ProPublica

by Mark Olalde

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.

For well over a century, the oil and gas industry has drilled holes across California in search of black gold and a lucrative payday. But with production falling steadily, the time has come to clean up many of the nearly quarter-million wells scattered from downtown Los Angeles to western Kern County and across the state.

The bill for that work, however, will vastly exceed all the industry’s future profits in the state, according to a first-of-its-kind study published Thursday and shared with ProPublica.

“This major issue has sneaked up on us,” said Dwayne Purvis, a Texas-based petroleum reservoir engineer who analyzed profits and cleanup costs for the report. “Policymakers haven’t recognized it. Industry hasn’t recognized it, or, if they have, they haven’t talked about it and acted on it.”

The analysis, which was commissioned by Carbon Tracker Initiative, a financial think tank that studies how the transition away from fossil fuels impacts markets and the economy, used California regulators’ draft methodology for calculating the costs associated with plugging oil and gas wells and decommissioning them along with related infrastructure. The methodology was developed with feedback from the industry.

The report broke down the costs into several categories. Plugging wells, dismantling surface infrastructure and decontaminating polluted drill sites would cost at least $13.2 billion, based on publicly available data. Adding in factors with slightly more uncertainty, like inflation rates and the price of decommissioning miles of pipeline, could bring the total cleanup bill for California’s onshore oil and gas industry to $21.5 billion.

Meanwhile, California oil and gas production will earn about $6.3 billion in future profits over the remaining course of operations, Purvis estimated.

Compounding the problem, the industry has set aside only about $106 million that state regulators can use for cleanup when a company liquidates or otherwise walks away from its responsibilities, according to state data. That amount equals less than 1% of the estimated cost.

Taxpayers will likely have to cover much of the difference to ensure wells are plugged and not left to leak brine, toxic chemicals and climate-warming methane.

ProPublica is reporting on oil and gas, with a focus on decommissioning, asset retirement obligations, liability evasion and government oversight. Do you work for an oil and gas company, a state or federal regulator, an insurance company or a financial institution that interacts with the oil and gas industry? Reach out directly at mark.olalde@propublica.org, or find details on how to send us tips securely here.

“These findings detail why the state must ensure this cost is not passed along to the California taxpayer,” state Sen. Monique Limón, a Santa Barbara Democrat who has written legislation regulating oil, said in a statement. “It is important that the state collect funding to plug and abandon wells in a timely and expeditious manner.”

Representatives of the state’s oil regulatory agency, the California Geologic Energy Management Division, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment on the report’s findings.

Rock Zierman, CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Association, an industry trade group, said in a statement that companies spent more than $400 million last year to plug and clean up thousands of oil and gas wells in the state. “This demonstrates their dedication to fulfilling their obligations and mitigating the environmental impact of their operations,” he said.

Fees on current oil and gas production will offset some of the liabilities, but they’re nowhere near enough to address the shortfall quantified by the new report.

“It really scares me,” Kyle Ferrar, Western program coordinator with environmental and data transparency group FracTracker Alliance, said of the report’s findings. “It’s a lot for the state, even a state as big as California.”

Industry in Decline

High oil prices have translated to huge profits for the industry in recent years, but Carbon Tracker’s report found that’s likely to be short-lived. Only two drilling rigs were operating in the state at one point this year, meaning few new wells will be coming online, and more than a third of all unplugged wells are idle.

Judson Boomhower, an environmental economist and assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego who has studied California’s oil industry, said there are inherent uncertainties in estimating future oil revenues. For example, one variable is how quickly the country shifts from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric. But, he said, Carbon Tracker’s estimates for environmental liabilities track with his research.

“It’s a state in the twilight of its production period, and that means big liabilities,” Boomhower said. He added that now is the time for regulators to prevent companies from offloading their wells to “thinly capitalized firms” unable to shoulder the cleanup.

As ProPublica reported last year, the major oil companies that long dominated in California and have the deep pockets necessary to pay for environmental cleanup are selling their wells and leaving the state, handing the task to smaller and less well-financed companies.

Roughly half of the wells drilled in California have changed hands through sales and bankruptcies since 2010, according to data Ferrar analyzed.

Smaller companies are often one bankruptcy away from their wells being orphaned, meaning they’re left to taxpayers as companies dissolve. The Biden administration recently committed $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds to plug orphan wells.

And the industry’s environmental liabilities in California are far bigger than Carbon Tracker’s report quantifies.

Purvis only included environmental liabilities associated with onshore oil and gas production. Billions of dollars more will be needed to plug offshore wells, remove rigs and reclaim artificial islands used for drilling off the coast of Long Beach, Ventura and Santa Barbara.

Additionally, the report did not quantify the emerging risk of “zombie wells,” which were plugged years ago to weaker standards and are likely to leak if they aren’t replugged. That’s an expensive endeavor, as the average cost to plug one well in California — to say nothing of cleaning up surface contamination — is $69,000, according to Purvis’ research. But some California wells have already begun failing, including in neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

“They’re Not Going to Have Money to Do It Later”

Time is running out to rectify the funding shortfall, for example by increasing the money companies must set aside for well plugging.

Carbon Tracker’s report — using state production data and financial futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange — estimated that as production declines, 58% of all future profits from drilling oil and gas in the state are likely to come over the next two years.

“We have our backs up against the wall in California right now,” Ferrar said. “If companies don’t put money towards it now, they’re not going to have money to do it later.”

Environmental policies could accelerate the industry’s decline. California voters will decide on a ballot initiative in 2024 that would reinstate large buffer zones between communities and oil wells, limiting drilling.

Purvis said acting quickly to plug wells would also “stimulate economic activity” and help smooth the transition for oil and gas workers who stand to lose well-paying jobs in the shift away from climate-warming fossil fuels. Spending large sums to plug old wells would create short-term employment for oil field workers.

As California faces the consequences of its failure to quickly clean up aging oil and gas infrastructure, there are likely several million more wells around the country that are either low-producing or already orphaned and will soon need to be decommissioned.

“California’s going to be a test case or the leading edge of this,” Boomhower said. “This same problem is eventually going to manifest everywhere.”

by Hannah Dreyfus

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.

One Thursday afternoon in December, a father and two of his estranged children boarded a flight from Salt Lake City to Texas, beginning an effort to repair their fractured relationship.

A family court official had ordered them to attend a reunification camp, Turning Points for Families Texas, to repair damage that the judge said the boys’ mother had inflicted by alienating them from their father.

The following morning, at the vacation rental where their therapy sessions were to be held, the counselor made an unusual request.

Jordan, the boys’ father, was asked to play a recording he’d made of a 2019 domestic dispute with his ex-wife, Hollie, that led to her arrest and their divorce. (ProPublica is using only the first names of adult family members to avoid identifying the children who are minors.) Jordan would later tell the court that he never intended for his sons to hear the sounds of their mother screaming during their fight. “I never even wanted the kids to know it existed,” he said of the recording.

But the Turning Points counselor, Loretta Maase, insisted. The camp claims to remedy parental alienation, a disputed psychological theory in which one parent — in this case Hollie — is accused of brainwashing a child to turn them against the other parent. They needed to hear the truth about their mother so that “the healing can begin,” Maase said of the children.

What unfolded after the recording was played caused the four-day treatment session to spiral out of control.

The younger son, then 12, covered his head with a blanket, shutting out the sounds, while his older brother became violent. When the boys refused to leave their bedroom to take part in therapy, Maase ordered the door removed. Their bedding, shower items, food and clothing were also removed, according to family members who participated in the intervention.

“They would use the blankets to hide underneath so they didn’t have to come out,” Jordan’s new wife would later testify.

The court-ordered intervention failed to reconcile the boys with their father, and beginning in January a judge convened a four-day hearing to understand why. The testimony that followed offered a rare glimpse into Turning Points’ operations and methods, as well as how family courts handle complicated family dynamics.

Custody disputes are often fraught, and courts and child welfare workers have the difficult job of sorting through allegations and counter allegations to decide what’s best for the children. Programs like Turning Points, in effect, allow overburdened family court judges to outsource some of that difficult decision-making: An order to participate effectively transfers to the person running the camp the power to decide if and when a parent can contact their child, regardless of the court’s previous custody rulings. This transfer of power generally lasts from the time the court order is issued until the camp director determines the treatment has been successful.

Despite family courts’ frequent use of Turning Points for Families, little is publicly known about the program, which was founded by New York-based social worker Linda Gottlieb, who describes the intervention as a “therapeutic vacation.”

But its treatments are controversial and frequently fall short of addressing the underlying causes of broken family relationships, experts told ProPublica.

This case is the latest example of Turning Points and programs like it triggering pushback over their methods.

ProPublica reported this year on another Utah case involving siblings who barricaded themselves in their bedroom to avoid being sent to the same Texas program. A judge subsequently backed down on an order mandating that they return to their father’s custody, and the children left their room. In March, a California appellate court reversed a lower court order sending two children to a similar program, saying the judge had not adequately understood or vetted the program before ordering the children to attend.

In April, Colorado lawmakers approved a bill to prohibit state courts from using reunification programs like Turning Points; lawmakers in California and Montana are considering similar bills. And a recent United Nations Human Rights Council special report recommended that court-ordered reunification camps be prohibited.

Maase, who runs Turning Points for Families Texas, told ProPublica she was not able to comment on specific cases. Questions that ProPublica sent to her were included in a motion filed last month by Jordan, asking the judge to restrain the news organization’s reporting on the case. The judge denied the request, stating the court did not have jurisdiction over ProPublica.

Jordan filed a motion against ProPublica requesting the court seal the custody case involving his boys and their mother. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Jordan declined to speak with ProPublica, citing his children’s need for privacy. “They’ve gone through a lot,” he said.

In an interview, Hollie said she faces “an impossible choice: see my kids again or subject them to more of this.”

Maase has blamed Hollie — “the alienating parent,” Maase called her — for the treatment’s failure, according to court documents. She did not comply with “Turning Points Protocols,” specifically writing a letter of apology and another in support of the reunification efforts. The letters, both subject to Maase’s approval, were to “explicitly and convincingly” disabuse the children of “their false beliefs about their father.”

“I’m not signing anything Loretta Maase sends me,” said Hollie, who despite having 50% custody before the Turning Points treatment began hasn’t seen the boys since December. “I’m not putting my kids through more of her ‘treatment.’ I never consented to this, and I never will. How this is not a violation of my parental rights, I do not know.”

“I Don’t Know of Any Other Option”

Years before the children were sent to Turning Points, the court appointed reunification therapists to address their resistance and ill will toward their father.

Karly McGuire said during the year she counseled the family she came to believe that Jordan’s parenting style was the cause of his sons’ continued resistance to him, according to her testimony. Jordan disagreed, she said.

McGuire, who holds a Ph.D. in family therapy, told the court that Jordan constantly sent her videos about parental alienation. And he accused Hollie of spearheading a campaign of parental alienation against him and causing the rift between him and his sons.

After years of therapy, the boys continued to report they were being harmed by their father and violently resisted visitation with him. The 12-year-old posted a video on TikTok with a gun barrel in his mouth, and all three of Jordan and Hollie’s sons declared a “suicide pact” if they were forced to live with their father, according to court documents. (The oldest of the three brothers is an adult and did not participate in the reunification program.)

If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources:

-Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

-Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

Bryce Froerer, appointed by the court to represent the boys’ interests in the custody case, cites worries of self-harm by the 12-year-old in his motion recommending treatment at Turning Points. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Bryce Froerer, a guardian ad litem appointed by the court to represent the boys’ interests in the custody case, told the court that their refusal to visit their father and their threats of self-harm were evidence of parental alienation. He also said a more severe intervention was needed to address it, according to court documents.

The “conservative, cautious approach” advocated by McGuire wasn’t working, argued Froerer, who has no psychological training, according to his office. He recommended they instead attend Turning Points and follow its practice of prohibiting the children from seeing the “alienating parent” for at least 90 days. Froerer admitted that he had “very little experience” with Turning Points, beyond speaking with Maase and reviewing some promotional materials.

“I don’t know of any other option at this point besides trying this program,” he told the court. “The alternative, from my perspective, Your Honor, is to linger on. And it is not my recommendation that we linger on.”

Froerer declined to speak with ProPublica. After the news organization requested an interview, he petitioned the court to seal the case.

McGuire testified that she cautioned Froerer against sending the boys to an intervention like Turning Points. She had grown concerned about their increasing despondency during her sessions, which she attributed to burnout from all of the court-ordered therapy. She believed separating them from their mother, the primary caregiver for most of their lives, would further harm their mental health.

But Froerer’s argument prevailed. Christina Wilson, the judicial commissioner overseeing the case, agreed that the court was running out of options. Though she also admitted knowing little about it — asking at one point “how the program works” — she ordered the boys to participate in the intervention.

“When that’s done, we can come back here and talk about what happened,” Froerer said. “And if things have improved, wonderful. And if things haven’t improved,” he paused, “I don’t know.”

A spokesperson for the court said Wilson was unable to comment on “any past or current cases.”

A Courtroom Affliction

The family’s trip to Texas was intended to repair a case of parental alienation. Advocates and critics debate whether it’s a real ailment, but they agree on one thing: It is only diagnosed and treated in the family courtroom.

“Other kinds of psychological dysfunctions that show up in court tend to show up elsewhere as well, whereas parental alienation is a process that is specifically brought to court to remedy,” said Demosthenes Lorandos, an attorney and parental alienation scholar who has written about a reunification program that uses methods similar to Turning Points. Lorandos defends parental alienation as a legitimate diagnosis and believes reunification camps are a safe and effective way to treat the condition. Lorandos, who also holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, said he does not know of another psychological dysfunction that only shows up in court.

Dr. David Corwin, a professor and director of pediatric forensic services at the University of Utah and a past president of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, disputes that parental alienation is a legitimate disorder. It almost exclusively affects children of parents with higher socioeconomic status, he said. “True mental health disorders are more equally distributed throughout the population, regardless of socioeconomic status, class or social context.”

Gottlieb told ProPublica that she created Turning Points at the request of lawyers whose clients were seeking intensive treatment for alienation. Gottlieb, who trained Maase, has expanded to meet the demand, including the Texas location and a program in California.

Maase said Jordan paid her company $12,000 for the Texas sessions. Today, the price for the four-day treatment is $15,000.

Lorandos said he charges $5,000 a day for expert testimony in parental alienation cases, and the bill for his services on a single case has reached $50,000.

“Business is booming,” said Robin Deutsch, chair of the American Psychological Association’s working group on high conflict family relationships involving children.

She is a critic of Turning Points and programs like it, saying their treatments don’t address the complex dynamics that cause fractures within families. “The court has to put all their eggs in the parental alienation basket. And the kids will suffer because of it,” Deutsch said. (Previously, Deutsch ran a reunification camp that she says differed in its approach to family fractures; she said the camp is no longer in operation.)

Outside the courtroom, the ailment that the programs claim to heal — parental alienation — has struggled to gain legitimacy. Medical and psychological professionals, including the American Psychiatric Association, have rejected it as a mental disorder. And the special report released by the United Nations Human Rights Council blasted parental alienation as a “pseudo-concept” and recommended member states prohibit its use in family courts.

The theory has also been shunned by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges for failing to meet court evidentiary standards.

Jennifer Hoult, an attorney and legal scholar, has written about why parental alienation fails to meet national standards for court admissibility. She said the theory is based on a fallacy that parents have a right to be loved. “There is no legal right to force your children to love you, respect you or even like you,” she said.

Gottlieb, who spoke to ProPublica in February for another story, argues alienation typically begins when people believe children’s claims of abuse. “Everyone knows children lie,” Gottlieb told ProPublica. “Lying is so instinctual — children love to make up stories. Why on earth do we believe that children are reporting accurately?”

Little independent research has examined the long-term effects of reunification camps on children.

A 2021 evaluation led by Jennifer Jill Harman, an associate professor of psychology at Colorado State University who believes parental alienation is a genuine diagnosis, analyzed video recordings of Gottlieb’s intervention with 15 families. Based on Gottlieb’s “self-reported” success during the intervention itself, the evaluation found the program was safe and had a 96% rate of effectiveness.

According to Harman, the analysis didn’t look at the treatment’s long-term effectiveness. And the study was intended to “promote” the program and refute claims that its interventions “are traumatic for children and cause long-term harm,” according to Harman’s application to the Colorado State University Institutional Review Board for the project. Gottlieb was involved in designing and executing the evaluation of her program, records show.

Harman declined to comment. Gottlieb didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story.

Jennifer Bard, an expert in human-subjects research law and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, questioned the value of this evaluation of Turning Points.

“The fact that the person who stands to profit by the findings of this study designed it should cause considerable concern,” Bard said. “It’s almost as if this study was put together to support a predetermined conclusion, which is not what studies are supposed to do.”

Sessions Spiral Out of Control

On Dec. 1, police officers arrived at Jordan’s brick-front home in Syracuse, Utah. He had called for help with a “juvenile problem.” His two sons were refusing to be taken to Turning Points as the court had ordered, according to police records.

Eventually, the boys agreed to go, and the group that traveled to Texas included Jordan’s new wife (the boys had not previously met her) and stepchildren, and the boys’ paternal uncle and cousins, according to testimony. The boys’ older brother, Xander, who is 19, opted out of the program.

Maase held full-day sessions at the family’s vacation rental. (The address on the Turning Points for Families Texas website is a post office box at a strip mall in Austin.)

In discussing the program, the judge and commissioner overseeing the case referred to Maase repeatedly as a “doctor,” though Maase is not a doctor and does not refer to herself as such. She is a licensed professional counselor with a master’s degree in counseling and family therapy. She is not permitted to provide or advertise herself as providing psychological or medical services, according to the executive director of the Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council. Maase also operates a counseling company called ParentRise, which provides therapy to families.

Jordan testified that after the sessions began, Maase instructed him to play for the boys the recording of the July 1, 2019, domestic dispute between him and his ex-wife.

Hollie said during the dispute she lunged to grab a phone when she realized her then-husband was using it to record them. She denies being physically violent with Jordan.

The incident led to Hollie’s arrest. She was charged with domestic violence in the presence of a child and disorderly conduct. She pleaded not guilty to the charges, which were later dismissed.

Maase told the court that introducing children to recordings and documents of their parents’ domestic disputes is “standard procedure” at her camp in order to correct children’s “false narrative” about the alienated parent — in this case Jordan.

In her report to the court, Maase wrote that throughout their time in Texas the boys showed “inadequate compliance, aggressive and violent behaviors, and overall lack of progress.”

Texas police officers were called several times to respond to the 16-year-old’s threats of violence toward himself and others. Though he weighed only 111 pounds, the teenager had to be physically restrained several times by family members before police arrived.

According to accounts from those who participated in the intervention, Maase instructed adult family members to physically coerce the boys to cooperate with the treatment. According to one account, Maase recorded the therapy sessions over the boys’ objections and repeatedly threatened them, including telling the older boy that he would go to jail if he didn’t cooperate and might never see his mother again. According to more than one account, Maase took away the boys’ food during the intervention in order to compel participation.

Maase told ProPublica that these claims are “preposterous.” “I advise that you turn your attention to the motives of those who would make such assertions in the first place,” she wrote in an email.

Since the intervention, the children have been barred from participating in individual therapy.

In her report to the court, Turning Points counselor Loretta Maase states that individual therapy would be considered dangerous to the children. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Such prohibitions are standard Turning Points protocol. Maase explained to the court that interacting with therapists who aren’t part of Turning Points could be “dangerous” because they might encourage the children to believe “they had abusive past experiences when, in fact, they did not.”

Separated From Their Mother

After returning from Texas, the boys remained with their father, beginning the 90-day separation from their mother and any relatives who had defended her in the dispute.

In such programs the separation can be extended by the facilitator if the children or the accused parent fail to comply with the treatment.

“Sometimes the 90-day order can turn into a forever order,” Deutsch said.

On Dec. 6, the day after their return from Texas, Jordan brought the 16-year-old to a Salt Lake City emergency room out of fear he would hurt himself or others, according to court documents.

The teenager told the doctor that he had attended a “brainwashing camp” and felt “unsafe” with his father. He said that he had been physically assaulted while at the Turning Points program, according to medical records. The medical report described “faint linear marks” on his upper arms, where the patient said his father had grabbed him.

Another teenager treated years ago by Turning Points in upstate New York also alleged he was abused during his therapy sessions. According to a July 2016 police report, an officer was dispatched to the home of Gottlieb, the Turning Points founder, to investigate claims that a 16-year-old, Caleb Thomas, had been “dropped off at the therapist's residence” and “assaulted and thrown in a closet.” No charges were filed.

Thomas told ProPublica that when he protested Gottlieb’s attempts to record his therapy sessions, he was pinned to the floor by his father and another man. Thomas said he escaped through a window, intending to return to his mother, but was caught by police.

Lt. Craig Wood, the police officer who responded to the report, said he recalled Gottlieb showing him an order from a Delaware family court judge, placing the teen in her care. “I found it unusual that they couldn’t find a doctor closer to where they lived, but she’s a specialist, I guess,” he said.

Gottlieb did not respond to a request for comment.

The week after Jordan took his 16-year-old son to the emergency room, he brought his 12-year-old son to the ER for “suicidal ideation with intent.”

The boy also told medical staff about the “alienation camp,” where he was “threatened that he would be arrested if he didn’t cooperate,” according to medical records. He told hospital staff that while there he had been forced to look at documents and watch video showing that “his mom was a ‘bad person.’”

The 12-year-old said that at his father’s house he was being “restrained daily” if he didn’t do what his dad wanted, and he said he felt “mentally broken down” because of his father’s threats that he would never again see his mother. The boy disclosed to medical staff that his father had sexually abused him at age 11. According to the medical report, Utah’s Department of Children and Family Services is investigating the boy’s claims. DCFS declined to comment.

Jordan did not respond to requests for comment about the allegation. He told hospital staff that multiple DCFS cases had been opened against him and closed because of a lack of evidence. He said he believed his ex-wife had made false claims about him to the children to further alienate them from him, according to court documents.

The child told medical staff that if he was forced to return to his father’s house, he would “find a way to kill himself.” He was admitted for inpatient psychiatric care.

Jordan’s father, Brent, testified in the hearing earlier this year that he has long-standing concerns about his son’s parenting and the effect the reunification camp has had on his grandsons.

“They don’t feel safe with police officers, they don’t trust you, they don’t trust their father. And the reason is because they told their story of abuse and what happens is they get shoved back into the hands of their abuser every time,” Brent testified. “How can you ask a child to rationalize that?”

Police have been called to Jordan’s home multiple times since the family’s return from Texas, according to 911 records. On Dec. 15, a juvenile court judge ordered the children to be removed from the home and placed with their mom. Police brought the 12-year-old to Hollie (the 16-year-old had already run away to his mother’s home). The next day, Jordan secured an order returning the boys to his house. Police assisted with the transfer.

In February, Maase advised the court to continue prohibiting the boys from seeing their mother until Hollie “fully acknowledges the alienation and discontinues her negative behaviors.” The children must first “relinquish their alienating thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, feelings and behavior” before they are allowed to see her, Maase wrote in a report to the court.

Judge Ronald G. Russell ordered the children to continue Maase’s treatment.

Hollie has not been permitted to communicate with her children who are minors since December. In February, she moved from her home in Utah to dissuade the boys from running away from their father’s house to see her, as they had done multiple times. If they do it again, the no-contact order will be extended, Hollie said.

The Oldest Brother

As a legal adult, the court couldn’t force Xander, the oldest of the three brothers, to participate in the reunification program.

Jordan invited him to join them in Texas, texting at the end of November, “It will not be the same without you. I have a ticket ready to purchase for you to come with us. I love you and hope to be your life again.”

Jordan invited his son Xander via text message at the end of November to participate in the reunification program in Texas. (Provided by Xander)

Xander never responded.

He told ProPublica that he had been through years of failed court-mandated reunification therapy and had no intention of participating in more.

Still, he has struggled with feelings of guilt for not being with his brothers as they suffered through the reunification camp.

“Maybe if I had gone, I could have protected them,” he said. “I’m having trouble forgiving myself for that.”

Clarification, May 18, 2023: This article was updated to clarify that the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has shunned the theory of parental alienation.

Mariam Elba and Mollie Simon contributed research. Michael Squires contributed reporting.

by Daniel Golden, ProPublica, and Kunal Purohit

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was co-published with The Chronicle of Higher Education.

On a family trip to the Jersey Shore in the summer of 2021, Sophia’s go-to meal was the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. The buns were toasty, the chicken was crispy and the fries didn’t spill from the bag.

Sophia was entering her sophomore year in prep school, but her parents were already thinking ahead to college. They paid to enroll her in an online service called Scholar Launch, whose programs start at $3,500. Scholar Launch, which started in 2019, connects high school students with mentors who work with them on research papers that can be published and enhance their college applications.

Publication “is the objective,” Scholar Launch says on its website. “We have numerous publication partners, all are peer-reviewed journals.”

The prospect appealed to Sophia. “Nowadays, having a publication is kind of a given” for college applicants, she said. “If you don’t have one, you’re going to have to make it up in some other aspect of your application.”

Sophia said she chose marketing as her field because it “sounded interesting.” She attended weekly group sessions with a Scholar Launch mentor, a marketing executive who also taught at an Ivy League business school, before working one-on-one with a teaching assistant. Assigned to analyze a company’s marketing strategy, she selected Chick-fil-A.

Sophia’s paper offered a glowing assessment. She credited Chick-fil-A as “responsible for the popularity of the chicken sandwich,” praised its fare as healthier than fast-food burgers, saluted its “humorous yet honest” slogan (a cow saying, “Eat mor chikin”) and admired its “family-friendly” attitude and “traditional beliefs,” exemplified by closing its restaurants on Sundays. Parts of her paper sounded like a customer endorsement (and she acknowledged to ProPublica that her marketing analysis could’ve been stronger). Neither too dry nor too juicy, the company’s signature sandwich “is the perfect blend to have me wanting more after every bite,” she wrote. “Just from the taste,” Chick-fil-A “is destined for success.”

Her heartfelt tribute to the chicken chain appeared on the website of a new online journal for high school research, the Scholarly Review. The publication touts its “thorough process of review” by “highly accomplished professors and academics,” but it also displays what are known as preprints. They aren’t publications “in the traditional sense” and aren’t vetted by Scholarly Review’s editorial board, according to Roger Worthington, its chair.

That preprint platform is where Sophia’s paper appeared. Now a 17-year-old high school junior, she said she wasn’t aware of the difference between the journal and the preprint platform, and she didn’t think the less prestigious placement would hurt her college chances: “It’s just important that there’s a link out there.”

Sophia is preparing to apply to college at a time when the criteria for gaining entry are in flux. The Supreme Court appears poised to curtail race-conscious affirmative action. Grade inflation makes it harder to pick students based on GPA, since so many have A averages. And the SAT and ACT tests, long criticized for favoring white and wealthy students, have fallen out of fashion at many universities, which have made them optional or dropped them entirely.

As these differentiators recede and the number of applications soars, colleges are grappling with the latest pay-to-play maneuver that gives the rich an edge: published research papers. A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential.

At least 20 online research programs for high schoolers have sprung up in the U.S. and abroad in recent years, along with a bevy of journals that publish the work. This growth was aided by the pandemic, which normalized online education and stymied opportunities for in-person research.

“You’re teaching students to be cynical about research. That’s the really corrosive part. ‘I can hire someone to do it. We can get it done, we can get it published, what’s the big deal?’”

—Kent Anderson, past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing

The consequence has been a profusion of published research papers by high school students. According to four months of reporting by ProPublica, online student journals now present work that ranges from serious inquiry by young scholars to dubious papers whose main qualification seems to be that the authors’ parents are willing to pay, directly or indirectly, to have them published. Usually, the projects are closely directed by graduate students or professors who are paid to be mentors. College admissions staff, besieged by applicants proffering links to their studies, verify that a paper was published but are often at a loss to evaluate its quality.

Moreover, ProPublica’s reporting shows that purveyors of online research sometimes engage in questionable practices. Some services portray affiliated publications as independent journals. Others have inflated their academic mentors’ credentials or offered freebies to college admissions consultants who could provide referrals. When asked about these practices by ProPublica, several services responded by reversing course on them.

The business of churning out high school research is a “fast-growing epidemic,” said one longtime Ivy League admissions officer, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak for his university. “The number of outfits doing that has trebled or quadrupled in the past few years.

“There are very few actual prodigies. There are a lot of precocious kids who are working hard and doing advanced things. A sophomore in high school is not going to be doing high-level neuroscience. And yet, a very high number of kids are including this” in their applications.

The programs serve at least 12,000 students a year worldwide. Most families are paying between $2,500 and $10,000 to improve their odds of getting into U.S. universities that accept as few as 1 in every 25 applicants. Some of the biggest services are located in China, and international students abound even in several U.S.-based programs.

The services pair high schoolers with academic mentors for 10-15 weeks to produce research papers. Online services typically shape the topic, direction and duration of the project, and urge students to complete and publish a paper regardless of how fruitful the exploration has been. “Publication specialists” then help steer the papers into a dizzying array of online journals and preprint platforms. Almost any high school paper can find an outlet. Alongside hardcore science papers are ones with titles like “The Willingness of Humans to Settle on Mars, and the Factors that Affect it,” “Social Media; Blessing Or Curse” and “Is Bitcoin A Blessing Or A Curse?”

“You’re teaching students to be cynical about research,” said Kent Anderson, past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing and former publishing director of the New England Journal of Medicine. “That’s the really corrosive part. ‘I can hire someone to do it. We can get it done, we can get it published, what’s the big deal?’”

The research services brag about how many of their alumni get into premier U.S. universities. Lumiere Education, for example, has served 1,500 students, half of them international, since its inception in the summer of 2020. In a survey of its alumni, it found that 9.8% who applied to an Ivy League university or to Stanford last year were accepted. That’s considerably higher than the overall acceptance rates at those schools.

Such statistics don’t prove that the students were admitted because of their research. Still, research can influence admissions decisions. At Harvard, “evidence of substantial scholarship” can elevate an applicant, according to a university filing in a lawsuit challenging its use of affirmative action in admissions. The University of Pennsylvania’s admissions dean, Whitney Soule, boasted last year that nearly one-third of accepted students “engaged in academic research” in high school, including some who “co-authored publications included in leading journals.” A Penn spokesperson declined to identify the journals. Yale, Columbia and Brown, among others, encourage applicants to send research.

One admissions dean acknowledged that conferring an advantage on those who submit published papers benefits affluent applicants. “Research is one of these activities that we’re very aware they’re not offered equitably,” Stuart Schmill of MIT said. Nevertheless, MIT invites applicants to submit research and inquires whether and where it was published.

Admissions officers often lack the time and expertise to evaluate this research. The first reader of each application typically takes 10 minutes or less to go through it, which means noting the existence of the published paper without actually reading it. If the applicant is on the cusp, a second staffer more versed in the subject area may read their file. The first reader “is very young and in almost all cases majored in humanities or social sciences,” said Jon Reider, a former admissions officer at Stanford. “They can’t tell if a paper in the sciences means anything or is new at all.”

As a result, admissions staff may rely on outside opinions. Schmill said that MIT pays more attention to the mentor’s recommendation than the actual research. Academic mentors, even when paid, “do a pretty good job being honest and objective,” he said. The longtime Ivy League admissions officer was more skeptical, likening the mentors to expert witnesses in a trial.

Brown admissions dean Logan Powell described faculty as “invaluable partners” in reviewing research. But many professors would rather not be bothered. “Our faculty don’t want to spend all their time reading research projects from 17- and 18-year-olds,” the veteran Ivy League admissions officer said.

“Our faculty don’t want to spend all their time reading research projects from 17- and 18-year-olds.”

—A longtime Ivy League admissions officer

Also complicating the admissions office’s ability to assess the papers is staffers’ unfamiliarity with the byzantine world of online publications favored by the research services. Several have confusingly similar names: the Journal of Student Research, the Journal of Research High School, the International Journal of High School Research. Selective outlets like the Journal of Student Research and the Scholarly Review also post preprints, making it hard to determine what, if any, standards a manuscript was held to.

Some also hide ties to research services. Scholarly Review doesn’t tell readers that it’s founded and funded by Scholar Launch. The lack of transparency was “not a conscious decision,” Scholar Launch co-founder Joel Butterly said. “Our intent is to keep it as separate as possible from Scholar Launch.”

The companies are intertwined in at least two respects. Worthington, who chairs the Scholarly Review’s editorial board, also works as a mentor for Scholar Launch and InGenius Prep, a college admissions counseling service co-founded by Butterly. Three of the seven articles in the Scholarly Review’s inaugural issue were written by students who Worthington advised, possibly enhancing their college prospects.

“Editors selecting papers they were involved in is a no-no,” said Anderson, the former New England Journal of Medicine publishing director.

Worthington told ProPublica that he had recused himself from discussing those manuscripts. Then Scholar Launch changed its policy. “For future issues,” Worthington said in a subsequent email, “the company will disclose mentoring arrangements in advance to make doubly sure that nobody will be reviewing work by a former student.” Worthington also said, after ProPublica raised questions, that Scholarly Review would make it “more obvious” that the editorial board is “not responsible” for articles on its preprint platform. (During ProPublica’s reporting process, Sophia’s Chick-fil-A paper was removed from the site.) The platform, which is managed by Scholar Launch and InGenius Prep, has been given a separate section on the Scholarly Review website, and further changes are likely, he said.

Online research services are an offshoot of the booming college-admissions-advising industry. They draw many of their students from the same affluent population that hires private counselors. Many families that are already paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for advice on essay writing and extracurricular activities pay thousands more for research help. Scholar Launch charges $3,500 for “junior” research programs and between $4,500 and $8,800 for advanced research, according to its website.

Polygence, one of the largest online high school research programs in the U.S., cultivates college counselors. The service, which was founded in 2019 and worked with more than 2,000 students last year, has developed relationships with counselors whose clients receive a discount for using Polygence.

Polygence proclaimed April to be Independent Educational Consultants Appreciation Month. It planned to raffle off prizes including “an all-expenses paid roundtrip to a college campus tour of your choice” — it suggested the University of Hawaii — and “2 free pro bono Polygence research projects.”

Such perks appear to brush up against ethics codes of two college counseling associations, which prohibit members from accepting substantial compensation for student referrals. Asked about these rules, Polygence co-founder Jin Chow said the event celebrates all counselors, “regardless of whether or not they have partnered with us or sent us students.” Polygence then dropped the tour prize and added two more free research projects.

Then there’s the question of credentials. Lumiere Education’s website has routinely identified mentors as Ph.D.s even when they don’t have a doctorate and described itself as “founded by Oxford and Harvard PhDs,” even though its founders, Dhruva Bhat and Stephen Turban, are pursuing doctorates. It’s “shorthand,” Turban said. “We’re not trying to deceive anyone.” After ProPublica questioned the practice, Lumiere changed mentors’ credentials on its website from “PhD” to “PhD student.”

Paid “mentors,” who are frequently doctoral students, play key roles in the process of generating papers by high schoolers. The job is “one of the most lucrative side hustles for graduate students,” as one Columbia Ph.D. candidate in political science put it. Another Ph.D. candidate, who mentored for two services, said that one paid her $200 an hour, and the other paid $150 — far more than the $25 an hour she earned as a teaching assistant in an Ivy League graduate course.

“[The first reader of a college application] is very young and in almost all cases majored in humanities or social sciences. They can’t tell if a paper in the sciences means anything or is new at all.”

—Jon Reider, former admissions officer at Stanford

In some instances, the mentors seem to function as something more than advisers. Since high schoolers generally don’t arrive with a research topic, the mentor helps them choose it, and then may pitch in with writing, editing and scientific analysis.

A former consultant at Athena Education, a service in India, recalled that a client thanked her for his admission to a world-famous university. Admissions interviewers had praised his paper, which she had heavily revised. The university “was tricked,” the consultant said, adding that other students who were academically stronger went to second-tier universities.

The Cornell Undergraduate Economic Review, which accepts about 10% of submissions, published its first-ever paper by a high school student in 2021. Its editor-in-chief was impressed that the author, a Lumiere client in the Boston area, had used advanced econometrics to demonstrate that a reduced federal income tax subsidy for electric vehicles had caused sales to plummet.

But another editor, Andres Aradillas Fernandez, said he wondered whether the high-level work “was not at least partially” attributable to the mentor, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at an Ivy League university. He also felt uneasy that access to services like Lumiere is largely based on wealth. After Aradillas Fernandez became editor-in-chief last year and Lumiere clients submitted weaker papers, he notified Lumiere that the journal would no longer publish high school research.

The Boston-area Lumiere client declined comment. Turban, Lumiere’s co-founder, said the paper was “100 percent” the student’s work. The mentor said he showed the high schooler which mathematical formulas to use, but the student was “very motivated” and did the calculations himself. “I have to spoon feed him a bit on what to read and sometimes how to do it,” the mentor said.

The oldest online research mentorship program for high schoolers, Pioneer Academics, founded in 2012, has maintained relatively rigorous standards. It accepted 37% of its 4,765 applicants last year, and 13% of its students received full scholarships based on need. Pioneer “never promises academic journal publication,” according to its website.

“In our experience, we have noticed that [the Journal of Student Research] nearly never gives edits, and students always just advance straight to being accepted.”

—Manas Pant, a publication strategy associate at Lumiere Education

“The push for publication leads young scholars astray,” Pioneer co-founder Matthew Jaskol said. “The message is that looking like a champion is more important than training to be a great athlete.”

Oberlin College gives credits to students for passing Pioneer courses. The college’s annual reviews have found that research done for Pioneer “far exceeded” what would be expected to earn credit, said Michael Parkin, an associate dean of arts and sciences at Oberlin and a former Pioneer mentor, who oversees the collaboration. Pioneer pays Oberlin a small fee for each nonscholarship student given credit.

At Pioneer and other services, the most fulfilling projects are often impelled by the student’s curiosity, and gaining an edge in college admissions is a byproduct rather than the raison d’etre. Alaa Aboelkhair, the daughter of a government worker in Egypt, was fascinated as a child by how the stars constantly change their position in the sky. Googling in 2021, before her senior year of high school, she came across Lumiere, which gave her a scholarship. “The fact that we only know 5% of the universe drove me to study more,” she said. “That is my passion.”

At the suggestion of her Lumiere mentor, Christian Ferko, Alaa examined whether hypothetical particles known as axions could be detected by converting them into light. Lumiere was paying Ferko for weekly sessions, but he talked with Alaa several times a week. He emailed some textbooks to her and she found other sources on her own, working late into the night to finish her paper.

Since she chose not to submit her ACT score, the paper and Ferko’s recommendation were vital to her college applications. In March 2022, a Princeton admissions officer called Ferko to ask about Alaa. Ferko compared her to a first-year graduate student and said she showed the potential to make new discoveries. “My impression is this is something colleges do when they’re right on the fence of whether to admit the student,” Ferko said. “I did my best to advocate for her, without overstating.”

Princeton admitted only 3.3% of international applicants to the class of 2026, including Alaa. She said she received a full scholarship. (“Optional submissions are one factor among many in our holistic review process,” Princeton spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss said.)

A short walk from India’s first Trump Tower, in an upscale neighborhood known for luxury homes and gourmet restaurants, is the Mumbai office of Athena Education, a startup that promises to help students “join the ranks of Ivy League admits.” An attendant in a white uniform waits at a standing desk to greet visitors in a lounge lined with paintings and featuring a coffee bar and a glass facade with a stunning view of the downtown skyline. “We all strive to get things done while sipping Italian coffee brewed in-house,” a recent Athena ad read.

Co-founded in 2014 by two Princeton graduates, Athena has served more than 2,000 students. At least 80 clients have been admitted to elite universities, and 87% have gotten into top-50 U.S. colleges, according to its website. One client said that Athena charges more than a million rupees, or $12,200 a year, six times India’s annual per capita income. Athena declined comment for this story.

Around 2020, Athena expanded its research program and started emphasizing publication. Athena and similar services in South Korea and China cater to international students whose odds of getting accepted at a U.S. college are even longer than those American students face. MIT, for instance, accepted 1.4% of international applicants last year, compared with 5% of domestic applicants.

A former consultant said Athena told her that its students were the “creme de la creme.” Instead, she estimated, 7 out of 10 needed “hand-holding.”

For publication, Athena students have a readily available option: Questioz, an online outlet founded by an Athena client and run by high schoolers. Former Editor-in-Chief Eesha Garimella said that a mentor at Athena “guides us on the paper editing and publication process.” Garimella said Questioz publishes 75%-80% of submissions.

Athena students also place their work in the Houston-based Journal of Student Research. Founded in 2012 to publish undergraduate and graduate work, in 2017 the journal began running high school papers, which now make up 85% of its articles, co-founders Mir Alikhan and Daharsh Rana wrote in an email.

Last June, a special edition of the journal presented research by 19 Athena students. They tested noise-reduction algorithms and used computer vision to compare the stances of professional and amateur golfers. A survey of Hong Kong residents concluded that people who grew up near the ocean are more likely to value its conservation. Athena’s then-head of research was listed as a co-author on 10 of the projects.

Publication in JSR was “pretty simple,” said former Athena student Anjani Nanda, who surveyed 103 people about their awareness of female genital mutilation and found that they were poorly informed. “I never got any edits or suggested changes from their side.”

As Nanda’s experience suggests, virtual journals dedicated to high school research tend to be less choosy than traditional publications. They reflect a larger shift in academic publishing. Print journals typically accept a small percentage of submissions and depend on subscription revenue. Online publications tend to be free for the reader but charge a fee to the author — incentivizing the publications to boost revenue by accepting many articles.

The Journal of Student Research exemplifies this turnabout. It describes itself as peer-reviewed, the gold standard of traditional academic publishing. It relies on more than 90 reviewers at colleges across the U.S., and the typical review takes 12-24 weeks, according to its website.

“The push for publication leads young scholars astray. The message is that looking like a champion is more important than training to be a great athlete.”

—Matthew Jaskol, co-founder of Pioneer Academics

In reality, it may not be so stringent. Four of eight reviewers whom ProPublica contacted said the journal has never asked them to evaluate a manuscript. (Some academics agreed to review for JSR but forgot over time, Alikhan and Rana said; others specialize in fields where the journal has received few submissions.)

And while authors pay an “article processing charge” of $50 at submission and $200 at acceptance, for an extra $300 they can expedite “fast-track” review in four to five weeks. One Athena client who fast-tracked his manuscript so that it could be published in time for his college application said JSR accepted it without changes. He was admitted to a top-10 U.S. university. “I think it was important,” said the student. “I didn’t have much leadership in school so [I] needed other ways to get better extracurriculars.”

In “The Ultimate Guide to the Journal of Student Research,” a Lumiere “publication strategy associate” described JSR as a “safety” option that accepts 65% of submissions from Lumiere clients. “In our experience, we have noticed that JSR nearly never gives edits, and students always just advance straight to being accepted,” the Lumiere associate wrote.

Alikhan and Rana defended the journal’s standards. They said that many papers, which are submitted with the guidance of top mentors, hardly need editing: “Honestly, it is not the journal’s fault if their advisors working closely with students produce outstanding manuscripts.”

The journals are deluged with submissions. Founded in 2019, the International Journal of High School Research has expanded from four to six issues a year and may add more, said executive producer Fehmi Damkaci. “There is a greater demand than we envisioned,” he said, adding that the journal has become more selective.

As the pandemic closed labs and restricted fieldwork, forcing students to collect data and conduct interviews online, the Journal of Student Research “received an increased volume of submissions,” Alikhan and Rana said. Polygence complained that several students who wanted to cite publications in their college applications hadn’t heard back from JSR for months. The papers were eventually published.

Preprint platforms don’t even bother with peer review. The usual justification for preprints is that they quickly disseminate vital research, such as new information about vaccines or medical treatments. High school projects are rarely so urgent. Still, Polygence started a preprint platform last fall. “The idea is for students to showcase their work and have them be judged by the scientific/peer/college community for their merits,” co-founder Janos Perczel wrote to ProPublica.

The Journal of Student Research hosts preprints by clients of Scholar Launch and two other services. One preprint only listed the author’s first name, Nitya. Leaving out the last name is a small mistake, but one that hints at the frenzy to publish quickly.

Online research programs could end up victimized by their own success. College admissions consultant Jillian Nataupsky estimated that one-third of her clients undertake virtual research. “For students trying to find ways to differentiate themselves in this crazy competitive landscape, this has risen as a really great option,” she said. But “it’s becoming a little more commonplace. I can see it becoming completely over-inundated in the next few years.”

Then the search can begin for the next leg up in college admissions.

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Kirsten Berg and Jeff Kao contributed research.

by Jeremy Schwartz

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Texas lawmakers have closed a loophole in state law that allowed people who had serious mental health issues as juveniles to legally purchase firearms.

On Wednesday, the Texas House of Representatives voted 116-28 in favor of a bill that requires courts to report involuntary mental health hospitalizations of juveniles age 16 and older for inclusion in the federal gun background check system. The bill, which had already received unanimous support in the Senate, comes nearly a year after a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation revealed a gap in the law that required such reporting for adults but not for juveniles.

The passage of the bipartisan measure, authored by Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, offers a rare example of gun-related legislation that has cleared the Texas Legislature since last year’s school shooting in Uvalde. It is now headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. Huffman could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for Abbott did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether he supports the bill.

“This bill will go a long way to ensuring that our state and federal databases are linked and that the process is more efficient and effective in keeping firearms out of the hands of dangerous Texans who do not need to have them,” Jeff Leach, a Republican state representative from North Texas, who sponsored the legislation said on the House floor. Leach represents the city of Allen, where a gunman killed eight people at a mall on May 6.

Currently, Texas law requires county and district clerks across the state to send information on court-ordered mental health hospitalizations to the Department of Public Safety. The state’s top law enforcement agency is charged with sending those records to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. Federally licensed dealers must check the system before they sell someone a firearm.

Elliott Naishtat, a former state lawmaker from Austin who authored the legislation in 2009, said he intended for it to apply to juveniles as well as adults. But an investigation by the news organizations found that local court clerks were not sharing that information for juveniles, either as a matter of policy or because they didn’t believe that they had to because the law did not explicitly mention them.

Further heightening the importance of closing the reporting gap, Congress passed gun reform legislation in June that includes a requirement that federal investigators check state databases for juvenile mental health records. Such checks would not show many court-ordered juvenile commitments in Texas because they are not currently being reported.

The Texas Judicial Council, which monitors and recommends reforms to the state judiciary, called on lawmakers to clarify juvenile reporting requirements after the ProPublica and Tribune investigation, stating that there was widespread confusion about them.

Pro-gun groups sought to extinguish the bill, arguing that it was a “red flag law,” a reference to laws that allow judges to order that weapons be taken from people who are deemed a threat.

The Texas Gun Rights group on its website called the bill a “Draconian scheme” that “discourages kids from coming forward to seek help for mental health issues by stigmatizing them and removing their Second Amendment rights for the rest of their lives.”

Leach has denied the bill represents a red flag law, arguing that it does not change any existing state or federal laws.

Texas law allows those discharged from court-ordered mental health services to petition the court that entered the commitment order to restore their right to purchase a firearm.

Other legislation sought by Uvalde survivors and family members, including a bill that would have raised the minimum age to purchase a rifle from 18 to 21, has been stymied in the current legislative session, which ends May 29.

Kiah Collier contributed reporting.

by Paul Kiel

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The IRS on Tuesday announced that it would develop an experimental online tool to allow Americans to file taxes directly with the agency for free.

It’s a major development — one in which ProPublica’s reporting played a significant role — given that most U.S. taxpayers pay to file and the tax preparation industry has long held sway in Washington. Only four years ago, the industry nearly succeeded in getting a law passed that would have barred the IRS from providing direct filing.

The limited pilot, as the IRS called it, is only a first step intended to gather information, and the IRS made clear that if it does proceed with a direct filing platform beyond this test, it will scale up gradually. Under the most optimistic scenario, it will be at least a few years before the IRS offers a direct option for millions of taxpayers.

The IRS would need funding to operate a broad program, and there will be continued opposition to the agency taking that path. The tax prep industry, particularly TurboTax-maker Intuit and H&R Block, will likely keep spending big on lobbyists to stop the IRS from competing with them. Republicans in Congress have already criticized the idea of free direct filing and want to cut IRS funding.

But the pilot is a possible turning point in a fight that goes back decades — as ProPublica has covered extensively — and seems sure to continue years into the future.

The IRS announcement came as it released a report, required by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, on the possibility of a direct file program. The IRS found wide public support in surveys for the idea of a direct file portal and laid out a range of possibilities of who might be able to use it. (It seems certain the tool would be geared toward taxpayers with relatively simple returns.) After the report was completed, President Joe Biden’s Treasury Department directed the IRS to conduct a pilot program.

All that’s clear about the pilot is that it will occur next year, will involve a very limited number of taxpayers and will be a question-based tool similar to commercial tax prep. The point of the trial, IRS and Treasury Department officials said on a call with reporters, was to gather more information on what form such a direct filing tool would ultimately take. It would then be up to the Biden administration “whether to move to the next level of full-scale implementation,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said.

One of the main thrusts of the report was that maintaining a direct filing program would cost a significant amount. The main hurdle was not building the software tool but providing customer service support for users. The more people who use the tool, the more customer service agents are needed. As a result, for 25 million users, the report estimated an annual cost north of $200 million, with over 80% going to customer service. That’s around $10 per return filed.

Americans who purchase tax prep software pay multiples of that figure. TurboTax paid products, for example, range in price from $69 to $129 for federal returns, with additional fees for state tax returns.

The need for continued funds would likely create frictions in Congress. In the short-term, the IRS can tap some of the $80 billion it received as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. But only a small portion of that, $3.2 billion, was directed to taxpayer services, and the IRS has already articulated plans for how to use it. To support a program in the long term, the IRS would need enough money appropriated along with its other taxpayer service demands.

Republicans, who forced huge cuts to the IRS budget last decade, remain critical of the agency and skeptical of the need for increased funding. One of the first acts of the new House majority was to pass a bill to repeal the $80 billion the IRS received in the Inflation Reduction Act.

At a congressional hearing last month, Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., chief of the House Ways and Means Committee, said that “asking the IRS to do your taxes is like asking your kid to guard the cookie jar.” Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., observed that “the tax preparation industry already provides free filing services for roughly 30 million returns each year. So, I’m not quite sure why trying to tackle this concept in the near term would be beneficial.”

Since the 2000s, TurboTax has drawn customers with the promise of “free” tax prep while deploying a deep bag of tricks to turn many into paying customers, sometimes by convincing them to purchase add-on services, sometimes by charging them because they have a wrinkle like a deduction for student loan interest. Customers who run that gantlet can indeed receive free tax prep.

The IRS’ Free File Program, a collaboration between the agency and the tax prep industry to provide free services to most taxpayers, will continue to limp along. The industry forged the program as a way to keep the IRS from developing its own direct option. But after ProPublica reported in 2019 that the companies were intentionally downplaying IRS Free File in order to push customers to their own “free” options, the program began to unravel. TurboTax and H&R Block backed out, leaving lesser-known companies as the only participants. Last year, 3 million people used Free File.

Meanwhile, in coming years the filing experience figures to improve, whether taxpayers pay for prep or not. Much of tax filing involves entering in data from forms like W-2s and 1099s, a process that should be unnecessary, given that employers, brokerages and the like also transmit the same data to the IRS each year. The agency has not had the technology to share this data with taxpayers when they file. As part of the tech upgrades the agency is planning with the $80 billion boost, the IRS says that by 2025 it will be able to prefill that info. “The information will be provided in a format that can interact directly with return preparation software or can be taken to a return preparer when authorized by the taxpayer,” according to the agency’s plan.

Dozens of other countries have systems that pre-fill information, making it possible for taxpayers, if they have to file a return at all, to simply make sure the info looks accurate. The idea of anything like that in the U.S. has long been far-fetched, given the entrenched opposition from profit-making corporations. The possibility for even a sliver of Americans to use that tool is still years off. But for the first time, the government is taking real steps in that direction.

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by Marilyn W. Thompson

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The Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear oral arguments in a South Carolina redistricting case where the NAACP is challenging the state’s Republican plan as racially motivated.

The role of the state’s most powerful Democrat, U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, is likely to play an important part in the discussions, legal experts said.

In 2021, South Carolina Republicans reshaped the voting map, taking a district that had been in the hands of a Democrat as recently as 2018 and making it a much safer seat for the incumbent Republican. The NAACP brought a suit against the effort, and in January, three Democratic-appointed judges ruled in the group’s favor.

The Supreme Court could decide to restore the map that the Republicans drew or order the legislature to create a new map. The case comes after a series of rulings from the high court that have made partisan gerrymandering easier, though the court has still deemed redistricting predominantly based on race to be illegal. Legal experts said this week that the South Carolina case will help define the limits of how much a legislature can consider race as it draws new maps.

South Carolina Republicans have defended their efforts, saying they were not motivated to dilute Black political power in the state. Lawyers for state Republican leaders argued during the trial that they did not consider race in making their map. They also contended that their map could not have targeted Black voters because they worked with Clyburn, one of the most powerful Black Democrats in the country.

This month, ProPublica added new detail to this account, reporting that Clyburn had been more involved in the process than previously known. He recommended moving Black and white voters in such a way that made his district politically safer but hurt Black Democrats.

A map of the new district lines. They were the subject of a 2021 lawsuit, and the Supreme Court said it will hear oral arguments in the case. (Cheney Orr for ProPublica)

Clyburn’s role could be an important underlying factor for the court, according to legal experts following the case.

“The court likely will get into the details of South Carolina redistricting, including the role played by Rep. Clyburn, because all this information is potentially relevant to whether racial or partisan factors predominantly explain” a district’s design, said Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, an election and constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School.

Clyburn’s recommendations for how his district map should be drawn are “potentially relevant” as the court weighs the three-judge panel’s decision that the Republican-led legislature predominantly used race to create the maps, said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School. Clyburn’s role has already complicated the NAACP’s case. The appellate panel threw out some of the racial gerrymandering allegations, partly because Clyburn’s office had recommended the changes. Nevertheless, it found that the new map of the coastal 1st, which had been the swing district, was an illegal racial gerrymander that deliberately targeted Black Democrats and moved most of them into Clyburn’s district, the 6th.

Court documents and testimony showed that Clyburn, who had no official role in the redistricting, submitted a confidential hand-drawn map that Republican lawmakers said they used as their starting point. None of his requests were made public.

Clyburn’s recommendations sought to move about 85,000 people into the majority-Black 6th District to make up for a population deficit. His map also moved some white Republican-leaning residents out of his district into the 1st, currently represented by the Republican Nancy Mace. Under the redistricting plan, each of the state’s seven congressional districts had to represent 731,203 people.

Clyburn’s office declined to answer specific questions about his requests and said his only input was responding to legislative inquiries. Clyburn said in an interview that he did not get everything he wanted in the plan passed by the legislature, mainly because it lowered the Black voting age population in his district to under 50%. Maintaining a majority-Black district had been important to Clyburn, who was elected in 1992 and rose to become one of the most prominent Democrats in the House.

Clyburn’s office said he opposes the Republican map and hopes the decision of the three-judge panel will be upheld.

The Supreme Court has pending decisions on several other important redistricting cases, including an Alabama racial gerrymandering case that addresses whether legislatures in states with high Black populations have an obligation to draw more majority Black districts.

Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University School of Law, said the court generally accepts findings of fact from a three-judge panel unless it concludes they are “clearly erroneous.” In that case, he said, it will look more deeply into the court record and question parties at oral arguments.

Joshua Douglas, an election law and voting rights expert at J. David Rosenberg College of Law at the University of Kentucky, said the South Carolina case is significant because it “involves the interplay of race and politics.”

“The legislature says it was trying to achieve a partisan result, not a racial result. The court had previously said a legislature cannot hide behind politics to justify a racial gerrymander. It’s possible the court will use this case to reevaluate that rule,” Douglas said.

Republican lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to render an early decision in the case because it may require new maps that could impact congressional races in 2024.

Do you have access to information about redistricting that should be public? Email marilyn.thompson@propublica.org. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

by Byard Duncan and Anjeanette Damon

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You’ve seen the ads in your neighborhood. They’ve flashed across your television and buzzed your phone to life at odd hours. The slogans and phone numbers might change, but the pitch is the same: “We buy houses for cash.”

Thousands of real estate investors across the country use a variety of techniques to find potential sellers and plan their next deal.

A recent ProPublica investigation looked at how HomeVestors of America, one of the house flipping industry’s leaders, teaches its franchisees to seek out people in “Ugly Situations.” (In a statement, the company said it does not target vulnerable sellers and pointed to an internally calculated 96% seller satisfaction rate.)

In the course of our reporting, we interviewed dozens of experts, attorneys, advocates, sellers and investors to better understand the world of cash home buying. Here’s what they say you should know to get the most money for your home.

Jump to:

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There are many reasons a cash home buyer might advertise to you. You may live in a neighborhood that has a high percentage of homeowners with a lot of equity, meaning you wouldn’t be left underwater on a mortgage even if a company paid you less than your home is worth. Home prices in the area may be going up rapidly, creating opportunities for cash buyers to fix and flip them for a profit. Your contact information may have been scooped up by a company that sells leads to real estate investors.

It’s also possible that you’ve been identified as a so-called motivated seller: someone in a difficult situation who needs money soon. Our reporting shows that some real estate investors comb public records looking for signs of financial hardship, such as foreclosures, divorces or death notices. They scout neighborhoods for signs of disrepair, such as boarded-up windows or water shut-off notices. And they leverage personal connections — with other investors, lawyers, nursing home administrators and others — to locate distressed properties.

I am NOT interested in selling. How do I get them to stop advertising to me?

If you’re approached about selling your home and don’t want to, the easiest solution is simply to ignore the request: Hang up the phone, recycle the postcard, delete the text. If the solicitations keep coming, add your number to the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call Registry.

Some cash home buyers will still find you. That’s why certain states and cities have added additional protections. In Philadelphia, for example, prospective real estate buyers who continue to pester residents after being told to stop can be fined. In Atlanta, a ban on “commercial harassment” prohibits investors from contacting homeowners for six months after their initial overtures are rejected.

In areas without these laws, homeowners have submitted complaints to their state attorney general’s office or real estate commission. If these officials receive repeated complaints about a particular person or company, they may investigate.

I might be interested in selling. What should I expect if I respond to an ad?

If you respond, there’s a good chance the investor or company behind the ad will promptly follow up. They may schedule a walkthrough of your home and ask questions about its condition and your circumstances. Afterward, they may present you with a purchase contract and encourage you to sign on the spot.

Experts caution homeowners against immediately jumping into a commitment. Before agreeing to sell, they say, it’s important to learn as much as possible about your home’s value.

“Don’t sign anything right away,” said Michael Froehlich, the managing attorney for Community Legal Services’ homeownership and consumer rights unit in Philadelphia. “If somebody wants you to sign something that day, that’s a huge red flag.”

How do I figure out how much my home is worth?

To get a ballpark value, search for your address on the online real estate marketplaces Zillow or Redfin. These prices are not always accurate, however: They may not take into consideration a home’s condition or recent improvements. Use Zillow or Redfin to look at the recent sales prices of similar houses in your neighborhood.

If you can afford it, a licensed appraiser can give a more precise estimate of the value of your home. That usually costs between $300 and $500, depending on your home’s size, and can take a few weeks to get scheduled.

You could also ask a real estate agent for a free market analysis, said Grant Cody, executive director of Oklahoma’s real estate commission, which regulates the industry there: In many cases, they “would bend over backwards and would love to come to your house — or email you instantly, right then and there.”

What’s the difference between a real estate agent and a cash home buyer?

A real estate agent markets your house to buyers and has a fiduciary responsibility to you; they’re required to try for the best deal possible. The agent is paid a percentage of the sales price of the house. And you are contractually bound to that person for a period, meaning if you sell your house by yourself during that time, you’d still have to pay the agent a percentage.

A cash home buyer purchases the house or “wholesales” it to another investor for a profit. Their pitch is largely about speed and convenience: They are able to quickly put money in your pocket, free you from burdensome paperwork and even clean up your home. In exchange, they get the property at a discount. They will most likely repair the house and flip it for a profit or hold it as a rental property; or they may enter a “contract assignment,” in which the deal itself is delivered to another party for a fee.

What are the risks of going with a cash buyer instead of a real estate agent?

“Irrespective of jurisdiction, real estate licensees have an obligation to act in the best interest of their client,” said Nick Rhoad, CEO of the Association of Real Estate License Law Officials. Real estate agents are bound by a code of ethics requiring them to make things as clear as possible, not misrepresent pertinent facts and more.

That standard does not apply to cash buyers, who do not always have to be licensed. While the cash buying industry does have a code of ethics, enforcement is spotty. Laws governing unlicensed real estate transactions are generally newer and less developed than those designed for licensed activity.

Our reporting shows that some real estate investors have been accused of deceptive and exploitative behavior. (When real estate agents are accused of unethical behavior, a licensing board polices it.) Wholesaling, in particular, has left many sellers feeling dismayed: Properties they signed away for one price ended up being resold, with few or no improvements, for much more.

What if I need money but don’t want to sell my home?

Don’t be discouraged. Homeowners facing personal or financial distress have a variety of possibilities to explore.

Options vary by state, but here’s where experts say to start:

• Get help from the federal government. The National Council of State Housing Agency’s Homeowner Assistance Fund, overseen by the U.S. Treasury Department, has allotted roughly $10 billion to help homeowners enduring financial hardships due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NCSHA website summarizes the program and maps where the assistance fund is open (44 states, as of this writing). It also has a directory of state resources.

• Find a local adviser. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sponsors housing counseling agencies across the country. These agencies provide free advice about foreclosure prevention and homelessness counseling. They may charge a small fee for additional services. To find resources near you, go to HUD’s website. You can also call 888-995-4673, or download the agency’s resource locator app for help in several languages.

• Consult a legal aid office. A good place to start is Legal Services Corporation’s directory of local offices. Once you reach someone, it’s important to be patient, said Lisa Sitkin, a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project. Legal aid offices are usually busy, and the intake process can move slowly. Once an attorney reaches out, they will ask you for information to diagnose the situation. It’s important to have “somebody who can look at your situation holistically and give you sort of realistic advice about what steps you can take,” Sitkin said.

A cash home buyer gave me a sales contract. How do I make sense of it?

What appears — and doesn’t appear — on a sales contract varies widely, depending on state laws and the preferences of the prospective buyer. But there are a few important components to understand.

1. Disclosures: Although laws vary across states, many investors agree it’s necessary to disclose that they intend to turn a profit by buying your house for below fair market value. If the contract says the buyer is paying “below market prices for a profit,” or if it says the buyer has the “option to market this property, and assign this agreement prior to closing,” that means it’s possible there’s a higher bidder out there.

2. A “clear title” requirement: Any debts you owe, including mortgage liens, overdue water bills, property tax delinquencies and more, can be subtracted from the final price. So if the offer is $100,000, but you’re behind $25,000 in bills and back taxes, you’ll only get $75,000.

A title report costs $50 to $250 and can give you a clearer picture of what hidden debts could be deducted in a sale.

3. Cancellation provisions: In many wholesale contracts, the buyer reserves the sole right to cancel the contract. Pay attention to what rights the buyer is asking for — and which ones you’re giving up.

4. Other unexpected costs: Even if you’ve agreed to a price that seems fair, it’s important to review the contract for fine print about other charges that could affect your bottom line. Closing costs or transfer taxes are sometimes deducted from the sale price you see on the page.

5. Earnest money deposit: In traditional real estate deals, an earnest money deposit shows how serious the buyer is about the purchase. If the buyer backs out, the seller gets to keep the deposit. A broad rule of thumb is the deposit should equal 1% of the purchase price. Investors try to put down as little as possible in earnest money. Contracts reviewed by ProPublica included deposits as low as $100 on a $157,000 deal. In such cases, the buyer can bail with minimal consequences.

6. Clouding your title: Look for language that authorizes a buyer to cloud your title and make it more difficult to sell the property to another buyer if your deal falls through. Investors will often record a “memorandum of sale” on the property as a means of locking you into a contract.

I signed a contract, but I’m having second thoughts. What are my options?

Our reporting demonstrates how difficult it can be for sellers to back out of a contract that they later decide is unfair. As mentioned, real estate investors sometimes file memorandums of contract that cloud a homeowner’s title and pressure them to close the deal — even if they’ve found a much higher bidder.

This behavior is predatory, according to four housing experts we interviewed, as well as Charles Tassell, the chief operating office of the National Association of Real Estate Investors. But, barring proof of fraud or elder abuse, it’s legal. If you suspect what happened may have broken a law related to one of those practices, follow the instructions above to get legal aid.

The bottom line, according to Grant Cody of Oklahoma’s real estate commission: Cash buyers “aren’t in a position to do what’s best for the consumer. They’re in a position to do what’s best for them.”

Sometimes what’s best for them is also best for you. But not always.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Patrick Rucker, Maya Miller and David Armstrong

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

Update, May 16, 2023: This story was updated with a statement that Cigna provided after publication.

A key congressional committee asked insurance giant Cigna on Tuesday to provide corporate documents so that lawmakers can examine the company’s practice of denying health care claims without ever opening a patient file.

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce joined several state and federal regulators in scrutinizing the legality of Cigna rejecting the payment of certain claims using a system known as PXDX.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington who chairs the committee, noted that policyholders under Cigna’s Medicare Advantage plans appeal about one in five denials for requests for medical procedures, known as prior authorizations. Of those denials, about 80% are overturned.

“If these figures are at all illustrative of Cigna’s commercial appeal and reversal rates, it would suggest that the PXDX review process is leading to policyholders paying out-of-pocket for medical care that should be covered under their health insurance contract,” Rodgers wrote in a letter to Cigna.

The letter follows an investigation by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum that found Cigna doctors blocked payment for certain tests and procedures by automatically labeling them “not medically necessary.” In two months last year, Cigna doctors refused to pay for 300,000 claims using the PXDX system, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, according to internal spreadsheets that tracked how fast they worked.

A Cigna spokesperson on Tuesday said that the company welcomes “the opportunity to fully explain our PxDx process to regulators and correct the many mischaracterizations and misleading perceptions ProPublica’s article created.”

After publication, Cigna provided four examples of what it called “mischaracterized information” and “omitted facts.”

Cigna said ProPublica had wrongly described the company’s rejections of claims as a denial of care. The story does not say that and quotes Cigna saying the denials were for payments of care.

The statement said ProPublica reported that doctors were incentivized to deny care. The story does not say that, either.

Cigna also said ProPublica’s story “creates the impression” that the company saved “billions of dollars” using denials to boost its bottom line. It said any savings were passed on to clients. ProPublica quoted an expert who developed PXDX as saying the system had saved that much money. Cigna has not provided evidence of its savings or how much was passed on to clients.

Finally, the company said the ProPublica story left the impression that Cigna uses the PXDX process on all health care claims. The story explicitly stated that “not all claims are processed through this review system.”

In the past, Cigna has said the PXDX system was built to process claims more quickly.

But state insurance commissioners contacted in recent weeks criticized Cigna, with several saying that they wanted to more closely examine the company’s use of algorithms to deny claims.

Mike Kreidler, the insurance commissioner for Washington, said it is an “abhorrent” practice “to routinely deny just to enhance the bottom line.”

Kreidler said he and other state insurance regulators are reviewing their records for customer complaints that seem to describe an auto-denial process.

“I’m afraid it might be the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “We darn well better start paying attention to it.”

Industry sources there told the news organizations that other large insurers operate similar systems.

The investigation by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum has also raised red flags in California.

The California Department of Insurance said in a statement that it is “looking closely at health insurance companies’ handling of claims, while simultaneously exploring all options in coordination with other state regulators.”

Other state insurance commissions said they, too, were interested in a deeper examination of Cigna’s practices.

“Given your article, this will likely warrant a closer look,” said a spokesperson for the Delaware Department of Insurance.

The U.S. Department of Labor regulates a common kind of insurance held by many Americans: plans sponsored by employers that cover their own health care costs. Federal officials said they were alarmed by the auto-deny practices.

“This is very concerning,” said one senior Labor Department official who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak on a sensitive matter. “I don’t see a scenario where we’re not taking a hard look at these kinds of practices.”

Two organizations accredit health insurers to make sure plans are abiding by certain standards. Both of these groups, the Utilization Review Accreditation Commission and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, have opened investigations into the denials system. They did not immediately respond to detailed questions about the investigations.

The letter from the energy and commerce committee asked for the company to hand over “copies of all memoranda analyzing the legality of the PXDX review process.”

The records requested include details about the number of claims denied using PXDX, the number denied by individual medical directors employed by the insurer and details on how often those decisions were appealed and overturned.

Do You Have Insights Into Health Insurance Denials? Help Us Report on the System.

Clarification, May 16, 2023: This story was updated to make clear that the PXDX system was used to deny 300,000 claims in two months last year.

by Emily Hopkins

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.

Update, May 18, 2023: The Minnesota Board of Nursing on Thursday accepted the resignation of its executive director, whom it had placed on leave earlier this week for an unspecified “personnel issue.” The action came during an emergency meeting to consider firing Kimberly Miller, who had led the agency since August 2021. In a letter to the board, Miller said she had worked diligently and the agency had made gains under her leadership. She said the pandemic and the board’s transition to computers had caused problems but that the board’s performance was improving. She said she could not address allegations in the media about a toxic work environment or the slow pace of investigations because she had “not received notification of the specific allegations or been asked to participate in an investigation.” Board member Sarah Simons said that after ProPublica reported on Miller, the office of Minnesota Management and Budget, the state’s human resources arm, conducted an investigation into the dysfunctional workplace issues raised in the story and presented findings to the nursing board, which led to the effort to remove Miller.

The Minnesota Board of Nursing has called an emergency meeting to consider removing its beleaguered executive director over an unspecified “personnel issue.”

In an email to board staff Tuesday morning, President Laura Elseth said Executive Director Kimberly Miller was on leave “effective today.”

The move comes at a critical time for the nursing board. It’s been mired in a backlog of complaints against nurses, with some inside the agency blaming Miller for dysfunction in the work environment, according to a ProPublica investigation published in April.

That story detailed how the board’s slow disciplinary process puts the public in harm’s way. The time to resolve complaints had risen to 11 months, on average, and hundreds of cases remained open as of March. As a result, nurses who are accused of serious misconduct are allowed to keep treating patients.

The meeting to determine Miller’s future, scheduled for Thursday, was announced one day after board members, lawyers from the state attorney general’s office and representatives from Minnesota Management and Budget, the state’s human resources arm, gathered in an emergency meeting that was closed to the public. The purpose was “preliminary consideration of allegations against” Miller, according to Elseth.

Management and Budget confirmed last month that the agency had received complaints about Miller and was reviewing them. Additional details about the investigation are not public because they are related to a “personnel issue,” spokesperson Patrick Hogan said.

Current and former staff members and a former board member told ProPublica that Miller’s poor leadership was among the reasons for the backlog and for turnover among the board’s staff. David Jiang, a former board member, wrote in his resignation letter to Gov. Tim Walz that Miller had created a culture among staff that was “strained” if not “dysfunctional.”

William Hager, a former legal analyst for the board, raised concerns about Miller’s capabilities in a 2022 email to another staff member. “I am very concerned the Director seems to have been unaware of this ‘backlog,’” he wrote. Although the board’s backlog started increasing before Miller became executive director in August 2021, it has grown during her tenure.

In a previous interview with ProPublica, Miller acknowledged the backlog and said the board was working to “right the boat,” though she did not respond to questions about complaints surrounding her job performance.

Miller and 11 board members who attended the meeting on Monday did not respond to requests for comment.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Jeremy Kohler contributed reporting.

by Jessica Priest

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Voters in West Texas have decisively rejected three conservative Christian candidates who campaigned on infusing religious values into local decision making. But the support the candidates received from local churches during the race has prompted calls for state and federal investigations and triggered a local political reckoning.

“I think there should definitely be some penalties,” said Weldon Hurt, a two-term Abilene City Council member who won his race for mayor against one of the candidates. “I don’t know how severe it should be, but I think there has to be a way to curtail this from happening again,” he added. “I think there should be some discipline to these churches.”

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported a day before the May 6 election that three churches had donated a total of $800 to the campaign of Scott Beard, a pastor who was running for City Council. That was a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment, a law passed in 1954 by Congress prohibiting nonprofits from intervening in political campaigns. The IRS can revoke the tax exemption of violators, but there’s only one publicly known example of it doing so, nearly 30 years ago.

Beard, a senior pastor at Fountaingate Fellowship, said the donations were a mistake and that he would be returning the money. But within days after Beard’s defeat to retired Air Force Col. Brian Yates, a national group that espouses the separation of church and state demanded that the IRS revoke the churches’ tax exemptions.

“Beard is insisting that he has returned the donation checks, but his belated attempt at contrition doesn’t mitigate the initial transgressions” of the churches making the donations, the Freedom from Religion Foundation wrote in a news release. The group has sued the IRS in the past “to force it to take steps to enforce the law against tax-exempt entities from engaging in partisan politicking, and is prepared to sue again if necessary.”

Beard said via text message after the election that the money paid by the churches was intended to cover the cost of meals at one of his fundraisers. He said he returned the money and is in the process of amending his campaign finance reports.

Dewey Hall, the pastor of Fountaingate Merkel Church, which is nearly 18 miles west of Abilene and not affiliated with Beard’s church, told ProPublica and the Tribune before the election that Beard had told him that his church couldn’t give Beard’s campaign a $200 donation. Hall said he thought Beard would “be a good councilman, and we need to have Christians in politics nowadays.”

A representative of Remnant Church, which Beard reported gave him $400, responded to a question via Facebook Messenger to say that its donation was intended for Fountaingate Fellowship Church, not Beard’s campaign.

“They must have a mistake,” wrote the representative, who did not identify themselves when asked. “We will look into it.”

Neither Hall nor Remnant Church responded to additional questions after the election.

Bruce Tentzer, pastor of Hope Chapel Foursquare Church, also known as Hope 4 Life Church, said the $200 Beard’s campaign filing listed as having come from Tentzer’s church was an appreciation gift for Tentzer that he then used to pay for meals at Beard’s fundraiser for himself, another pastor and their wives.

“Obviously had I known that it would be considered a campaign contribution I would have not paid with the check. This is not some dark conspiracy,” Tentzer wrote via email. “I pray Mayor elect Weldon all the best as well as the newly elected council.”

The church donations may also violate Texas election law, which prohibits both nonprofit and for-profit corporations from making political contributions to candidates or political committees.

The Texas Ethics Commission is charged with investigating such violations and can assess a civil penalty of up to $5,000 or triple the amount at issue, whichever is greater, said J.R. Johnson, the commission’s executive director. Agency commissioners also have the authority to refer violations to local district attorneys for criminal prosecution, he said. Violations are considered third-degree felonies.

Beard has had at least two pending state ethics complaints filed against his campaign.

One comes from former Dyess Air Force Base Cmdr. Michael Bob Starr. His April 17 complaint alleges that Beard left in-kind donations from his own church, a nonprofit corporation, off his campaign finance report. Separately, on April 25, Abilene attorney Kristin Postell alleged that Beard’s campaign finance reports were incomplete, were incorrect and showed that he had accepted an anonymous donation.

“It just really bothered me that he was presenting himself as this upstanding citizen that’s going to be the moral voice of the city and has worked so hard to pass new city ordinances, yet can’t follow the rules as they exist and is lying about it,” Postell said.

Both Starr and Postell submitted their complaints to the state prior to the submission of Beard’s April 28 campaign finance report, which showed the donations by the three churches. In an interview before the election, Beard acknowledged the existence of the complaints and said “we made some errors in our reporting.”

“We’re amending those, and we’re going to resubmit them, and then we’ll just have to deal with whatever, if there’s financial penalties or whatever, we’ll just have to pay them and learn a lesson from it,” he said.

The ethics commission has not publicly announced on its website whether a violation occurred, nor has it assessed a civil penalty or made a referral to local DAs for criminal prosecution.

Both Starr and Postell said they plan to file additional state ethics complaints against Beard’s campaign for accepting donations from the churches, which are all nonprofit corporations in Texas.

Neither the IRS nor the commission would confirm or comment on any complaints.

Besides the monetary donations, at least five churches displayed campaign signs for Beard and two other Abilene candidates: Ryan Goodwin, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor against Hurt, and James Sargent, an unsuccessful City Council candidate.

The three candidates touted their involvement in an effort to get abortion outlawed in Abilene. They worked with Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, and collected thousands of signatures to bring the ordinance to a vote before the council in April 2022. The council sent the matter to voters, who approved it in November 2022. Texas already prohibits most abortions, but Abilene’s ordinance goes further than state law. The ordinance, which has not been tested in court, purports to make it a crime to assist a city resident in getting an abortion, even outside of Texas, and expands who can potentially face lawsuits related to aiding or abetting a prohibited abortion.

More recently, Goodwin, an associate pastor at Mosaic Church, a small church on the outskirts of Abilene, and Sargent, a Mosaic Church member, pushed to remove books from Abilene’s public libraries that they said were obscene and harmful to children.

And all three candidates spoke about the need to prohibit family-friendly drag shows within the city limits and establish community standards as part of an effort they said would protect children. Beard said in interviews that those standards should be based on “Judeo-Christian principles” that he believes serve as the nation’s foundation.

Technically, local races are nonpartisan, but locally these were seen as a battle between social conservatives and conservatives more friendly to the business establishment.

Yates, Beard’s opponent, said it was overly simplistic to cast the election as a fight between religious conservatives and fiscal ones. He said he too is a Christian who opposes abortion. A key difference, he said, was that he and his allies don’t believe that establishing community standards is the role of government.

Hurt said he was disappointed that the local Republican Party endorsed Goodwin before the candidates got a chance to debate. At the debate, he said, he was asked what church he attended and how involved he was in it.

“Being a Christian, does that make you a better politician?” he asked in an interview. “I never used that avenue to promote myself politically. I think the time I’ve already served on council shows I’m devoted.”

The forum was meant to educate voters, said Chris Carnohan, chair of the Taylor County Republican Party, adding that churches had been “too silent and too much on the sidelines for too long” and that it was a misconception that they shouldn’t be involved in politics.

“I don’t know where that idea could ever get a foothold,” he said in an interview before the election. “They open every session of Congress in the U.S. Capitol every day with a prayer from the congressional chaplain. They do the same thing in Austin. I think they open our City Council meetings with a prayer, so what kind of crazy idea is this? You’re going to have to tear down a lot of America to get rid of the Judeo-Christian principles we were founded on.”

The local Republican Party endorsed Beard and Sargent as well. In the end, the three candidates each lost by at least 29 percentage points, according to unofficial final results.

Goodwin did not return a call seeking comment after the election, and Sargent declined a phone interview. In a text message, Sargent wrote that he disagreed with experts who have told the news organizations that churches are not legally allowed to put up political candidates’ campaign signs.

“I understand some individuals would prefer the ‘church’/church people to remain silent,” Sargent wrote. “Just because we are religious; or more specifically; Christians; it does not mean we lose our 1st Amendment rights. Pastors can and (I believe) should speak about social/political issues to inform their congregations.”

Jennifer Bell, a precinct chair for the local Republican Party, didn’t vote for the trio, because she said they were unwilling to lift the local abortion ban in cases of lethal fetal abnormalities, something doctors said her fetus had when she was pregnant in 2010.

Then, doctors gave her two options: continue to carry the fetus, which was unlikely to make it to full term, and go through a traumatic birth; or induce at 20 weeks, which would be legally considered an abortion, with medicine that could ease both her and the fetus’ suffering, she said. After praying with her husband, they made the difficult decision to do the latter.

“I think one of the most important things for a lawmaker to have is humility. I thought they would hear my story and have the humility to say, ‘Wow, we know her and she’s a good person. Maybe we should make allowances for this type of situation.’ But honestly, all I got was ‘I’m saving babies. I’m saving babies,’ and that’s honorable, but my baby couldn’t be saved,” Bell said. “I’m hoping to see the ordinance change, and I know the more of them that get into office, the less the chance of that.”

The candidates and the churches’ support of them have pushed away some like Denise Jones, who backed Yates and is leaving a church her family has attended for years because she disagreed with its pastor’s decision to give the trio of candidates the opportunity to deliver a Sunday sermon.

But others, like Diana Hartmann, a longtime Abilene resident who is active in the Republican Party, saw no problem with churches posting their campaign signs or with Beard, Goodwin and Sargent wanting to address social issues in addition to paving streets and providing water.

“I do think they have a role to play in this,” she said, referring to the City Council. “As far as I’m concerned, we have enough porno on TV and enough of that in our society today that maybe we should be making better choices that way.”

After the election, Beard returned to his pulpit and told his congregation he’d continue to look for ways to influence the city outside the four walls of his church and they should, too.

“In a world that’s grown kind of increasingly more hostile toward the church, I’m all the more motivated and really challenged to continue building here at Fountaingate a healthy and dynamic local church that not only impacts its community, but impacts its state, its nation and the nations” of the world, he said.

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by Jennifer Oldham for ProPublica

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.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed into law Friday a bill that mandates a statewide wildfire-resistant building code, a step that scientists say will help protect residents and first responders as climate change intensifies blazes.

The bill creates a 21-member board charged with developing standards for new and substantially remodeled homes in high-risk areas, including rules for using fire-resistant construction materials and clearing vegetation around residences. The board — which will include building industry representatives; urban and rural residents and government officials; an architect; fire officials; and insurers, among others — must be appointed by Sept. 30 and adopt a minimum building code by July 1, 2025. The law requires the code to be reviewed every three years.

The measure passed after a ProPublica investigation found that Colorado regulations hadn’t kept pace as mega fires, fueled by extreme weather, threatened the state’s urban areas. Legislative efforts to require fire-resistant materials in home construction had been repeatedly stymied by developers and municipalities, while taxpayers shouldered the growing cost of fighting the fires and rebuilding, ProPublica found.

“Articles like ProPublica’s helped drive the awareness that we are all in this together,” said Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention & Control, in an interview Friday at a fire station in the Rocky Mountain foothills.

The new law “gives us the opportunity to start looking at ways to build homes safer,” he said, gesturing to nearby residences hidden among towering pines. “This will normalize fire-resistant construction over time.”

Until Friday, Colorado was one of only eight states that didn’t have a minimum construction standard for homes.

Polis signed the bill inside an Inter-Canyon Fire Protection District station, which is in an area at high risk for wildfire, about 25 miles southwest of downtown Denver. He also signed a measure providing more resources to fire investigators and another to bolster the workforce dedicated to thinning vegetation and setting prescribed burns, measures intended to better protect forests and residents from wildfire.

The lack of uniform regulations cost the state $101 million in grant money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s resilient infrastructure funds between fiscal years 2020 and 2022. The state’s applications were denied, in part, because Colorado didn’t have a statewide building code.

Polis lauded the bill establishing a wildfire-resiliency code, saying it will make the state better able to compete for such federal grants.

“And it gives us the flexibility we need to make sure we don’t add costs to homeowners,” he said.

Efforts to adopt a statewide code began gaining momentum after the December 2021 Marshall Fire, the most destructive in state history. Driven by hurricane-force winds and overgrown grasslands, it killed two people and incinerated 1,084 residences and seven businesses within hours. Financial losses from the fire are expected to top $2 billion.

The Marshall Fire incinerated 550 homes and businesses in Louisville, Colorado. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

A little-known subcommittee of the Colorado Fire Commission recommended the creation of a board to design a uniform wildfire building code after Polis sent a letter in 2021 that was critical of lawmakers’ failure to “address a critical piece of the wildfire puzzle in Colorado: land use planning, development and building resiliency in the wildland-urban interface.”

Lawmakers took the recommendations to heart and tried to pass such a measure last year in the waning days of the legislative session, but the effort failed in the face of stiff opposition from municipalities and builders.

ProPublica reviewed legislation introduced from 2014 to 2022 and found that only 15 out of 77 wildfire-related bills focused primarily on helping homeowners mitigate risk from fires. Most of the 15 proposals offered incentives to homeowners and communities through income tax deductions or grants — some of which required municipalities to raise matching funds — to clear vegetation around structures. None called for mandatory building requirements in wildfire-prone areas, even as 15 of the 20 largest wildfires in state history have occurred since 2012.

Such safety codes usually require fire-resistant materials on siding, roofs, decks and fences, along with mesh-covered vents that prevent embers from entering the building. These measures have been scientifically proven to reduce risk for residents and rescuers and to increase the odds that structures will withstand a blaze.

After the new panel begins work this fall, it must first define what’s known as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI, where homes mix with trees, shrubs and grasses that make them more vulnerable to fire. Following the Marshall Fire, ProPublica found, firefighters agreed that practically the entire state could fall under this high-risk designation.

A common understanding of which areas are at risk will help officials prioritize resources to protect communities, said Jefferson County Commissioner Lesley Dahlkemper. Her community enacted one of the state’s most stringent wildfire building standards in 2020.

“If you asked each of us to define the WUI right now, we would all give you a different answer,” she added.

State Sen. Lisa Cutter, who spent months shepherding the code board bill through discussions with community leaders, builders, firefighters and others, said once the minimum building code is published by the board, the responsibility will fall to individual municipalities to enact it.

“This is now state law,” said Cutter, who represents some of the state’s most fire-prone communities. “Everyone will have to have a minimum standard code, and it helps communities hold each other responsible.”

As she stood in front of uniformed firefighters and a fire engine, Cutter said she and her co-sponsors made concessions to ensure communities have flexibility to tailor fire-resilient codes to meet their needs, including giving municipalities the ability to petition the board for modification to the codes. Such compromises were necessary to pass the law in a state with a longstanding culture of local control.

In debating the building code board bill, legislators heard emotional testimony from firefighters forced to repeatedly defend their communities against deeply unpredictable wildfires.

In testimony before a state Senate committee on March 16, Grand Fire Protection District Chief Brad White recounted how the 193,812-acre East Troublesome Fire in 2020 traveled 25 miles overnight and incinerated 366 homes, so far costing $720 million.

“Two-and-a-half years later, these costs are not what bother me,” White said as he asked the Senate Local Government & Housing Committee to support the bill. “What bothers me is that of those 366 homes, we saved many of them several times before.”

by Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon

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

HomeVestors of America, the company behind the “We Buy Ugly Houses” ads, says it’s in the business of helping people.

Sometimes, the quick cash its franchises provide in exchange for a property at vastly below market value does help the owner.

But a ProPublica investigation found the types of houses targeted by HomeVestors franchises often belong to people in vulnerable situations who sign away what for most Americans is their largest asset. To make matters worse, aggressive legal tactics employed by HomeVestors franchises can trap homeowners in a deal or cost them thousands of dollars to settle.

In a statement, a HomeVestors spokesperson said the purchases covered by ProPublica’s reporting represent a small fraction of the more than 71,400 homes bought by its franchises since 2016. "We do not discriminate or target our advertising to any specific demographic groups based on age, race, or socio-economic status,” the company said. It has removed several franchises from its system and, in light of our reporting, is investigating the cases to “determine appropriate action.”

Over the last year, ProPublica interviewed dozens of people who have sold to a HomeVestors franchise. Some appeared satisfied with the experience, opting for convenience or speed over getting full market value for their house. Others, though, came to regret calling the number on a HomeVestors ad.

Here are five of their stories.

Pennee Nichols (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

Pennee Nichols tried to hang on to the Arizona mountain home she inherited from her mother. The place had been in her family for decades, and she planned to move there after her partner retired. But when he died, the maintenance and taxes became too much. So in late 2017, she called the number she saw on a HomeVestors television commercial.

The house — a converted 1960s trailer — was in disrepair. But the town of Heber-Overgaard is a popular spot for vacation cabins, and the property was dotted with piñon and juniper. Nichols believed it could fetch around $50,000.

When Jayson Ellingson, who owned the HomeVestors franchise Jaycorp, showed up, he told Nichols the house was in such bad shape it would have to be torn down and rebuilt. His offer was $10,000. She could take it or leave it, but he doubted anyone else would buy it as-is.

“He basically convinced me it was a piece of shit,” Nichols said. “In my heart, I knew I was getting totally screwed, but I took the deal.”

Ellingson didn’t bulldoze the house. He sold it six months later for $55,000 without any repairs.

In an interview, Ellingson told ProPublica he was upfront about his intention to buy the property below market value. He said he gave Nichols time to think it over. And after he bought the home, he said, he got lucky finding a buyer who had cash and wanted to fix it up.

"This lady just might be bitter about the fact I bought it for $10,000 and sold it for $55,000,” Ellingson said. “I made $45,000. I wouldn’t have ever forecasted that would happen on that deal."

Ellingson left HomeVestors in 2021. He said the franchise model wasn’t for him.

Maria Jimenez (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

In 2019, Maria Jimenez felt under siege. Seventy-two and in poor health, Jimenez had a problem with hoarding that attracted the attention of Camarillo, California, code enforcement officers. She had bought her house in 1981 with her late husband and worked two jobs to afford the mortgage. She raised her children there, teaching them to work hard and follow the rules. Now, city inspectors had begun issuing her citations.

When she called the phone number on a HomeVestors ad, she reached Patriot Holdings, the successful franchise run by brothers Cody, Chris, Casey and Cory Evans with their partner Scott Mansfield.

“I need help,” she told the person on the phone.

Cory Evans arrived the next morning. According to court documents, he told her: If you sell to me, I’ll clean the house up and code enforcement will go away. If you don’t, the city will come with its trucks, pack up your belongings and take your house. While that wasn’t true, it scared Jimenez into signing a sales contract on the spot.

The next day, a social worker arrived to help with the code violations. She assured Jimenez the city wouldn’t take her home and taught her about programs to help older adults clean up their properties.

But after Jimenez tried to cancel the sale, Evans sued her for breach of contract. In arbitration, Patriot Holdings demanded $150,000 to release its claim on the house, Maria’s daughter Patsy Jimenez said. The stress took its toll on Maria Jimenez, who suffered a mild stroke, Patsy said.

Meanwhile, criminal investigators in Ventura County took an interest in the case. After they found a second elderly victim who was pressured by Evans into selling his house, the district attorney filed felony charges against Evans of attempted grand theft of real property and attempted theft from an elder. He pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted grand theft, dropped his lawsuit against Jimenez and served his sentence on probation. His conviction was later expunged in accordance with California law.

Jimenez saved her home, but the trauma from the experience continues, her daughter said. “She feels guilty. And, I go, ‘Mom, you were a victim.’”

Neither Evans nor the franchise responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for HomeVestors’ corporate office said Cory Evans is no longer associated with the franchise.

“We are not aware of any complaints since the removal of Cory Evans from the franchise,” the company said.

The year after Evans pleaded guilty, he and his brothers received an award from HomeVestors recognizing their “top sales volume.”

Deanna Merriman (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

How the sales representative from the HomeVestors franchise Revolution Holdings wound up at Deanna Merriman’s St. Petersburg condo in July 2020 is in dispute. Merriman, a prolific journaler, wrote at the time that he had knocked on her door to see if anyone was interested in selling a condo. She sent him on his way, but he continued to return over the next month, she wrote.

Britton Briscoe, who owns the franchise through a separate LLC, said his records indicate Merriman had called HomeVestors.

Merriman had moved from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Florida to be closer to family. But after a couple of angry fallouts with her grown children, Merriman decided she wanted to return to Erie and talked to the Revolution Holdings representative about selling her condo.

“I told him, the only way I would sell mine was if the salesman would buy me a house in Erie, PA,” she wrote.

After showing her photos of houses in Erie and getting an estimate for moving her things, the sales representative brought Merriman paperwork to sign.

At the time, Merriman, who was 83, was suffering blackouts and anxiety attacks and took a variety of medications, including one that caused brain fog.

In her journal, Merriman wrote that she believed she was initialing papers the sales representative would use to write up a contract. It turned out to be an actual contract to sell her condo for $61,000 — half of what similar units in the building sold for.

Briscoe said in a statement that Revolution Holdings tried to help Merriman close on a home in Erie and provided her with several walkthrough videos. He said one of her adult sons was involved in the discussions. No one mentioned Merriman’s health conditions, Briscoe said. He attributed the low sales price to the fact her walls were “coated with nicotine.”

Unaware she had signed a contract with a HomeVestors franchise, Merriman decided she no longer wanted to sell her Florida condo and stopped communicating with Revolution Holdings.

After she went silent, Revolution Holdings threatened to take her to court and recorded notice of an ownership dispute on her title to prevent her from selling to anyone else. Briscoe told ProPublica he needed to get his deposit back. According to the contract, the deposit was $100.

Distraught, Merriman fought to cancel the sale but didn’t live long enough to see it resolved. “She definitely died thinking they were going to take her house and she would be put out on the street somewhere,” her daughter-in-law Amy Bonnell said.

When the estate went to probate, Briscoe demanded money to release his claim on the property. Bonnell and her husband paid him $9,512 after selling the condo for $160,000 last year.

In response to ProPublica’s questions about company practices, HomeVestors said it will no longer allow franchises to record documents on homeowners’ titles the way Briscoe did to Merriman, because of the impact it has on sellers.

Ira Reiner (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

Ira Reiner spent the final days of his life fighting a lawsuit from Florida franchise Hi-Land Properties, a frequent HomeVestors “Franchise of the Year” winner.

In late 2020, Reiner’s health was in decline, his income had dried up because of the pandemic, and he and his adult son Douglas needed to find a less expensive place to live. Reiner’s Delray Beach condo was in need of significant repairs and cleaning, so Reiner had his son call the number on a HomeVestors ad.

Reiner signed a contract to sell the condo to Hi-Land for $80,000, a price he knew was low but not unwarranted given the condition of his home. Problems arose when he couldn’t quickly find a new place to live.

After Reiner missed the first closing date, Hi-Land told him he could rent back the condo for a few months while he searched for new housing and gave him a $4,000 cash advance on the sale. But the homeowners association didn’t allow rentals, and after a misunderstanding over who would pay his mortgage, taxes and fees prior to closing, Reiner decided he wanted out of the deal.

In a court document, Reiner said he called Hi-Land to cancel the sale. Don Cameron, owner of Hi-Land, said Reiner stopped communicating with him entirely in August 2021. That’s when Cameron decided to sue.

“Given the circumstances, and especially considering the fact that we already had paid $4,000 towards the purchase of the condo, we were left with no choice but to file litigation with the hopes of being able to reopen the lines of communication and resolve this matter,” Cameron said.

By this time, Reiner could no longer walk and was confined to his bed, he told ProPublica. The only way he could leave the condo was in an ambulance. From the hospital, he tried to fight Hi-Land’s lawsuit by sending a handwritten document to the judge, but it was rejected because he didn’t comply with filing rules.

When he spoke with ProPublica in September, Reiner said he was waiting for an eviction notice.

“I’m going to become homeless,” Reiner said. “I’m waiting for the call. Even if I win the case, I’m so far behind I don’t know if I can catch up.”

Reiner died in February at the age of 80.

His son, Douglas Reiner, remained in the condo until a judge entered a default judgment in Hi-Land’s favor. Douglas said Hi-Land paid him $500, and he was expecting another $2,000. He said he plans to live in his van.

Martha Swanson (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

At 83, Martha Swanson struggled to maintain the sprawling yard around her brick bungalow in Marietta, Georgia. For months, she’d been receiving constant solicitations to sell her home in the historic city 20 miles north of Atlanta. So one day near the beginning of 2018, she called the number on a HomeVestors ad.

Keith Gereghty, the franchisee who paid her a visit, made an offer of $82,211 — a number Swanson’s daughter Sherry Nixon believed to be extremely low based on the market.

As soon as Nixon, who lives in Montana, learned that her mother wanted to sell, she began searching for a real estate agent. But it was too late: Her mother had signed Gereghty’s contract. When Nixon called Gereghty to complain about the low price, she said, Gereghty told her, “That’s all I can do. Your Mom has agreed to it.”

“My mother has had a series of mini strokes,” Nixon said she responded. “And she's really not able to make these kinds of decisions well.”

“Well, if she's so bad,” Nixon recalls Gereghty responding, “why isn't she living with you?”

Gereghty denied making that comment and said he never saw Swanson display signs of impairment. He said he gave Swanson more than a week to review the contract with her children and would have released her from the deal had she asked. However, he also recorded a notice of the pending sale on her title shortly after she signed the contract, tying her to the deal.

“I never intended to cause Ms. Swanson or her family distress,” Gereghty said, also noting he has never sued anyone for backing out of a sale as other franchises have.

Gereghty never took ownership of the property. Instead, he sold the contract to another investor for a profit — a practice called wholesaling. That investor flipped the property for $171,000. Nixon recalled seeing the home listed with a broken bookshelf the sellers didn’t bother removing.

“I thought, ‘Well, they'll fix the house up — who knows how much that would cost?” she said. “They did nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Until her death three years later, Swanson agonized over money and how to pay the $3,000 a month it cost for her assisted living center, her daughter said.

“That’s just not ethical,” Nixon said. “My mother was this sweet, elderly little lady. A southern lady — very religious, really saw the good in people, and felt like Keith was her friend.”

According to HomeVestors’ training materials and webinars, franchisees should seek out a homeowner’s family members for consultation if they have doubts about a deal. Before closing, they’re instructed to look a homeowner in the eye and ask them, “You’re not going to wake up in the middle of the night and wish you could tear up my offer, are you?”

Nixon posed a parallel question. “I mean, how do they sleep at night doing that to old people?”

Help ProPublica Investigate “We Buy Houses” Practices

by J. David McSwane and Ryan Gabrielson

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In just a handful of years, members of a Canton, Ohio, family built a financial empire that included a boutique airline, a bank in the Missouri Ozarks, a chain of carpet stores, a marijuana farm in Oregon, and more than $20 million in real estate. The “conglomerate,” as the Beers family calls it, was made possible by hundreds of millions of dollars collected from Americans who thought they had found an affordable alternative to medical insurance. Instead, many were saddled with debt.

The conglomerate, however, is showing signs of strain as the family downsizes its workforce and sells off some of its holdings. These moves will free up cash, said an attorney who represents several family members, and allow them to pay off a court settlement related to its alleged fraud. Now, another big debt has come their way: Several family members face liens placed against their properties for millions in back taxes.

A ProPublica investigation earlier this year revealed how Liberty HealthShare — the Christian nonprofit the family controlled and marketed as a cheap way to circumvent Obamacare requirements — paid at least $140 million to vendors owned by members and friends of the Beers family. Those family members and friends then funneled the money through a network of shell companies to purchase scores of businesses. As the family amassed wealth, Liberty’s finances were depleted and thousands of members’ medical bills went unpaid.

As part of the settlement with the Ohio attorney general’s office in 2021, Liberty HealthShare severed all ties with the family.

Members of the family, including patriarch Daniel J. Beers, and their attorneys, have denied wrongdoing. They claim that the family-owned vendors — Cost Sharing Solutions and Medical Cost Solutions LLC — charged Liberty market rates or less for their services, which included running a call center and negotiating bill payments with doctors and hospitals.

In January, Cost Sharing Solutions laid off all but a handful of staff, according to current and former employees. “They have no money,” said one source who asked to remain anonymous because of the nondisclosure agreements that the company required employees to sign. “It’s all gone.” From 2014 to 2021, Liberty paid Cost Sharing Solutions at least $90 million.

Last month, members of the family auctioned off more than 470 acres they owned outside of Canton. Those parcels constituted roughly half of the Lazy L Ranch, the compound where most of the family lives. “From its hilltop panoramic views to wooded valleys and open farm fields, this property will take your breath away,” the auction notice read. Purchase prices and the identities of the buyers have not yet been made public.

The IRS has recently secured liens against parcels of the ranch that family members still own. Property records show that Beers’ sons, Danny and Ronnie, owe $2.9 million and $1.1 million in federal income taxes for 2017 to 2021. Brandon Fabris, who also lives on the ranch and serves as chief operating officer of Cost Sharing Solutions, owes more than $700,000 in federal taxes.

Family members have also recently sold their controlling stake in Ultimate Air Charters, a small airline that caters to gamblers who travel from Canton to locales such as Atlantic City. Rick Arnold, the attorney who represents Beers and many of the companies that family members own, said the airline was sold to an entity outside of the family. He would not disclose its identity, which also has not been made public in Ohio business filings, and did not respond to questions about the federal tax liens on the Beers and Fabris homes.

In addition to the monthly dues that Liberty members paid for coverage of their medical bills, all of these ventures benefited from taxpayer money. Seven entities in the conglomerate received more than $6.3 million in COVID-19 relief funds, the vast majority of which was forgiven by the federal government, according to a ProPublica analysis of Paycheck Protection Program data. Cost Sharing Solutions, claiming it would save 168 jobs, obtained more than $1 million in April 2020 and another $1 million in January 2021. Ohio Lazy L Ranch LTD collected more than $80,000, and Ultimate Air Charters secured more than $2.9 million.

Arnold said the layoffs and sales are a way for his clients to pay $5 million in collective damages from the settlement with the Ohio attorney general’s office. Although the agreement with the state calls for monthly payments, Arnold says his clients have negotiated a new deal to send a lump sum “within the next couple of months.”

“It was part of a greater business plan,” Arnold said of the recent transactions. “It also creates liquidity and allows them to pay the attorney general.”

Beers and the two family-controlled vendors have missed several payments and are in arrears for $290,000 and $690,000, according to records from the attorney general’s office. A spokesperson for the Ohio attorney general said the payment schedule and agreement have not changed, despite Arnold’s claim.

In 2021, Liberty members whose medical bills languished and were referred to collections filed a class-action lawsuit against the Beers family, the ministry and the two vendors. The defendants have filed a motion to dismiss, which is pending.

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by Anna Clark; Photography by Sylvia Jarrus for ProPublica

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.

The story discusses gun violence and suicidal ideation.

On a cold evening in March, at a school board meeting in Oxford, Michigan, Buck Myre approached members with a sheaf of papers. As they were passed down the line, he paced and fidgeted.

For three minutes, the room was quiet. One board member covered her eyes with both hands. Finally, Myre stepped to the lectern. He released a shaky exhale, crackling the microphone.

“I don’t even know where to start, and I don’t even know what to say,” he said. “But imagine — you can’t imagine. But imagine going to the coroner’s office and picking this up.”

The papers were copies of his 16-year-old son’s death certificate.

On Nov. 30, 2021, Tate Myre and three other students — Hana St. Juliana, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; and Justin Shilling, 17 — were shot and killed inside Oxford High School by a 15-year-old sophomore. Seven more were shot but lived.

The shooter, who pleaded guilty to murder, terrorism and other felonies, awaits a hearing to determine whether he’ll face a life sentence without parole. His parents, who bought a gun for the troubled teenager four days before the shooting, are charged with involuntary manslaughter and awaiting trial.

But for many families, that’s not enough. They want a full accounting of what happened and whether it could have been prevented — which they still haven’t received.

“I do believe that things went wrong that day,” Myre told the school board in March. “And I don’t understand why we’re running from it. I don’t get it.”

Buck Myre and his wife, Sheri. Their 16-year-old son, Tate, was among the four killed at the high school in Oxford, Michigan. (Paul Sancya/AP Photo)

Oxford has ordered an external review of the shooting, and school officials say they too want answers. But many parents say those same officials have stonewalled them, delayed the review and not committed to full transparency or accountability.

Nationwide, there’s no protocol for such reviews. If they happen at all — “usually where we see higher body counts” — they vary widely in process and purpose, said James Densley, co-founder and president of the Violence Project, a nonprofit research center. Such a haphazard approach not only leads to mistrust inside communities, experts say, but wastes an opportunity to extract lessons that may prevent the next tragedy.

After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, a state commission delivered a preliminary report 322 days later, reaching the community before the first anniversary.

In Newtown, Connecticut, the local state’s attorney issued a report 346 days after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. After a 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, a state panel’s report arrived in 136 days.

In Oxford, it’s been more than 525 days, and counting.

A sign stands at an entrance to Oxford High School.

Two weeks after the shooting, Oxford’s school board voted unanimously for a review to begin “immediately.” But the board declined multiple offers from Michigan’s attorney general to investigate. For six months after the shooting, following guidance from a lawyer retained by its insurance company, the board insisted a review must wait for criminal and civil cases to resolve.

Finally, in May 2022, after facing community pressure, Oxford decided to hire Guidepost Solutions, a company that has investigated abuse allegations at the Southern Baptist Convention.

But Guidepost struggled to get people to cooperate with its review, including those who work for the district. Unions and the lawyer brought in by the school’s insurance provider cautioned against talking. “In our experience, the extent of third-party interference of this investigation has been unusually extraordinary,” Guidepost has said in a statement.

During the tumult, two board members resigned, later saying that they felt the board was not well served by the lawyer’s involvement.

Guidepost declined to comment for this story. Oxford Community Schools and its insurance company didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. The lawyer, Timothy Mullins, didn’t respond to ProPublica’s inquiries about his actions on behalf of the board.

“Obviously, this community wants answers,” the school board’s president, Dan D’Alessandro, told ProPublica. “That’s why we hired Guidepost — to get those answers.”

He added: “Once we have an opportunity to look at everything, then we’ll make any changes that are necessary.”

Dan D’Alessandro, Oxford school board president, leads a meeting at Oxford Middle School on April 11.

Guidepost delivered a report this month that assessed Oxford’s current strategies for security, suicide intervention and threat assessment. But it’s the second report, the one that will examine the events surrounding the shooting, that many parents feel is essential. It will draw from interviews as well as case files from investigators. However, it is unclear when it will be released.

Meanwhile, in lieu of a timely and comprehensive accounting, many Oxford families are left with unsettling questions.

“Every Tuesday marks another week without those four precious children that didn’t get to come home,” said a woman who works for the school at the March meeting, “and we still don’t get to have the answers for what happened, and people are still working at this school who were directly involved.”

I’m here, she added, to “demand the report be given to us.”

“I Have Access to the Gun and Ammo”

On the rural-urban fringe of southeast Michigan, where about 1,800 students attended Oxford High School, the final weeks of 2021 had everyone on edge.

In November, a student displayed a severed deer head in the courtyard with red paint looking like blood. He was disciplined, but less than a week later, in a boys’ restroom, students found a bird’s head in a jar.

Law enforcement and school personnel investigated but were unable to determine its origin, the district superintendent said in an email sent weeks later. As it happened, a sophomore named Ethan Crumbley was responsible for the bird’s head. He recorded the decapitation on his phone and wrote about it in his journal.

This is one of many disturbing details from the weeks before — and the day of — the shooting that were described in court documents and public testimony.

Ethan was spiraling, public records show. His Spanish teacher emailed school counselor Shawn Hopkins, saying he seemed sad. In a brief meeting outside a classroom, Hopkins told Ethan he was available if he wanted to talk.

On Nov. 26, Ethan’s father bought him a SIG Sauer 9 mm handgun. Three days later, an English teacher caught him searching online for bullets. She emailed Nicholas Ejak, dean of students, and Pamela Fine, another counselor.

At a five-minute meeting with Fine and Hopkins, Ethan told the counselors it was hobby research. Appearing calm, he said he’d gone to the range with his mom that weekend with his new gun. (She posted about it on Instagram: “Mom and son day testing out his new Xmas present.”)

Fine left a voicemail with Ethan’s mom, saying guns may be a hobby but searching for ammunition during class wasn’t good behavior.

His mom texted Ethan: “Seriously? Looking up bullets in school?? … Lol, I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught.”

That evening, Ethan posted on Twitter: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. See you tomorrow Oxford.”

Early on a foggy Tuesday morning, Hopkins got an email sent by Ejak about an English teacher who’d caught Ethan watching a shooting video. Some 20 minutes later, a math teacher informed Ejak that on a test review, Ethan drew a picture of a handgun, a bullet, a laughing face with tears and a twice-shot figure with blood pouring from its mouth.

“Blood everywhere,” Ethan wrote.

“My life is useless.”

“The world is dead.”

“The thoughts won’t stop.”

“Help me.”

The video he watched was only a game, Ethan said in the counselor’s office.

Hopkins, Ejak and Fine are among the school staff that have faced civil suits from the case, including in federal court. Mullins, a lawyer representing them and the school district, said in an email that because of ongoing litigation, he wouldn’t comment on the facts of the case. In a motion to dismiss federal lawsuits, Mullins wrote that “nothing about what the individual defendants knew could have put them on notice” that Ethan “posed the specific risk of shooting multiple students.”

Hopkins asked about the drawing. By then, Ethan modified it, adding phrases like “Harmless act” and “I love my life so much!!!!”

Ethan said the drawing depicted a game he wanted to design. Asked about “my life is useless,” Ethan’s demeanor became sad, according to Hopkins’ testimony in a pretrial hearing in the criminal case against Ethan’s parents. He described difficulties, including a grandparent’s death and a family dog dying.

He said he wasn’t a danger to anyone, but Hopkins felt “there was enough suicidal ideation” to call Ethan’s mom, the counselor testified. Both parents arrived about 10:30.

The description of what happened next is based on court documents and public testimony, including from Hopkins. There is not yet a full public account from Ethan or his parents about the office meeting.

Ethan needs help, Hopkins remembered telling the parents, “today, if possible.” He provided a list of mental health resources.

But, the counselor testified, Ethan’s mom said they couldn’t take him that day because they needed to return to work. Hopkins was taken aback. It was the first time he’d had such a meeting where parents would not take their child home, Hopkins said. He told them he wanted Ethan to get support within 48 hours. “I’ll be following up,” he recalled saying.

Looking at his drawing, Ethan’s dad told his son he had people he could talk to and his journal to write in.

“Are we done?” Ethan’s mother asked.

Hopkins asked Ejak if any disciplinary issue prevented Ethan from returning to class. No, Ejak said.

“I guess so,” Hopkins said.

Less than 15 minutes after the meeting began, it was over. Ethan’s parents left without him.

Hopkins wrote Ethan a pass. At some point that morning, Ejak retrieved Ethan’s backpack from math class and returned it to him. No one asked about Ethan’s access to weapons or searched his backpack.

Back at work, his mom mentioned to her boss that she needed to find Ethan a counselor. She texted her son. “You ok? … You know you can talk to us and we won’t judge.”

At a pretrial hearing, a lawyer for Ethan’s mother noted that Hopkins was a mandatory reporter; if he truly felt Ethan was at risk of not getting proper medical attention, including psychological, he must report it to Children’s Protective Services. But no one called outside authorities. Nor did he insist that Ethan leave school.

He wasn’t forced to leave school, Hopkins testified, because “there was no discipline issue.” At the time, Hopkins was concerned that Ethan was a threat to himself and thought it best for him to not be alone. He intended to follow up the next morning about mental health services.

When a lawyer asked if Hopkins thought he should have done anything differently that day, Hopkins said: “I want that situation to be as different as possible. I acted off the information I had available.”

Ethan’s lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment. A gag order prevents attorneys involved in his parents’ criminal cases from speaking to the media.

Less than two hours after the meeting with his parents, Hopkins and Ejak, Ethan emerged from a bathroom with the gun that had been in his backpack, along with ammunition and his hard-bound black journal. Every entry described shooting the school, including the last one: “The shooting is tomorrow. I have access to the gun and ammo.”

Ethan turned left and fired.

A Patchwork System

When a plane crashes, a federal agency begins an automatic and immediate investigation. Olivia Upham, whose brother was close to where shots were first fired, thought something like that would happen after a school shooting.

Olivia Upham and her brother, Keegan. Keegan was at Oxford High School during the shooting.

“I assumed that an outside agency, whether it be the attorney general, or the FBI, or some sort of commission of education and rule of law experts, would come in and help us with that,” said Upham, who, along with her mother, taught at Oxford’s middle school at the time.

In fact, comprehensive, third-party reviews of school shootings aren’t particularly common.

They typically happen in high-profile cases, said Densley of the Violence Project. “Higher body counts mean more scrutiny, more media attention, more parents who are asking questions about their loved ones.”

Even then, it’s a patchwork process. Multiple government agencies may issue distinct, sometimes overlapping reports, each informed by different investigative tools. Private companies, which may boast of former law enforcement officers and risk management professionals on their staff, are more often brought in for security assessments than for accountability reviews. Victim privacy and preserving a defendant’s right to a fair criminal trial also can add complexity.

Stephen J. Sedensky III, the local state’s attorney who authored one of several reports on the Sandy Hook shooting, said in an email that such reviews by public agencies are “often necessary and helpful in answering questions the public may have, in assisting policy and law makers and in preventing speculation as to the unknown.”

However, he noted, even with numerous Sandy Hook reports, speculation and conspiracies still took root in a vocal minority. “Victims’ families suffered and continue to suffer.”

Parkland is unusual in how thoroughly it was investigated. The state appointed a commission with parents, educators, law enforcement, advocates, public officials and mental health professionals. Even with the alleged shooter facing trial, the commission issued the preliminary report before the first anniversary. Within 20 months, it delivered its full 389-page report.

It was a deep dive into the shooter’s life and exposed chaotic breaches of protocol by school officials and law enforcement. The report catalyzed a number of significant new policies. The commission, which is funded by Florida’s Legislature through 2026, continues to address school safety and threat assessment statewide.

Max Schachter, a commissioner whose 14-year-old son died in the Parkland shooting, said the work was difficult “because every time we met, I basically had to relive Alex’s murder all over again.”

But, he said, the commission is devoted to making sure “that something good comes from this tragedy.”

“We Couldn’t Be True to Our Community”

Both of Steve St. Juliana’s daughters were at Oxford High School the day of the shooting. Only one came home.

Hana — athletic, empathetic, “a really bright soul,” her dad said — was shot and killed. As early details emerged about the shooter’s interactions with school officials, St. Juliana said he tried “desperately to give them the benefit of doubt.”

School officials sent some signals that they wanted to get answers for families like his.

Within a week, Oxford’s superintendent and the school board president at the time called for a third-party review. The board subsequently voted 7-0 on an eight-part resolution for a review that “will look far beyond the criminal investigation and into all the systemic factors that were at play.”

But by then, Mullins had assumed a large role in shaping decisions, advising the board and speaking on behalf of the district. Scarcely three hours after the shooting stopped, the district’s insurance company, SET SEG, connected Mullins with Oxford.

The insurer retained Mullins, and it would come at no cost to the district, according to a Nov. 30 email from a SET SEG claim manager to two top school officials. Mullins can “provide any legal assistance you may need.”

Mullins’ speciality: school immunity. He has successfully defended districts when a school conducted strip searches of students and when a football player died at practice.

Tom Donnelly, then the school board president, told ProPublica that it seemed that Mullins never wanted a review. “He had no intention of it happening.”

Mullins later told a Detroit News reporter that a review was premature and a waste of money. “Any lawyer would say don’t talk to anybody but us,” he said.

In December, state Attorney General Dana Nessel made her first of three offers for an investigation. The district turned her down. Mullins replied to Nessel in an email saying the district was already cooperating with the local prosecutor and sheriff, according to The Detroit News.

“I’m disappointed, quite honestly,” Nessel said on CNN. She said she hoped the district “cares as much about the safety of their students as they do shielding themselves from civil liability.”

Weeks passed. Months. No investigation.

To St. Juliana, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. “If you can’t even talk about it, if you can’t even admit what you did wrong, how are you supposed to fix it?” he said. “And we’re just supposed to have faith that you’re going to fix this behind the scenes? … And, more and more, you find out just how badly they messed up.”

A small cohort of community members began to conduct their own investigation of sorts, exploring not only Oxford’s policies on paper but its practices. They questioned whether Oxford consistently trained staff in threat assessment — a process for determining if a student poses a threat of violence — and whether it had in place the threat assessment team described in its own policies. If there was such a team, they asked, why wasn’t it activated in November 2021?

“We were not prepared,” said Danielle Krozek, an Oxford mom. “And so as a parent with a kid in school now, are we prepared now?”

The Krozeks. “We were not prepared,” Danielle Krozek said. “And so as a parent with a kid in school now, are we prepared now?”

In an email to community members in January 2022, the superintendent at the time said that “we have always taken threats very seriously and will continue to listen to students and parents who report threats to the district. In reminding everyone to ‘say something if you see something’ we are in no way suggesting that our community has ever hesitated to do so in the past.”

The principal, administrators, teachers and support staff “followed their training and implemented our District’s detailed emergency plans and protocol” on Nov. 30, 2021, and “put the safety of our students above their own safety,” wrote then-Superintendent Tim Throne, who has since retired.

The board insisted that a formal review couldn’t proceed because it would interfere with the criminal cases against the shooter and his parents. Two former board members said they believed this because of what Mullins told them.

The prosecutor’s office contradicted that explanation. Following inquiries from parents, it sent a March 4 letter to Oxford families saying that a review wouldn’t interfere with criminal proceedings — and that it had communicated this to school attorneys, too.

“To be clear,” the letter said, “decisions about what, when and how to conduct any investigation or assessment are up to the School Board and the community, and our office is not asking anyone to delay those efforts.”

But board members continued to blame looming legal cases for the delay. Lawyers for the district never delivered the prosecutor’s message to them, according to Donnelly and former board member Korey Bailey. They felt they had few options. Their understanding, they said, was that if they didn’t heed the advice of the attorney retained for Oxford by SET SEG, the insurer could rescind its coverage.

“Insurance companies had us by the throats,” Donnelly said. “We couldn’t be honest, and we couldn’t do our jobs, and we couldn’t be true to our community.”

Parents forwarded the prosecutor’s message to school officials, spoke at meetings and held a press conference. Donnelly and Bailey acknowledge it took two more months for the board to realize that the parents were right. In May, after the prosecutor’s office issued a letter affirming its support for an independent investigation, the board changed course. It retained its own law firm and soon hired Guidepost.

An official from Guidepost Solutions, the company Oxford hired to conduct a review of the shooting, speaks at the April 11 school board meeting.

“I did not feel the level of confidence and trust in the attorney from the insurance company to allow him to continue representing me as a board member,” Bailey said, “and I strongly supported the board finding our own legal representation that we could trust.”

As Guidepost began seeking interviews with school employees, Mullins played a role in urging union members to be careful about participating.

Doug Pratt, the Michigan Education Association’s director for public affairs, told ProPublica in an email that the union passed along Mullins’ advice, which he said was that “members who are or could be litigants shouldn’t participate in the third party review, which is voluntary.” Some members have participated, and some declined, Pratt said.

In an email to ProPublica, Mullins said that “critical witnesses have all been interviewed by law enforcement officials. They have also been deposed — under oath — by victims’ attorneys. Their sworn testimony has been set forth in voluminous transcripts, which are available to all parties and were provided to Guidepost by my firm.”

By fall, Donnelly and Bailey had seen enough. They resigned from the board and held a press conference alleging failures in Oxford’s threat assessment practices.

Bailey said he believes that in the aftermath of school shootings, there needs to be a high-level agency that automatically investigates what happened. Without one, “the school’s insurance company was allowed to come in and take charge.”

D’Alessandro, the current board president, said he’s aware of the community’s anxiety and mistrust as it waits for answers. “Sometimes the messaging that comes out from the legal system and the legal teams isn’t necessarily reflective of that of what the school district is trying to do,” he said.

In January, Guidepost reported that it didn’t have interviews with 20% to 30% of witnesses and 50% to 60% of critical witnesses. Noting the absence of criminal allegations against school personnel and immunity protections for government employees, Guidepost urged people to come forward.

Over nearly 18 months, Oxford has taken steps to invest in the physical security of the high school, as this month’s 179-page report documented. That includes installing a weapons screening system at several entrances, using a camera-based artificial intelligence technology intended to detect weapons and mandating that students only carry clear backpacks during the school day. It also made changes to its threat assessment protocol. The report described strengths in current policies and practices, as well as gaps and excesses.

That’s not enough, said Brian Cooper, the father of two high schoolers. He wants to see the report on what went wrong. “I feel like they’re delaying it intentionally to make people give up. And that’s damaging for families that lost children, and had their children shot.”

“You Are Running Out of Time”

Oxford will soon graduate the second class of students who escaped with their lives.

“You are running out of time to look these kids in the eye and tell them what was broken on Nov. 30,” 2021, said Renee Upham at an April board meeting. Along with her daughter Olivia, she used to teach at Oxford Middle School, and her son was inside the school during the shooting.

The Uphams. “You are running out of time to look these kids in the eye and tell them what was broken on Nov. 30,” 2021, Renee Upham said.

In March, a circuit court dismissed civil allegations against the district and its employees, including school counselors and the dean of students, affirming that the defendants are protected from the claims against them by governmental immunity. An appeal is expected. On Friday, a federal judge issued an opinion on 10 related lawsuits, granting them in part and dismissing them in part. The claims that Hopkins, Ejak and Oxford Community Schools presented a state-created danger can go forward.

“I don’t want to make a profit off of this. This is about forcing them to change,” said Andrea Jones, co-founder of the student-parent group Change4Oxford, which initiated a federal lawsuit. “And it’s really sad, if you think about it, that we have to bring a lawsuit to do that.”

Andrea Jones is one of the founders of the student-parent group Change4Oxford.

The community remains shaken, and tensions roil. An Instagram account run by students shares their poetry, with titles like “Stuck,” “Why” and “Nothing will happen if we do nothing.” Parents report problems with bullying and kids struggling to attend class in the same building where they were shot at.

Some students, including Reina St. Juliana, Hana’s sister, created the group No Future Without Today to prevent future tragedies. She and her father advocated at the state Capitol for gun safety bills, which, after a February shooting at Michigan State University, were signed into law.

And a battle is brewing over the May 18 graduation ceremony. Many students want to wear orange cords sent to them by Students Demand Action, which is part of Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group. But the superintendent said in a statement that no unapproved apparel is allowed.

Family members protested in emails to school officials. Despite the school’s “lack of procedures and protocols that allowed November 30 to happen, these students continue to show up and participate to earn enough credits to graduate,” wrote Chalmers Fitzpatrick, an Oxford mom. “They want to wear orange, and this should be a no-brainer.”

After hearing from family members and students, the district offered to let students wear navy and gold cords to acknowledge “the incomparable challenges they have had to face in their journey.”

“I get the impression they want people to graduate, move on, forget,” Olivia Upham said. “The less people in Oxford that were there that day, the less pressure they’re going to get.”

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Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Nicole Carr; Photography by Terra Fondriest for ProPublica

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.

This story is part of a series that explores how school board meetings across the country are fomenting conflicts and controversies that have led to violence and arrests. Are you interested in a virtual event on this topic? Let us know here.

When one police officer heard the radio call for backup at a high school campus outside Little Rock, Arkansas, he first thought there’d been a problem at a football game. The indecipherable chanting in the background sounded like roars from the bleachers. But it turned out that the rhythmic rallying call that November night last year was coming from the lobby outside a school board meeting.

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The prior two meetings, in September and October, had been held in Conway High School’s huge auditorium, equipped with ample seating and plenty of parking for what had, as of late, been larger crowds. There also had been an unusual amount of conflict. The day after the September meeting, police showed up at the homes of two residents to investigate separate incidents allegedly related to that meeting. At the October meeting, shortly before the board’s vote on policies that would restrict the rights of transgender students, a local grandfather stepped up to the microphone and warned the board about the sins of the LGBTQ+ community. “They invent ways of doing evil,” the man said during the public comment period. “But let me remind you that those that do such things deserve death.”

Alex Barnett, a junior philosophy major at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, learned about tensions at the meetings on Instagram, where a video of the anti-LQBTQ+ comment to the board had gone viral. Barnett was motivated to do something. He pulled together a group, including members of a nascent Young Democratic Socialists club, at another student’s apartment. They brainstormed ideas for voicing opposition to the school board’s decision to pass the policies on transgender students.

Alex Barnett sits in a park across from the Conway High School campus, where a school board meeting took place last fall.

Barnett had learned that the board had moved its November meeting back to the much smaller administration building and had decided to skip the part of the agenda where attendees could share their views. Given that none of the college students would be able to speak directly to board members, Barnett made a suggestion: “Well, why don’t we just go into the school board meeting and shut everything down?”

When the late-arriving backup officers got to the building, they first encountered a cluster of community members protesting on the sidewalk, some of whom had joined high schoolers staging a Conway High walkout earlier that day. Inside, the officers found a group of young people sitting on the lobby floor, their arms linked and their voices loud. “Trans Lives Matter!” they chanted. The officers warned them to clear out of the lobby. But they remained planted on the floor.

“I’ll start with this one here,” one officer said, leaning over Barnett. “You are required to leave. If you do not leave you’re being arrested. Do you understand?”

Barnett did not budge.

“Take him into custody,” the officer said, pointing to two other officers. The trio pulled Barnett off the lobby floor, clamping handcuffs on his wrists.

Another of the student protesters then calmly allowed officers to cuff him, accepting the arrest as the consequence of his resistance. A third protester kept chanting as he, too, was arrested. “These policies are discriminatory!” he yelled as officers ushered him out of the lobby. “Let them use the fucking bathroom!”

After pausing for eight minutes during the loudest of the chanting, the school board meeting resumed without interruption.

ProPublica has identified 59 people arrested or charged over an 18-month period as a result of turmoil at school board meetings across the country. The majority of the individuals railed against the adoption of mask mandates, the teaching of “divisive concepts” concerning racial inequity and the availability of books with LGBTQ+ themes in school libraries. Many of the people arrested were attempting to make a statement, narrating their interactions with police for their social-media followers. In some cases, they resorted to threats and violence.

The arrests in Conway stand out for several reasons. The college students organized in support of the issues that most other people who were arrested around the country opposed. What’s more, no arrests were made following two allegedly violent incidents stemming from the September meeting.

But the Conway arrests also reflect the pervasive challenges school districts and police departments across the country face in trying to figure out how to handle hordes of aggrieved citizens — and what to do when the clashes lead to chaos. In the coming weeks, ProPublica will be publishing stories about how that unrest has played out in various communities and has upended once-staid school board meetings.

A broken window at the home of retired teacher Cindy Nations (Courtesy of Cindy Nations)

Cindy Nations was fast asleep when her alarm system warned of a “glass break” at 2:33 a.m. on Sept. 14. It wasn’t until later that morning, after she returned home from driving the early school bus route, that the recently retired teacher noticed the damage. Tiny slivers of glass glinted on the hardwood floors, on the armchair next to the fireplace and on the tray atop an ottoman. Then she parted her curtains and saw the hole.

Her mind immediately went to the school board meeting the night before. The meeting was the first after the start of the 2022-23 school year, and close to 200 people filed into the auditorium to hear the community’s input on two proposed policies concerning transgender students. One would bar them from using the bathroom that matches their self-identified gender. The other would require that, when traveling for school functions, they share hotel rooms only with a student who matches their gender assigned at birth. They’d also have the option to room alone.

One speaker also complained about what she called “sexually explicit” books available in school libraries across the state. She read passages to the board from three of those books: “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” “Wait, What?: A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up” and “Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out.” And she handed out a pamphlet with passages from those books to fellow concerned parents.

Nations at her home in Conway

Nations and her friend Tamara Tucker were part of another cohort. Wearing a shirt printed with a rainbow to express her solidarity with LGBTQ+ attendees, Nations sat among like-minded parents and school employees near the back of the auditorium. They cheered on the mother of a transgender student who described to the school board the scrutiny her daughter faced after rooming with two girls during a school orchestra trip — even in the absence of a policy. “She had to report everything she’d done during the trip, and she was afraid she was in trouble,” the mother said. “These kinds of rules make no sense in the lives of actual children.”

The board itself didn’t act on the proposed policies at the meeting. That vote would come the following month.

Around 7:30 p.m., attendees made their way to the parking lot. Nations recalled that a group of people who’d congregated around a pickup truck stared her down as she walked toward her car. She would later tell police that “after leaving the school board meeting, she was followed home by a black SUV, but thought nothing of it.”

At about the same time, Tucker and her wife were standing in the parking lot, talking with other parents who were at the meeting to support LGBTQ+ students. Then, according to several of the parents, a truck almost hit Tucker’s wife.

A police officer arrived minutes later and asked what happened.

Tucker described how her wife said to the man: “Are you trying to run me over?” Then, Tucker said that “he kept yelling” — and that she yelled back: “Just move the fuck along.”

She said he climbed out of his truck, asking, “What did you say?” When she responded with, “I told you to move the fuck along,” she said the man pushed her. Parking lot surveillance obtained by ProPublica shows the man shoving Tucker.

“I flew back about three steps and hit the truck,” Tucker told the officer, Daniel Hogan, rubbing her shoulder and circling her arm. “It’s really hurting. It knocked the breath out of me.”

Watch video ➜

The following day, Hogan flipped on his body camera as he and his partner pulled up to the man’s brick ranch home. The officers were quick to assure him that he wasn’t being arrested. But the school was seeking a criminal trespass warning against him.

“What does that mean?” the man, Scott Simpson, asked.

“Basically, you can’t go back over to the school.”

“I can’t go to football games?” Simpson asked.

Simpson asked to tell his side of the story. He told the officers he’d gotten worked up during the school board meeting by the “pamphlets of the books.”

“I don’t know if you saw it, but it is boy-on-boy — it’s something I wouldn’t even look at,” Simpson told the officers. “And my temperature just, it elevated by looking at this stuff that’s in our public school system.”

He also described how, after the meeting, he drove his truck close to several women in the parking lot, complaining to the officers: “They just kept mouthing and cussing.”

“That’s when I pushed her,” he said. “I got in my truck and I left. That was all it was.”

Simpson then told Hogan, “You know, we go to church together.” Turning to the other officer, he pointed out that they’ve known each other for years, since Simpson’s sons were in junior high. “I am just not that type of person unless I am just provoked,” he said. “And it didn’t take much last night.”

“I understand,” Hogan said. “I definitely understand.”

“I’m glad you understand,” Simpson replied. “This world is going to shit. And I’m sure being a policeman you have to listen to both sides, but if you took your uniform off you would understand where I’m coming from.”

“Don’t have it off right now, though,” Hogan said, “so I’ve got to be indifferent on both sides.”

The night before, when Hogan took Tucker’s statement in the parking lot, he told her “he’d definitely pass that over to detectives” and that she could press charges if detectives didn’t. Eight months later, no charges have been filed. “I am undecided if I will pursue charges,” Tucker wrote in response to ProPublica’s questions, adding that she’d sought medical treatment later that week for bruises. Simpson did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

A Conway Police Department spokesperson said that because the investigation involved an allegation of third-degree battery, the department did not move forward with the case. “The Conway Police Department is following the rules of criminal procedure and cannot legally make an arrest on this specific offense as it did not take place in the presence of a police officer,” the spokesperson wrote, adding: “It will be the victim’s option to seek a misdemeanor warrant.” The spokesperson referred other questions about the incident to the city attorney, Charles Finkenbinder, who cited the same statute and said, “I am not aware of any request for charges in this matter.”

Nor did anything happen in Nations’ case. Though she told an officer she believed the damage to her window was from a gun, he found no bullet or bullet hole in her home, according to his police report. The report concluded that “the object may have been a BB or some other slower moving object like a small rock.” The day after the incident, the officer updated the report: “Due to lack of leads at this time, this incident will not be assigned for further investigation.” The Police Department did not comment on the Nations incident.

The only people who have faced charges for incidents stemming from the school board tensions in Conway last fall were the three college students who showed up at the school board meeting two months later.

In the two years leading up to her retirement, Nations had become distressed by what she saw in the junior high school where she taught — a reflection of larger debates raging in her district and nationwide.

“What happened in our country, how divided we became, just really spilled over into the classroom,” she said. “And it hurt me. It really hurt me.”

It started with a dust-up over “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The book had been taught in public schools for decades, but during the 2020-21 school year, Nations was stunned by a debate among administrators over whether it was appropriate for her ninth grade students. The concern was whether students should have to consider the role of race in the nation’s criminal justice system, a concept highlighted in the book. Nations, who’d taught English for 35 years, recalled her principal advising: “Right now with the current political climate, let’s not teach ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’”

Conway Public Schools Superintendent Jeff Collum did not respond to questions about the events described in this story. In a statement last year to a local television station, a district spokesperson acknowledged that the book had been removed from the curriculum during the pandemic but said that it hadn’t been banned and that educators again had the option to teach it.

Nations said of the encroaching culture wars: “It divided my school family.”

The debate over “To Kill a Mockingbird” reminded Nations of similar friction decades earlier. In the late ’90s, parents complained that Nations was teaching “The Chocolate War,” a controversial young adult novel that explores the mob mentality of a high school secret society and depicts bullying, violence and sex. Nations said that as a result of those concerns, the district created a committee to review the appropriateness of books being taught in classrooms. (That committee would be tasked in the fall of 2022 with considering the appropriateness of two books with LGBTQ+ themes, one of which the parent with the pamphlets had singled out; committee members recommended that the books remain on library shelves, but the board banned them anyway.)

In February 2022, things took another turn. Nations recalled that during her planning period, she was standing in her empty classroom with a colleague when another ninth grade English teacher walked in and plopped a poster down on a vacant desk. The teacher wanted to know what they thought of her Black History Month display for her classroom door.

Nations said her temperature rose when she saw what was on the poster: a photograph of a tree-lined lane leading to a grand Louisiana plantation.

The following week, according to Nations, another teacher posted her Black History Month poster in the hallway: “All History Matters,” it read.

“It divided my school family,” Nations said of the encroaching culture wars. “We were such a closely knit bunch, those ninth grade English teachers. We spent all our time together.” After February 2022, that was no longer the case.

At a tense faculty meeting that month, Nations lost her temper. The offensive displays. The book debates. Something felt very wrong. She recalled saying, “This has got to stop!” — and that the assistant principal told her to leave the meeting and go to her classroom. She said she refused.

“I could already tell they were going to just start telling me: ‘This is what you say and what you do. And you can’t veer from this in any way,’” she said. “And I just thought, that is not even teaching to me. That’s not what teaching is.”

The decision to retire came fast. But it wasn’t easy.

“I was so disappointed,” she said. “It had been just the best place to be, and then it became horrible.”

A week before finals last month, Barnett settled into a bench in the Conway courthouse, waiting for his name to be called. It was a Tuesday afternoon, more than five months after the protest.

His fellow protester Keylen Botley had been the first of the three students to be sentenced. At the urging of a church member, the 18-year-old had pleaded guilty months earlier to misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and failure to disperse. He was fined $650.

Barnett had no plans of taking a plea deal. Instead, a judge would hear his case. At his bench trial, two of the arresting officers testified. Then Barnett took the stand.

“I wasn’t ashamed of what I did,” he said in an interview. “I felt like what I did was justified. I told the judge that, yeah, I’m the one who organized the protests. I’m not sorry for what I did at all. I would have gladly done it again.”

Barnett and Colburn Clark at the Conway Public Schools administration building. Barnett, Clark and a third student, Keylen Botley, were arrested there during the November 2022 school board meeting.

Of the 59 people ProPublica determined were arrested or charged for incidents stemming from school board unrest, Barnett received the stiffest sentence. The judge gave him 10 days in jail. ProPublica could not identify any others — including those who damaged school property or assaulted another attendee — who received a single day of jail time as punishment. The third student who’d been arrested in Conway, Colburn Clark, is scheduled for trial in late May.

Barnett said that during his day locked up, he was one of eight inmates in a windowless cell, with a shortage of first-come, first-serve beds. Barnett didn’t snag one; he got a yoga mat on the floor. Because the underwear he wore at the time he was booked was not white, and because he couldn’t yet buy any from the commissary, he went without. On the second day, his lawyer got him out on appeal.

Barnett said he’d hoped that the protest might have led the school board to reconsider the policies restricting transgender students. Instead, one of those policies was codified in state law when the newly elected governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed a bill in January denying transgender students access to the bathroom of their self-identified gender.

And this summer, another new law goes into effect, allowing anyone to challenge what they consider “obscene” books in public libraries. Local governments will decide whether to pull them from shelves. And library employees can be jailed and fined for “knowingly” distributing those books to minors. The offense would be a felony.

“I mean, it’s hard not to feel discouraged just by how fast that they’re going and how unstoppable this thing feels,” Barnett said. “But I think a lot of us are trying to resist that feeling of there’s nothing that we can do.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

Correction

May 13, 2023: This story originally misquoted one of the Black History Month posters described by Cindy Nations. According to Nations, the poster said "All History Matters," not "All Lives Matter."

by Kathleen Sharp for ProPublica

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced this week that it plans to hire four experts to investigate “more thoroughly” the history of works in its collections. The decision follows criminal investigations into some items in the museum’s collection, as well as news reports, including by ProPublica, that the museum has displayed items that were allegedly stolen or lacked provenance showing they were legally obtained.

As part of ProPublica’s Repatriation Project, the news organization researched every Native American work donated or loaned to the Met by the noted art collectors Charles and Valerie Diker. That reporting showed that only 15% of the 139 works provided by the Dikers had solid or complete ownership histories. Most either had no histories listed, identified previous owners in such vague terms as an “English gentleman,” or left gaps in ownership ranging from 200 to 2,000 years.

While it’s common for antiquities to have gaps in their documented histories, several art experts said the Diker Collection has an unusually large share of works with missing provenance, suggesting some of the pieces could be either fraudulent or stolen, the experts said.

For example, the provenance for an ancient Hopi (or Ancestral Pueblo) piece in the Diker Collection — a storage jar made between 1050 and 1100 — begins about 800 years after it was made, in 1984, when the Dikers bought it from a gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona. A researcher for the Hopi cultural office told ProPublica the jar was likely looted.

In a written statement to ProPublica before the prior story’s publication, the Dikers said that before acquiring the works they had assessed “all available information relating to provenance.”

As of April, the museum said it had accepted the transfer of 77 gifts from the Diker Collection.

In this week’s announcement, Met director Max Hollein acknowledged the work that the institution must do related to its Native American items. “The recent milestone of having greatly expanded our collection of Native American art substantially diversified our presentation of American art and dramatically broadened our outreach and ties to tribal communities,” he said.

Earlier this year, the Met said that it had drafted a new Native American Arts Initiative in 2021 under the guidance of its “first-ever” curator of Native American art, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha). The initiative includes “creating an advisory committee and hiring a full-time staff position that will collaboratively focus on NAGPRA responsibilities and further prioritize the building of ongoing partnerships as well as the strengthening of community collaborations,” the Met said. In March, the museum said it was also hiring a Native American art researcher whose duties would include “some provenance research.”

The Met did not respond to requests for comment this week. But in response to ProPublica’s earlier reporting on the Diker Collection, the museum said in a statement, “Although some progress has been made in updating the online catalog information and providing more complete provenance information, we recognize there is still much work to do and that this is an ongoing process that requires relationship building, patience, and great care. This is important work, and it is precisely one of the intentions of the Dikers to have a large, well-resourced institution such as The Met devote the time and scholarship to these Native items.”

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, or NAGPRA, says that a museum receiving federal funds must alert tribal representatives no later than six months after it receives objects created by that tribe’s ancestors. However, ProPublica found that the Met had sometimes waited years before contacting tribes. The museum contacted some tribes only after ProPublica asked about the works in their collections. Since then, the Met has said it plans to return to the Dikers at least one loaned item, a quiver-and-arrow set made around 1875 by an “Apache artist.”

Dozens of Native American tribal officers told ProPublica that they had yet to hear from the museum about their tribes’ items in the Diker Collection.

Max Bear, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, said that he has not heard from the Met in the eight years he’s worked as a tribal historic preservation officer and supervisor. “I know the Met has a lot of Cheyenne and Arapaho objects,” he said, including color drawings on ledger paper. “I’d like to work with them,” he added, and “get an opportunity to see the collection.”

Rosita Worl, president of Sealaska Heritage and a Tlingit citizen, was pleased to hear of the Met’s intention to hire more provenance researchers. “I think it’s a step in the right direction,” she said. “It’s good news, assuming that the Met will consult with the tribes.” Worl noted that when museum curators talk to ethnographic specialists and combine their findings with the knowledge of indigenous leaders, “there is a wealth of information that can be had.”

The Met’s announcement of the four new provenance hires mentioned foreign countries, including Egypt, Greece, India, Italy, Nepal, Nigeria and Turkey, whose works are in the museum. But it did not name any tribal nation.

In July, state and federal agents seized 21 allegedly stolen antiquities valued at more than $11 million, including a marble head of the Greek goddess Athena from 200 B.C., according to a search warrant ProPublica obtained. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported in March that the Met had possessed more than 1,000 objects that were tied to people allegedly involved in crimes related to the antiquities trade. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has returned some of those confiscated works to foreign countries.

No one at the Met has been charged. But a museum donor, Michael Steinhardt, returned $70 million worth of stolen antiquities. He denied criminal wrongdoing but in 2021 agreed to a lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities to resolve a criminal investigation.

Hollein cautioned that the museum’s examination and decisions about its collections will take time.

“In some areas, we are able to make swift and definite moves, and in others it may literally take years to acquire the needed provenance information and even more time to collaborate with other museums, nations, or individuals to find the right solution,” he wrote. “Despite the urgency the media environment may suggest, we must be diligent, thoughtful, and fair in our evaluation of any evidence being presented to us. We are committed to getting it right, and equally committed to taking the time necessary to do so.”

You can reach us using this form or by contacting repatriation@propublica.org or 206-419-7338 (calls or Signal messages). If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, see our advice at propublica.org/tips. We won’t publish anything you write without getting your permission first.

by Aliyya Swaby

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Transgender people who are trying to get their insurance plans to cover their transition-related health care face a fragmented landscape.

Consider: A transgender retiree on the state of Arizona’s health insurance plan is generally covered for transition-related surgery. But an active state employee is not.

Some of the health plans that the state of West Virginia offers its employees do cover transition-related care, but others don’t.

If you’re a transgender employee of Georgia's state university system, you are covered for gender-affirming care by its insurance plan, but other state employees don’t have that coverage.

The discrepancies illuminate the challenges transgender people face in accessing and affording gender-affirming care, which can include services like long-term hormone therapy and chest and genital surgery. Major medical associations recognize the necessity of those services for transgender people and the harm that can result from prohibiting them. Meanwhile, as conservative state lawmakers propose and pass restrictions on gender-affirming care for both children and adults, transgender people are watching their options for care narrow even further.

“We still have a lot of people who think that this stuff isn’t real or that it’s immoral or sinful and that it shouldn’t be covered,” said Christine Yared, an attorney who has represented transgender plaintiffs against employers that don’t cover gender-affirming care. Changes to these policies, she said, often result from “pressure from the ground up.”

Within some states, different state agencies have made conflicting decisions — either voluntarily or as a result of lawsuits — on whether their various health plans will cover gender-affirming care.

Federal courts have consistently ruled that employers cannot categorically exclude gender-affirming care from health care plans, often referencing federal policies on employment and health care discrimination. ProPublica previously reported that two states — North Carolina and Arizona — and a county in Georgia each spent in excess of $1 million to fight employees seeking coverage for gender-affirming care. The state of North Carolina and Houston County, Georgia, now must offer that care, after rulings in those cases; both are appealing.

But while lawsuits can force employers, including states, counties and big corporations, to cover such care, legal wins sometimes apply narrowly, extending to some of an employer’s transgender members and excluding others.

As a result of another Georgia lawsuit, filed in 2018, the state’s university system agreed to a settlement that awarded the plaintiff $100,000 and began providing coverage for gender-affirming care under the university system’s plan. Transgender employees are now suing the state of Georgia to get it to offer coverage of gender-affirming care through all state insurance plans.

“Lacking any justified or justifiable reason, the only conceivable purpose of the Exclusion is to single out transgender people undergoing a gender transition for inferior compensation as compared to their colleagues, and to avoid covering a stigmatized form of health care,” the complaint against Georgia alleges.

A spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Community Health and State Health Benefit Plan, both defendants in the case, declined to comment on ongoing litigation.

A transgender person working for Arizona’s state government cannot get coverage for gender-affirming surgery — until they retire and sign on to the state retirement system’s health plan. The two plans are administered by separate state departments. The retirement system chose to cover gender-affirming care “for the benefit of our retiree cohort,” said spokesperson David Cannella.

15 States Offered a Health Plan That Didn’t Cover Gender-Affirming Care for State Employees in 2022 Note: Some states have multiple employee health plans with differing policies on coverage for gender-affirming medical care. North Carolina was ordered to remove its exclusion in 2022 by a federal judge, but the state is appealing the ruling. The exclusion was inactive as of December 2022. Source: ProPublica review of health plans in all 50 states and D.C. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Arizona’s Department of Administration, which oversees the employee health plan, for years had fought to keep excluding gender-affirming care from coverage, even when faced by a federal lawsuit. Arizona is now finalizing a settlement agreement with the plaintiff, a University of Arizona professor. Arizona state officials did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment by the time of publication.

In 2020, several transgender public employees in West Virginia sued the state to demand it provide coverage of gender-affirming care. One of its health insurance providers agreed to a settlement with employees and began covering the care last year.

But the state Public Employees Insurance Agency, which offers its own health plan options, didn’t agree to settle — and that part of the case stopped short when the plaintiff, a computer technician for a county school board, died unexpectedly last year. Her lawyers agreed with family members to dismiss her claims.

Now West Virginia offers public employees four health insurance choices that don’t cover gender-affirming care and three that do.

Avatara Smith-Carrington, a Lambda Legal lawyer who represented the West Virginia plaintiffs, said it is their hope that another transgender employee will step up to file a lawsuit against the organization that provides the other plans. “It should be challenged,” Smith-Carrington said.

Have You Faced Barriers to Getting Gender-Affirming Care? Help Us Investigate.

Lucas Waldron contributed reporting.

by Jennifer Oldham for ProPublica

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. This story was co-published with COLab, the Colorado News Collaborative.

Colorado’s snowcapped Rockies towered in the distance on a crisp April day as firefighter Emilio Palestro used a torch to ignite damp prairie grass within view of a nearby farmhouse and a suburban neighborhood.

Propelled by a breeze, orange flames crackled up a ditch bank, devouring a thick mat of dead grass, cornhusks and weeds. It was neither too windy, nor too humid, nor too hot — a rare goldilocks moment for firefighters to safely clear irrigation ditches of weeds, grasses and brush that can block the flow of water and spread wildfire.

“At this time of year, it’s a race against what we call green-up,” said Seth McKinney, fire management officer for the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, as eye-stinging smoke curled over newly emerging shoots of grass nourished by a wet winter. “We are threading that needle to find the right time in between a rainstorm, red flag conditions” — when winds, temperatures and dry conditions magnify wildfire risk — “and snow melt.”

McKinney is trying to prevent conflagrations like the Marshall Fire, the most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, which killed two people and incinerated 1,084 residences and seven businesses in December 2021. That fire ignited in overgrown grasslands crisscrossed by unkempt ditches, which together spread flames into urban areas with unprecedented speed, according to scientific simulations and eyewitnesses.

The out-of-control Marshall Fire raged through parts of Boulder County, Colorado, in 2021. (RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images) The Marshall Fire completely destroyed this Superior, Colorado, neighborhood, which borders a large swath of open space that did little to slow or redirect the flames (Chet Strange)

The controlled use of fire by expert crews is widely considered the most effective way to reduce the dangerous build-up of grasses and other vegetation that fuel larger conflagrations, experts agree.

But it has become nearly impossible to conduct controlled burns like the one McKinney’s crew set last month. A combination of overly broad restrictions, erratic weather patterns and public resistance have left piles of dead branches and shrubs sitting in open spaces for months.

Figuring out how to overcome these barriers, prevalent throughout the West, is crucial to addressing the fire risk, say land managers whose homes were also threatened by the Marshall Fire.

“We’ve done a lot of work in the forests about what to do to reduce fire risk and anticipate fire behavior,” said Katharine Suding, a plant community ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who is working to update fire modeling of prairie vegetation. “We need to do that in the grasslands.”

The restrictions and a burdensome planning process often postpone or indefinitely delay controlled burns. Firefighters must complete multipart plans and comply with rules that can differ in each of Colorado’s 64 counties. Large burns on federal, state or county land require permits from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to ensure they don’t violate federal clean-air regulations. And in some areas, burns are off-limits from November through February because air pollution is already high.

The end result is that only a small fraction of what needs to be burned ends up being burned. In 2020, firefighters proposed burning 312,943 piles of branches and logs throughout the state but were able to do only about 18% of that work, records show. Of 88 burns proposed to consume vegetation across a large number of acres — in a forest or grassy area — only 55% were completed that year.

Boulder County firefighters work on a prescribed burn. Only a fraction of the burns that firefighters proposed conducting in 2020 were actually carried out. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Extreme weather and climate change also are getting in the way of executing prescribed burns, documents obtained by ProPublica under the Colorado Open Records Act show. In 2022, a prescribed fire driven by high winds and tinder-dry vegetation morphed into the largest fire in New Mexico’s history, with devastating consequences for residents.

In Colorado, residents grew wary of controlled burns after one escaped in 2012 and killed three people. The Lower North Fork Fire, near the foothill community of Conifer, burned 24 structures and 4,140 acres. Afterward, prescribed burning ceased as state lawmakers enacted stricter rules governing the practice.

Only about 1 in 1,000 prescribed burns spirals out of control, statistics show, but the ones that do have added to public opposition.

The push-pull of fire prevention and community opposition could soon come to a head as the U.S. Forest Service, Western governors and Colorado counties ramp up prescribed burning to rid overgrown forests and open spaces of a century worth of fuel, aiming to better protect nearby communities. Federal fire simulations found 500,000 buildings could now be exposed to wildfire in a single year.

Public lands managers hope to treat 50 million acres with controlled burns and mechanical thinning in the next decade.

After Larry Donner, a retired fire chief in Boulder, and his wife purchased their house in 1991, they installed noncombustible siding, double-paned windows and a fire-resistant roof, and they replaced a wood deck with flagstone. Still, it burned to the ground in the Marshall Fire. He attributed the fire’s spread to poor maintenance of open spaces near communities.

“Thirty years ago, they mowed 20 feet around subdivisions, or they grazed and plowed grasslands — then they planted houses and they stopped,” said Donner, who gestured toward grassy Davidson Mesa as he stood in front of his partially reconstructed Louisville home. “Fuel reduction is a big thing for me. If you can keep fire out of neighborhoods, you can better protect those neighborhoods.”

First image: Former Boulder Fire Chief Larry Donner in front of the home he’s rebuilding in Louisville, Colorado. Second image: The Harper Lake neighborhood in Louisville was almost completely destroyed by the Marshall Fire. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica) A New Understanding of Grassland Risk

Coloradans have always understood the threat of forest fires. The state ranks first among eight Western states for the number of acres at high risk for fire, or “firesheds,” federal models show.

The Marshall Fire, however, made many residents realize that the state’s vast and populous grasslands — abutting its largest metro areas on the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains — are also a wildfire threat. Cities from Fort Collins, in the north, to Pueblo, in the south, where most Coloradans live, are surrounded by thousands of square miles of flat, open space that evolved to burn every five to 15 years.

The fireshed around Boulder and the Arvada fireshed to the south are among the 10 most at-risk zones from Wyoming to Nebraska, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Boulder ranked 41st in the western U.S. out of 7,688 such hazardous areas.

Around the Denver metro area, grassland acres outnumber forest acres, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis conducted for ProPublica using wildland fire data compiled by federal agencies.

This spring, wildfires in grasslands and brush on the eastern slope of the Rockies, known as the Front Range, have already forced evacuations and concert cancellations in suburban enclaves.

“The urgency of fire in the county, whether in the mountains or on the plains, is very real,” said Boulder County Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann during a February meeting.

In the forests that blanket Boulder County’s foothills, residents are accustomed to smoke in the air. Firefighters have burned vegetation there, primarily in the woods, since 1997. But for every successful burn, there are just as many that don’t happen, public records obtained by ProPublica show.

Each year, the Boulder County wildland team and the city of Boulder’s Fire-Rescue unit request smoke permits — required when burns on public lands could cause air quality issues — from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division. Many are for county- and city-managed open spaces. Some foothill areas are grassy, like the valley floor below.

The permits require contingency plans, notification of nearby residents and analysis of the vegetation, and are approved only when winds are deemed less likely to send smoke toward homes.

Burns aren’t allowed when the state issues air pollution emergencies or alerts for the area. And the number of high-ozone days along the northern Front Range and in the Denver metro area is increasing. The region is out of compliance with national air quality standards.

A prescribed burn outside of Boulder. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Brian Anacker, senior manager of science and climate resilience for the city of Boulder, said his community is “trying to accelerate our prescribed fire program.” But there are “barriers upon barriers” that stop that from happening.

Regulations can also work at cross purposes: Winter weather often offers the lowest risk of a prescribed burn getting out of control, but that’s also when smoke below 6,400 feet can most affect the region’s poor air quality.

Firefighters and state air quality regulators have begun experimenting with allowing burns in the metro Denver area during winter months.

“We are starting to look for more and more of what we would consider off windows,” said Brian Oliver, wildland fire division chief for the city of Boulder.

For example, Boulder County firefighters asked to burn up to 40 acres on Hall Ranch during snow season using “additional experimental provisions.” These included burning between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on days when the air is clear, discussing the timing with the state meteorologist and advising state air pollution staff at least a day in advance.

Firefighter David Buchanan last year asked regulators for permission to burn during the “high-pollution season,” when it’s typically prohibited. He said that granting the permit would allow crews to torch grassy areas and saplings when temperatures are low and there is more moisture on the ground. Doing so would minimize smoke, he added, because fuels burn “swiftly and efficiently.” State regulators granted the permit.

Boulder County’s challenges were echoed by federal watchdogs and Western governors. The Government Accountability Office and state leaders this spring urged the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider regulations that curtail prescribed burning in areas that aren’t in compliance with air quality standards.

Land managers told the GAO that these rules “could limit their ability” to rid high-risk areas of vegetation, investigators said in a March report. The GAO added that controlled fires could lead to less smoke overall because they help prevent future wildfires.

Both the rising interest in controlled burns and the difficulty in conducting them are apparent at the state’s Division of Fire Prevention & Control. The agency, created after the escaped Lower North Fork Fire, requires firefighters to complete a “prescription” that assesses 23 risk factors, including how quickly fuels will burn, how likely the fire is to escape, how smoke can be managed and how far the fire is from homes and businesses.

Ensuring the public understands that there’s a detailed, scientific process behind prescribed burning is key to gaining support for more controlled burns, firefighters and land managers agree.

Also included in the prescription are optimal weather conditions, including a minimum temperature for burns in grass and brush of 30 degrees and a maximum of 80 degrees; relative humidity between 5% and 40%; and wind speed between 2 mph and 15 mph.

Such conditions are becoming rarer.

Snowstorms, fire weather watches and red flag warnings — alerts sent out when dry air and high, gusty winds create conditions that could rapidly spread fires — forestalled prescribed burns this spring in the city of Boulder. Burning is prohibited when these warnings, issued by the National Weather Service, are in effect.

Sometimes, all the conditions align: The Forest Service said in May it was able to burn approximately 25,000 piles of dead vegetation this winter across the Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests. The federal agency, along with other partners, also intentionally burned more than 110 acres in this region this spring.

Grassland Wildfire Risk Foreshadowed in 2009

Residents on the valley floor in Boulder County remain leery of controlled burns, and many are also angry at what they view as a lack of urgency to address the fire threat surrounding dense suburbs.

“Our neighborhood is like a ship at sea in grasslands,” Collen Callin, a Superior resident whose home survived the Marshall Fire, said following a March community forum attended by Gov. Jared Polis and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, both Democrats.

“If they don’t mitigate them, I’m to the point that I get so stressed with winds I will probably leave,” added Callin, who handed Neguse a flier that detailed how the blaze climbed from grasslands onto wood fences that “created firebrands that were blown into our yards and caught homes on fire.”

Collen Callin, center, speaks with Rep. Joe Neguse, right, during a community forum for victims of the Marshall Fire. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Land managers are urging patience. Officials are updating Community Wildfire Protection Plans to weigh options for managing the fuels but warn the process will take a year to complete.

The last plan was made 12 years ago and acknowledged wildfire risk isn’t limited to mountainous communities. “Plains residents are also at risk,” authors wrote, citing lessons from the 2009 Olde Stage Fire.

In hindsight, that blaze was eerily similar to the Marshall Fire — severe winds and “large evacuations of residents and their animals just after the holiday season.” But unlike the Marshall Fire, it slowed as the winds died down, allowing firefighters to control it before it burned homes.

Still, it prompted planners to identify a “grassland wildland-urban interface,” though they didn’t offer ideas to address the risk to communities on the plains.

The plan that’s being developed will have to address this issue, but the reality is the options are few — mow, graze or burn — and none are easy to carry out or guaranteed to be effective.

“We have 343 miles of agricultural property boundaries we manage,” said Stefan Reinold, resource management division manager for Boulder County Parks and Open Space. “Are we going to mow a 100-foot buffer twice a year? Is that really going to stop a fire — or are embers going to make it into neighborhoods?”

Residents listen during a community forum for victims of the Marshall Fire, attended by Gov. Jared Polis and Rep. Joe Neguse. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Millions of dollars in state and federal grants are available for mitigation work on open-space grasslands. At the March community forum in Superior, state officials were asked if they would consider legislation to aid communities in deciding which methods are the most effective. Lawmakers said they will discuss their approach this summer.

Firefighters would like prescribed burns to be part of the plan.

“Prescribed fire is the best way to keep grasslands healthy and vibrant,” Meg Halford, senior forest health planner for Boulder County, said at a Jan. 30 town hall. “What is scary is that we would do it behind your communities — not that it can’t be controlled.”

One day this spring, Buchanan, the Boulder County firefighter who’d requested out-of-season burn permits, slapped out errant wisps of flame on a ditch bank with a “mud flap on a stick.” The oddball device worked well to mop up the burn as Sheriff’s Office fire manager McKinney described how he hopes to tamp down the stigma that surrounds prescribed fire.

His team would like to increase agricultural burning, which is exempt from federal smoke management regulations. Doing more ditch burns would get residents more accustomed to the sight of intentionally set flames and smoke, McKinney said.

“The goal is to normalize it so people can see the conditions are good,” he said. “And they know we’ve had moisture recently and the winds aren’t high, so we must be lighting it for a reason.”

A prescribed burn outside of Boulder. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Fire Revealed Danger Posed by Ditches in Boulder County Suburbs

Like other climate-fueled wildfires, the Marshall Fire revealed new fire threats that have emerged as the West heats up and dries out. Among them: the irrigation ditches that water crops across the region and grow thick with trees, grasses and other vegetation.

Until the Marshall Fire, Amy Willhite viewed vegetation in ditches just as an impediment to water flows, not as a fire risk. That fact that overgrown ditches could help spread wildfire into communities “was just a big shock,” said Willhite, a senior water resources project manager who until weeks ago oversaw the city of Boulder’s shares in about 60 ditches.

Willhite and firefighters this spring walked unkempt canals as they began a first-ever assessment of the risk they present.

A black-spotted woodpecker scolded overhead as Willhite reached a charred piece of prairie at the end of a line of 21 sedan-sized piles of gray branches and brush. Here, firefighters had begun a controlled burn of a mound in March, she said. They were forced to stop when the wind blew smoke toward homes to the east.

“The plan was to burn them all,” Willhite said of the piles. “It was really disappointing — there is huge caution used when they do these things.”

It’s often not publicly known who owns the ditches — ownership is divvied up into hundreds of shares that are tied to water rights, and shares are passed down among families — which makes it difficult to pinpoint who is responsible for their maintenance. The records are not public. Organizations that manage the canals, called ditch companies, are not required to remove the fuel that they clear and stack alongside the ditches — often on land they do not own, Willhite said.

As a result of these and other limitations, firefighters burned only a fraction of several ditches, records obtained by ProPublica show, with the number of miles ranging from 3.21 (in two ditches) in 2021 to 6.7 (in five ditches) in 2016 — out of about 113 miles of field ditches the city maintains in collaboration with its agriculture tenants.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by Stephen Engelberg and Jesse Eisinger

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Our reporting on the relationship between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and Republican megadonor, has touched off a national conversation about the ethics of the Supreme Court. Other news organizations have stepped up their scrutiny of the high court, and our stories have been cited thousands of times in editorials, op-eds and Congress.

The lavish travel Crow funded and the previously undisclosed real estate deal and tuition arrangements between Crow and Thomas that our reporting revealed has become fodder for the dueling narratives of American politics.

“Today’s report continues a steady stream of revelations calling Justices’ ethics standards and practices into question,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in response to our story about the tuition payments. “I hope that the Chief Justice understands that something must be done — the reputation and credibility of the Court is at stake.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., shot back at a recent hearing of the committee: “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court. There’s a very selective outrage here.”

The furor seems destined to continue. And so we thought it might be useful if we said a bit more about the origins, timing and criticisms of our journalism on this subject.

Editors at ProPublica have been thinking about the need to look more closely at the state and federal judiciary for years. One byproduct of our gridlocked legislature is that judges have come to play a larger and larger role in people’s lives, from health care policy to affirmative action to abortion.

Last year, we worked with our partners at The Lever on a story revealing that a wealthy industrialist had gifted $1.6 billion to a group run by Leonard Leo, a key player in assembling the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Reporting in recent years has shown Leo running dark money groups focused on influencing the judiciary.

We admired the work done by our colleagues, notably at The Wall Street Journal, which found federal judges were ruling on a surprising number of cases in which they had a financial interest. A New York Times piece on what appeared to be a coordinated effort to befriend and influence Supreme Court justices also caught our eye.

But the federal judiciary still struck us as a relatively under-scrutinized branch of our democracy. So late last year, we assigned Justin Elliott, Josh Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski to take a look. The team filed a raft of public information requests for records on courts across the country.

Early on, the ProPublica team decided to focus on the highest court in the land and began by scouring the annual disclosure forms filed by the justices. Research in some obscure corners of the internet brought to light evidence that Thomas had made at least one trip on Crow’s plane that had not been disclosed. As the team dug deeply over several months, the reporters amassed a detailed picture of what turned out to be decades of unreported trips the two had taken in the United States and overseas.

The weekend after that story appeared, a reader called one of the reporters to say Crow may have renovated Thomas’ mother’s house in Savannah, Georgia. A cursory search of online records showed that Thomas’ mother’s home had, in fact, been sold to a limited liability corporation that we quickly linked to Crow. The reporters flew to Savannah, collected public records from the appropriate local government offices and interviewed neighbors. Once we established that the justice had sold properties to Crow and confirmed Thomas had never disclosed the deal, we published.

Soon after that second piece appeared, the reporters turned to another tip that came in after the initial story published: that Crow had paid tuition for Mark Martin, Thomas’ grandnephew, who the justice had legal custody of and has said publicly he was raising as his own son.

The tip was that Crow had paid tuition at two private boarding schools. One of the schools had spent a period in bankruptcy, and the reporters reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings. They found a bank statement that showed Crow had paid a month’s tuition for Martin. A former administrator at the Georgia school who had access to school financial information told us in an on-the-record interview that Crow had paid a full year of tuition. He also said that Crow had told him that Crow also paid Martin’s tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia.

Crow has issued statements about his relationship with Thomas that we’ve included in our stories. He acknowledged that he’d extended “hospitality” to the Thomases, but he said that Thomas never asked for any of it and it was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.” He said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house to preserve it for posterity. And in response to questions about the tuition payments, his office said, “Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth.” He has not disputed any of the facts in our reporting.

The timing of the stories have prompted some to wonder if ProPublica had the information about the trips, the house and the school tuition in hand at the outset and spaced out publication to achieve maximum impact. We did not.

This story developed as much investigative journalism does — organically, with one finding leading to the next. Tips like those that pushed the Thomas story forward are essential to our reporting. It’s why ProPublica publishes the email addresses of its editorial staffers to help sources connect with us. (If you have a tip for our newsroom, we have details about how to get in touch.)

Our reporting on the courts continues, and we stand ready to look into questions about judges or justices of any ideological stripe.

The response to our investigation has been generally positive, with leading commentators on legal affairs using it to examine and explain why the nation’s highest court has no binding ethical code. As is always the case, our work also has its critics.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has also criticized the reporting on Thomas in a series of columns by James Taranto, its editorial features editor.

Boiled down, his argument is that Thomas was not required to disclose the tuition for Martin and his omission of the sale of his mother’s house from his forms was an innocuous mistake. The experts we quoted, Taranto and several other critics contend, simply got it wrong.

We understand that experts may hold differing points of view about complicated subjects. It’s why we reached out to ethics lawyers who had served in Republican and Democratic administrations. We specifically sought out attorneys with expertise on the Ethics in Government Act, the federal disclosure law that binds justices and many other federal officials. We also talked to retired and currently serving federal judges about how they would handle comparable situations. Their views are reflected in our stories.

Every ethics expert we have spoken with said Thomas was required by law to disclose the gifts or transactions that we’d found.

In his columns, Taranto has used an increasingly inaccurate shorthand to refer to our work. He began by saying we had committed a “sloppy reporting error” in our story about the real estate transaction. Later, he said we were “comically incompetent” and described our story on the real estate transaction as “error-filled.”

Despite his assertions, none of Taranto’s columns cited an error in our stories. We sent an email asking him to identify the multiple facts he believes we’ve gotten wrong. He sent back a link to his first column. When we replied that the piece did not cite a single factual misstatement from our story, he ghosted us.

Perhaps more importantly, we sent detailed questions to Thomas and invited him to explain his decisions. He declined to do so but issued a statement the day after the first story appeared that said he and his wife, Ginni, counted Harlan and Kathy Crow as “among our dearest friends.” Thomas said that early in his tenure on the court, he “sought guidance from my colleagues and others on the judiciary and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

The debate over that statement continues in Congress and in public. Neither Crow, Thomas nor anyone else has identified a factual error in any of the stories. Thomas has not responded to any of the questions we sent about each of our subsequent stories, and he has not commented in public since his initial statement.

by Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon

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On April 18, HomeVestors of America executives held a virtual meeting for its nearly 1,150 franchisees. The purpose: Alert local “We Buy Ugly Houses” operations about a forthcoming ProPublica investigation into their business tactics.

“It is not going to be flattering for us,” HomeVestors CEO David Hicks warned.

Our reporting found HomeVestors franchisees who used deception and targeted the elderly, infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling. The franchisees were trained by HomeVestors to look for signs of desperation and pounce on so-called distressed sellers. Many used legal tactics, described as predatory by five experts, to trap sellers in below-market deals.

A HomeVestors spokesperson said in a statement that ProPublica’s reporting examined a small fraction of the more than 71,400 homes bought by its franchises since 2016. "We do not discriminate or target our advertising to any specific demographic groups based on age, race, or socio-economic status,” the company said. It has removed several franchises and is investigating some cases identified by ProPublica to “determine appropriate action.”

After we first contacted the company in early March, a former FBI spokesperson who specializes in “crisis and special situations” and “reputation management” began answering questions on their behalf.

Hicks, through this spokesperson, declined requests for interviews. But during the virtual meeting — which ProPublica obtained a recording of — the CEO alternated between accusing the news organization of writing “attack articles” and praising the rigor of our investigation.

“It’s amazing what they have brought up,” he said.

In a slide titled “Public Relations,” Hicks outlined HomeVestors’ plan to drown out ProPublica’s story with “strategic ad buys on social and web pages” and “SEO content to minimize visibility” of the article.

He instructed franchisees not to click on ProPublica’s story link; doing so, he warned, might improve its internet search ranking.

“Our goal is to bury it,” he said.

The company did not respond to a ProPublica question about executives telling franchisees that they want to bury the story. But in a statement, HomeVestors wrote, “As a company, we embrace any opportunity to improve customer service and satisfaction. We used the meeting to reinforce our code of conduct and company tenets that emphasize the importance of doing the right thing for our sellers and our communities.”

During the same webinar, Hicks and other senior leaders announced new policies to end the very practices ProPublica’s investigation brought to light.

On April 11, HomeVestors updated its “Systems and Standards” to forbid franchises from clouding sellers’ titles, a maneuver that makes it difficult for homeowners to back out of a deal. The company discouraged franchisees from suing sellers for breach of contract. And it reiterated that buyers who deal with seniors should always involve family, attorneys or other guardians in the transaction.

Some franchise owners on the call pushed back on the changes, claiming they could hurt business. But HomeVestors general counsel Anthony Lowenberg was unequivocal: Those who regularly sue to enforce the sale of homes are “putting the entire system at risk,” he said.

“The juice is not worth the squeeze,” Hicks added, repeating a comment from a franchise owner in the call’s chat.

Maren Kasper, managing director at Bayview Asset Management, the investment management firm that bought HomeVestors in 2022, also spoke during the virtual meeting. Kasper said that ProPublica had uncovered two cases of improper behavior that HomeVestors had not known about. “Those franchises have since received default letters,” she said, referring to a formal notice that they are not in compliance with company policies.

In the course of our reporting, we sent the company questions that detailed our findings point by point. We issued similar letters to each franchise mentioned in the story. In all cases, we allowed ample time to respond.

During the webinar, Kasper acknowledged the depth and thoroughness of our investigation.

“They have scoured every corner of the internet,” she said. “They’ve done, you know, good reporting, I would say.” She predicted other inquiries might follow. “If the Department of Justice came knocking, and needed us to verify every answer that we provided to this reporter, we have all the data and materials to do so,” she said.

“This is going to make us a better company,” Hicks concluded. “Because overall, we're going to change some of our practices, and make sure we change our Systems and Standards to make sure that we have our franchise doing the right things.”

A few days after the webinar, HomeVestors sent its franchises an email unveiling a webpage to address and counter ProPublica’s story. Among the offerings: a copy of its corporate response, a list of talking points and the number for a “rapid response media hotline.” When a ProPublica reporter called the hotline, a company representative declined to answer questions or provide comment.

The email, signed by Hicks and HomeVestors COO Larry Goodman, also contained a warning for franchisees:

“Don’t get baited into arguments or ‘off the record’ conversations.”

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