” (Hawk could not be reached for comment.)

During Huffman’s first four years in the legislature, the governor was a Democrat, and the focus was on protecting existing vouchers. But after the Republican John Kasich took office, in 2011, Huffman proposed a significant expansion: making vouchers available to middle-­class Ohio families, too, regardless of whether they were in a failing district. “This is starting down the path of looking at funding education in a fundamentally different way,” he said.

The proposal met with impassioned resistance. Opponents pointed to a ­report in the Plain Dealer that showed voucher students had performed worse than students at the public schools that they would have attended. Among the critics were public school administrators in Lima, where hundreds of students were already receiving vouchers because a few local schools were rated as failing. The exodus of students resulted in a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in state revenue. As Lima’s school superintendent at the time, Karel Oxley, explained to me: Even if a class lost students, the school still had to pay for their classroom and teacher. To complicate matters, the students who left tended to be motivated kids from stable families, while special-needs students stayed. This made it harder for public schools to improve their poor test scores. “You have to have your A-team to help the school be as good as possible, but the A-team moves over to the other school,” Oxley, who also served as president of the state superintendents’ association, said. “It’s almost impossible to catch up.”

Oxley is herself Catholic, and consults for a Catholic school in retirement, but she testified against vouchers at a committee hearing around this time. She recalled that Huffman was adamant. “There was nothing I could have said that would have allowed him to see that he might be stripping resources from the greater community,” she told me. “He said, ‘You pay taxes, I pay taxes. Why can’t my taxes go toward my children’s school?’ I said, ‘Because you chose that private school.’ He said, ‘That doesn’t make sense, Karel. My taxes should pay for my child’s education.’” (Huffman did not respond to requests for comment.)

Huffman settled for a partial victory: In 2013, the state allowed EdChoice vouchers for families with incomes up to twice the poverty line in any district. It was a step forward, but Huffman wanted the program to be available to wealthier families, and it would take another ally to help him realize his full ambition.

Phil Burress was always candid about what had brought him to Citizens for Community Values: He was a former pornography addict. Burress had fought the addiction from the age of 14, until he finally swore it off, at 38. “I became a Christian that day,” he told me. From then on, he said, he was a “better father and husband” and “started speaking out about things that are wrong.” His background gave him insight into the enemy. “You have to look at your communities through the eyes of a pornographer and stay ahead of them,” he once told reporters.

Burress, a former organizer with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks, joined Citizens for Community Values in 1983. By then, the organization, which started as a Cincinnati prayer group, had devoted itself to fighting pornography and strip clubs, including various enterprises belonging to Larry Flynt, who launched his Hustler brand in Ohio. In 1990, it gained national prominence by leading the opposition to an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center. Not long afterward, Burress took over as president. “We are not some radical, right-wing, fundamental bunch of Bible-­thumping nuts out there yelling and screaming,” Burress said at the time. “We do our homework.”

The group grew under Burress — by 1997, it claimed to have 25,000 supporters — and started taking on nationwide causes, such as pressuring hotels to stop offering pay-per-view porn. In 2004, it led a successful petition drive for an amendment banning same-sex marriage in Ohio, a factor in George W. Bush’s narrow win over John Kerry there. “I was thinking, No way we can get that many signatures,” Lori Viars, a conservative activist in the Cincinnati exurbs, told me. “But we ended up doing it.”

The victory attracted more funding, which the group used to hire full-time lobbyists in Columbus. Its top issues were abortion, same-sex marriage, gay rights and, increasingly, school choice. Though the members were mostly evangelical, not Catholic, they shared the conviction that the public should pay for kids to attend religious schools. Still, Burress told me, the group struggled to persuade legislators to expand voucher access. “We could not get any traction whatsoever,” he said. What changed matters was “electing the right people to office.”

“You have to look at your communities through the eyes of a pornographer and stay ahead of them,” said Phil Burress, a former leader of the Center for Christian Virtue, which has become a leading advocate for vouchers. (Al Behrman/AP Images)

In 2017, Matt Huffman arrived in the state Senate. He had served the maximum eight years in the House and, like many other Ohio legislators, simply ran for the other chamber. In the Senate, school choice remained his primary cause. That year, he sponsored a bill to expand eligibility for vouchers to families that made as much as four times the poverty level. Catholic leaders were thrilled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a legislator who did more for school choice,” a former employee of the Catholic Conference of Ohio, the church’s public policy arm, said. “He’s just been a rock.”

Huffman still faced resistance from public school officials, but he now had influential assistance from Citizens for Community Values. In 2016, Burress was succeeded by a new director, Aaron Baer, who signaled a more expansive mission. Baer was a 29-year-old graduate of Ohio University, a hip-hop enthusiast raised by a single parent. “This is a Christian conservative movement for the next generation,” he told the Dispatch. “We talk about poverty, human ­trafficking, opioids, while still talking about ­marriage.” The organization moved its headquarters to Columbus and gave itself a forthright new name: the Center for Christian Virtue. Burress welcomed the change. “I was glad to see them admit that without God we’re nothing,” he told me.

Baer and Huffman were unlikely ­allies. Huffman liked to do impersonations and had a profane streak; he was once forced to apologize for making an ­off-color joke at an office party. But on vouchers they were effective partners, with Baer far more willing to advocate in public than the bishops were. In the next couple of years, Baer fought to get the state to define “failing” schools as broadly as possible, and called out suburban districts, many of which opposed vouchers, when they resisted accepting students from struggling city schools.

By early 2020, Huffman was still trying to make the case for a major voucher expansion. That January, he met with a few dozen public school officials in western Ohio. Craig Kupferberg, the superintendent for Allen County, which includes Lima, told me that he’d raised his hand and asked Huffman, “Have you put anything in the bill to stop the David Dukes of the world from starting up their own private schools and having our tax dollars fund their hateful ideology?” Kupferberg recalled that Huffman had looked at him “like I was from outer space” and said, “What stops homeschooling parents from doing any of that?” (Never mind that vouchers weren’t going to home­schooling families.) Then Huffman embarked on a lengthy complaint about how many people viewed Catholicism as a cult.

“You pay taxes, I pay taxes,” Matt Huffman, now the speaker of Ohio’s House of Representatives, told the president of the state superintendents’ association. “Why can’t my taxes go toward my children’s school?” (Carolyn Kaster/AP Images)

Huffman’s proposal stalled again that term. But, two months later, the pandemic arrived and schools closed. After nearly a year, about a third of Ohio’s 609 districts still hadn’t returned to full in-person instruction. The holdouts included many of the largest districts, Cleveland and Columbus among them.

The state’s parochial schools, in contrast, had mostly reopened after a few months. The Catholic Conference of Ohio highlighted students’ educational gains in the legislature. “A lot of legislators appreciated what we did for children, because a lot of legislators were frustrated, too,” the former conference employee said. “We were sort of a beacon in the COVID era.” It helped proponents that many legislators had their own children in Catholic schools. Although Catholics account for only about 17% of the state’s population, they constitute more than half of the Senate and a third of the House.

As the pandemic wore on, school closures inspired similar outrage in other states. They “sparked a parent revolution, because families saw that school systems didn’t care about them all that much,” Corey DeAngelis, a leading voucher proponent, said on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” last May. “This is the silver lining of the pandemic.”

Many parents were alarmed by virtual instruction. It was not just that lessons conducted by Zoom seemed frustratingly inadequate; they also offered a glimpse of what their children were being taught, which in some families caused consternation over a perceived progressive agenda. Viars, the Cincinnati-area activist, noticed a surge of interest in Christian schools. “The books being pushed on these little kids were so objectionable,” she said. “It was really sexually explicit material for little kids. We heard that a lot: ‘No, these kids should not be seeing any of this.’”

In May 2021, two Republican representatives in Ohio introduced a “backpack bill,” which would give every ­family voucher money to spend as they saw fit: $7,500 for each high school student and $5,500 for each younger one. At a press conference announcing the bill, Baer stood beside its sponsors. “In the pandemic, we saw the need to have innovative and different learning environments,” he said. “You had some families who, because their local public schools decided not to open for in-person education, they were forced into an online environment that wasn’t ideal for them.”

The bill went a step further than Huffman had before; whereas he had pushed for vouchers for all but the wealthiest families, the backpack bill included everyone. It was a bold move, but proponents had a new advantage: earlier that year, Huffman’s Republican colleagues had elected him president of the Senate. In that role, not only was he able to push for vouchers — he could also block efforts to reform Ohio’s redistricting system, which had produced maps heavily slanted toward the GOP. By 2022, the Senate had 25 Republicans and eight Democrats; the House was split 64 to 35. “We can kind of do what we want,” Huffman told the Dispatch.

Yet Huffman and his allies decided not to advance the backpack bill through regular legislative channels, which would require stand-alone votes in both chambers. Opposition lingered, even within their own party: Some rural Republicans were conscious that there were few private schools in their districts, and so their constituents’ tax dollars would go toward vouchers used mostly by wealthy suburbanites. And, if more private schools did open in rural areas, that would drain enrollment from public schools that often served as centers of the community.

Instead, Huffman and his counterparts used a maneuver that would have been familiar to George Voinovich: they slipped an expansion of vouchers into the budget, a 1,200-page document that they sent to Gov. Mike De­Wine just before the deadline. Families with incomes of up to 450% of the poverty level would qualify for full payments: $8,407 for high school students and $6,165 for younger ones. These sums came close to covering tuition at many Catholic schools, and far exceeded what many public districts received in per-capita funds from the state. Even families making more than that income threshold, which was $135,000 for a family of four, would qualify for some funding. “Every student in Ohio will be eligible for a scholarship worth at least 10% of the maximum scholarship, regardless of income,” Huffman’s office said.

More than 30 years after Voinovich and the bishops proposed vouchers as a solution for underprivileged children in a single city, public subsidies for private ­school tuition were now universal in Ohio, covering tens of thousands of families. “We’re going to have the money to pay for it,” Huffman said afterward. “I hope more people take advantage of that if they want to.”

C.J. Prentiss died last April at 82. She had spent her retirement with Charney in a cottage on Lake Erie, in Ashtabula County. In her final years, declining health kept her from engaging much in the battle over public education. But she did have a confrontation with Huffman when she returned to Columbus for a Senate reunion in 2022. Several speakers had been chosen for the event, and when Prentiss saw that they were all white she asked Huffman about it. According to Charney, Huffman responded that he didn’t have enough time to line up others. “Don’t lie to me,” Prentiss said, and walked away.

That same year, a coalition of school districts, now numbering more than 200, filed suit against the voucher expansion. The suit alleged that the program exacerbated racial segregation, by essentially allowing private schools to select their own students; 90% of the new voucher recipients are white, in a state where only about two-thirds of students are. The suit also alleged that the vouchers violated two principles of the state constitution: a bar against religious control of public school funds and a promise of an adequate education for all. A judge denied the state’s motion to dismiss the case; a trial is expected in the coming months.

Among the districts that joined the suit is the one in Lima, Huffman’s home town. Virtually all the students enrolled in Catholic schools there now receive vouchers. Enrollment at these and other parochial schools has not increased dramatically; as is true across the state, they have limited capacity, so they accept only those students they prefer. This undermines the narrative that vouchers allow families to escape their public school. But public schools still suffer. Kupferberg, the superintendent, estimates that in his county the voucher expansion is costing schools millions of dollars a year. Federal pandemic relief aid has helped mitigate the damage, but that is coming to an end. “We’re starting to feel the impact,” Kupferberg said.

Meanwhile, some private schools are raising tuition, knowing that vouchers allow families to pay more. In Centerville, south of Columbus, the principal of Incarnation Catholic School told parents last year that it would no longer offer a discount for families that had multiple students enrolled there. “Our parishioner tuition rate is nowhere near the true cost to educate,” she wrote. “This increased revenue will allow us to increase teacher and staff salaries, address deferred maintenance, and hire additional staff.”

Huffman and his allies are pushing for more. Huffman (who has now moved back to the House, and was recently elected speaker) inserted funding for new construction at private schools into the last state budget, with an eye toward creating private school options in rural areas. Also on the table is legislation to create education-savings accounts for families with children in unregulated private schools that now can’t receive vouchers.

For these coming fights, the Center for Christian Virtue is stronger than ever. The organization has assembled a network of dozens of religious schools, which pay the center $5 per enrolled student, up to $3,000 per school, to lobby on their behalf. In effect, the state’s religious schools can now use some of the public money they receive to advocate for the flow of funding to increase.

Between 2020 and 2022, the center’s revenue more than tripled, to $4.2 million. It used some of the money to purchase two buildings opposite the statehouse — one previously owned by the Dispatch — for a total of $2.35 million, giving it space to accommodate a staff that has grown to 20. (The Center for Christian Virtue did not respond to a request for comment.)

In early October, the center held a policy conference, called the Essential Summit, at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. A main topic of discussion was Christian education, with sessions led by the executive director of the Center for Biblical Integration at Liberty University, the college founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. One session would address the question “How should we plan for teaching knowing that humans are inherently corrupt?” Another asked, “Why do Christian educators have the most dignifying approach to all humans?”

Huffman was slated to join a discussion with the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in ­Michigan that has become a powerful incubator of conservatism. Also in attendance was Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which produced the policy blueprint for the second Trump administration. The plan, called Project 2025, includes a strong endorsement of vouchers, and Roberts’ presence was an affirmation of Ohio’s role as a model for the school choice movement. In Florida, the number of voucher recipients approached half a million this school year, up 74%. (The state distributes the same voucher — about $8,000 — regardless of income.) In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott helped to defeat nearly a dozen anti-­voucher Republicans in state legislative primaries last year. He had $10 million in campaign funding from Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania hedge fund billionaire who has made expanding vouchers his central policy goal.

At the convention center, conference staff turned me away, even though I had paid to register. I hung around as attendees emerged from the morning session, their tote bags filled with brochures for Christian schools, investing advice and health coverage. Many of the event’s discussions were aimed at religious schools that were now supported with public funds. But, as I was about to approach Roberts, security guards blocked the path and told me to leave.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

by Alec MacGillis

Two Families Sue After 11-Year-Old and 13-Year-Old Students Were Arrested Under Tennessee’s School Threat Law

1 month ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Two families have sued an East Tennessee school district in federal court, arguing that school officials violated students’ rights when they called the police under a Tennessee law that seeks to severely punish threats of mass violence.

One 11-year-old was arrested at a restaurant even though he denied making a threat. A 13-year-old with disabilities was handcuffed for saying his backpack would blow up, even though only a stuffed animal was inside.

ProPublica and WPLN News wrote about both cases last year as part of a larger investigation into how new state laws result in children being kicked out of school and arrested on felony charges, sometimes because of rumors and misunderstandings. Our reporting in Hamilton County found that police were arresting, handcuffing and detaining kids, even though school officials labeled most of the incidents as “low level” with “no evidence of motive.” The students arrested were disproportionately Black and had disabilities, compared to those groups’ overall share of the district’s population.

The lawsuits against Hamilton County’s school district, filed this month in federal court in Chattanooga, are two of several brought against school officials in Tennessee in response to the threats of mass violence law. Advocates hope to push for changes to the law in the legislative session that begins this month. But the law’s Republican sponsor, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, told ProPublica and WPLN News that he is “not looking to make any changes to the law.”

“The zero-tolerance policy for even uttering the words ‘shoot’ or ‘gun’ is an unconstitutional kneejerk reaction by the legislature, and has led school administrators to make rash decisions concerning student discipline,” states one of the lawsuits, filed Thursday on behalf of the 11-year-old autistic student arrested at the restaurant.

When asked by another student last September if he was going to shoot up the school, the 11-year-old said, “Yeah,” according to the lawsuit. The school reported the comment to the police, who tracked him down and arrested him.

The other federal lawsuit, filed Jan. 3, involves the 13-year-old student with “serious intellectual impairments,” who told his teacher last fall that the school would “blow up” if she looked inside his backpack. The teacher found just a stuffed animal in the backpack, but school officials reported the incident to police anyway.

“Despite the clear absence of any true threat, and in the context of a student with Doe’s intellectual and emotional impairments, Doe was isolated, handcuffed by the [student resource officer], and transported to juvenile detention,” the lawsuit reads. (Both suits refer to the children involved as John Doe to keep them anonymous.) The school later determined that the student’s behavior was a manifestation of his autism, according to documentation included in the lawsuit.

Both lawsuits allege that district officials violated state law by allowing students receiving special education services to be physically restrained and by failing to follow proper procedure before facilitating the students’ arrests. The school district “infringed on Doe’s First Amendment rights and did so with deliberate indifference,” both lawsuits read.

The juvenile court cases against both students have been dismissed.

The Hamilton County Schools superintendent referred a request for comment to the school board’s attorney, citing pending litigation. The attorney did not immediately respond to a subsequent request for comment. The district has not yet filed a response to either lawsuit.

Disability rights advocates fought for a broader exception in the law that would have prevented police from charging kids who might, as a result of their disability, say or do something that could be construed as a threat.

“What we’re seeing coming out with all of these lawsuits, it’s sort of exactly what we were trying to educate about last year,” said Zoe Jamail, the policy coordinator for Disability Rights Tennessee.

Instead, lawmakers only excluded people with “intellectual disabilities,” failing to address students with other disabilities that affect their communication or behavior. The law does not state how police should determine whether a child has an intellectual disability before charging them. In fact, our reporting found that police arrested the 13-year-old in the lawsuit although school records showed he did have an intellectual disability.

Disability Rights Tennessee and other organizations plan to push for an amendment to the law this legislative session to protect more students with disabilities, especially when the threat is not credible. “The question should really be how can we better support those young people in the school environment, and how can we handle these cases with compassion and reason, rather than reacting and interpreting the law in a way that is not really reasonable,” Jamail said.

A federal judge allowed a lawsuit against a suburban Nashville school board to move forward in November. Two parents had sued Williamson County’s school board on behalf of their children, claiming they were wrongfully suspended and arrested after being accused of making threats of mass violence at school.

The families, Judge Aleta Trauger ruled, had a “plausible claim” that the school board violated the students’ due process rights by suspending them.

Part of the lawsuit involved a middle school student referred to as “H.M.” Teased by friends in a group chat about “looking Mexican,” she jokingly texted her friends, “On Thursday we kill all the Mexicos.” The school board argued in a legal filing that state law required officials to suspend the student and call the police, regardless of whether the threat was serious. In response to a request from ProPublica and WPLN, a school board official declined to comment further.

Trauger questioned Williamson County school board’s analysis of the law, which she said “leads to absurdity.”

“The implausibility of an action — here, a middle school student killing all Mexicans — ought to affect the threat analysis,” she wrote. “What if, for example, H.M. had threatened to cast a magical killing spell on a large group of people? What if H.M. had threatened to fly to the moon and shoot at people using a space laser?”

She denied the Williamson County school board’s motion to completely dismiss the lawsuit. The suit is pending.

by Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

“All Our Future Money Is Gone”: The Impossible Task of Providing Child Care in Rural Illinois

1 month 1 week ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. _A portion of the reporting in Alexander County is supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Heather and Stephen Casner sat across from the loan officer in the fall of 2022, a stack of papers between them. The building they were trying to buy — a 21-room, one-story motel in rural Anna, Illinois — was overflowing with trash and would need a complete overhaul before they could reopen it as a child care center in a region where there were almost no such facilities. But after a long search, it was the best option they could find.

The Casners were about to sign the papers for a $600,000 loan, using their house as collateral and setting aside $200,000 from Stephen’s retirement to cover what the loan wouldn’t. It was a staggering sum in a southern Illinois town where the per capita income is about $25,000 — 40% below the national level. “I’ve never even seen that much money,” Heather said. “I wasn’t raised that way.”

But Heather, who grew up on a farm just up the road, channeled her late father’s philosophy: “My daddy always used to say he was going to just keep farming until the money runs out.”

With a firm handshake, they were the new owners of a 1950s relic, the Plaza Motel.

The clock on the project was already ticking: In order to survive financially, they’d need to start enrolling children within six months. They knew it would be tough, but they soon would be shocked by the magnitude of the challenges ahead.

The motel the Casners bought as it looked in 2022, before it was remodeled (first image), and in December 2024, after they turned it into a child care center (second image).

Over the past decade, Illinois has lost nearly 4,300 licensed child care providers, a 33% decline. As a result, it has also lost nearly 38,000 licensed child care slots for kids, outpacing the rate at which the child population is shrinking.

In 2019, at the end of his first year in office, Gov. JB Pritzker acknowledged that child care providers in rural Illinois were closing at an “alarming rate” and promised to make Illinois the “best state in the nation for families raising young children.” In response, the state increased its payments to providers. But that funding had been slashed in previous years amid a state budget crisis, and the extra boost was too little, too late. When COVID-19 hit, those that were already fragile folded.

With increased state and federal funding, the closures have now slowed slightly, but Illinois has still lost roughly 1,300 providers since Pritzker took office.

Over several months, Capitol News Illinois spoke with more than 50 parents, employers and child care experts to understand how the child care crisis has reshaped their lives.

Driven to the Limit

Jala Wilson, 25, works with adults with developmental disabilities and attends nursing school. She has struggled to find care for two children. Her older son has behavioral challenges and his public school can’t accommodate him full time. And for her younger son, she couldn’t find child care nearby: Before the Casners opened the Our World of Learning Child Development Center, she was driving 100 miles round trip each day for child care. She spent more than a year getting up at 5 a.m. to drop off her younger son before heading to her nursing classes in the opposite direction. At night, she did it all in reverse. “That was insane,” she said. “I’d pick them up by 5 p.m., cook dinner, get them in the bathtub and do homework after they go to bed. So I probably would stay up until about midnight.” Gas alone cost her $600 a month. “If OWL closed, honestly, I’d probably drop out of school.”

Wilson picks up her younger son, Royce Lingle, from OWL.

People who have sought to open new facilities say they’ve faced monumental difficulties, especially in rural areas where properties are scarce and often require costly repairs. Launching a child care center, even in rural areas, can cost upwards of $1 million, experts say. “We typically think about the cost of care as being much less in our rural communities, and I think that’s a false narrative,” said Ariel Ford, a senior vice president with Child Care Aware of America, a national advocacy organization.

Adding to the difficulties in Illinois, prospective providers say they struggle to navigate a maze of complex requirements largely on their own, leading to delays in opening. They also point to regulations that are contradictory or outdated. One directs providers to place a blanket in every crib, even though the state prohibits using blankets to reduce the risk of SIDS. The state also directs providers to carry coins on walks so they can use a pay phone in an emergency, a relic Heather Casner called “ridiculous.”

Providers also say their applications can get stuck in limbo for weeks or months, with little explanation for the delays or news about when they’ll be licensed. The state’s own data supports this claim: For more than a third of applicants, the state misses its 90-day timeline to approve applications.

Part of the challenge is that the Illinois offices that oversee child care centers are severely short staffed, with a roughly 20% vacancy rate. On average, each state licensing representative is responsible for about 120 facilities, while the National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends a caseload of 50. “Is a rep with 150 cases going to take 30 minutes to explain, step by step, how to fill out a form for somebody? It’s possible,” said Janet O’Connell, a 30-year veteran of the Department of Children and Family Services who recently started a consulting business, Licensing Navigators, to help providers find their way through the system. “But when you’ve got 149 other day care providers tugging at your coat, it’s really hard.”

“The application timeline and the timeline to actually open would shock you,” said Jill Andrews, a longtime child care provider and president of the Southern Illinois Early Childhood Action Team, a nonprofit child care advocacy organization. Centers must hire staff before opening, but without a clear timeline for when they will be allowed to open, she said, they often end up paying staff for weeks or months while waiting for clearance. “Most get into so much unnecessary additional debt due to the long process.”

Child care is urgently needed throughout the country, but particularly so outside urban areas. In one of the few nationwide studies of child care access, the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, found that about 60% of rural Americans live in a child care desert — a region with too few licensed child care spots for the children who live there. In rural Illinois, it’s nearly 70%.

The sun sets over Anna, a town of about 4,000 people in southern Illinois.

Parents in southern Illinois said they have been forced to rely on a patchwork of family and neighbors, drive long distances — sometimes over 100 miles — or bring children to work. Some have left the workforce, unable to find affordable care.

Alex Gough, a spokesperson for Pritzker, said that since the governor took office in 2019, the state has expanded access to subsidized child care, sought to stabilize the industry with cash infusions during the pandemic, and started the Smart Start grant program to raise worker wages and provide ongoing support as federal pandemic assistance runs dry — one of only 11 states to do so.

Pritzker has also promised to streamline the state’s red tape with a new Department of Early Childhood. But most changes won’t begin until mid-2026, and what impact they will have on providers is not yet clear. Additionally, Illinois’ child care system relies heavily on federal funding, and there could be significant changes under the new Trump administration. But what he’ll do is unclear: In his first term, President Donald Trump both sought deep cuts to child care subsidies and touted historic increases.

Heather Casner said that throughout the licensing process, she felt “alone in the middle of an ocean, just bobbing and looking for land.” Opening a child care center had long been her dream. After graduating with a degree in early childhood education, she faced a job market that couldn’t pay the bills. Instead, she took a job working with troubled teens. “I loved them,” she said, but their struggles reminded her of her true calling: “I’m like, man, if I had known you earlier, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have thought you were worth nothing.”

The Casners intended to serve families across four rural Illinois counties, among the poorest regions in the state. According to the plan they developed with a business expert at a local university, they would need 48 children enrolled for a full year to break even.

“And this looked good, on paper,” Stephen said.

“On paper,” Heather echoed.

Heather Casner “Somebody Has to Care”

People talk about the Illinois divide: Chicagoland and the rest of the state. But in far southern Illinois, the economic chasm widens and becomes more visible near Anna, where the Casners bought their motel. The back roads wind past struggling towns, crumbling buildings and boarded-up storefronts, toward the state’s southernmost tip, which The Wall Street Journal called the fastest-shrinking place in America.

Here, infrastructure and vital services are vanishing at an alarming pace. In recent years, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has demolished four public housing complexes, displacing hundreds of people, while flooding forced others out. Grocery stores disappeared too, creating a food desert until Rise Community Market opened in Cairo in 2023. That facility is now temporarily closed, but the founders are planning a reopening.

For parents of young children, life here can be especially daunting. And that has been true for a long time: Heather faced the same shortages 30 years ago when she returned to work when her daughter was 9 months old.

What finally made her plan possible was Stephen. The couple had been dating off and on for 10 years when Stephen learned in 2014, at 40, that he had early-onset Parkinson’s disease. Not long after, Stephen popped the question. He was also determined to get her business off the ground.

“I had a little bit of extra money,” he said. He could have spent it on himself, but he remembers thinking, “Somebody has to care about the families around here.”

Stephen Casner watches children on the playground at OWL. Stephen Casner, center, was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease, and Heather is his primary caregiver. The couple and Stephen’s father, Fred Casner, spend time in a motel room they converted into a break room where Stephen can be near Heather during the day.

The first challenge they encountered was finding a building. The region hasn’t seen much new construction for decades, and in each place they found, their licensing representative from the Department of Children and Family Services pointed out problems that would cost more to fix than they could afford.

Searches like the Casners’ for an affordable building in decent condition are “incredibly common, especially in rural communities,” said Brittany Walsh, senior associate director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that has focused on the rural child care crisis. The largest source of child care funding in America comes from the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant funds administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. But most of it goes to offset payments for low-income parents; only a few exceptions allow spending federal funds on the buildings themselves.

A proposed expansion of loans and grants from the Department of Agriculture that rural child care providers could use to offset steep startup costs is pending in Congress, Walsh said. But it’s tied up in the long-delayed new farm bill.

Illinois has sought to help but has barely made a dent. The multiyear Rebuild Illinois infrastructure program, launched in 2019, included $100 million for early childhood facilities. But in the first round of funding, 238 applicants vied for grants with only eight programs receiving $55 million between them in January 2023. Most of those were in Chicago and its suburbs, and no grants went to any providers in the bottom half of the state. A second, $45 million funding round is forthcoming, though no timeline has been given, according to the Capital Development Board.

Stephen was the first to spot the listing for the old Plaza Motel, built by community leaders decades ago during a boom era for this Midwestern factory-and-farm town.

When they went to visit, the place smelled musty, with soiled carpeting and midcentury wood paneling. The broken furniture, old clothing, drug paraphernalia and stacks of lottery tickets inside would eventually become 22 truckloads of trash. A decrepit shack where squatters had lived sat where the Casners envisioned the playground.

But it did have some things going for it, including its manageable size and flat playground area. Heather invited their Department of Children and Family Services representative to walk through it with her again.

“I talked to the DCFS person, and she’s like, ‘Oh, I love it. I can see it. This works,’” Heather recalled with a chuckle. “And I’m like, Really, all those other places for two years didn’t work, but an old run-down motel, you’re like, ‘Yes, this is where the kids need to be’?”

Mary Pender, a teacher at OWL, pushes snow off an awning. The Money Pit

Heather is drawn to things that sparkle and shine, like bedazzled clothing and glittery nail polish, and she has a contagious laugh that can fill a room. In September 2022, in her typical upbeat fashion — her short bob of curly hair dancing in the breeze — Heather took to Facebook Live to share her vision: “In this great building behind us, we are going to be able to have students from 6 weeks old to 6 years old in hopefully a matter of three months!”

Things didn’t go as planned. It turned out that years-old fire damage had left hidden destruction in the interior walls. Then they paid the water bill and turned the water on for the first time: “The building started crying,” Stephen recalled. For a time, the prior owners had not heated the building but had left the water on, causing the pipes to burst. The entire plumbing system had to be replaced.

Each day brought new costs: $47,000 for an HVAC system; $170,000 to the general contractor; $130,000 to stock the playground and furnish the building.

They tapped into part of the $200,000 taken from Stephen’s retirement account and borrowed additional money from Stephen’s dad. They quickly blew through their budget and their timeline — and then some.

They also pored over rules, highlighters in hand. They needed articles of organization, operating agreements, budgets, staffing plans, job descriptions and the details of every teacher’s and aide’s educational background. Then there were lesson plans, radon measurements, lead tests, plumbing and fire safety checks, and blueprints, each done according to very specific requirements where any mistakes would set them back months more.

“Everybody jokes that all of our rules have been written by some 85-year-old man who never dealt with kids a day in his life because that’s how it reads,” Heather said. The back-and-forth with their DCFS licensing representative felt endless, correcting paperwork, resubmitting forms that got lost in the shuffle, hoping each submission would be the last one.

In December 2022, Heather wrote to her licensing representative: “I am hoping for a March opening. Eventually I need some money coming in on this deal instead of just flying out.”

In February, Heather started interviewing staff and preparing to open. It was admittedly a leap of faith, but the system is also a catch-22 for providers: They can’t predict when their license will be approved, yet they need to complete background checks and hire staffers for each classroom before that can happen. This can take weeks to months because of teacher shortages and the often-lengthy process for background checks.

March came and went.

First image: Bryce Clemons and Harper Watkins play with bubbles as Heather cleans toys. Second image: Heather comforts Raydyan Taylor, 2. First image: Heather Casner walks Royce Lingle to his mother’s car. Second image: Heather rests in the break room at the end of the day.

In April, she informed DCFS of their plan for a grand opening of the Our World of Learning Child Development Center, which the Casners called OWL for short, on May 22, hoping that would encourage DCFS to complete her paperwork. But that day, too, came and went without a license approval.

DCFS’ licensing division, chronically understaffed for years, currently faces a 20% vacancy rate. There’s a 45% vacancy rate for supervisors, who must review and approve all license applications. A DCFS spokesperson said the agency is working to fill vacancies in its licensing division, but said delays are not due to staff shortages but rather are the result of a range of issues including missing paperwork from applicants.

Providers frequently post on a Facebook page, Illinois Child Care in Crisis, about frustrating delays. One woman told Capitol News Illinois she has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into expanding her Chicago-based child care business into suburban Oswego only to be stuck in limbo for months awaiting approval of her licence while paying a full staff.

“I’m paying people to sit around and do nothing,” Doyin Ajilore said in late November. She has been paying a center director since August and several teachers since September. She received her license on Dec. 13. But Ajilore said the delays still forced her to borrow additional funding. Heather, however, couldn’t afford to pay her staff until children enrolled. And she couldn’t enroll children without DCFS’ final approval. When Stephen’s patience ran out, he made an angry phone call, demanding the licensing representative finalize the paperwork. Heather still shudders when she remembers that call. But by the following week, DCFS signed off on their license.

It was late July by this point, and by then most of their staff had lined up other jobs. They scrambled to rehire staff.

Few Kids, Small Subsidies

OWL’s doors finally opened on July 31, 2023, the place filled with pint-sized tables and chairs, shelves stocked with brightly colored toys and books for playing and learning. They’d transformed the old motel into an inviting space decorated with owls, their license now proudly on display near the entrance.

But the problems didn’t end. A few months before opening, Heather had asked parents on Facebook to add their names to a form if they were interested in care. The response seemed promising: Nearly 100 parents put their names down. When the Casners opened OWL, there were only two other centers serving children in an area with about 2,600 kids under 6. But filling classrooms still took months, a common issue in rural areas, experts said, because parents may live far away, be unaware of a new facility or need time to secure a job if they’re returning to the workforce.

The Casners’ business plan had little margin for error, especially given the subsidy payments they were relying on.

Illinois has long faced issues with its subsidies, which the state pays to child care providers on behalf of low-income families who qualify. The federal Administration for Children and Families recommends that states pay providers 75% of the market rate for care, but Illinois pays less than 45% for child care centers, according to federal data from April 2023, the latest available. That was one of the largest gaps in the nation, and it violated the equal access provision of the federal government’s block grant funding program, according to a news release from the federal agency. State officials noted that the data lags behind recent subsidy increases and said Illinois is now compliant in all but one category.

Providers could charge parents who receive these subsidies additional fees to help make up the difference, but most — including the Casners — don’t, knowing that many parents simply can’t afford it.

Today, a year and a half after opening, OWL is at just over half capacity, serving about 45 children. The vast majority of their care is paid for by government subsidies, and the center would need to maintain that population for a full year to break even.

Several OWL parents have no backup plan if Heather’s center doesn’t survive. Before the center opened, Jala Wilson of Carbondale had spent over a year driving 100 miles a day to drop her son at child care, head to her nursing classes in the opposite direction, and then do it again in reverse at pickup time. She spent $600 a month on gas alone. “That was insane, but it’s what I had to do,” she said.

Rachel Clover, another OWL mom, is effusive. Her daughter’s father died by suicide last summer, and Heather treated her and her daughter, 3-year-old Aizlyn, kindly. “They’ve been there for me emotionally,” she said, adding that having child care has allowed her to work full-time as an aide for the elderly and disabled. “It’s given me a chance to be more than just a welfare mom,” she said.

A Lifeline at a Hard Time

When Rachel Clover, 36, talks about OWL, she breaks down in tears. She’s been on her own with two girls, ages 8 and 3, since her fiancé died by suicide last summer, and child care had already been a battle for years — Clover said she had to pull her older daughter out of another facility after she was left sitting in the same diaper all day. Clover tried working nights while family and friends watched the kids, but it left her frazzled and sleep deprived, and she ultimately switched jobs. When OWL opened just a few miles from her public housing in Jonesboro, it felt like a godsend. “Heather never said anything if I was late for pickup because I just needed a moment to breathe,” she said. “I don’t want to get all choked up, but it’s true. Without having somewhere safe for my daughter to be, I won’t be able to work, I won’t be able to survive.”

Rachel Clover picks up her younger daughter, Aizlyn, from OWL. Access to nearby child care allows Clover to work.

Heather feels this pressure profoundly. Originally she had planned to pay herself a salary of $40,000, but since opening in July, she has yet to take a full paycheck. Every two weeks, she prays that there’s enough for payroll, and her staff has never missed a check. In early October, she was $1,000 short. To pay her staff, Heather had to transfer funds from an account that barely covered her $4,000 mortgage. Paying back Stephen’s retirement account seems out of reach. “Steve and I are broke by now,” Heather said. “And all of our future money is gone.”

Heather blinks a lot when she’s stressed, and there’s been a lot more blinking lately. “I can’t give up,” she said. She plans to keep the center open until the money runs dry, just as her father did with his farm.

“Sure,” Stephen added, “until she drops dead just trying to make a go.”

“Yep,” she concurred, “Just to make it go one more day.”

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, and Julia Rendleman for ProPublica, photography by Julia Rendleman for ProPublica

Gretchen Whitmer’s Chance for Wide-Ranging Legacy Derailed by Botched Legislative Session

1 month 1 week ago

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The door is closing on Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s chance to fulfill many of her campaign promises after Democrats couldn’t coalesce around a legislative agenda in the final days of 2024.

Michigan Democrats led all branches of government for the past two years, for the first time in about four decades, and they started with a multibillion-dollar budget surplus to boot. But the trifecta was lost after Republicans won back the state House in the fall. And, during the chaotic final session of the year, Democrats accomplished little on what Whitmer once presented as the most significant issues facing the state.

Among the bills not acted upon: ones to bring more transparency to the governor’s office and Legislature, which are now exempt from public record requests. Also dead were efforts to repeal Michigan’s controversial emergency manager law and to charge royalties to bottled water companies for extracting groundwater and invest it in infrastructure and other programs, an idea similar to what Whitmer herself once suggested. The Legislature also took no substantive action to “fix the damn roads,” as Whitmer’s famous 2018 campaign slogan put it.

“Governor Whitmer thanks our colleagues in the legislature for their efforts on behalf of their fellow Michiganders and looks forward to working alongside the incoming House,” Stacey LaRouche, Whitmer’s press secretary, said in a statement. “She will continue to work with anyone who is serious about getting things done.”

Overall, Michigan Democrats followed an active first year in leadership with a markedly more stunted one, tempered by internal conflicts and moderate policies that seemed tailored to shoring up electoral prospects. (The governor has consistently demurred when asked about her interest in running for president.)

“I’m across-the-board mad,” said Lisa McGraw, public affairs manager of the Michigan Press Association, which has lobbied for years to expand the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

There is a continuing cost to secrecy in state government, McGraw said, pointing to how a lack of transparency contributes to corruption and the potential misuse of power. To those who oppose opening up the governor’s office and Legislature to FOIA, she asks, “What do they have to hide?”

Bills that would have made long-unaddressed fixes to Michigan’s Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act also never made it to the governor’s desk. A ProPublica investigation last year showed how WICA provides support for wrongfully convicted people as they rebuild their lives, but many of their compensation claims are challenged by the state. Some get nothing at all. Two Supreme Court justices, a state commission, the attorney general’s office and advocates have implored legislators to address gaps in the law.

But bills that aimed to do so expired at the end of the year.

“More people will be harmed in the near future because of the failure of our Legislature,” said Kenneth Nixon, president and co-founder of the Organization of Exonerees.

Now, he said, “everything starts over” with the WICA reform effort. The split government makes it unlikely that a new bill will advance over the next two years, he said, but it’s important to educate legislators on why the changes are needed.

“People have had their lives destroyed through no fault of their own, and they should be made whole,” Nixon said.

A Senate bill to ensure that health plans cover a new generation of cancer therapies also failed to reach the finish line. ProPublica previously reported on how a Michigan man died after an insurer denied the only therapy that could have saved his life.

Road funding wasn’t publicly addressed until the last moment. In mid-December, Whitmer reportedly warned her fellow Democrats that they shouldn’t expect her to sign any further bills if they didn’t move on road funding or economic development. But in the end, nothing got done on the issue that had once been Whitmer’s flagship.

Short-term funding sources that paid for some improvements in recent years are running out. Without further action, according to one estimate by civil engineers, the proportion of paved roads in poor condition will increase in the years to come.

“The governor has run on roads funding, but has she actually fixed it?” asked Rachel Hood, a Democrat whose term in the House ended in December. If Whitmer does run for higher office, she said, voters “will see that the job didn’t get done.”

Sam Inglot, executive director of the left-leaning nonprofit Progress Michigan, said that one of the lessons of the last session is that, even with a trifecta advantage, there’s a need for strong leadership. “You need to have somebody who’s going to set the vision and the priorities of what these folks are going to do,” he said.

Michigan lawmakers did pass a slew of consequential laws in 2023, the first year of full Democratic power. They repealed the state’s “right-to-work” law that allowed workers in unionized jobs to opt out of union dues and fees, codified reproductive rights, expanded the earned income tax credit, and provided free breakfast and lunch to all public schoolchildren.

And, in the last weeks of the trifecta, they passed bills that strengthened hate crime protections, modified the state’s gun buyback program and made changes intended to increase access to birth control.

State Sen. Jeff Irwin, a Democrat who sponsored the cancer treatment bill, said that many of the year’s accomplishments were overlooked because they didn’t sync with issues spotlighted in the presidential election. As an example of one such success, he pointed to reforms in how reading skills are taught in Michigan. (ProPublica has reported on how 1 in 5 American adults struggles to read at a basic level.)

Nonetheless, “2024 will be chronicled as one of the least productive legislative sessions in history,” said Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan policy organization.

Momentum slowed in the first part of the year, as the Democrats’ slim House majority slipped to a tie until after special elections were held for two seats. Election-year campaigning ate up the summer and fall. And an ordinarily crowded late-term agenda was even more so because House Speaker Joe Tate instructed members to wait until after the election to introduce many bills, according to Hood. (Tate’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Then House Republicans and one Democratic representative refused to show up unless their policy priorities were addressed. Unable to muster a quorum, Tate adjourned the House early, on Dec. 19. “No one did their job in the House,” McGraw said. “They didn’t show up.”

The Senate continued working, powering through an all-night session before concluding business on the afternoon of Dec. 20. But it was effectively limited to bills needing no further action from the House.

That was a problem for the wrongful-compensation bill. Although the House passed it in December, the bill inadvertently left off an amendment, so it wasn’t possible for the Senate to vote on a complete version of the bill, said Sen. Stephanie Chang, the Democratic sponsor.

Despite her reported warning about legislative inaction on roads, Whitmer did sign many bills, including policies addressing housing discrimination and human trafficking.

And this week, on the first day of the new legislative session, the senators who have long fought to expand FOIA introduced the bipartisan proposals yet again. “The Senate has made this a priority,” said McGraw. “I hope the House Republicans feel the same way.”

If passed, the bills would likely not take effect until 2027 — after Whitmer concludes her second and final term in office.

LaRouche said in a statement that the governor believes that state government must be open, transparent and accountable to taxpayers. “She is the first governor in state history to voluntarily disclose personal financial information, and income tax returns,” LaRouche said.

Whitmer previously said that if legislative efforts to increase transparency stall, she would unilaterally open up the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s offices to public record requests.

“Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on,” she vowed in her 2018 Sunshine Plan.

Six years later, she has yet to do so.

by Anna Clark

The Neverending Case: How 10 Years of Delays Have Prevented a “Horrendous” Sexual Assault Allegation From Going to Trial

1 month 1 week ago

This story describes an alleged sexual assault and serious injuries resulting from it.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

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The sexual assault case was one of the most horrendous that two Alaska Superior Court judges said they had encountered in their long careers on the bench. The victim suffered internal injuries that required surgery and the use of a bag for her digestive system.

“Even somebody like me, who does nothing but this work for so long, still has their sensibility shocked,” Judge Philip Volland said at an early bail hearing, warning that he worried the suspect might try to threaten the woman. “The facts of this case tell me there is a very, very real risk of intimidation of the victim. If she wasn’t afraid then, she should be afraid now.”

Detectives had interviewed the alleged victim, executed search warrants and, two weeks after the reported incident, arrested a suspect: then-38-year-old Lafi “Beago” Faualo, who pleaded not guilty to first-degree sexual assault.

That was a decade ago. The case has still not gone to trial.

Over the years, the state assigned the case to four different judges, including Volland, who between them agreed to delay the trial more than 70 times — usually at the request of the defense attorney. Such delays and judges’ acquiescence have become routine in Alaska, robbing victims of timely justice and sometimes eroding the prosecution’s ability to mount an effective case using eyewitness testimony.

A spokesperson for the court system said the state is taking steps to reduce the length of time it takes to resolve Alaska criminal cases, including providing new training for judges and issuing orders to limit delays.

In the neverending case of sexual assault against Faualo, it all began with an alleged attack on July 16, 2014, in a van parked outside an Anchorage church. According to the charges, Faualo was in the back seat with the victim during the incident. Prosecutors additionally accused a second man, who was in the driver’s seat, of sexual assault in the case but later dropped the charges when the man pleaded guilty to coercion.

According to a charging document, Faualo denied sexually assaulting the woman but told Anchorage police he might have “accidentally” put his hand in her anus. The report quotes Faualo saying he might have used a bottle, but then saying it was definitely his hand. Faualo’s defense attorney has since said that Faualo’s co-defendant — who has since died — was the one who committed the assault and not Faualo.

ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News obtained audio recordings and logs from each hearing or listened to it live. Nearly every time the defense attorney asked to delay the trial, a judge agreed. Not once did anyone in the courtroom ask what the victim wanted.

Faualo did not respond to an interview request and did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions.

Here’s how an Alaska sexual assault defendant has been able to prevent his case from going to trial since 2014. Prosecutors typically raised no objection to the delays. Unless noted, the judge granted the defense request for a delay in every instance.

  • Sept. 25, 2014: Faualo has hired a private attorney, Rex Butler, who asks to delay the hearing.
  • Oct. 7, 2014: Judge Philip Volland agrees to a delay because the defense attorney says he is still new to the case.
  • Nov. 4, 2014: The judge grants the defense a three-week delay.
  • Nov. 25, 2014: The judge delays the case as Faualo’s co-defendant considers a plea deal.
  • Dec. 9, 2014: The defense attorney has a scheduling conflict, delaying the case.
  • Jan. 13, 2015: Faualo files a motion to suppress evidence, delaying the case for months.

By 2015, the case has stretched past the state’s 120-day speedy-trial deadline. With no trial date in sight, Faualo asks to be released on bail, but the prosecutor claims he is a flight risk and a threat to the victim. The judge denies the bail request. The stakes are high. If convicted, Faualo faces a minimum of 25 years in prison for one count of sexual assault that resulted in serious injury, plus additional time for each of three additional counts of sexual assault.

  • April 7, 2015: The defense asks for another delay.
  • July 7, 2015: The judge grants a two-week delay, no questions asked.
  • Aug. 18, 2015: Judge Michael Wolverton has been assigned to the case. He approves another delay.
  • Aug. 26, 2015: The judge delays the trial to November 2015.
  • Oct. 14, 2015: The judge agrees to another delay.
  • Nov. 18, 2015: The judge delays the case another 35 days.
  • Dec. 9, 2015: The first motion to suppress evidence fails, and the judge agrees to another delay.
  • Jan. 20, 2016: The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
  • Feb. 17, 2016: The state has offered a plea deal. The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
  • Mar. 16, 2016: The defendant hasn’t decided on the plea deal and asks for another monthlong delay.
  • April 20, 2016: The defense files another motion and asks for a 30-day delay.
  • May 18, 2016: The judge agrees to delay the case for another month.
  • June 15, 2016: With a new prosecutor assigned to the case, the defense again asks for a 30-day delay.
  • July 13, 2016: The defendant is considering a plea deal that has been offered; the prosecutor asks for a two-week delay.
  • July 27, 2016: The defendant hasn’t decided on whether to take the deal. The judge delays the trial by six weeks.

By now, the delays in the case mostly revolve around motions filed by the defense to throw out evidence collected by detectives early in the investigation. For example, Faualo’s lawyer says police served a search warrant too late at night — despite the warrant saying it could be served at any time. Meanwhile, Faualo’s co-defendant has agreed to a plea deal and is expected to testify against him at trial.

  • Oct. 12, 2016: The defense asks for a one-month delay to continue negotiating a deal.
  • Nov. 16, 2016: The judge agrees to the defendant’s request for another one-month delay.
  • Dec. 14, 2016: The judge delays the case a month to make time for an evidentiary hearing.
  • Feb. 8, 2017: The judge denies the defense’s motions to suppress evidence, and the defense asks for another three-week delay.
  • Mar. 8, 2017: Faualo’s lawyer tells the judge he will “try to get” the case resolved soon but asks to delay the trial two months.
  • May 17, 2017: The defense asks to delay the trial by one month to negotiate a deal.
  • July 5, 2017: The defense asks for another one-month delay to continue negotiating.
  • Aug. 2, 2017: The defense says they’re “very close” to making a plea deal and just need to delay proceedings by another two weeks.
  • Aug. 16, 2017: Still negotiating, the defense says, asking for another two-week delay.
  • Aug. 30, 2017: The defense says it needs a three-week delay to continue negotiating.
  • Sept. 27, 2017: “Give us two more weeks,” the defense attorney asks. The judge OKs the delay.
  • Oct. 11, 2017: The defense is “pretty close” to a plea deal but needs a two-week delay.
  • Nov. 1, 2017: The defense asks for a one-month delay — long enough “so we don’t come back in two weeks and not have an answer.”
  • Dec. 6, 2017: The defense asks for a one-month delay. The judge agrees without asking questions.
  • Jan. 10, 2018: The defense says the two sides are “close to resolving” negotiations but need a two-week delay.
  • Jan. 24, 2018: The judge delays the trial to allow more negotiations.
  • Feb. 14, 2018: The defense asks for a new three-week delay without explanation. The judge agrees.
  • Mar. 7, 2018: A new prosecutor takes over the case; the defense attorney asks for a two-week delay.
  • Mar. 21, 2018: The defense asks for a one-week delay to negotiate.
  • Mar. 28, 2018: The defense asks for two more weeks to negotiate.
  • May 2, 2018: The defense attorney asks to delay the trial until October.

Prosecutors often say that trial delays make it harder to win a conviction because witnesses’ and police officers’ memories fade over time.

“Without question, the delay that occurs in cases going to trial makes it more difficult to keep track of where victims and witnesses are,” said Alaska Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore. “Police officers retire, move out of state. Lab analysts leave.”

“All of our cases depend upon us being able to present the evidence, and it’s just a fact of life that as time progresses, life moves on,” he said.

  • Sept. 5, 2018: The defense asks for a one-month delay.
  • Oct. 3, 2018: The defense asks for a two-week delay.
  • Oct. 17, 2018: The judge agrees to delay the trial for two weeks for “attorney negotiations.”
  • Nov. 28, 2018: Faualo has a new public defender, who asks to delay a week to prepare.
  • Dec. 12, 2018: The public defender asks to delay again.
  • Feb. 6, 2019: Butler, the private defense attorney, returns. He requests a delay until September.

Nothing happens in the case for seven months because Faualo’s attorney says he doesn’t have time for the trial. Faualo has now been in jail for five years, but the case appears to finally be destined for trial when a judge sets a new date for November 2019.

  • Oct. 28, 2019: The defense attorney asks to delay the trial one month.

The 2019 trial date comes and goes, and Wolverton has now retired. At a spring hearing held before Judge Catherine Easter, the defense attorney says he’s once again considering a plea deal rather than a trial. The judge chuckles when she reads the case number, which shows it has been awaiting trial since 2014. When the defense asks for a delay, the prosecution objects.

Because of the age of the case, the judge sets a trial date. But soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic pauses jury trials across Alaska.

  • May 11, 2020: COVID-related delay.
  • June, 11, 2020: COVID-related delay.
  • Oct. 27, 2020: COVID-related delay.
  • Jan. 12, 2021: COVID-related delay.
  • Mar. 9, 2021: COVID-related delay.
  • June 17, 2021: COVID-related delay.
  • Aug. 16, 2021: The defense asks for a delay to negotiate a deal. Judge Erin Marston, the latest judge assigned to the case, agrees.
  • Oct. 26, 2021: A new prosecutor is assigned to the case and asks for a delay.
  • Nov. 24, 2021: The defense requests a delay.
  • Jan. 5, 2022: Jury trials have resumed across Alaska, but both sides in this case ask for a delay.
  • May 9, 2022: The prosecutor says she’s ready for trial. The defense wants a delay.
  • June 10, 2022: The defense asks for a 30-day delay to continue negotiations.
  • July 14, 2022: The judge delays a hearing a week. The prosecutor doesn’t show up to the new hearing, so the judge delays again.
  • July 26, 2022: The defense asks for a delay due to a scheduling conflict.
  • Sept. 9, 2022: The prosecutor asks the judge to delay the case for “one last status hearing.”

The only witness to the alleged assault, other than the victim, has now died, the defense attorney says. Faualo has been in jail for eight years, and the judge agrees to release him on bail. His daughters will be asked to watch him and report to police if he violates conditions of his release.

  • Nov. 28, 2022: “I know it’s an old case,” the defense attorney acknowledges while asking that the trial be delayed several more months.
  • Feb. 1, 2023: The defense asks for a delay of 45 days.
  • Mar. 15, 2023: The defense requests a delay. A new judge assigned to the case, Judge Andrew Peterson, agrees.
  • April 26, 2023: The defense asks to delay a trial until 2024.

The talk of trial dates pauses for a few months as Faualo’s lawyer works, successfully, to loosen bail restrictions. At a bail hearing, a judge confuses Faualo with the codefendant who pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Misunderstanding the severity of the charges against Faualo, the judge agrees to ease up on his bail conditions. Faualo is now allowed to leave his house during the day.

  • Nov. 15, 2023: The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
  • Dec. 13, 2023: The prosecutor wants time to negotiate. She asks for a 30-60 day delay.

It’s now been nearly 10 years since the alleged sexual assault. Having failed to reach a plea agreement, the two sides say the earliest they can appear at trial is October 2024.

  • Aug. 30, 2024: With the trial set for October, the defense asks for a 15-day delay.
  • Sept. 25, 2024: The defense requests a 30-day delay.
  • Oct. 30, 2024: The prosecutor is ready. But the trial is delayed again because Faualo’s lawyer had double-booked himself for two trials at the same time.
  • Nov. 27, 2024: The prosecutor and defense are supposed to select a trial date, but the defense isn’t ready. The judge delays the case again.

The most recent hearing in this case was held on Dec. 16, 2024, when Judge Andrew Peterson set a trial date for June 2025, 10 years and 11 months after the alleged sexual assault took place.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News; Graphics by Lucas Waldron and Zisiga Mukulu, ProPublica

Justice Department Sues Six of the Nation’s Largest Landlords in Effort to Stop Alleged Price-Fixing in Rental Markets

1 month 1 week ago

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The Department of Justice on Tuesday sued six of the nation’s largest landlords, accusing them of using a pricing algorithm to improperly work together to raise rents across the country.

The lawsuit expands an antitrust complaint the department filed in August that accused property management software-maker RealPage of engaging in illegal price-fixing to reduce competition among landlords so prices — and profits — would soar. Officials conducted a two-year investigation into the scheme following a 2022 ProPublica story that showed how RealPage was helping landlords set rents across the country in a way that legal experts said could result in cartel-like behavior.

Together, the six landlords manage more than 1.3 million apartments in 43 states and the District of Columbia. Prosecutors have already negotiated a settlement with one of them.

“While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing, the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The suit seeks to end “their practice of putting profits over people” and to make housing more affordable.

The legal action is the latest development to follow ProPublica’s initial investigation. Since 2022, senators have introduced legislation seeking to ban the use of rent algorithms similar to RealPage’s, and tenants have filed dozens of ongoing federal lawsuits. Cities around the country, including San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, have also moved to bar landlords from using similar algorithms to set rents.

RealPage’s popular software was collecting nonpublic pricing information from multiple property managers and feeding it through a common algorithm, which then recommended an optimal rent level to those who used it — in violation of rules that prohibit such coordination, federal prosecutors alleged. They also accused the landlords of improperly communicating directly about their pricing through calls, emails and participation in “user group” forums hosted by RealPage.

The company pushes landlords to use an “auto-accept” feature on its software, authorities said, and makes it onerous for property managers to reject its suggestions.

RealPage Senior Vice President Jennifer Bowcock called the federal case “flawed” and said the company is “committed to vigorously defending ourselves and our customers against the DOJ’s accusations.” RealPage has already changed its software to remove nonpublic data, despite its view that its technology was legal and “pro-competitive,” she said.

“It’s past time to stop scapegoating RealPage — and now our customers — for housing affordability problems when the root cause of high housing costs is the undersupply of housing, which we have been saying from the beginning,” she said.

Three of the landlords sued in this week’s action appeared in ProPublica’s 2022 story, including the nation’s biggest landlord, Greystar, and Camden Property Trust.

Camden CEO Ric Campo told the news organization at the time that the apartment market in Houston, where the company is headquartered, was so big and diverse that “it would be hard to argue there was some kind of price fixing.”

But when Camden adopted the nascent rent-setting technology in 2006, the company found that its profits grew even though more tenants were moving out.

“The net effect of driving revenue and pushing people out was $10 million in income,” Campo told a trade publication then. (He later said that quote doesn’t reflect how he or Camden views renters today.)

Neither Campo nor Camden responded to a request for comment.

Greystar, the biggest manager and owner of rentals in the U.S., said in a statement that it was “disappointed” that the Justice Department added the company to the suit.

“At no time did Greystar engage in any anti-competitive practices,” the statement from the South Carolina-based company said. “We will vigorously defend ourselves in this lawsuit.”

ProPublica’s 2022 data analysis also found Willow Bridge Property Company (formerly Lincoln Residential) managed dozens of buildings in markets that had seen fast growth in rent. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Justice Department lawsuit.

One property owner and manager, Cortland, has already agreed to stop using competitors’ nonpublic data to train or run pricing models under a settlement with federal prosecutors. The proposed agreement has been submitted to the court for consideration.

Atlanta-based Cortland manages over 80,000 rentals in 13 states. A related federal criminal investigation that led to a May 2024 search of its headquarters has been closed, a spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said the company is “pleased” to announce the settlement.

“We believe we were only able to achieve this result because Cortland has invested years and significant internal resources into developing a proprietary revenue management software tool that does not rely on data from external, nonpublic sources,” the spokesperson said.

Revenue management software can help landlords manage rents “efficiently” and avoid discrimination, said a spokesperson for defendant Cushman & Wakefield, which also owns defendant Pinnacle. The spokesperson said that as a manager only, the company does not “set strategy, pricing, or occupancy targets,” decide which software to use, or whether to accept any software’s recommendations.

The lawsuit also named as a defendant Blackstone’s LivCor. Blackstone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In addition to naming landlords as defendants in the claim, it also added the attorneys general of Illinois and Massachusetts as co-plaintiffs, bringing the total number of participating states to 10. The states include the country’s most populous — California, which has 17 million renters.

RealPage said that “fewer than 10% of all rental housing units in the U.S. use RealPage software to suggest rental prices, and our software recommendations are accepted less than half the time.”

But a White House report in December said that number could be higher. It said RealPage and census data suggest that as many as 1 in 4 rentals nationwide use a RealPage pricing algorithm. And the company’s penetration is higher in some markets, it said.

Using models of what competitive markets would look like, researchers found that algorithmic pricing costs renters in units where it is used $70 more a month, or 4% of rent, on average. In six major metro areas, the cost exceeds $100 a month, the report found.

The report estimated the total added cost to renters from the use of such algorithms in 2023 to be roughly $3.8 billion.

RealPage said that the analysis is “riddled with flawed assumptions,” and that the White House never contacted the company about the report.

The fate of the Justice Department’s lawsuit under the incoming administration is unclear. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Gail Slater, a veteran antitrust attorney and economic advisor to JD Vance, to lead the department’s antitrust division.

by Heather Vogell

North Carolina Supreme Court Blocked Certification of a Justice’s Win. Activists Fear It’s “Dangerous for Democracy.”

1 month 1 week ago

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The Republican-controlled Supreme Court of North Carolina threw the election of one of its members into disarray on Tuesday as it temporarily blocked the certification of the Democrat incumbent’s narrow victory. The move gives the court time to consider a challenge by her Republican opponent, state appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, who has cited debunked legal theories in his previous failed attempts to block Justice Allison Riggs’ reelection.

Griffin has sought for his claims to be decided by the Supreme Court he hopes to join, which is led by his mentor. On Monday, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump remanded Griffin’s challenge to the state Supreme Court. The state election board is now requesting a federal appeals court to return the case to federal court.

Riggs won reelection by 734 votes — a minuscule margin of victory that was confirmed by two recounts. She will remain on the court while the election results are being contested, though she has recused herself from this matter.

Griffin is asking the Supreme Court to throw out roughly 60,000 ballots — an unprecedented request based on a theory that has been dismissed by both the state election board and a federal judge.

Griffin did not respond to a request for comment. He previously declined to answer questions from ProPublica, saying that commenting on pending litigation would be a violation of the state’s judicial code of conduct.

“This is hugely dangerous for democracy in North Carolina,” said Ann Webb, the policy director for Common Cause North Carolina, a voting advocacy organization. If the state Supreme Court sides with Griffin and overturns Riggs’ win, it would open the possibility for future candidates to “challenge the rules that were in place for elections and get votes retroactively discarded. If there’s a never-ending process of challenging election rules and results after the fact, our entire system could come to a standstill.”

This case is even more exceptional, Webb said, because “so far, Judge Griffin has not produced evidence of a single instance of voter fraud or illegal voting. He’s just vaguely raised the specter that there’s not been enough verification of voter identities and is using that to try to overturn an election.”

Griffin is arguing that voters in North Carolina’s elections database who are missing driver’s license or Social Security information should have their ballots discounted. That theory was originated and championed by far-right activists working with a conservative organization that was secretly preparing to contest election results if Trump had lost the 2024 election, ProPublica has reported. The organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

State election officials and a federal judge have rejected this theory multiple times, finding that there are many legitimate reasons for that information to be missing, including voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require those details. “There is virtually no chance of voter fraud resulting from a voter not providing her driver’s license or social security number on her voter registration,” attorneys for the state election board wrote in legal filings.

Neither Griffin nor the right-wing activists have proven a single case of voter fraud among the 60,000 ballots.

In a July 2024 call of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing activist argued that a candidate who lost a close election could use the theory to contest an outcome they did not agree with, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. When the chapter’s leader voiced concern about the theory’s legality, calling it “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, another activist said, “I guess we’re gonna find that out.” That activist’s data analyses and arguments then became the foundation for an attempt by the Republican National Committee to disqualify hundreds of thousands of voters before the election and Griffin’s attempt to overturn the election, ProPublica found.

ProPublica reported in December that Griffin has described Chief Justice Paul Newby as a “good friend and mentor,” and that Griffin wrote, when announcing his candidacy for the Supreme Court: “We are a team that knows how to win — the same team that helped elect Chief Justice Paul Newby and three other members of the current Republican majority.”

Newby and other justices did not respond to a detailed list of questions regarding the December story.

Not all the Republican justices concurred with blocking the certification of Riggs’ victory. “Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief,” Republican Justice Richard Dietz wrote in a dissent, emphasizing that Griffin’s challenge to the 60,000 ballots was “almost certainly meritless.” He was joined by Democratic Justice Anita Earls, breaking ranks with the four other Republican members of the court.

Permitting Griffin’s litigation to proceed, Dietz stated, “will lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections.”

by Doug Bock Clark

Elon Musk’s Boring Company Is Tunneling Beneath Las Vegas With Little Oversight

1 month 1 week ago

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Elon Musk’s Boring Company spent years pitching cities on a novel solution to traffic, an underground transportation system to whisk passengers through tunnels in electric vehicles. Proposals in Illinois and California fizzled after officials and the public began scrutinizing details of the plans and seeking environmental reviews.

But in Las Vegas, the tunneling company is building Musk’s vision beneath the city’s urban core thanks to an unlikely partner: the tourism marketing organization best known for selling the image that “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”

The powerful Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority greenlit the idea and funded an 0.8-mile route at its convention center. As that small “people mover” opened in 2021, the authority was already urging the county and city to approve plans for 104 stations across 68 miles of tunnels.

The project is also realizing Musk’s notion of how government officials should deal with entrepreneurs: avoid lengthy reviews before building and instead impose fines later if anything goes awry. Musk’s views on regulatory power have taken on new significance in light of his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump and his role in a new effort to slash rules in the name of improving efficiency. The Las Vegas project, now well under way, is a case study of the regulatory climate Musk favors.

Because the project, now known as the Vegas Loop, is privately operated and receives no federal funding, it is exempt from the kinds of exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analyses demanded by the other cities that Boring pitched. Such reviews assess whether a proposal is the best option and inform the public of potential impacts to traffic and the environment.

The head of the convention authority has called the project the only viable way to ease traffic on the Las Vegas Strip and in the surrounding area — a claim that was never publicly debated as the Clark County Commission and Las Vegas City Council granted Boring permission to build and operate the system beneath city streets. The approvals allow the company to build and operate close to homes and businesses without the checks and balances that typically apply to major public transit projects.

Meanwhile, Boring has skirted building, environmental and labor regulations, according to records obtained by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas under public records laws.

In June, a Clark County official documented water spilling onto a public street from a Boring Company worksite near the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The county issued a cease-and-desist letter. (Clark County Public Works)

Watch video ➜

It twice installed tunnels without permits to work on county property. State and local environmental regulators documented it dumping untreated water into storm drains and the sewer system. And, as local politicians were approving an extension of the system, Boring workers were filing complaints with the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration about “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and severe chemical burns. After an investigation, Nevada OSHA in 2023 fined the company more than $112,000. Boring disputed the regulators’ allegations and contested the violations.

The complaints have continued.

“The Boring company is at it again,” an employee of the Clark County Water Reclamation District wrote to the agency’s general manager and legal counsel in June, after video showed water spilling from a company-owned property into the street near the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Tyler Fairbanks, a Boring Company manager, emailed the county official, saying “we take this very seriously and we are working to correct what is going on.” In August, a Las Vegas Valley Water District staffer documented a similar issue. On both occasions, the county issued cease-and-desist letters but did not fine Boring.

Financial penalties wouldn’t put a dent in the company’s bottom line, John Solvie, a Clark County water quality compliance manager, told county Public Works Director Denis Cederburg in an email. Still, the concerns were significant enough that Solvie asked if the department would “consider revoking permits (essentially shutting down their operations until they resolve these issues).”

A county spokesperson declined to answer how the incidents were resolved, or whether the Public Works Department had ever revoked any of Boring’s permits. Solvie and Cederburg declined to comment.

Boring did not respond to repeated requests to comment for this story.

As Boring begins hauling passengers beyond the convention center in the first-ever test of an underground road network using driver-operated Teslas, it has successfully removed yet another layer of county oversight. Last year, Boring requested that the county no longer require it to hold a special permit that, among other things, mandates operators of private amusement and transportation systems to report serious injuries and fatalities, and grants the county additional authority to inspect and regulate their operations to protect public safety.

The result is that key questions about the operation and maintenance of an unproven transportation system are unanswered. The county declined to respond to detailed questions about its oversight role since the special permit ended. It provided a statement saying that Boring is “responsible for the safe operation of its system and retaining a third-party Nevada registered design professional to conduct annual audits of their operations.” The county can review those audits and inspect the system “as deemed appropriate.”

Ben Leffel, an assistant professor of public policy at UNLV, said in an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas that the private project’s ability to expand without the same scrutiny required of public projects is a major gap in oversight. Vegas Loop customers will expect Boring to follow the same standards as a public transit system, Leffel said, and it “should receive the same amount of oversight and maintenance,” more so because of the company’s construction and labor citations.

Former Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, who completed her third and final term in December, said she too is concerned about safety, as well as accessibility for riders with disabilities. She had questioned whether the tunnel project was the best transportation option for the city. “I have been totally opposed to it from the beginning and still remain so,” she said.

Other elected and appointed officials have offered nearly unanimous support.

Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, is now leading the president-elect’s Department of Government Efficiency taskforce, recommending cuts to the federal bureaucracy and its ability to regulate. And Boring Company CEO Steve Davis is helping recruit staff for the initiative.

Given Musk’s role advising Trump on ways to slash regulations and government oversight, Boring and the Vegas Loop might be a harbinger for the country.

“A Real Get-It-Done State”

In 2014, Musk stood on the steps of the Nevada Capitol with a man named Steve Hill, who was heading the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. They were celebrating a deal to build a Tesla Gigafactory outside Reno.

From left: Brian Sandoval, then-governor of Nevada; Steve Hill, then-executive director of the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development; and Elon Musk speak at a news conference to announce a deal to bring a Tesla battery factory to the state. Hill has been instrumental in advancing Musk’s Boring Company project in Las Vegas. (David Calvert/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Hill, as the state’s negotiator, had worked feverishly on the agreement, which provided $1.25 billion in tax incentives to Tesla. Musk would later praise Nevada as “a real get-it-done state.”

Soon after the battery factory opened in 2016, Musk’s Boring Company was looking for a place to build a project testing its solution to urban congestion, an idea that sprang from Musk’s frustration with LA traffic. Leaders at the city of Los Angeles were interested. A regional transportation authority, Metro, has a say on public transit in the city, and California law requires an environmental review. But Boring and the city tried to sidestep the state law, claiming an exemption for building in urban areas.

Residents, however, weren’t as eager to turn Boring loose. When neighborhood groups in West LA sued the city over the lack of environmental review, Boring settled with them and looked to build elsewhere.

Musk has frequently railed against government scrutiny of his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX, and claims excessive government oversight has made it nearly impossible to build big projects in parts of the country.

“Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute in June. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective. To say, ‘Look we’re going to do this project; if something goes wrong we’ll be forced to pay a penalty.’ But we do not need to go through a three- or four-year environmental approval process.”

Everywhere Boring tried, it struggled to start digging. In Chicago, where then-Mayor Rahm Emmanuel was a supporter, local leaders expressed skepticism about whether Boring could build an airport loop without public funding. In Maryland, where Boring and federal officials completed a draft environmental review in 2019 for a high-speed link between Baltimore and Washington, the company never started tunneling.

That was, until it got to Las Vegas.

In 2018, an executive who’d met Hill during the Tesla Gigafactory negotiations called him to discuss potentially bringing Boring to Las Vegas, Hill said. (Hill said Musk himself had previously pitched Hill on a Boring Company project in Northern Nevada.) Hill, now a leader at the convention authority in Las Vegas, was in a position to help. Funded by about $460 million in annual revenue from hotel room taxes and conventions, the authority is a force in local politics, channeling the influence of the gaming and tourism industry.

The authority happened to be looking to build a people-mover to link exhibit halls at the 4.6 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center. Hill said he already had a sense that the Boring Company’s concept “would work pretty well here.” Nine companies submitted bids, and two were finalists. Boring’s bid was about a third of the cost of the other credible proposals, Hill said. A week before the board was to select the winner, Hill called a news conference and announced the Boring partnership. He pointed to a map of a tunnel system extending far beyond the convention center — to the airport and toward Los Angeles.

The authority boasted that news coverage of its Boring partnership was picked up by 1,200 outlets, providing $1.3 million in free publicity for Las Vegas.

The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada is the planning agency for the Las Vegas metropolitan area, overseen by local elected officials. But because Boring’s project started so small and didn’t use federal funding, the commission wouldn’t have a say. The convention authority’s governing board, which focuses more on supporting tourism than transportation for local residents, took the lead. Nearly half of the authority’s 14-member board represents private interests, primarily the gaming industry. Goodman and two others voted against the partnership.

To fund the convention center loop, the authority committed $52.5 million in bonds that will be paid back by the agency. Since it opened in April 2021, Hill said the authority has paid Boring about $4.5 million a year to operate the convention center loop, which provides free rides to conventioneers. The authority also spent $24.5 million to purchase the Las Vegas Monorail out of bankruptcy, giving Boring the right to tunnel in the monorail’s noncompete territory.

Hill has repeatedly claimed, to elected officials, to local environmentalists and in an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas, that the loop is the only viable way for Las Vegas to address its traffic congestion. “It’s not really a debate. There’s no reason to explore the other options,” he told members of the Sierra Club during a meeting to discuss public transit, according to Vinny Spotleson, volunteer chair of the environmental group’s regional chapter.

Hill acknowledged to ProPublica and City Cast, however, “that’s a prediction. That’s not a mandate. I don’t have the standing to make that decision. I think people listen to what I have to say periodically."

The Clark County Commission — which governs the Las Vegas Strip and surrounding areas — was listening when, just a few months after the convention center loop opened, Hill told them that Boring had already proven “how great a system this is, that it can be done, and I think provided confidence for this community to move forward.”

At the urging of Hill, casino executives and labor union leaders, the County Commission approved a 50-year agreement giving Boring the right to operate a “monorail” above and below ground on county property. The 2021 vote was unanimous.

In Las Vegas, Boring had achieved what it could not in Maryland, Chicago or LA.

“All of their company, it seemed like, was dependent on Vegas working out,” said Spotleson, who first met company representatives around 2019 when he was district director for U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas. “That we were the test case that they wanted to take to the Chicagos and Bostons and other cities of the world and say, ‘Look at what we did in Vegas. We can do that here.’”

An Expanding System

The Boring Company has completed more than 5 miles of the 68-mile system. Despite the proposal’s massive scale, it has been approved with little public input.

When the County Commission considered the expansion plans, they were listed on agendas under the obscure names of limited-liability companies, making it difficult for anyone but the company and its supporters to track. For example, the county approved a roughly 25-mile expansion and 18 new stations at a 2023 zoning meeting through a notice that gave no indication it was related to the Vegas Loop: UC-23-0126-HCI-CERBERUS 160 EAST FLAMINGO HOTEL OWNER L P, ET AL. In 2021, the commission approved an extension for Caesars Entertainment hotels under the name UC-20-0547-CLAUDINE PROPCO, LLC, ET AL, and about 29 miles of tunnel under UC-20-0547-CIRCUS CIRCUS LV, LLC, ET AL.

Clark County and the City of Las Vegas Approved 68 Miles of Tunnels Between 2019 and 2024

In nearly six years, the company has built about 5 miles of tunnels, with even fewer miles in use.

The Boring Company does not make available geographic data about its system. Maps were created based on publicly available reports. Locations may not be exact. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

Boring uses a machine known as Prufrock to excavate its 12-foot-in-diameter tunnels, applying chemical accelerants during the construction process. For each foot the company bores, it removes about 6 cubic yards of soil and any groundwater it encounters, according to a company document prepared for state environmental officials. It is required to obtain permits to ensure the waste does not contaminate the environment or local water sources.

Public records — including emails, notices, photos and videos, and other documentation — obtained from Clark County, the Clark County Water Reclamation District and Nevada Division of Environmental Protection through public records requests show the company has been less than meticulous in handling the waste.

In June, an employee with the county road division tailed a Boring Company truck that spilled mud onto city streets, according to the records. The trucks “have no marking and no license plates,” wrote Dean Mosher, assistant manager for the roads division. A truck route that the company had reported to the county must have been “totally false,” Mosher concluded.

A few months later, a truck hauling waste from the project spilled gravel, rock and sand onto Interstate 15, slowing traffic for more than four hours during rush hour. The driver was fined $75 for an unsafe or unsecured load, according to court records.

Last year, without the county’s knowledge, a Boring contractor relied on a permit held by a county contractor to store muck near apartment buildings and the Commercial Center shopping plaza, along one of the busiest thoroughfares in central Las Vegas, a county spokesperson said. The county fined the contractor $1,549. A county spokesperson would not disclose other locations where the company stores waste and directed “operational questions” to the company.

Photos taken by a Clark County official show a truck hauling waste from a Boring Company worksite on June 6, 2024. The official observed mud spilling from the vehicle. The photos were obtained through a public records request. (Credit: Clark County Road Division)

Boring must also remove groundwater as it digs — including near an area where the aquifer is polluted with a dry cleaning chemical known as tetrachlorethylene, or PCE, which can be toxic in large amounts. Boring is required to filter the water before discharging it into storm drains, which flow to Lake Mead. But regulators documented cases where Boring had started work without permits or bypassed their water treatment system, government records show.

In 2019, the company discharged groundwater into storm drains without a permit, resulting in a state settlement and a $90,000 fine. In 2021, state officials sent a cease-and-desist letter to prevent Boring from taking actions that could “cause unpermitted discharge of groundwater,” prompting Davis, Boring’s CEO, to complain to the head of the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection that the state was “being fairly aggressive and that this was starting to hurt” the company, according to an email the head of the agency sent to several staffers.

The following year, local officials cited Boring for illegally connecting to a sewer without approval, records show. In 2023, state environmental regulators found the company was dumping untreated groundwater into the sewer, with one official writing that Boring staff were “unsure of how long they have been bypassing the treatment system.” Local officials said they investigated but did not find evidence to take further action.

That year, Boring tunneled without permits required to work in public rights of way, prompting the Public Works director, Cederburg, to note, “They are in violation of the franchise agreement,” records show. A Boring official responded that once the county notified the company of the issue, it had immediately filed the two permits. The county approved them retroactively, tacking on a $900 fee for each permit.

Untested, Unstudied, Private

On a recent Friday at a Vegas Loop station at the Resorts World hotel, an attendant directed riders to Teslas parked in a waiting area. An all-day pass to ride between the Las Vegas Strip hotel and a MagicCon event at the convention center cost $5. (Trips within the convention center are free.)

A Tesla sedan enters a Vegas Loop tunnel during a media preview of the Las Vegas Convention Center loop in 2021. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Inside the narrow tunnels, which glow green, magenta and orange, the driver navigated shoulderless roadways at 35 mph, which felt fast. At the first convention center stop, the driver halted, and three additional riders squeezed into the five-passenger sedan before the trip continued.

Boring says its system will be able to move 90,000 passengers an hour, more than a typical day’s subway ridership in 2023 at New York City’s third-busiest station, 34th Street-Herald Square Station (72,890). It’s also significantly more than Las Vegas’ monorail (3,400 per hour) and its regional bus system (7,500 per hour), according to Hill.

About a dozen Sierra Club members toured the Vegas Loop in June and were impressed, Spotleson said: no carbon emissions; neon everywhere; “It’s very Vegas.” Yet while it might be faster than walking, he said, “it just isn’t the actual mass transit solution” the city needs for its busiest places, like the airport.

The lack of alternatives has made Boring an easy sell to politicians, Spotleson said. “They understand that we need transit solutions. They’re being presented with a free option that is also carbon free. That is as simple as it gets.”

Hill acknowledged skepticism of the company’s claim that the Loop will transport up to 90,000 people an hour. “People poke at this all the time,” he said, adding that he thinks the company will be proven right. “I am completely willing to take that bet. Let’s just wait and see.”

M.J. Maynard, who leads the Regional Transportation Commission, said that because the Vegas Loop is private, her agency did not have information to evaluate Boring’s ridership claims. “As a public agency, we have to be very transparent and accountable with the [ridership] numbers that we publish,” she said. “I can’t speak to the numbers that Steve Hill or his team have posted or talked about.”

Marilyn Kirkpatrick, the only county commissioner to vote against Boring’s 2023 expansion, said she opposed giving the company permission to build beneath miles of public roads when it had completed only a small portion of the system. “Why would we give something away if we didn’t know it was going to work?” she asked.

The public might know even less about whether it’s working, thanks to removal in May of the “amusement and transportation system” permit, a designation also used for enclosed systems like the airport tram and the Strip’s High Roller Ferris wheel.

Over the past three years, county inspections of Boring’s operations under the permit identified numerous issues, including speeding drivers and an unauthorized SUV entering one of the above-ground stations. Since 2022, there have been at least 67 incidents in which the tunnel system was breached, including by outside vehicles, a skateboarder and a curious pedestrian, Fortune reported in October.

But the company convinced Clark County to remove that layer of oversight by arguing the system “did not fit squarely into the requirements” of the regulation, which “greatly complicated” matters for Boring and the county.

The company outlined an alternative oversight plan in a letter obtained by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas. The company will continue to submit structural, civil, fire, electrical and plumbing studies, as well as emergency plans and other planning documents, according to the letter. But Boring’s letter did not address what would replace ordinances that required multiple layers of inspection and the immediate notification of injuries and fatalities.

A Clark County spokesperson did not answer questions about potential gaps in accountability created by removal of the permit. In a statement, the county said “safety is the top priority for all county departments and agencies” as they review projects.

Kirkpatrick said she worked to include additional fire-safety and security measures in a 2021 franchise agreement, which she supported. Still, she remains concerned about Boring’s operations, including the potential for price-gouging if it becomes the “only game in town.”

In an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas, a Nevada transportation industry expert who has closely observed the system’s development said it’s concerning that Boring’s plans, including basic transportation safety protocols, haven’t been vetted like a public project.

“What’s the traffic control system going to be like down in those tunnels? How are they going to make sure that none of those cars crash into each other when they’re going at 35 mph from one tunnel into an intersection with another tunnel?” said the expert, who requested anonymity because of concerns about professional repercussions. “All their answers are completely evasive. So there are significant operational concerns.”

Going to the Airport

Soon after the Boring Company arrived in Las Vegas, Hill approached airport leadership about connecting the Vegas Loop to the airport. The reasons are obvious. More than 50 million people landed at Harry Reid International Airport in 2023. On busy weekends, congestion at the airport can trap casino customers for almost an hour as they wait for rides.

Passengers crowd a baggage carousel at Harry Reid International Airport in October. The Boring Company hopes to eventually connect the Vegas Loop to the airport. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

But tunneling there requires compliance with Federal Aviation Administration regulations and federal environmental reviews. For now, Boring plans to end its tunnels near the airport and use surface streets to carry passengers the last mile to the terminals, said Rosemary Vassiliadis, Clark County’s director of aviation. An airport spokesperson later clarified that no plans have been confirmed.

Using surface streets for its airport connection — at least initially — won’t alleviate gridlock like mass transit could. Vassiliadis acknowledged it won’t “give us any [traffic] relief. It’s just supplanting how people are getting here” by car, but said she supports efforts to build a more direct tunnel line to the airport.

With casino and tourism industry support — and their help paying for the project — politicians, including its most vocal critics, like Goodman, have found little reason to challenge Boring’s plans. For some, the airport factored into the decision.

When a large expansion into the city of Las Vegas came before the City Council in 2023, Goodman criticized the project as unsafe, inaccessible and inefficient, but said she would still vote in favor of it “because of the plea of the hotels and the private sector to move more and more people easily around our Southern Nevada community.”

She said she had asked the casinos and hotels if they wanted to connect to the Vegas Loop. “Every one of them said, ‘We’re scared not to, because if it succeeds and if it gets to the airport, we want to connect,’” Goodman told ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas.

With Goodman’s vote, the council approved the extension unanimously.

Michael Squires and Anjeanette Damon contributed reporting.

by Daniel Rothberg for ProPublica and Dayvid Figler, City Cast Las Vegas

Feds Fine Baker College $2.5 Million for Deceptive Marketing That Left Students With Debts and Regrets

1 month 1 week ago

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The U.S. Department of Education has fined a Michigan college $2.5 million for years of “substantial misrepresentation” of career outcomes.

The department said in a news release on Tuesday that its investigation of Baker College found that the institution’s misrepresentations “could harm students, who may reasonably rely on this information when considering their higher education options and potential outcomes.”

The federal review was launched following a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Detroit Free Press in 2022 that detailed the college’s low graduation rates and the heavy debt that many students shoulder. For decades, the college promoted a near-100% employment rate, which, the investigation found, was based on shaky, self-reported data. The nonprofit college regularly spent more on marketing than on financial aid, and experts identified conflicts of interest in its governance structure.

In 2023, the news organizationsalong with The Chronicle of Higher Education — reported on growing financial problems at the institution.

As part of a settlement, the college agreed to make no misrepresentations in the future, provide the department with its marketing materials for review over a period of three years and tell current students and employees about how they can submit complaints or information to the department about alleged misconduct.

President Jacqui Spicer said in a statement that the college maintains that it did not commit any misrepresentations and that the settlement contains no admission of wrongdoing. The findings “did not assert the College provided false information, as part of our marketing and recruitment data,” she said, but rather instances “in which our materials had what the DOE viewed as insufficient background or explanation.”

“Baker College is committed to continuous improvement and meeting and exceeding DOE’s expectations and has already taken steps consistent with that commitment,” Spicer said in the statement.

Dan Nowaczyk, a 2016 graduate from Baker’s now-closed Flint campus, cheered news of the penalty and settlement.

“I hope it’s something that can help their administration take a step back and analyze what went wrong and fix it,” Nowaczyk said in a text message. “Although they’re being fined for this, I wish that something more was done to help shield the people who were exploited by this false advertising. But I do think it’s a good step to show that the DoE takes these things seriously.”

Nowaczyk was among the former students who previously told reporters about their troubling experiences at Baker, including some who said they didn’t realize they’d have to pay back their loans.

Another former student said he wished the department had gone further.

“My first thought is that I am honestly shocked they are allowed to remain open and accredited. If they were able to lie like this before, they will absolutely do it again,” Bart Bechtel said in a text message.

A Baker graduate, Bechtel said he took out more than $40,000 in student loans for an online associate degree. “My second thought is that it sucks. I still owe $5,000 remaining on a $16,000 loan because of those liars.”

Kevin, a graduate of Baker’s Flint campus who asked that his last name not be used, agreed. “This seems like a slap on the wrist,” he said.

“From what I can see, there’s no restitution for students,” he added. “They should be losing accreditation. But that’s not up to the Department of Education. That’s up to the Higher Learning Commission, which may very well happen down the road.”

The HLC is the private accreditation agency that monitors Baker. It was unable to be immediately reached for comment.

The original investigation by the media organizations found that 10 years after enrolling, fewer than half of former Baker students made more than $28,000 a year, the lowest rate among colleges of its kind in Michigan, according to federal data.

The settlement comes in the waning days of the Biden administration, which had promised to crack down on deceptive advertising by colleges, particularly around outcomes. Many experts have said they are worried these types of investigations will disappear under the incoming Trump administration.

The investigation, conducted by the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid, found that:

  • Baker published misleading career outcome rates on its websites, which gave the false impression that all graduates were represented in the outcomes statistics when it was just a portion of them.
  • Baker advertised in emails that it had a 91% overall career outcomes rate and that its automotive program had a nearly 96% rate, but the college didn’t say how it reached those calculations or what career outcome meant.
  • Baker included a list of employers on its website that it claimed had hired the college’s graduates. But 14 of the more than 100 listed employers had hired those individuals before they started at Baker.
  • Baker misrepresented its graduates’ earnings, using national figures from the U.S. Department of Labor rather than data from its own graduates.
  • Baker published inaccurate data about employment outcomes for students in its culinary programs.

“This settlement demonstrates the department’s ongoing commitment to enforcing higher education laws and regulations and protecting students and taxpayers,” the department said in its announcement.

In a 2023 message to the campus community, responding to reporting by the news outlets, Baker noted that “numerous in-state and out-of-state colleges and universities engage in marketing activities in Michigan; Baker College is not unique.”

Baker was founded as a for-profit business college in Flint, before converting to nonprofit status in 1977. It grew rapidly, becoming an early adopter of online learning and opening multiple campuses. It was once the largest private nonprofit college in Michigan.

The growth made for a healthy balance sheet. At the end of the 2013-14 academic year, Baker was bringing in $219 million in revenue and had $226 million in expenses. But by the end of the 2022-23 year, revenue was $58 million and expenses were $93 million. From a high of about 45,000 students in 2011-12, enrollment is now about 4,000.

Baker, however, still holds an endowment of about $362 million, according to its 2023 tax filing. Given that, Cleamon Moorer Jr., a former administrator and faculty member, wondered about the impact of the fine. “$2.5 million, out of a $300 million endowment — I’m not sure how punitive that is for an organization of its size,” he said.

Baker is in the midst of a radical shift in its target market, closing campuses in historically industrial places like Flint and Allen Park and building a new one in the more well-off suburb of Royal Oak.

But many students said Baker’s growth came from deceptive practices, and they filed complaints with several agencies, including the Department of Education. About 60 complaints were received by the Federal Trade Commission between 2016 and mid-2023, ProPublica and The Chronicle previously reported. Between January 2021 and June 2023, records from the Department of Education show that 500 borrower defense applications, claiming deceptive practices, were filed against Baker, an unusually high number for a nonprofit school.

Among the complaints collected by the FTC in 2022 was one from a student who wrote: “Baker College is a supposed non-profit institution, but they have made false claims about their employability of graduates, finances, and programs.”

Another wrote: “I was lured into a sense that I would be attending a college that valued their students, only to learn that they valued my financial asset to the college and not my education. I feel that I have been deceived and used for their financial gain.”

by Anna Clark, ProPublica, and David Jesse, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Connecticut DMV and Top Lawmakers Vow to Review Towing Laws

1 month 1 week ago

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The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles said Monday the agency would undertake a “comprehensive review” of towing practices in response to an investigation by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica. The reporting found that some low-income residents were losing their cars because they couldn’t afford the recovery fees and had a short window to pay before towing companies were allowed to sell their vehicles.

The review comes as the 2025 legislative session opens Wednesday. The leader of the state House of Representatives said he will support efforts this session to lengthen the time period that tow truck companies have to wait before requesting the DMV’s permission to sell people’s vehicles.

“This will be a priority,” said House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford. “I mean, we are all pretty shocked by it.”

State law allows tow companies to seek permission from the DMV to sell a vehicle worth $1,500 or less just 15 days after towing it — one of the shortest such periods in the country, CT Mirror and ProPublica found.

The investigation, which was published Sunday, detailed how Connecticut’s laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of owners. In many cases, people’s cars were towed from their apartment complexes not for violating the law, but because their complex-issued parking sticker had expired or they weren’t properly backed into a space.

As towing and storage charges mount, some towing companies set up additional barriers, like only taking cash. Others won’t release cars until they are registered in the person’s name, even if the driver just bought the vehicle and wasn’t required to register it yet under DMV rules.

The investigation found that the 15-day window was sometimes less time than it takes to get a DMV registration appointment and less than the time it takes to get a hearing for a complaint challenging a tow.

When presented with the findings, DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera said that the 15-day window “strikes the right balance for consumers and towers.”

But on Monday, Guerrera said in a statement that his agency will propose changes to the Legislature to ensure that policies are updated and clear.

“We will undertake a comprehensive review of the issues highlighted in the article and engage in substantive discussions with legislative advocates,” Guerrera said. “Our proactive approach will involve actively participating in the legislative development of proposals to modernize the regulation of tow companies.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Gov. Ned Lamont said he is “open to reviewing proposed changes to the law.”

Legislative leaders said they are concerned about the impact of the towing law on low-income residents particularly.

Connecticut House Speaker Matt Ritter (Yehyun Kim/The Connecticut Mirror)

“It’s not a friendly system for people who have probably the least amount of time and resources to navigate a tricky system,” said Ritter. “So it really is a double whammy. It’s an unfair policy, and then the only way to undo it requires an inordinate amount of effort and time and resources that a lot of these individuals don’t have.”

State Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, the upcoming co-chair of the General Law Committee, said he’s already spoken with the DMV, Democratic leadership and the governor’s office about legislation he is drafting that would lengthen the 15-day window before a sale, expand the forms of payment that towing companies are required to take, and prohibit companies from patrolling private parking lots looking for cars to tow. Instead, they would be required to wait for a complaint.

“The tow trucks are just driving around looking for a problem,” he said.

A bill that Lemar proposed in 2023 to require tow companies to accept credit cards, in addition to other measures, passed the legislature’s Transportation Committee. But facing opposition from towing companies and property owners, it wasn’t called on the House floor.

Timothy Vibert, president of the Towing and Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said towing companies are willing to talk about changes to the laws but that legislators don’t want to address the underlying reason for tows — lots of people driving unregistered and uninsured cars.

“The reason they’re being towed is because they’ve done something wrong,” Vibert said. “Yes, there are some unscrupulous towers out there, and that’s just the way they are, OK? But you can’t change every piece of legislation to push on and make the towers be the fall guy.”

John Souza, president of the Connecticut Coalition of Property Owners, said that 15 days seems like a short window, particularly for some of his tenants who get paid each month through Social Security, but allowing towers to patrol parking lots is helpful for larger apartment buildings. He doesn’t live at the rental properties he owns, he said, so it would be hard for him to call towing companies at all hours of the day.

“As a landlord, I get it,” Souza said. “You have to have rules, and people unfortunately take advantage. If the rules are too slack, people take advantage of them. There’s nothing worse than coming home after a long, hard day and someone’s in your parking space.”

House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, said his office quickly researched the issue following the story’s publication and found there’s a longer window for reclaiming minibikes before sale than there is for some vehicles.

“Fifteen days seems like a very short amount of time for anybody to be able to react and kind of do whatever they have to do to try to secure their vehicle before there’s an opportunity for it to be sold,” Rojas said. “For those reasons, and perhaps others too, it merits a look for sure.”

He said the issue “struck a nerve” with him and others because of how important it is to have reliable access to transportation.

House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said he is willing to consider changes to the state’s towing law.

“I’m concerned about the potentially predatory nature of towing practices in Connecticut,” Candelora said. “A number of years ago, I thought we had addressed this issue by requiring the posting of signs and the cost of towing prior to allowing the towing of vehicles, but obviously there seems to be an issue that still needs to be addressed.”

Leadership in the state Senate said they were interested in exploring the issue. Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven, said there’s an “issue here about fairness” that should be examined.

Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.

by Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror