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by Brittany Freeman, Rocky Mountain PBS

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

It was Christmastime in 2021, and Michael St. James didn’t feel much like celebrating.

From his top-floor condo overlooking Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, St. James said he spent much of his time in the final weeks of December trying to recover nearly $30,000 that had disappeared from the bank account of his condo’s homeowners association.

“Half of the board has checked out for the year. ... The bankers are about to go on vacation, too,” said St. James, who volunteers as the HOA’s board president. “Meanwhile, every day, I’m looking at the bank account, like, ‘What’s going on?’”

More than eight months later, the London House HOA said it still has not recovered its funds. The HOA realized its money was missing, St. James said, when he asked its management company if he could use the association’s bank card to pay for building expenses.

The company, Mastino Management, replied he should not use the card because the community’s account was restricted by the bank over “some fraud activity.” St. James said he followed up with the bank, which told him that Mastino had reportedly paid $29,996 out of the HOA’s funds to a “fraudster” after receiving a “compromised email” with an invoice requesting immediate payment.

The HOA said the transaction was so large it exceeded the balance of the association’s operating account, funded by monthly dues and other fees paid by owners of the building’s 65 units. Records gathered by the HOA show the bank reached out to Mastino several days after it processed the payment because the community’s account was overdrawn, and Mastino authorized the bank to take $20,000 out of the community’s reserves to cover the transaction. It was a payment so large that, under the community’s rules, the board would need to sign off on the expenditure and transactions, but the board told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica that Mastino never asked.

The board fired Mastino in February. St. James said the company has since refused to provide the HOA with its accounting records and has also yet to provide proof of the emailed invoice to the HOA. Mastino reported the incident to police in Aurora, where the company’s office is located, but an investigator closed the case after police said the company failed for months to provide bank statements for the transaction, despite repeated requests.

About two months after its funds disappeared, the board reached out to the office of Denver’s district attorney for advice. The office’s staff advised the board to file a complaint with the HOA office in the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA).

The board put together a detailed complaint, attaching the evidence it had gathered, and sent it to regulators. A few weeks later, it received an email reply it still struggles to understand: Like every other complaint received by the state HOA office this year, London House’s concerns could not be investigated. That’s because HOA managers, also known as “community association managers,” are no longer subject to any government oversight in Colorado.

“I feel like we have done every single thing we were supposed to do,” St. James said. “And yet we don’t seem to get any remedy for getting ripped off for $30,000.”

State records show the majority of Colorado’s 10,000-plus HOAs hire professional companies to handle their community’s day-to-day needs, delegating a great deal of responsibility — and power — to them. Management companies often have direct access to an association’s bank accounts, collect dues from homeowners, arrange for repairs and maintenance, and enforce the community’s rules by assessing fines and fees.

A review of complaints submitted this year to the state HOA office shows homeowners targeted their ire at management companies more often than the resident-run boards that make decisions for their communities. Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica obtained and reviewed 86 complaints submitted to the state HOA office through its online portal in the first half of the year and found more than 48% of them were directed at management companies. About a third were directed at boards, and 11% complained about both boards and management companies.

Michael St. James volunteers as the board president of the London House HOA. (Jeremy Moore/RMPBS)

The complainants alleged that management companies jeopardized the sale of their property, withheld association records from homeowners, held shadowy elections and didn’t provide explanations for large increases in dues. One homeowner submitted a link to a YouTube video showing a flooded yard, saying the management company was slow to respond to a water main break. One board had a complaint similar to London House’s: Once it fired its management company, the company was refusing to turn over the community’s records.

In a statement to Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica, Mastino said it made “several attempts” — through London House’s attorney — to return the HOA’s accounting records. But “no response was provided,” the company said.

Mastino also noted that it “was instructed” to let its bank handle providing documentation for the police investigation. Mastino did not answer questions about who had provided this instruction.

In its statement, Mastino also alleged that London House still owes the company payment for management services that it had provided.

The HOA said it cannot determine how much it may owe Mastino until it receives its accounting records. The HOA’s attorney said Mastino’s statement that it had made several attempts to return those records is “not accurate.”

When similar disputes arise with management companies, many residents, including board members, said they feel they have little recourse. Some residents said they have had to pay larger dues because of management companies’ mismanagement.

Watch the Rocky Mountain PBS Report

“Who is the department that is supposed to make sure that the law is followed, and if it is not, who investigates to see whether or not it was a misunderstanding or whether it’s someone materially breaching that law on purpose?” St. James said. “I’ll jump to the end of the story: There is nobody.”

Officials at the state HOA office, known formally as the HOA Information and Resource Center, said they are accustomed to hearing that kind of reaction.

“Some members of the public can say, ‘Well, then, why did I take the time to do this?’” said David Donnelly, Colorado’s HOA information officer. “I explain to them what we do with the statistical data that we collect, which is that we collect that into a report and provide it to the legislature so that the legislature can act if they deem appropriate. Which is important.”

But the legislature, and the governor, apparently have not deemed it appropriate. Proposals to regulate community association managers have failed to become law in two of the four previous legislative sessions.

Stan Hrincevich, who runs Colorado HOA Forum, an online resource for homeowners, said he hears concerns from homeowners almost daily. “We have nearly a $3 billion HOA industry with no oversight and plenty of abuse,” he said. “Something needs to be done one day.”

It Wasn’t Always This Way

In February 2018, a complaint came in to Colorado real estate regulators at the Department of Regulatory Agencies, saying that the manager of an HOA management company called ProActive Community Management was misappropriating money from HOAs.

The state sent the complaint to ProActive’s manager and asked her to respond. But she did not respond, state records show. Eventually, a state investigation revealed about two dozen unauthorized payments and transfers the manager had made from the funds of seven different HOAs.

The state revoked the manager’s license, effectively putting her out of business, and handed her an $11,500 fine.

ProActive and its manager could not be reached for comment.

That kind of discipline is no longer possible in Colorado. It happened during a four-year window in which the state had regulatory authority over community association managers. But the window closed in 2019 when Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a bill that would have extended a program that required anyone managing a community association to be licensed.

Under the expired law, in order to obtain a license, managers were required to take classes or obtain professional credentials, pass an exam, pass a criminal background check and pay a fee to the state. Managers were also required to meet continuing education requirements to maintain their licenses.

Rep. Brianna Titone, an Arvada Democrat, had proposed extending the program because of her experience serving as the president of her HOA board.

“It’s the first level of protection for me as a board member, and to the people in the community, to have a manager who really knows what they’re doing,” Titone said. “Now there’s more people getting into this business who don’t know the business and are not vetted in a way that would make it safe for them to be in a community. That’s what we were trying to prevent.”

The state said it received 1,319 complaints about the 1,638 community association managers who were licensed during the duration of the program. Regulators disciplined 98 managers in that time. Eight managers either had their licenses revoked or voluntarily surrendered them.

Polis’ veto came as a shock to many. One HOA attorney, Molly Foley-Healy, blogged that she saw “a significant decrease in basic management mistakes and oversights” during the period when managers were licensed and said the decision “set back the entire industry and important consumer protections.”

In a letter explaining his veto, Polis said, “The data we have reviewed does not demonstrate that regulating community association managers has had the intended effect of reducing harm to consumers,” and he argued that licensure requirements can create undue barriers to employment for Coloradans, as well as extra costs passed along to homeowners. He directed the Department of Regulatory Agencies to study whether licensure would protect consumers in the future.

A subsequent review conducted by the state recommended regulating the HOA management industry — echoing similar recommendations in two prior state reports examining HOA issues.

In response to the latest recommendations, Titone brought forward another proposal to revive licensure in the most recent legislative session. She tried to take what she thought would be a lower-cost approach by requiring companies, rather than individual managers, to be licensed. But the bill died in committee.

“This issue is a really, really tough issue,” Titone said. “There’s little appetite for change in the legislature because of the lobbying efforts.”

Rep. Brianna Titone proposed the extension of a program that required community association managers to be licensed. (Jeremy Moore/RMPBS)

The governor’s office said Polis “continues to support efforts to reduce the power of HOAs from oppressing homeowners,” and it noted that he signed significant legislation to limit foreclosures initiated by HOAs this year.

When asked if Polis would support future efforts to bring regulation back to the HOA management industry, the governor’s office responded with a statement, which reads in part:

“In the future, the Governor hopes more legislation comes to his desk that limits HOAs from preventing homeowners from making positive changes such as installing zero-scaping and turf, which would create a more sustainable water future for Colorado.”

Even those in the industry who opposed the governor’s 2019 veto said it would be difficult and costly to go back now.

“To ask [community association managers] and community association management companies to spend the funds and time necessary to retake these courses and related examinations for a new licensure program would be wrong,” Foley-Healy told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica. Instead, she said, boards should be asking prospective managers about the training and certification they have obtained.

At committee hearings for Titone’s latest proposal, opponents — who mainly represented the industry — argued that only a tiny percentage of licensed HOA property managers were disciplined during the window the state regulated them. They also said regulation would add costs for homeowners and is largely unnecessary, pointing to the relatively small numbers of complaints received annually by the state’s HOA office.

“Last year, [the state HOA office] reported a 28% reduction in complaints,” testified John Krueger of Associa, a national community association management company. “I’ve yet to see or hear any data or evidence that there is a significant problem with this profession in Colorado requiring this licensure program.”

Titone has taken to calling the HOA Information and Resource Center “the office of shoulder to cry on,” because it can’t do much more than listen to complaints and count them. She believes it’s unfair to draw conclusions about how many problems exist in HOAs from the numbers of complaints gathered by an office that cannot investigate or mediate the disputes. Many homeowners may not file complaints at all, she said, because they see it as a waste of time or they are unaware that the office exists.

“It’s hard to measure because nobody calls the office. Nobody cries on the shoulder. They don’t believe it does anything, because it doesn’t. ... The same sad song plays on and on,” Titone said.

The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies responded to London House’s complaint by saying that it could not investigate. (Obtained by ProPublica and RMPBS)

Donnelly said that, while his office does not have the authority to investigate complaints or intervene in disputes, it provides educational resources and carefully responds to people who come forward seeking help.

“I do provide a response to that individual, helping them by providing some resources or information that might help aid them in their next steps,” Donnelly said. “While I can be a shoulder to cry on, I don’t think that that’s me really doing my job very well if that’s all that I provide.”

Donnelly said he frequently has to explain to homeowners and board members that HOA law in Colorado is a civil matter — meaning enforcement of the law can require a homeowner to seek mediation or file a lawsuit.

“If a board is not doing what they should be doing, it would be incumbent on a homeowner to raise that through perhaps a small claims case or a county court or district court lawsuit, if that is appropriate,” Donnelly said.

Titone said litigation isn’t an option for everyone: “The only recourse that people have is to take people to court, and taking people to court is expensive. ... If you’re a private citizen or an HOA that just had $30,000 stolen from you, do you have the resources to fight this company?”

Homeowners Pay the Price

On a Tuesday night in August, about two dozen homeowners took seats on white folding chairs inside the clubhouse at the Traditions community in Aurora. The HOA board president took note of a larger-than-normal turnout for a monthly board meeting and noted that an update about the community’s former management company was last on the agenda. “That’s why a lot of you are here,” Ken Haldeman said.

The HOA’s social committee reported on a successful movie night and announced plans for a dog swimming event once the community pool closes for the season after Labor Day. The board discussed a plan to reduce vandalism at the clubhouse with security cameras and a proposal to add speed humps to some heavily trafficked neighborhood roads.

With all of its regular business out of the way, Haldeman turned to the topic he figured most of his neighbors had gathered to hear.

The Traditions Filings 1-7 Master Association, a sprawling master-planned community of more than 900 homes near Aurora’s expanding eastern edge, had filed a lawsuit against its former management company, Mastino, and its owner Kimberly Bacon. Haldeman read key passages from the lawsuit.

“$757,885.40 of Association funds that were supposed to be deposited into the Association’s accounts were, instead, deposited into Mastino’s bank account ... and not repaid to the Association,” Haldeman read. Neighbors shook their heads. “Dude!” one resident exclaimed upon hearing the dollar amount. Board members asked homeowners to refrain from posting on the matter on social media. The board declined to comment for this story.

“We’ve worked two years to get to this point,” Haldeman said.

Traditions, according to a police report, cut ties with Mastino in the summer of 2020 citing “increasing problems with them getting work completed.” The HOA said it discovered during the transition to new management that Mastino had failed to pay more than $150,000 in bills and left less money in the HOA’s bank account than the board expected. Faced with a financial crunch, homeowners are now paying about 28% more every month for their dues.

“The average homeowner in Traditions has lost faith in the process. They feel that the process has abandoned them by the inability to investigate or pursue the recovery of their funds,” Traditions attorney Brian Matise told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica, when approached about the lawsuit. He said the community has spent tens of thousands of dollars so far in an effort to recover its funds.

In a statement, Mastino said the company will soon file a response to the lawsuit, including a counterclaim against Traditions and third-party claims against the HOA’s bank, as well as “one other person who was in charge of the Traditions account.” The company said the record will “completely exonerate” Mastino and will include a letter from AppFolio, an HOA accounting software provider, which confirms that Mastino did not initiate the deposits of the funds to its account.

“This lawsuit arose from a despute [sic] in which the Traditions Board refused to pay their vendors and overspent beyond their ability to pay. One of the parties they have not paid includes Mastino,” the statement read, in part. Mastino “takes their direction from the Boards they work with. If they are refusing to pay bills, [Mastino] can’t pay them.”

Traditions filed its lawsuit after Aurora police closed the case. A police report shows a detective gathered voluminous accounting records and interviewed former Mastino employees. One former employee told police they had tried to report the company to regulators.

“I tried to contact the insurance, department of what’s it called? Regulatory. Yeah, I tried to contact them. I left a message, but I never [heard] back,” police quoted the former employee as saying.

The police report shows an Aurora detective interviewed Mastino owners Kimberly and Rick Bacon after an accountant hired by the HOA claimed more than $700,000 had been misappropriated. The owners, according to police, said deposits of some Traditions funds were “defaulted” into a Mastino account because of bank errors. The report said the Bacons produced documentation showing they had tried to correct the issue with both the bank and their software provider.

Ultimately, police decided to close the case after consulting with prosecutors. Police felt “they would not have been able to prove theft beyond a reasonable doubt after they completed their investigative work,” according to city of Aurora spokesperson Ryan Luby.

In a statement, Steve Fauver, a senior deputy district attorney with the 18th Judicial District, said his office “offered some suggestions regarding additional information that should be provided by the complainant and additional areas of investigation that would be necessary to accurately assess whether a theft may have occurred.”

Fauver added: “It’s important to note that while poor accounting practices or lack of transparency may be perceived as a red flag, it does not necessarily prove that a crime took place.”

Traditions and London House were not the only HOAs dissatisfied with Mastino. Two more disputes between the company and homeowners associations ended up in court last year.

In February 2021, the Villas at Meridian Village HOA sued the company claiming “a former employee of Mastino confidentially notified” their association that the company “had been misappropriating funds” and a forensic review of the HOA’s financials showed a shortfall of more than $80,000. In court filings, Mastino said there was no evidence the company stole any money and suggested the bank or software provider may have been responsible for the issues. Court records show the case was settled this year. In a statement to Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica, Mastino said, “The Villas lawsuit was settled via a settlement agreement that has a confidentiality provision in it.” The HOA’s current management company said its board would not be able to comment.

About two months after the Villas at Meridian Village filed its lawsuit, Mastino filed a case against the Fox Run at Centennial HOA. In the lawsuit, Mastino said it ended its contract with Fox Run after a board member lashed out at Kimberly Bacon at a board meeting. Two board members posted online reviews claiming the company failed to pay some of the HOA’s bills and complete repairs in a timely fashion, and Mastino claimed in its lawsuit the reviews were “false and defamatory.”

“Please help us share our negative experience with other potential communities, in order that they may not endure the same experience as our community did,” one of the reviews read.

Court records show the lawsuit was dismissed after a settlement was reached. Fox Run did not respond to requests for comment directed to its current management company.

“The lawsuit was the only way ... [to stop] the board members behavior [and] to force the social media sites to remove the content,” Mastino said in a statement. The reviews, however, are still visible on several sites.

About the patterns noted in the lawsuits and complaints, Mastino said it has been working with more than 20 “accounts” for three years or longer, indicating their bills are getting paid to their satisfaction.

“Numerous HOAs say [Mastino] doesn’t pay on time, but Mastino is not in full control of the payments,” the company said. “The Board authorizes the payments, and they are often the party that halts the efforts to pay.”

Mastino also said it changed its accounting practices in May 2021 and “no longer relies on in-house employees to perform accounting functions.” Instead, the company said, a third party does most of the accounting “to reduce the potential employee errors and add an extra layer of checks and balances.”

That change did not prevent the “spoofing incident” that left London House in a $30,000 hole.

In a statement, Mastino said the incident happened when someone faked an email and then accessed Mastino’s accounting software to release the payment “without going through a higher approval.”

For its part, the London House HOA’s board is reluctant to sue to recover the community’s funds, St. James said, knowing how expensive the endeavor could be. “It just doesn’t seem like there’s any recourse here,” he said.

Mastino, too, lamented the current lack of a regulatory system to mediate HOA disputes without litigation. The company said it held a license “without incident” during the period community association managers were licensed by the state.

“DORA provided a vested 3rd party to resolve disputes. Because they were familiar with complaints and different types of resolution, it presented a much better method for resolving these issues,” the company said.

In the current landscape, St. James said, he’s learned it’s important for homeowners and the boards they run to take more control.

“I think that HOAs for the longest time have handed over their bank accounts, have handed over their business,” he said. “That is a massive problem when it gets complicated.”

There was a similar sentiment at the most recent community meeting for the Traditions HOA.

Residents asked how they could feel confident about their current management company. Board members responded that when they changed management, they ensured that they could monitor the association’s bank accounts in real-time.

“Volunteers are going to have to do more work to serve on an HOA board. You’re going to have to be more involved,” St. James said. “Don’t believe your property management blindly.”

Colorado Homeowners: Do You Have Experience Dealing With an HOA? Help Us Investigate.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Kiah Collier and Maya Miller

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Elected officials in the Texas-Mexico border town of Laredo have begun taking steps to conduct air monitoring after a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation revealed that toxic pollution from an industrial facility has increased the cancer risk for about half of the city’s residents.

This month, the Laredo City Council approved $105,360 to purchase equipment and hire a full-time technician to oversee a new air monitoring program. The Webb County Commissioners Court also gave $35,000 to an environmental coalition as part of a larger effort to conduct air monitoring at the five schools that are closest to the plant.

Owned by Missouri-based Midwest Sterilization Corporation, the facility uses ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing chemical, to sterilize medical equipment. An unprecedented ProPublica and Tribune analysis of five years of industry self-reported emissions data found that the facility released enough ethylene oxide from 2014 to 2018 to elevate the estimated lifetime cancer risk for nearly 130,000 Laredoans, including more than 37,000 children. A company spokesperson said that the plant’s emissions are within legal limits.

“I’ve read all this literature, and this is some pretty nasty stuff,” Commissioner John C. Galo said before the Monday vote. “Even if they are in legal limits, if you’re exposed to that day in and day out, you know, say 300 days out of the year, there are a lot of people that are not tolerant to that.”

A written statement from Midwest said the company “takes its regulatory compliance seriously and expects to remain in compliance.” The statement says that the company uses ethylene oxide to provide critical medical sterilization services, calling the chemical an “important tool in protecting patient health.”

“Midwest is taking all steps necessary to ensure that patients across the nation and residents locally remain safe,” the statement read.

The company declined to answer questions about what those steps are.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this month listed Midwest’s Laredo plant, along with another facility the company owns in Missouri, among 23 high-risk commercial sterilizer facilities. The agency, which spent the past year analyzing emissions data from such facilities, announced plans to “engage and inform” nearby communities about the risks.

A community meeting is planned in Laredo on Sept. 15. The public meeting comes years after the EPA initially identified the Midwest plant as high-risk and directed its regional office to inform residents.

Last year, ProPublica and the Tribune contacted more than 100 Laredo residents to ask if they were aware of the risk posed by the plant. All but one said they didn’t even know the plant existed.

Upon learning of the public health risks posed by the Midwest plant from reporters, the city’s nonprofit environmental group, the Rio Grande International Study Center, spearheaded the creation of the Clean Air Laredo Coalition. The coalition’s membership includes the environmental group, concerned community members and elected officials. This month, the group began asking local governmental entities for money to conduct air monitoring at five school campuses closest to the plant, an initiative it says will cost roughly $115,000.

With the $35,000 approved by county commissioners, the group will begin taking air samples at Julia Bird Jones Muller Elementary School, which is less than 2 miles from the plant. The school is in an area that has an estimated elevated lifetime cancer risk of 1 in 3,700. That’s nearly three times higher than the maximum 1 in 10,000 risk level the EPA considers acceptable, making it the most at-risk school in Laredo and one of the most at-risk in the country.

The coalition plans to seek the remaining funding for the air monitoring effort from the Laredo City Council and the city’s two public school districts.

Two weeks ago, the board of trustees of Laredo’s United Independent School District voted unanimously to begin examining the cost of air monitoring at its schools, starting with Muller. While the school district did not allocate funding, board President Ramiro Veliz said in an interview that he believes there’s enough support among trustees to pay for air monitoring at one or more campuses.

City Council member Vanessa Perez, whose district includes the Midwest plant and who has been working closely with the coalition, said there’s been widespread interest in air monitoring since the community learned about the toxic air pollution from the facility.

“You could be sitting in your backyard and be breathing in ethylene oxide without knowing it,” Perez said of the odorless and invisible gas. With more air monitoring, she said, the chances of that happening again would plummet because officials would know for certain that there are unsafe levels of the chemical in the air and could take action.

An ethylene oxide sterilizer plant in the Chicago suburb of Willowbrook closed in September 2019 after EPA monitoring found that emissions levels at various sites were higher than what the agency considers safe. But air monitoring doesn’t always lead to such action. In Calvert City, Kentucky, ProPublica found that state and federal regulators did little to stop pollution despite air monitors registering high levels of a cancer-causing chemical for years.

Perez hopes her colleagues on the City Council will support providing funding to the coalition in addition to the steps the city has already taken to develop its own air monitoring program.

The details for the city’s program, including locations for air monitoring, are still being worked out but should be finalized sometime this fall, according to Dr. Richard Chamberlain, director of the city Health Department. Chamberlain said the city plans to hire someone to oversee the new air monitoring program when funding becomes available on Oct. 1.

“Air quality and water quality monitoring are essential to ensure good health of an individual and community,” he wrote in an email.

The Health Department submitted an application in March for the EPA’s Enhanced Air Quality Monitoring for Communities program in hopes of securing $400,262 to support its efforts. It has not yet heard back from the agency.

Chamberlain said the city will proceed with monitoring regardless of whether it receives funding from the EPA. He said if the city gets the money, some of it could go to support the coalition’s air monitoring efforts. While the initiatives are separate, he said the city plans to provide logistical support to the coalition and share data.

The program will monitor for not only ethylene oxide but a variety of other air pollutants, Chamberlain said.

Air monitoring efforts are pivotal, said Sara Montalvo Saldaña, who has been helping take care of her nephew, Juan Jose, or JJ, Nevares since he was first diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia in 2018. The cancer has been linked to ethylene oxide exposure. At the time, JJ was just one month shy of his sixth birthday and had been attending Julia Bird Jones Muller Elementary.

“It’s a blessing,” Saldaña said, expressing relief at learning that Muller is slated to receive air monitors.

JJ, who is looking forward to celebrating his upcoming 10th birthday, returned to Muller as a fourth grader this month. He is still undergoing chemotherapy at home every day and travels to The Children’s Hospital of San Antonio for more intensive treatment every six weeks. If all goes well, doctors expect that he may reach remission in May.

by Christine Willmsen, WBUR

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This story was produced in partnership with WBUR. WBUR’s investigations team is uncovering stories of abuse, fraud and wrongdoing across Boston, Massachusetts and New England. Get their latest reports in your inbox.

Both U.S. senators from Massachusetts criticized local bans on hiring outsiders as police chiefs, while the top federal law enforcement official in the state said that the restrictions may violate civil rights law.

U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said that requiring police chiefs to be hired from within their departments is “problematic” and “ridiculous.” Such rules may limit the diversity of the candidate pool, she said.

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., urged state and local officials to “address these pressing civil rights concerns” and lift “harmful policies that have only made it more difficult for women and people of color to take on leadership roles.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said that “excluding outside candidates from consideration for key public positions is not a good idea.” An ordinance in the Boston suburb of Revere “should be reexamined to ensure all qualified candidates, internal and external, get a fair shot in an inclusive hiring process,” she said.

Rollins, Markey and Warren were reacting to a recent WBUR and ProPublica investigation of the police chief in Revere and the circumstances that led to his selection. Revere and another suburb, Waltham, have had ordinances for more than two decades that ban hiring an outside candidate as chief.

Revere’s ordinance prevented Mayor Brian Arrigo from looking outside for candidates to clean up what he called the police department’s “toxic culture.” In 2020 he promoted David Callahan, who as a lieutenant had been accused of bullying and sexually harassing a patrolman and creating “an atmosphere of fear” in the department. Neither Callahan nor the other three candidates for the chief’s job — all white men — had scored in the top two ranges, “excellent” and “very good,” on a test measuring attributes such as decisiveness and leadership. The Revere chief oversees more than 100 officers and civilian employees.

Also in response to the WBUR/ProPublica investigation, Revere City Councilor Dan Rizzo this week proposed a public examination of the allegations against Callahan and what the mayor knew about them. The council voted to speak with the mayor in private.

Rollins said an ordinance like Revere’s may violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gives the U.S. Department of Justice the authority to initiate investigations into “practices that have the effect of discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin.” For example, the no-outsiders law could constitute discrimination if there were no officers of color inside the department who had sufficient rank or experience to be eligible for chief, or if the ordinance prevented a qualified external candidate of color from applying.

While declining to speak specifically about Revere, Rollins said, “If there were an ordinance that somebody told me directly precluded a city or a town from hiring qualified members of law enforcement that have language capacity, that are representative of certain communities, I’d want to work as hard as I could to remove that hurdle.”

Rollins recently led an investigation into patterns of police misconduct in another Massachusetts city, Springfield, where officers in the narcotics bureau failed to report instances of excessive force. Under a consent decree announced in April, the Springfield police agreed to improve internal investigations, as well as policies to prevent excessive use of force.

With police departments facing demands for reform nationwide, some experts say that one way to address problems such as racial discrimination, poor training or use of excessive force is to bring in an outsider. But Revere’s mayor, Arrigo, didn’t have that option. In 2017, he tried to change the ordinance so he could look at external candidates, but he was rebuffed by the city council.

“We absolutely welcome the help of [U.S. Attorney] Rachael Rollins to make these changes going forward,” Arrigo said in a statement to WBUR. “I have been and always will be in support of this change and am willing to work with anyone able to provide help and guidance. The work of improving a toxic police department culture cannot be done alone.”

U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said that rules like Revere’s that require hiring police chiefs from within are “ridiculous” and may limit the diversity of the candidate pool. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

It’s not known exactly how many cities and towns around the country are constrained to choose police chiefs who already work in the department. In New Jersey, state law requires most municipalities to choose a chief from the ranks. The city of Bakersfield, California, will hold a ballot referendum this November on whether to remove its insiders-only requirement. Bakersfield agreed to the referendum as part of a settlement with the California state Department of Justice, which had been investigating alleged civil rights abuses by city police officers. In 2020, after a sweeping overtime pay scam that implicated more than 45 troopers, the Massachusetts legislature dropped a requirement that the head of the state police be hired from within.

Police unions and local elected officials often support these insider-only ordinances to reward veterans of the force for their service and to keep political allies close. Brandon Buskey, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Criminal Law Reform Project in New York, said that these requirements should be abolished because they limit cities from finding the most qualified candidates for chief, but that unions are standing in the way.

“That’s a problem that really is national in scale because we see police unions and the lobbying effort of police groups being used to really thwart necessary reforms in so many jurisdictions,” he said.

Historically, in Revere, police unions have opposed eliminating the insider-only rule. Callahan had served almost three decades on the force when Arrigo chose him in July 2020. As a lieutenant, he had been recognized by the FBI for “exceptional assistance” in a public corruption investigation.

In 2017, a patrolman, Marc Birritteri, accused Callahan of repeated sexual harassment and “torment,” including calling him a “rapist” in front of fellow employees. The city found that Birritteri’s complaints were substantiated. Arrigo agreed that the city would pay the patrolman $65,000 and went along with Birritteri’s request for a special type of retirement for officers injured on duty, which could ultimately cost the city at least $750,000. Birritteri, who has been on paid leave for more than a year, promised not to disparage the city, the mayor or the police department.

Callahan has disputed Birritteri’s allegations. During an interview with WBUR and ProPublica on Aug. 4, he admitted that while he was a lieutenant he texted an image depicting the Virgin Mary superimposed on a vagina to a patrolman. He called it “a mistake” and said it would “never happen again.” He has also acknowledged that he didn’t properly investigate allegations that another senior officer had sex in multiple areas of the police station while on duty. Callahan declined to comment for this article.Arrigo has never disciplined Callahan, who has a five-year contract as chief at an annual salary of $192,000.

The mayor told WBUR in May that he would give the chief an “A” for his job performance. He said Callahan has stood up to the department’s culture as if he were an outsider.

Rizzo, the city councilor, criticized those comments, saying Arrigo is “complimenting a chief that’s got numerous allegations against him, none of which have been investigated and all of which he’s aware of. … It’s despicable.”

But Rizzo, who served as the city’s mayor until he lost his reelection bid to Arrigo, doesn’t want to change the ordinance. Opening the job to outsiders would be “basically saying, ‘Look, we have such a horrible police department that we can’t find one person that could be chief,’” he said. “I think that’s a slap in the face, quite honestly, to the men and women of the department.”

Arrigo said Rizzo had four years as mayor “to tackle the toxic culture at the Revere Police Department, but chose instead to ignore it.”

During Monday’s city council meeting, Rizzo introduced a motion calling for the mayor to publicly “appear before the City Council to discuss his knowledge of prior and/or current allegations of misconduct against the current Chief of Police and what actions and/or financial settlements have been made on behalf of the city as a result of these allegations.” Rizzo said he wanted an accounting and explanation of financial settlements with officers made since 2017.

However, other councilors were reluctant to publicly discuss the police department’s problems. The council unanimously voted to compel Arrigo to provide documents and meet with them, but only in a private, executive session. Rizzo said he supported the compromise because it was the only way to hold the mayor accountable.

Buskey, of the ACLU, said he’s concerned by the council’s decision to keep the information behind closed doors. At a minimum, he said, Revere should appoint an independent counsel and investigator to look into the police misconduct. He added that Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden or state Attorney General Maura Healey should investigate Revere’s hiring and disciplinary practices. Both declined to comment.Revere is a “very, very troubling situation,” Buskey said. It’s a “poster child for the need for independent oversight and control of the police function.”

Update, Aug. 26, 2022: This story has been updated to include comment from Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

by Jessica Lussenhop

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For nearly three decades, long before the fall of Roe v. Wade, the blond brick Building for Women in Duluth, Minnesota, has been a destination for patients traveling from other states to get an abortion. They have come from places where abortions were legal but clinics were scarce and from states where restrictive laws have narrowed windows of opportunity.

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For many residents of northern and central Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it was faster to head west toward the Minnesota border than to go southeast to clinics in Milwaukee, Green Bay or Madison. Over the years, thousands of pregnant people climbed the stairs of the Building for Women to get abortions at WE Health Clinic, on the second floor.

Treating travelers from other states is nothing new for WE Health or the other abortion providers around the state, but Minnesota’s role as a so-called abortion access island is. The state’s neighbors have either banned abortion, are poised to do so or have severely restricted the procedure.

Data kept by Minnesota shows that white people make up a larger share of those who travel from another state for an abortion than those who seek abortions in state, raising questions about whether certain groups — particularly people of color — will be able to make the trip.

The Building for Women is home to the WE Health Clinic. (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)

According to the state’s data, Minnesota residents seeking abortions are a fairly diverse group. From 2018 through 2021, on average, 31% of patients were Black, 9% were Hispanic, 8% were Asian and 2% were American Indian; an additional 6% were recorded as “other.” White patients accounted for 44%.

But among those coming from out of state, people of color made up a much smaller percentage on average of the patient population. White people made up 75% of out-of-state patients.

Experts say some of the disparity results from the fact that the states bordering Minnesota are predominantly white, particularly in the rural areas adjacent to the state. But this also describes Minnesota’s population. So at least some of the difference could be tied to access to transportation or money to travel.

“Minnesota is going to become a haven state, but for what percentage of people that actually need our services?” said Paulina Briggs, WE Health Clinic’s laboratory manager and patient educator. “That’s a huge thing.”

Paulina Briggs, WE Health Clinic’s laboratory manager and patient educator, said the facility was prepared for the estimated rise in out-of-state patients. (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)

When Roe was overturned in June, the small staff at WE Health Clinic was dismayed but not surprised. In fact, it was prepared to meet the estimated 10% to 25% increase in out-of-state patients.

“We’ve anticipated this for a long time,” Briggs said. “So it’s not like sudden news to us.”

While the clinicians in Duluth may have been prepared for the end of Roe, something much more unexpected happened 2 1/2 weeks later, when a district court judge delivered a surprise ruling that expanded abortion access in the state. Ruling in Doe v. Minnesota, the judge threw out measures that included a mandatory 24-hour waiting period before abortions, two-parent consent for minors and a requirement that physicians discuss medical risks and alternatives to abortion with patients. He also tossed out a requirement that only doctors were allowed to provide abortion care, including by telemedicine, and that after the first trimester, the care had to take place in a hospital.

In contrast to the tearful scenes that played out in many clinics after Roe fell, in Minnesota that Monday morning, abortion providers and their support staff celebrated. Laurie Casey, the executive director of WE Health, was behind her long, crowded desk, doing paperwork when she first got news.

“It’s like, ‘Oh my God, is this real?’” she said. “Something good happened?”

Briggs said: “I think I audibly cheered. Like: ‘Yeah. Hell yeah.’”

Laurie Casey, the executive director of WE Health. She and her staff celebrated a surprise ruling that expanded abortion access in the state. (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Minnesota case, which was filed in 2019, had expected to go to trial at the end of August. Instead, the judge granted abortion supporters a big victory, leaving intact two measures: a requirement that abortion providers collect and report data on their patients to the state, and a law that dictates the rules for disposing of fetal remains.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, whose office represented the state in the lawsuit, announced that he would not appeal the court’s decision. Ellison also pledged that he would not prosecute abortion-seekers from other states and wouldn’t cooperate with extradition orders from outside jurisdictions.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order making similar promises.

Both officials have made abortion access central tenets of their reelection campaigns.

In these early days of a post-Roe reality, it’s not yet clear who will need these protections, though the data can provide clues.

States track demographic data on abortion differently; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than two dozen publicly report the race and ethnicity of patients. Minnesota is the only access island state in the Midwest that releases those numbers; the state also separates that data into resident and nonresident figures.

Illinois is projected to accept far more out-of-state patients than Minnesota, but its health department does not release statistics about the race and ethnicity of abortion patients. Kansas allows abortion up to 22 weeks, protects the right to abortion in its Constitution and reports one of the highest rates of out-of-state patients in the country, at nearly 50% and second only to Washington, D.C. But Kansas’ state health department does not combine where patients are from with demographic data.

From 2008 to 2021, 13,256 patients who live outside Minnesota received abortion care there, an average of about 950 people a year, according to the state health department. Among that population, the racial and ethnic breakdown of patients has held fairly steady.

A number of factors play into the lack of diversity, said Asha Hassan, a graduate researcher at the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota.

“There’s the obvious one that might be coming to mind, which is the effects of the way structural racism and poverty are interwoven,” Hassan said.

The bridge between Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin, often crossed by out-of-state pregnant people seeking abortion care in Minnesota. (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)

Caitlin Knowles Myers, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont who studies the economics of abortion, added, “Obviously resources like ability to take time off, ability to get and pay for child care, etc., etc. — that obviously prevents poor women from making a trip.”

Then there is the cost of the procedure itself. In Minnesota, residents can use state medical assistance funds to pay for an abortion under certain circumstances; out-of-state residents cannot. According to Our Justice, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance for abortion care and travel to Minnesota, in-clinic abortion services can cost $400 to $2,000, depending on the gestational age of the pregnancy. A locally based telemedicine service and mobile clinic called Just the Pill charges $350 for abortion medication.

Shayla Walker, executive director of Our Justice, said her organization helps people work through the kinds of barriers to travel that pregnant people of color face every day. Undocumented patients, for instance, may not have a driver’s license or other form of identification, meaning that flying from states like Texas or Oklahoma is out of the question.

Of the out-of-state patients who come to Minnesota, residents from neighboring Wisconsin make up the vast majority. And like Minnesota and its neighboring states, Wisconsin is predominantly white: 80.4% of residents identified as such in the 2020 U.S. Census.

From 2008 to 2021, an average of 690 patients from Wisconsin received abortion care in Minnesota each year. The proportion of Wisconsinites has dropped over the years — in 2008, 80% of out-of-state abortion patients reported that they lived in Wisconsin, compared with 63% by 2021. Over that same period, South Dakota residents ticked up from 4% to 16%, and Iowa patients rose from 2% to 6%.

According to Myers, the lack of abortion providers in western and central Wisconsin likely drives the traffic across the border to Minnesota. These parts of the state are largely rural and mostly white. Wisconsin’s more diverse urban centers are concentrated in the southern and eastern parts of the state, much closer to the Illinois border.

“A lot of them are likely to end up heading south to the Chicago area,” Myers said. “The Chicago area also has a lot of providers and likely a lot of capacity. And the question for Minnesota is, if the Chicago area ends up unable to absorb an enormous influx of patients heading their way from all directions, then you would expect to see patients spilling over into Minneapolis.”

Leaders of the Options Fund, which provides financial help to pregnant people in rural central and western Wisconsin who are seeking abortions, said the majority of the money they provide is for care that takes place in Minnesota.

“Certainly it’s not that people of color don’t exist, of course,” said the group’s vice president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for her safety. “But I think generally, the more rural we get, the more white it’s going to be.”

Of course, the data from Minnesota is backward-looking, from years when abortion was still legal, though restricted or sometimes difficult to access, in surrounding states. There are certain to be shifts in where patients travel from, most obviously North Dakota, where the state’s lone abortion clinic moved from Fargo to its Minnesota sister city of Moorhead, just across the border. And as reproductive rights supporters across the country respond to the end of Roe, abortion funds have reported huge increases in their donations, which may bring travel and abortion care in Minnesota within the grasp of more low-income pregnant people and people of color.

The first week after the Doe v. Minnesota decision, WE Health Clinic’s patients felt the impact. Casey said she was able to tell a mother that her minor daughter could receive an abortion without the permission of her long-absent father or from a judge. Briggs was able to schedule a next-day abortion, which would have been illegal before the judge’s decision.

A medical abortion kit from WE Health Clinic includes mifepristone and misoprostol as well as a home pregnancy test, lip balm, candy and other items. (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)

At some point, a clinic worker went through intake folders and pulled out all the forms certifying that “state mandated information” had been provided to patients. They were fed into the office shredder.

Tossing out their scripts, canceling the physician phone calls 24 hours in advance, no longer going down to the county courthouse to ask judges to grant their minor patients special permission to have an abortion — all of this will save the WE Health Clinic workers hours every week.

Beyond that, the court ruling — which abortion opponents are seeking to have overturned — has the potential to increase the number of providers, as advanced clinicians like nurse practitioners and some classifications of midwives may now be able to get training, and eventually provide abortion care and telemedicine.

This pivotal moment for abortion care in Minnesota and the country at large comes at a moment of major transition for WE Health as well. Casey is looking at retirement in the coming year, which means much of the work of adapting the clinic to serve patients in a post-Roe world will fall to her staff, including Briggs.

Briggs started working at the clinic six years ago, when she was just 23. She wanted to do this work after receiving her own abortion at WE Health as a college student, an experience she found at once “nonchalant” and “empowering.”

She is troubled by the disparities in who might be able to make it across the borders and climb the stairs of the Building for Women, to receive the kind of life-changing care that she did. Just keeping the doors open does not mean the care will be equitable.

Haru Coryne contributed data analysis.

Correction

Aug. 26, 2022: This story originally misstated the age of Paulina Briggs when she started working at WE Health Clinic. She was 23, not 21.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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The western United States is, famously, in the grips of its worst megadrought in a millennium. The Colorado River, which supplies water to more than 40 million Americans and supports food production for the rest of the country, is in imminent peril. The levels in the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam and a fulcrum of the Colorado River basin, have dropped to around 25% of capacity. The Bureau of Reclamation, which governs lakes Mead and Powell and water distribution for the southern end of the river, has issued an ultimatum: The seven states that draw from the Colorado must find ways to cut their consumption — by as much as 40% — or the federal government will do it for them. Last week those states failed to agree on new conservation measures by deadline. Meanwhile, next door, California, which draws from the Colorado, faces its own additional crises, with snowpack and water levels in both its reservoirs and aquifers all experiencing a steady, historic and climate-driven decline. It’s a national emergency, but not a surprise, as scientists and leaders have been warning for a generation that warming plus overuse of water in a fast-growing West would lead those states to run out.

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I recently sat down with Jay Famiglietti, the executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, to talk about what comes next and what the public still doesn’t understand about water scarcity in the United States. Before moving to Canada, Famiglietti was a lead researcher at NASA’s water science program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and a member of the faculty at the University of California, Irvine. He pioneered the use of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites to peer into the earth’s mass and measure changes in its underground water supplies. The Colorado River crisis is urgent, Famiglietti said, but the hidden, underground water crisis is even worse. We talked about what U.S. leaders either won’t acknowledge or don’t understand and about how bad things are about to get.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the Colorado River because it’s in the news. The federal government has put some extraordinary numbers out there, suggesting water users cut between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water usage starting this year — roughly 40% of the entire river’s recent flow. How could that possibly happen?

It’s going to be really hard. We’re looking at drastically reduced food production and the migration of agriculture to other parts of the country and real limits on growth, especially in desert cities like Phoenix. My fear is that groundwater will, as usual, be left out of the discussion — groundwater is mostly unprotected, and it’s going to be a real shit show.

Remind us how that happens. States and farmers cut back on the Colorado River, and California and Arizona just start pumping all the water out of their aquifers?

Yeah. This started with the drought contingency plan [the 2018 legal agreement among the states on the Colorado River]. Arizona had to cut nearly 20% of its Colorado River water. To placate the farmers, the deal was that they would have free access to the groundwater. In fact, something like $20 million was allocated to help them dig more wells. So, it was just a direct transfer from surface water to groundwater. Right away, you could see that the groundwater depletion was accelerating. With this latest round, I’m afraid we’re just going to see more of that.

Some of that groundwater actually gets used to grow feed for cattle in the Middle East or China, right? There’s Saudi-owned agriculture firms planting alfalfa, which uses more water than just about anything, and it’s not for American food supply. Do I have that right?

There’s been other buyers from other countries coming in, buying up that land, land grabbing and grabbing the water rights. That’s happening in Arizona.

What about in California? Groundwater depletion has caused the earth to sink in on itself. Parts of the Central Valley are 28 feet lower today than they were a century ago.

California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014, which mandated an extraordinarily long time horizon: two years to form the Groundwater Sustainability Agencies and then five years for each GSA to come up with its sustainability plan. So that’s now: 2022. And then 20 years to come into sustainability. My fear is that the slow implementation will allow for too much groundwater depletion to happen. It’s sort of the same old, same old.

But could it work?

I don’t think we’re talking about sustainability. I think we’re talking about managed depletion. Because it’s impossible to keep growing the food that we grow in California. It’s agriculture that uses most of the groundwater. The math just isn’t there to have sustainable groundwater management. If you think of sustainability as input equals output — don’t withdraw more than is being replenished on an annual basis — that’s impossible in most of California.

Will we run out of water? Are we talking about 10 years or 100 years?

Yes. We are on target to. Parts of the Central Valley have already run out of water. Before SGMA, there were places in the southern part of the valley where I would say within 40 to 50 years we would run out or the water is so saline or so deep that it’s just too expensive to extract. SGMA may slow that down — or it may not. I don’t think the outlook is really good. Our own research is showing that groundwater depletion there has accelerated in the last three years.

Then what happens? What does California or Arizona look like after that?

It looks pretty dry. Even among water users, there’s an element that doesn’t understand that this is going to be the end for a lot of farming. Farmers are trying to be really efficient but also magically want the supply of water to be sustained.

We focus on the big cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, but it’s farms that use 80% of water. They grow crops that provide huge amounts of the winter fruits and vegetables and nuts for the entire country. Is there any way that farming in California and Arizona can continue even remotely close to how it is today?

I don’t think so. It has to drastically change. We’ll need wholesale conversion to efficient irrigation and different pricing structures so that water is better valued. We’ll need different crops that are bred to be more drought tolerant and more saline-water tolerant. And we’ll probably have a lot less production.

What does that mean for the country’s food supply?

This is the big question. I don’t want to be flippant, but people don’t understand the food-water nexus. Do we try to bring more water to the southern high plains, to Arizona, to California, because if the food system’s optimized, maybe that’s the cheapest thing to do? Or does agriculture move to where the water is? Does it migrate north and east? It’s not just food production. What about the workers? Transportation? If we were to move all of our agriculture to northern California, into Idaho, into North Dakota over the next decade, that’s a major upheaval for millions and millions of people who work in the ag industry.

It’s really interconnected, isn’t it? The nation essentially expanded West beginning in the 19th century in order to build a food system that could support East Coast growth. The Homestead Act, the expansion of the railroads, was partially to put a system in place to bring stock back to the meat houses in Chicago and to expand farming to supply the urban growth in the East.

I don’t think a lot of people really realize that, right? When I go to the grocery store in Saskatoon, my berries are coming from Watsonville, California. The lettuce is coming from Salinas, California.

Farmers in the West are fiercely independent. So, in California, Arizona, do they lose the ability to choose what to plant?

Right now, there’s freedom to plant whatever you want. But when we look out a few decades, if the water cannot be managed sustainably, I don’t actually know. At some point we will need discussions and interventions about what are the needs of the country? What kind of food? What do we need for our food security?

Let’s discuss California. Its governor, Gavin Newsom, has advanced a lot of progressive climate policies, but he replaced the water board leader, who pushed for groundwater management across the state, and last month the agency’s long-serving climate change manager resigned in protest of the state’s lax water conservation efforts. What does it mean if a liberal, climate-active governor can’t make the hard decisions? What does that say about the bigger picture?

There has been a drop off from the Jerry Brown administration to the Newsom administration. Water has taken a step lower in priority.

Is that a sign that these problems are intractable?

No. It’s a sign that it’s just not as high a priority. There are tough decisions to be made in California, and some of them won’t be popular. You can see the difference between someone like Brown, who was sort of end-of-career and just like, “Screw it, man, I’m just going to do this because it needs to be done,” and someone like Newsom, who clearly has aspirations for higher office and is making more of a political play. We’re not going to solve California’s water problem, but we could make it a lot more manageable for decades and decades and decades. (Newsom’s office has rejected the criticism and has said the governor is doing more than any other state to adapt to climate change. On Aug. 11 his administration announced new water recycling, storage and conservation measures.)

Water wars. It’s an idea that gets batted around a whole bunch. Once, negotiating water use more than a century ago, California and Arizona amassed armed state guard troops on opposite banks of the Colorado River. Is this hyperbole or reality for the future?

Well, it’s already happening. Florida and Georgia were in court as was Tennessee. There’s the dispute between Texas and New Mexico. Even within California they’re still arguing environment versus agriculture, farmers versus fish, north versus south. Sadly, we’re at a point in our history where people are not afraid to express their extreme points of view in ways that are violent. That’s the trajectory that we’re on. When you put those things together, especially in the southern half or the southwestern United States, I think it’s more of a tinderbox than it ever has been.

That’s hopeful.

You’re not going to get any hope out of me. The best you’re going to get out of me is we can manage our way through. I don’t think we’re going to really slow global change. We have to do what we’re doing because we’re talking about the future. But a certain number of degrees warming and a certain amount of sea level rise is already locked in, and all that’s happening in our lifetimes. The best you’re going to hear from me is that we need to do the best we can now to slow down the rates of warming that directly impacts the availability of water. We’re talking about the future of humanity. I think people don’t realize that we’re making those decisions now by our water policies and by our climate change policy.

When people think about water, they think of it as a Western problem, but there’s water shortages across the High Plains and into the South, too.

I don’t think most people understand that scarcity in many places is getting more pronounced. Nationally, let’s look at the positives: It’s a big country, and within its boundaries, we have enough water to be water secure and to be food secure and to do it in an environmentally sustainable way. A lot of countries don’t have that. That’s a positive, though we still have the same problems that everyone else has with increasing flooding and drought. What I really think we need is more attention to a national water policy and more attention to the food, water and energy nexus. Because those are things that are going to define how well we do as a country.

What would a national water policy look like?

It recognizes where people live, and it recognizes where we have water, and then it decides how we want to deal with that. Maybe it’s more like a national water/food policy. Moving water over long distances is not really feasible right now — it’s incredibly expensive. Does the government want to subsidize that? These are the kind of things that need to be discussed, because we’re on a collision course with reality — and the reality is those places where we grow food, where a lot of people live, are running out of water, and there are other parts of the country that have a lot of water. So that’s a national-level discussion that has to happen, because when you think about it, the food problem is a national problem. It’s not a California problem. It’s not a Southern, High Plains, Ogallala, Texas Panhandle problem. It’s a national problem. It needs a national solution.

Is this a climate czar? A new agency?

Something like that. We’re failing right now. We’re failing to have any vision for how that would happen. In Canada, we’re talking about a Canadian water agency and a national water policy. That could be something that we need in the United States — a national water agency to deal with these problems.

In the Inflation Reduction Act we finally have some legislation that will help cut emissions. There’s plenty of other talk about infrastructure and adaptation — seawalls and strengthening housing and building codes and all of those sorts of things. Where would you rank the priority of a national water policy?

It’s an absolute top priority. I like to say that water’s next, right after carbon. Water is the messenger that’s delivering the bad news about climate change to your city, to your front door.

We don’t usually mix concern over drought with concern over contamination, but there was a recent study about the presence of “forever” chemicals in rainfall and salt washing off the roads in Washington, D.C., and contaminating drinking water. Can these remain separate challenges in a hotter future?

It doesn’t get discussed much, but we’re seeing more and more the links between water quality and climate change. We’ve got water treatment facilities and sewers close to coasts. During drought, discharge of contaminants is less diluted. The water quality community and the water climate communities don’t really overlap. We’ve done a terrible job as stewards where water is concerned.

Globally, what do you want Americans to think about when they read this?

The United States is kind of a snapshot of what’s happening in the rest of the world. There’s no place we can run to. Things are happening really, really fast and in a very large scale. We as a society, as a country or as a global society are not responding with the urgency, with the pace and the scale that’s required. I am specifically talking about rapid changes that are happening with freshwater availability that most people don’t know about. The problems are often larger than one country. A lot of it is transboundary. And we’re just not moving fast enough.

News flash.

Around the world the water levels have just continued to drop. In the Middle East or India. In fact, they’re getting faster. It’s actually a steeper slope.

So, the Colorado River is the least of our worries.

Globally? It’s not even as bad as the others. Arizona doesn’t really show up as much compared to some of these places.

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by Anjeanette Damon

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 The Baltimore Banner and Reno Gazette Journal.

As Nevada lawmakers heard public comment last year on a bill to ban ghost guns and the parts used to make them, a resident of the rural town of Dayton called into the hearing to offer his opinion. The privately made firearms are virtually untraceable because they lack a serial number and can be easily purchased online and assembled by people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to legally buy a gun.

“I do not care if this bill passes or not,” said the man, who identified himself only as Loran Kelley. “I am just informing you that we, as Americans, just will not comply with it no matter what you do.”

What he didn’t mention to the committee is that he owns a company called Polymer80, one of the country’s most prolific manufacturers of ghost gun kits and parts. His vow to defy such regulations is as much about principle as profit, even as thousands of untraceable guns bearing the P80 stamp have turned up at crime scenes from Los Angeles to Baltimore.

According to court documents, the vast majority of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement nationwide are built from Polymer80 parts. That’s why Nevada lawmakers were debating the bill: Anti-gun violence advocates saw a unique opportunity to shut down the flow of ghost gun parts to the rest of the country by going after the source.

“You can say you can’t possess an unserialized gun, but you need to be able to go up the supply chain if you want to stop this problem,” said David Pucino, deputy chief counsel for Giffords Law Center, who helped draft the Nevada legislation.

Nevada’s effort came as big city mayors across the country were beginning to grapple with an increase in crimes committed with Polymer80 guns. A handful of states had passed legislation restricting ghost guns. Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles had sued Polymer80, claiming the company was selling a product that violated their local gun control laws. And an additional four cities had sued the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, seeking to compel the agency to require manufacturers like Polymer80 to put serial numbers on core ghost gun components.

Advocates viewed the Nevada law as a potentially more effective tactic than the patchwork of efforts brought to bear so far.

And it almost worked.

The Legislature passed Assembly Bill 286 on a party-line vote in May 2021. In seven months, when the new law took effect, Polymer80 would be out of the ghost gun kit-making business. At least in Nevada.

But thanks to a strategically chosen court venue in rural Nevada and with the help of the New York law firm Greenspoon Marder, Polymer80 won a decision vacating the section of law that would have halted its ghost gun business. While it is now illegal to assemble or possess a ghost gun in Nevada, it remains legal to possess and transport the components of a ghost gun.

As a result, the parts that some use to evade gun-control laws and others use to pursue their hobby of homemade gunmaking continue to flow from Polymer80 to the rest of the country.

Anti-gun violence advocates say their court defeat in Nevada underlines the weakness of a state-by-state approach to closing the ghost gun loophole. They also noted that the bipartisan federal gun bill signed into law in June in response to a spate of mass shootings does nothing to address the problem of ghost guns.

“The state level laws are really important but can only go so far,” Pucino said. “Really we need a federal solution.”

Kelley, who doesn’t trust the news media, rarely talks to reporters, despite his company’s increasingly high profile. But in an hourlong interview with ProPublica, Kelley described his remarks to lawmakers last year as “political grandstanding” and not a promise to break the ghost gun law. Still, it was a moment that portended Kelley’s victory in court.

“I was pointing out a simple fact, ‘You can do whatever you want, but it’s not going to work,’” Kelley said. “And I was proven to be right.”

But Polymer80’s victory in the Nevada court does not obviate the legal threat it faces elsewhere, including lawsuits from big-city mayors trying to stem gun violence on their streets and a pair of deputies ambushed in their patrol car by an assailant wielding a Polymer80 ghost gun.

It’s a position that Kelley both relishes and resents. If it were up to him, he said, he’d focus on building his business and looking after his 50 or so employees. But he doesn’t shy away from a fight over his principles.

“Polymer80 is on the front lines of protecting the Second Amendment rights of all Americans right now,” Kelley told ProPublica. “That’s not a brag. It’s just the reality because we’ve become the whipping boy for emotionally driven government policy.”

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, right. (Ulysses Muñoz/The Baltimore Banner)

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott is one of the city leaders who has sued Polymer80. The lawsuit is intended to hold the company accountable for the street violence perpetrated by people using Polymer80 kits to circumvent federal and state gun laws that require a background check to purchase a firearm and a license to own a handgun. Maryland law also prohibits the sale and manufacture of guns that aren’t included on the state’s handgun roster, which does not list those built with Polymer80 parts.

Scott said he first heard about ghost guns in 2018, when, as a City Council member, he was chair of the Public Safety Committee. That year, law enforcement confiscated nine unserialized firearms. Within three years, police were confiscating hundreds of the illegal weapons annually.

“Once they arrived, they became a huge problem for us,” Scott told ProPublica. “They’ve been used in shootings, robberies, carjackings, murder. We’re seeing them run the gamut.”

Baltimore police recently busted a ghost gun-making operation, arresting a man who had dozens of Polymer80 kits, Scott said. The man was a childhood friend of Scott’s.

But another incident made the issue even more personal for Scott. In January 2021, Dante Barksdale, an anti-violence activist beloved in Baltimore was shot nine times with a Polymer80 ghost gun. He died in the courtyard of an apartment building where he had a few weeks earlier delivered winter coats to families who live there.

“Dante was like a brother to me,” Scott said. “His death really impacts everything that I do in the realm of public safety. If he were here today — he’s probably in the room with me right now — he would say, ‘You gotta go after the gun companies, too.’”

The rise of ghost gun crimes on Baltimore’s streets coincides with the growth of Polymer80’s business.

Kelley founded Polymer80 in 2013 with his father, Loran Kelley Sr., and their business partner David Borges, who recently retired from the company. Kelley’s father died in January. Polymer80 got its start in Vacaville, California. But Nevada, with its low taxes and friendly regulatory environment, beckoned, and the company moved here a year later.

In 2016, Polymer80 became a licensed firearm manufacturer, allowing it to produce traditional firearms that comply with the Federal Gun Control Act. But the larger part of its business is the production of so-called unfinished frames, the lower part of a handgun, including the pistol grip and trigger guard, onto which the firing mechanism and related components are fitted. The company also makes unfinished receivers, the base component of a rifle, such as an AR-15.

Federal law requires completed frames and receivers to be stamped with serial numbers. To avoid that requirement, Polymer80 designed “unfinished” frames, which are about 80% complete. The frame and remaining components can easily be assembled into a functioning firearm. In 2015, Polymer80 began sending samples of its unfinished frames to the ATF, which agreed the part did not require a serial number.

“Our strategy always has been to be very open and candid with the ATF and the government,” Kelley said. “We’ve always been proactive with sending the ATF information on our products and we just operate above board.”

Business took off. Between January 2019 and October 2020, for example, Polymer80 shipped nearly 52,000 items to customers across the country, according to court documents.

But as Polymer80 grew, so did the number of privately assembled firearms police were recovering at crime scenes. Just as Baltimore experienced an increase in ghost gun recoveries starting in 2016, so too did Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Nationally, according to ATF published numbers, the number of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement jumped to 19,344 in 2021 from 1,758 in 2016. The vast majority of those guns were assembled with Polymer80 parts, according to court documents.

Ghost guns haven’t been involved in the latest high profile mass shootings, such as in Uvalde, Texas; Highland Park, Illinois; or Buffalo, New York, which each involved legally obtained AR-15-style weapons. But mayors in the cities that have either sued Polymer80 or asked the ATF to close its ghost gun loophole — Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York — argue they’re increasingly common in street violence. Ghost guns have been used in school shootings by teenagers too young to legally buy firearms in New Mexico, Arizona, Maryland and California. In 2020, two Los Angeles County deputies sitting in their patrol car were shot — one in the face, one in the arm — by a man with a ghost gun. Both survived but sustained grievous injuries. A lawsuit they filed against Polymer80 is pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court, as is the lawsuit filed by the city of Los Angeles on behalf of the people of California.

Although the ATF gave Polymer80 the go-ahead to sell unfinished frames without serial numbers, the company started to market a kit — called Buy, Build, Shoot — that included both the unfinished frame and other parts needed to quickly assemble a complete firearm. The ATF never gave Polymer80 explicit approval to sell these complete kits without complying with serial number and background check requirements.

Pucino, the deputy chief counsel for Giffords Law Center, said Polymer80 is exploiting loopholes to enable its customers to evade gun control laws, including age requirements for gun purchases.

“Their whole business model, which makes them different from, say, Glock, is they evade restrictions,” he said.

In late 2020, investigators with the ATF concluded that Polymer80’s kits likely violated the Federal Gun Control Act and launched a raid on the Dayton manufacturing plant in December 2020. According to the search warrant affidavit, investigators found evidence Polymer80 shipped gun parts to individuals whose criminal backgrounds prohibit them from owning firearms and to individuals in foreign countries. (Polymer80’s website previously said the company has “a strict policy against selling 80% lower receivers to persons known to us to be convicted felons or otherwise prohibited persons.” That language was recently removed.)

Polymer80's headquarters and manufacturing facility in Dayton, Nevada. (Jason Bean/Reno Gazette Journal)

Although the affidavit was made public, the federal court has resealed the case, meaning the results of the raid and any subsequent actions aren’t public. ATF spokesperson Ginger Colbrun said she couldn’t comment on the case because the investigation remains active.

Kelley wouldn’t comment on the specifics of the ATF investigation, but he pointed to the fact no one from his company has been arrested following the raid as an indication Polymer80 hasn’t broken the law.

“We are still talking to them about that,” he said. “We have a positive set of conversations going on.”

Kelley vehemently disagrees with the assertion his company tries to exploit loopholes, saying the company does nothing but comply with the law. He describes his customers as hobbyists and homemade-gun enthusiasts engaging in a centuries-old practice of building their own firearms.

“Polymer80 has always been a law-abiding company and always will be,” he said, noting it hasn’t sold any ghost gun parts to Nevadans since the 2021 law — which still prohibits possessing a complete ghost gun. “What’s going on is people in power realizing people have always had a right to do this and they don’t like it.”

Polymer80 wants to succeed through legal means, Kelley said. That wouldn’t be possible if all his customers were criminals.

“It would be a really, really stupid business model to cater specifically to criminals, and I would find such a practice to be deplorable,” he said.

It’s not hobbyists using Polymer80 guns on the streets of Baltimore, Scott said.

“That is the most ludicrous thing and ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Scott said. “Their business model explicitly targets purchasers seeking to evade law enforcement or who can’t obtain a gun from a licensed dealer.”

After the 2021 ghost gun law passed in Nevada, Polymer80 hired the New York City law firm Greenspoon Marder to file the lawsuit in Yerington, an onion farming town that’s the seat of the county that’s home to Polymer80. One of the firm’s managing partners, James McGuire, traveled to Yerington to argue before Judge John Schlegelmilch that the law was written so vaguely it would be impossible to enforce and would be ripe for abuse.

McGuire said in an email he no longer represents Polymer80 and referred questions to another lawyer at the firm, who didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In court, McGuire argued the law failed to define key terms such as “receiver” and “frame,” and used “murky and undefined terms” to explain what an “unfinished receiver” is. He also argued the law doesn’t specify when in the manufacturing process an unfinished receiver actually becomes a receiver.

During two hearings on the lawsuit, Schlegelmilch seemed to have little patience with the state’s argument that the law relies on industry-specific terms that are well understood by Polymer80. Instead the judge agreed with McGuire that the law didn’t adequately define an unfinished receiver. At one point he asked whether his 5-year-old’s rubber band gun could be considered an unfinished receiver simply because it looks like a gun.

“What if I’m at home, and I’m machining a piece of wood. OK? And my 5-year-old wants a rubber band gun. OK? So, I take that piece of wood, I turn it, I make it into — you know, I take a band saw, and I cut out what looks like a firearm. And I put a couple of sticks on it so that you can put a rubber band on it when you push it up. You’ve seen a rubber band gun before, right? So, is that mostly completed?”

“I mean, a rubber band gun’s not a firearm,” responded the state’s attorney, Greg Zunino. “I don't think you would ever be prosecuted under that scenario because you still have to have an intent to turn something into a firearm.”

Schlegelmilch ruled in favor of Polymer80 and enjoined the state from enforcing the section of the law that prohibited the possession and sale of unfinished frames and receivers. Schlegelmilch let stand the rest of the law, which Polymer80 didn’t challenge and prohibits the possession of a completed ghost gun.

The state has appealed Schlegelmilch’s ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court.

Schlegelmilch declined an interview request because the appeal is pending.

Kelley declined to comment on the decision to file the lawsuit on his home turf in Lyon County.

Other courts have ruled differently.

A similar lawsuit filed in federal court in Reno the same month was quickly tossed by a judge who decided the law “is a valid exercise of the government’s police power.”

“What happened here, with the state court being more successful for them, indicates politics and ideology within the judiciary,” Pucino said.

This month, a judge in Washington, D.C., found Polymer80 sold illegal firearms in the district and ordered it to pay $4 million in penalties.

The ATF is also seeking to impose a new rule that would require unfinished receivers and frames to include a serial number — one of the federal strategies that Pucino said would be more effective than a state-by-state approach. The new rule, seen as a way to close the ghost gun loophole, is set to take effect on Aug. 24, but it faces at least three lawsuits from the ghost gun industry seeking to block its implementation.

McGuire, the lawyer who represented Polymer80, authored a 27-page public comment submission on the new rule arguing, in part, that it’s impermissibly vague, the same argument that he used successfully to stop the Nevada law.

To some, there’s an easy solution: Polymer80 could stamp serial numbers on the unfinished frames and receivers they sell.

Kelley said putting a serial number on his products wouldn’t hurt his company. But using those numbers to require background checks is a “critical threat” to his business, which he said relies on a growing market of individuals who “value their Fourth Amendment rights” to privacy.

“There’s a problem when people’s right to privacy is infringed and a government agency is looking at what you bought whenever they want,” he said.

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by Emily Corwin for ProPublica

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Funded in part by the Abrams Nieman Fellowship for Local Investigative Journalism at Harvard University.

DeMond Bush was living in his friend’s basement in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2017 when he heard about a job that could help him get beyond his past. Since getting out of prison two years earlier, the 43-year-old had cycled through day labor and temp work but hadn’t been able to find anything steady. He’d spent more than two decades behind bars for a violent crime that he was charged with as a teenager. During that time, he’d done everything he could to prepare for a better life — earning several associate’s degrees, learning a trade and performing in nine Shakespeare plays. But the world outside didn’t seem to care.

So when the temp agency Express Employment Professionals offered him a “temp-to-hire” position at a warehouse run by Tennant Company, a cleaning products manufacturer, Bush couldn’t help but get his hopes up. Bush said Express wasn’t concerned by his record and told him that if he worked 90 days as a temp, he’d be considered for a job working directly for Tennant with higher wages, plus benefits and sick days.

“I’m thinking, ‘I’m going in and prove myself, work hard, they’ll judge me based off that,’” said Bush, who was born in New Jersey but occasionally slips into a Southern lilt.

His plan seemed to be working: Bush said his managers told him he was doing a good job and he’d likely get hired. That changed on his 90th day on the job, after Tennant ran a background check, Bush said. In an instant, Bush’s months of hard work vanished. When he showed up for work the next day, a company representative escorted him off the property.

“I was feeling like, man, you know, I put this effort into this thing,” Bush said. “And then here it was, something from 27 years ago, it’s still haunting me. It seems like I can’t get past it, no matter how hard I work or what effort I put into it.”

Yet to the federal government, this outcome was worthy of a reward. Bush’s temp work was more than enough to qualify Express for a tax credit worth up to $2,400.

After losing the job, Bush became homeless and was caught in Indiana, having crossed state lines without permission. That was a violation of his parole, and Bush returned to prison.

When Congress passed the Work Opportunity Tax Credit to encourage businesses to hire and retain marginalized workers, lawmakers made it clear that the credit should be used for permanent employment — not dead-end temp jobs like Bush’s.

Instead, the $2 billion program is now handing out hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies for the very jobs lawmakers wanted to avoid rewarding. ProPublica analyzed data from nine states’ WOTC applications and found that nearly a quarter of the jobs certified for the tax credit between 2018 and 2020 were with temp agencies. The numbers become even more striking when the analysis is limited to one eligible group — workers with felony records. Thirteen of the top 14 employers certified to get credits for those workers were temp agencies.

In addition, some of the credit’s biggest beneficiaries are temp agencies with long records of labor violations.

Express did not respond to multiple calls and emails. Tennant, which benefited from Bush’s work but wasn’t eligible for the credit because it wasn’t his direct employer, declined to comment.

Coming out of the welfare reform movement of the mid-1990s, the WOTC aimed to give groups like food stamp recipients, residents of high-poverty areas and formerly incarcerated people access to long-term employment. In exchange, companies could write off thousands of dollars from their taxes for each worker they hired.

But the program’s rules didn’t match that intent. To receive the minimum tax credit — worth 25% of a worker’s wages — a company need only employ a worker for 120 hours, or about three weeks of full-time work. Employers can get the maximum credit — 40% of a worker’s wage, up to $2,400 — after just 10 weeks. The criteria say nothing about type of employer or the quality of the job and don’t forbid companies with a history of workplace violations from participating.

In the absence of tighter rules, the WOTC has become a financial boon for large low-wage employers with high turnover, including Walmart, Dollar General and Amazon. Those three companies are the top recipients of the tax credit in ProPublica’s analysis.

Walmart and Dollar General did not respond to requests for comment. Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait said, “Like many other companies, we utilize the Work Opportunity Tax Credit and we believe it helps to break down barriers some may face when seeking employment and encourages a strong and diverse workforce.”

But few industries have benefited as much as temp agencies.

Corporate filings by publicly traded temp agencies reveal how big a windfall the tax credit has been. One company, Kelly Services, reported receiving tax credits, “primarily” WOTC, worth $164 million over 10 years, or 48% of its U.S. pre-tax earnings. TrueBlue, which owns the day-labor firm PeopleReady, reported receiving tax credits — also described as “primarily” WOTC — worth $114 million over the past 10 years, or 29% of its pre-tax income. The credits reduced TrueBlue’s federal income taxes by 69% and Kelly Services’ by 73%.

“Everybody’s winning except the formerly incarcerated person,” said Andrea C. James, executive director of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.

Taylor Winchell, a TrueBlue spokesperson, said the WOTC “addresses a compelling need,” and suggested temp jobs serve the program’s goals by giving workers the chance to learn skills and providing “a path to permanent employment.” Kelly Services declined to comment on its use of the tax credit.

The departments of Labor and the Treasury share responsibility for the WOTC, but neither agency collects much data on it, even as it diverts billions from public coffers. Studies published over the last two decades cast doubt on whether the tax credit has led to long-term jobs.

“One of the most shocking things I ever discovered was how short these jobs are,” said Sarah Hamersma, an economist at Syracuse University who found that the subsidized jobs had little or no effect on workers’ long-term employment.

“I used to tell people, ‘I’m just waiting for someone to call me to give my testimony,’ but nobody does,” she said. “My cynical view is this is a program that clearly benefits businesses and gets support among that contingent. And it looks like it benefits vulnerable workers. So it tends to get a lot of support.”

The American Staffing Association defended the industry’s use of the credits. “As hiring experts, staffing agencies can help individuals obtain job training and uncover talents, experiences, and skills that can help them put their best foot forward with future employers,” Toby Malara, vice president for government relations, said in a statement.

Labor Department spokesperson Monica Vereen said the law doesn’t allow it to deny WOTC certifications based on job type or an employer’s record of labor violations. However, she said, “the department welcomes the opportunity” to assist Congress in strengthening the program. Similarly, Treasury spokesperson Julia Krieger said, “While we would like WOTC to lead to lasting employment, the IRS is administering the statute as it was enacted by Congress.”

Today, the WOTC costs the federal government about $2 billion each year. That’s enough to provide free community college tuition for 512,820 people, and, after adjusting for inflation, it’s about eight times what Congress estimated the program would cost in 1996.

Back then, lawmakers made the tax credit temporary so that the government could fully assess its effectiveness before making it permanent. A formal review has yet to occur.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, co-sponsored legislation last year to make the tax credit permanent but voiced concern after learning of ProPublica’s findings. “These agencies could be scamming the system using American tax payer dollars,” he said in an email. “It’s unacceptable, and my office will be looking into this to ensure the WOTC program is doing what Congress intended it to do: supporting workers and helping them secure good, long-term employment opportunities.”

A Failed Program Resurrected

The origins of the WOTC can be traced to the mid-1970s, when the jobless rate for young Black workers seemed stuck near 40%. The Carter administration set out to tackle what it called the “structural unemployment” of marginalized workers with public works projects and job training programs. But lawmakers balked at the cost and decried public programs for leading to temporary and dead-end jobs. The private sector, one prominent Democratic senator said, was more likely to lead to “further advancement and to a permanent job.”

The Targeted Jobs Tax Credit, which would form the basis of the WOTC, became law in 1978.

It failed spectacularly.

In 1994, Labor Department auditors found that most of the subsidized jobs lasted less than a year and that 92% of participating workers would have been hired even without the credit. The inspector general testified that “for the most part, the only ones benefiting” from the program were employers and he called on Congress to end the program.

The next year, a labor historian concluded in a research paper that “interest groups distorted the credit into a windfall for businesses that hire large numbers of low wage workers” and spawned “a whole industry” of consultants who processed the tax credits for employers.

Another industry was also poised to benefit. Around the time that lawmakers were devising the tax credit, lobbyists for the staffing industry were convincing state legislators to deregulate employment agencies, which had long been associated with exploitation, said George Gonos, a former sociology professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam who has spent his career studying the temp industry. One way lobbyists did this was by making staffing agencies — not the clients to whom they sent workers — the “bona fide legal employers” of temp workers.

“Not only could the employers get people through temp staffing agencies with lower wages and without rights, but the temp agency could also collect subsidies on the side for everyone they placed,” Gonos said. “Man, what a racket.”

Kelly Services and two other staffing agencies helped found a lobbying group dedicated to preserving and expanding the tax credit. Within months of the credit’s expiration in 1994, Kelly Services and others began asking lawmakers to revive it.

They found their opportunity in welfare reform.

In 1995, lawmakers resurrected the tax credit under a new name: WOTC. As Congress planned to require welfare recipients to work to receive benefits, lawmakers hoped that a new version of the credit might drive demand for those workers.

One of the WOTC’s architects, Rep. Amo Houghton, R-N.Y., bemoaned how many people left welfare only to find temp work. “They move into a job and out of a job, into a job and out of job,” he said. The new credit, he told colleagues, would ensure people become permanent employees.

Rep. Amo Houghton, a New York Republican, championed the Work Opportunity Tax Credit with the goal of helping marginalized workers land permanent jobs. (Denis Paquin/AP)

But Congress tweaked the old program only slightly: Employers would now need to confirm that the job applicant was eligible for the program before hiring and would have to employ workers longer to receive the maximum credit. The minimum credit was still available after just three weeks.

Many of the old problems persisted. Echoing past criticism, the Government Accountability Office noted that the program mostly benefited billion-dollar corporations with a large number of low-skilled workers and high turnover. A 2001 report showed that only 17% of employees remained at their jobs long enough to earn more than $6,000. That report also included a survey in which a majority of participating employers said applicants’ eligibility had no effect on their chances of being hired.

Such warning signs have had little impact. In April, the White House featured the tax credit prominently in its “strategy to expand employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated persons.”

William Signer, who worked on tax issues for former Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., and now lobbies for the WOTC on behalf of payroll and tax credit processing firms, said the WOTC is beneficial “regardless of whether the first job results in permanent employment.”

Though Houghton died in 2020, Bob Van Wicklin, who was Houghton’s legislative director when WOTC passed, said of the subsidized workers that “Amo definitely would have intended for them to get a full-time job — not a temp job.”

Rangel, who championed the WOTC alongside Houghton, said in an interview that he’s proud of the tax incentive. But he acknowledged the program has shortcomings and said using the tax system to address economic hardship was a legislative compromise.

“The tax system should not be used for social benefits,” he said. “There should be permanent programs providing for the needs that people have.”

Sanctions and Subsidies

Temporary staffing agencies might seem like an odd fit for a program designed to incentivize permanent employment. By definition, temp agencies exist to provide short-term help. They typically pay workers directly and earn money by charging companies an average markup of 41% to cover workers’ compensation insurance, overhead and profits.

While some workers, like travel nurses, earn a premium in exchange for unpredictable assignments, blue-collar temps typically earn less than conventional employees and rarely receive paid days off, health insurance or retirement benefits.

To find people willing to put up with those conditions, temp agencies “need exploitable disposable labor,” said Gretchen Purser, a Syracuse University sociologist who worked at day-labor agencies as research for her dissertation. People with criminal records “experience a whole bunch of barriers in the labor market that lead them to these jobs as a last resort.”

Mario Alvarez, a former branch manager at a PeopleReady franchise near Boston, said most of his workers were homeless, struggled with addiction or had criminal records. He described constant pressure from PeopleReady to cut costs “any way possible.” “The unfortunate part is that our product are people, no matter how you slice it,” he said. “I’m not selling desks. I’m not selling TVs. I’m selling people’s hard work.”

Comparing temp agency safety records is difficult because when temp workers are hurt on the job, those injuries are often attributed to the company where they occurred, not to the temp agency employing the worker. That makes calculating injury rates nearly impossible. But records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration show that many of the temp agencies with the greatest number of severe injury reports in recent years are also among the companies that have benefited most from the tax credit, according to our data.

ProPublica requested WOTC data from all 50 states and received nearly 700,000 records from nine of them — Virginia, Arizona, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Colorado, Kentucky, Rhode Island and North Dakota — which together represent 14% of the U.S. population.

Of the 10 temp agencies approved for the most tax credits, seven firms — including Express, TrueBlue and Kelly Services — were also among the agencies with the most reports of severe injuries, according to the OSHA data. In addition, the three companies approved for the most credits for employing people with felony records — Express, EmployBridge and TrueBlue — have each been cited for dozens of serious safety violations and wage infractions in the past two decades.

“Companies use temp staffing agencies to distance themselves from their workers and to avoid accountability as an employer,” said Laura Padin, an attorney at the National Employment Law Project. “Because they can be fired from an assignment at a moment’s notice, it is very hard for workers to speak out and enforce their rights.”

Winchell of TrueBlue argued that it wasn’t fair to compare agencies using OSHA or wage data because it doesn’t account for differences in the number of workers each agency assigns or the types of work environments they send people to. “Each year, we connect approximately 615,000 people with essential work and place their safety and fair treatment above all else,” she said.

Kelly Services spokesperson Christian Taske also noted these gaps in the data. He said Kelly Services assesses companies’ work environments before sending them temps and sometimes assigns safety managers to sites. “The health and safety of our temporary and contract workers is an important priority for Kelly and host employers,” Taske said.

In 2013, ProPublica found that temp workers faced a significantly greater risk of getting injured on the job than regular employees and, in at least four states, were three times as likely to suffer amputations.

Since then, the Labor Department has recorded hundreds of severe injuries among temp workers and ordered staffing agencies to pay $20 million in unpaid wages. But while one part of the federal government sanctioned the companies, another provided them subsidies.

No temp firm had more employees certified for the WOTC in the states ProPublica analyzed than EmployBridge, which calls itself the nation’s largest industrial staffing firm. But according to federal lawsuits, the company has also failed to protect some workers from injuries and sexual harassment.

Dustin Petrey said in a lawsuit that he suffered a life-changing injury after EmployBridge subsidiary ResourceMFG failed to train him for work at a Tennessee plastics factory. In an interview, he said he was vacuuming debris from a hopper outside the plant in 2014 when a coworker flipped a switch inside. Before the 19-year-old could comprehend what had happened, an auger had severed his right arm. Petrey said he’d passed a simple safety test at the temp agency, but that he’d never received on-the-job training — or even heard of “lockout, tag-out,” a standard safety protocol for securing machinery.

Larissa Overfield said that during her 14 months with EmployBridge subsidiary EmploymentPlus in Kentucky, two coworkers at the auto parts factory where she worked repeatedly asked her for sex, according to an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint and federal lawsuit. She said the men touched intimate parts of her body and threw things on the floor and told her to pick them up. Eventually, Overfield told a temp agency supervisor what was happening. The next day, she said, she was fired. When Overfield asked for another placement, the agency told her it didn’t have any other work available. “They completely turned their backs on me,” she said.

EmployBridge declined to comment. The company denied Overfield’s allegations in court. She said she received a settlement and her case was dismissed. EmployBridge was dismissed from Petrey’s lawsuit because it was already paying him workers’ comp benefits for his injury. Malara of the American Staffing Association said health and safety are a priority. “Over the past eight years,” he said, “ASA and our members have worked with federal stakeholders to ensure the increased safety of temporary and contract workers.”

A common argument for temp agencies’ participation in the WOTC program is that temp jobs will act as stepping stones to permanent employment. But according to many economists, such outcomes are the exception. “There’s no evidence to support the idea that temp work is leading to lots of direct-hire jobs,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the early 2000s, Autor and economist Susan Houseman analyzed a trove of data on the employment outcomes of Detroit welfare recipients who had been assigned to either temp agency jobs or “direct-hire” jobs, meaning positions where workers are hired by the company they report to rather than through a temp agency. The researchers found that temp jobs failed to improve outcomes and may even have resulted in lower earnings in the long term. “These results cast doubt on whether the widespread use of temporary-help agencies by government programs is a sound public investment,” the economists concluded.

In studies published from 2003 to 2011, Hamersma of Syracuse found that jobs subsidized by the WOTC typically lasted only nine months and that temp jobs were even shorter. While she concluded the WOTC may boost welfare and food stamp recipients’ earnings initially, she said, “I didn’t find evidence it helped them get or keep jobs in the long run.”

One possible reason: Many companies rely on outside firms to process the credits, and managers at temp agencies and retailers told ProPublica they weren’t aware which workers were eligible when making hiring decisions.

That “actually makes it a terrible incentive, because nobody’s responding to it,” Autor said. It’s like hiring someone and then getting a notification from the IRS saying, “‘Oh, congratulations, he’s a felon. Here’s your 2,400 bucks.’”

Congress paid little attention to Hamersma’s research, but staffing agencies and tax credit processing companies succeeded in circulating papers heralding the credit among lawmakers. Two papers written by Peter Cappelli, a prominent business professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said the WOTC was “not a windfall” for employers and estimated the credits provide a substantial return on investment for taxpayers. What the industry representatives didn’t disclose was that the papers were unpublished and had been paid for by lobbyists.

Cappelli said the attorney who offered to pay for his research didn’t say who was funding it or what it would be used for. If he were to redo the report, Cappelli said, he would make some changes, but he stood by the reports on the whole. “The questions that we’re asking here are about estimating the value of WOTC,” he said. “These things are not so simple to do.”

In the decade since, Congress has voted to extend the tax credit four times.

Reinforcing Barriers

One of the main problems with the WOTC, its critics say, is that it doesn’t address the many forces that create barriers for marginalized workers.

DeMond Bush is exactly the kind of person the WOTC was designed to help. He survived abuse as a child, became homeless at 14 and started selling drugs as a teenager. Then in 1995, when he was 21, a jury convicted him of robbery, kidnapping and manslaughter. Another Black man had been convicted in the high-profile murder of a white librarian in Frankfort, Kentucky, and prosecutors argued that Bush had helped him. Witnesses said they’d seen the men together in the days following the killing, jailhouse informants testified that Bush confessed to them and — in the time before DNA testing — a hair found in the victim’s car was determined to match Bush’s hair using forensic methods now considered inaccurate.

When Bush got out of prison, he hoped that his carpentry credentials would help him land a construction job. But despite the WOTC, he couldn’t find permanent work for several years. He’s now working a union construction job that he landed with the help of someone he met through a reentry program. (Luke Sharrett, special to ProPublica)

Bush insists he was in another city when the crime occurred and maintains his innocence, noting that the primary suspect in the case, who initially alleged that Bush was involved, has since retracted his statement. And over the more than 21 years Bush spent in Kentucky prisons, he earned three associate’s degrees in arts, science and skilled trades, a diploma from a seminary and two certificates in carpentry from a community college. He hoped that, when he got out, the carpentry training might help him land a union job.

Instead, Bush found himself picking up union workers’ trash. A day-labor agency had sent him to a sports arena to clean up after a union event.

Each day, Bush spent hours waiting at the agency for a chance to earn $9 to $10 an hour performing manual labor. The seats smelled like urine, he recalled, and cold air blew in through a hole in the door where a doorknob should have been.

“Beggars can’t be choosy,” Bush said. “And they know that, right?”

After more than two decades behind bars, Bush said he needed a lot more than a job. He needed housing, mental health services and time to adjust. But all he had access to were temp jobs. “You got to eat immediately,” he said. “I didn’t feel like there were any other options for me.”

Workers with criminal records who spoke with ProPublica listed dozens of reasons that temp jobs were their first and often only jobs after leaving prison. While failed background checks and the need for food and rent were common themes, longstanding criminal justice policies were often equally powerful factors.

Workers required to live at halfway houses said strict curfews ruled out the night shift at nearby factories and warehouses — often the only decent-paying direct-hire jobs available to them.

For most workers, employment was a condition of their parole. One parole office in New Hampshire provided ProPublica with a list of employers it gives to people. The first nine employers were temp agencies.

Workers also described owing court fines, parole fees or restitution. Some said the disruption caused by midweek parole meetings cost them jobs with conventional employers.

The rules governing federal grants to organizations that serve formerly incarcerated people also promote temp work. To receive federal grants for employment services, reentry nonprofits must show high job-placement rates. Because they needn’t specify whether those jobs are permanent positions or if they include benefits, some advocates say, nonprofits rely on temp agencies to keep their numbers up.

The U.S. Employment Service, a federal program that provides assistance to job seekers at centers across the country, once prohibited counselors from referring workers to employment agencies. But today its website tells people with felony records that “employment agencies can be a good path to a job” and recommends that applicants print out a brochure about the WOTC to present to employers.

Temp agencies, meanwhile, sometimes deter their client companies from hiring workers directly, charging penalty fees if companies want to bring someone on before their contract ends — and sometimes for up to a year after the contract expires.

For Courtney Decker, a 30-year-old Louisville resident whose battle with addiction led to stints behind bars, there was yet another reason she felt she had no choice but to take temp work. Because her mother had custody of Decker’s daughter, Decker owed child support. In Kentucky, missing just a few months of payments is a jailable offense. “If I did not pay my child support, I would have ended up getting locked up again,” she said.

Courtney Decker said she worked a series of temp jobs, never landing a permanent job despite promises that she would be hired. (William DeShazer, special to ProPublica)

As a child, Decker had wanted to be a police officer, like the one who let her pick out candy from the trunk of the cruiser he parked in her neighborhood. She was a junior ROTC cadet in high school and planned to join the Army. She dreamed of a career helping people and an income that would provide more than the instant ramen noodles with chopped hot dogs she and her four younger siblings ate while their single mom was at work.

Instead, Decker spent her 20s bouncing between prison and short-term jobs, grabbing hold of sobriety and then turning back to drugs and alcohol. Decker longed for a stable, full-time job — something that would allow her to pay for her own apartment and help support her young daughter.

Instead, Decker said, she woke up each morning on a friend’s couch, laced up her steel-toe boots and made her way in the predawn darkness to the same day-labor agency Bush had used. “You’d have to get there at like 4 in the morning,” she said. “If you was late, you didn’t get assigned anywhere.”

But none of the temp jobs led to lasting employment. Once, Decker said, a temp agency sent her to a nearby warehouse with the promise of a permanent job and benefits after 90 days. But the job ended the same way Bush’s did. After two months, Decker said, the company ran a background check and told her she could stay on as a temp but couldn’t become a permanent employee.

Soon after, Decker relapsed, her probation was revoked and she returned to prison. Despite the outcome, the temp agency was still eligible to collect tax credits for Decker’s work.

“It doesn’t make sense that they’re getting this tax credit and it’s not going towards full-time employment,” she said.

More Than “Worker Bees”

Bush and Decker had little in common before leaving prison. Yet after they were released, their journeys were remarkably similar. Both were attracted by temp agencies’ promises of permanent employment only to have their hopes dashed. Both draw a direct line between that disappointment and their return to prison. And both credit a nonprofit — not the private sector — with giving them a second chance.

After Bush left prison at the end of 2019, he vowed he’d never go back to a temp agency. This time, he found his way to a reentry services program run by Goodwill Industries of Kentucky. Bush enrolled in a class there, then landed a full-time job with the nonprofit, coaching men and women like him. “It drastically changed my life,” he said. It gave him newfound confidence and, eventually, a contact he made through Goodwill helped him get union construction work, earning more than $20 an hour.

Bush said it was a nonprofit, not temp agencies, that first offered him stable employment. (Luke Sharrett, special to ProPublica)

Likewise, Decker’s path after prison led her to Goodwill, which helped her find sober housing and gave her bus vouchers. Then, a career coach connected her with a full-time job directing traffic around construction. She stayed in that job for two years. The work was dependable and paid enough for Decker to move into her own apartment and start thinking about what she really wanted in a career: to help people like her. She applied for a job as a peer-support specialist at Goodwill.

Decker said Goodwill’s program is effective because the only roles that it considers to be acceptable placements are direct-hire jobs with benefits, an unusual policy among similar providers. If taxpayers are going to subsidize jobs for people like her, Decker said, these are the standards that employers receiving the WOTC should have to meet.

Labor advocates argue the same. “I think we need to restructure the WOTC so that we’re not just giving employers a subsidy for providing a job, no matter how low-quality that job is,” said Padin of the National Employment Law Project. She suggested increasing the minimum tenure from three weeks to a year, creating a wage floor greater than the federal minimum wage and requiring employers to provide training or opportunities for advancement to receive the subsidy.

Others say policymakers’ emphasis on immediate employment after prison is part of the problem.

If lawmakers want evidence-based programs with a good return on investment, said Autor, they should try six-to-12-month vocational training programs. But unlike tax credits, he warned, “the upfront costs are very substantial.”

Decker plays with her two youngest daughters in their backyard. (William DeShazer, special to ProPublica)

James of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls said people need resources after the “massive disruption, economic disruption and familial disruption” of incarceration. Her organization is in the second year of a project providing $500 a month, no strings attached, to women transitioning home from prison. James said recipients have used the funds for groceries, rent, gas and, in one case, graduation clothes for a grandson. While James’ program hasn’t produced data yet, studies show similar programs reduce crime rates, increase employment and improve mental health outcomes.

On a recent Saturday, Bush sat at a picnic table in Louisville’s Central Park, leaned into the summer sun and described the future he imagines for himself. In the evenings over the last year, Bush has been working toward a master’s degree in social work at a local university. Someday, he said, he hopes to use those skills to start his own nonprofit.

The way Bush sees it, most reentry programs, including WOTC, do little more than teach people leaving prison to become “worker bees,” prepared for little else but low-wage labor. Instead, Bush wants to help them envision the future they want, cope with their transition home and develop the skills and community they need to succeed. If given a chance, formerly incarcerated people like him can build rewarding careers and become community leaders, Bush said. “We have it in us to do it.”

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by Andrew Perez, The Lever, and Andy Kroll and Justin Elliott, ProPublica

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This story was co-published with The Lever.

An elderly, ultra-secretive Chicago businessman has given the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history — worth $1.6 billion — and the recipient is one of the prime architects of conservatives’ efforts to reshape the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court.

Through a series of opaque transactions over the past two years, Barre Seid, a 90-year-old manufacturing magnate, gave the massive sum to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the conservative legal group the Federalist Society.

The donation was first reported by The New York Times on Monday. The Lever and ProPublica confirmed the information from documents received independently by the news organizations.

Our reporting sheds additional light on how the two men, one a judicial kingmaker and the other a mysterious but prolific donor to conservative causes, came together to create a political war chest that will likely supercharge efforts to further shift American politics to the right.

As President Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations, Leo helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which recently eliminated Constitutional protections for abortion rights and has made a series of sweeping pro-business decisions. Leo, a conservative Catholic, has both helped select judges to nominate to the Supreme Court and directed multimillion dollar media campaigns to confirm them.

Leo derives immense political power through his ability to raise huge sums of money and distribute those funds throughout the conservative movement to influence elections, judicial appointments and policy battles. Yet the biggest funders of Leo’s operation have long been a mystery.

Seid, who led the surge protector and data-center equipment maker Tripp Lite for more than half a century, has been almost unknown outside a small circle of political and cultural recipients. The gift immediately vaults him into the ranks of major funders like the Koch brothers and George Soros.

In practical terms, there are few limitations on how Leo’s new group, the Marble Freedom Trust, can spend the enormous donation. The structure of the donation allowed Seid to avoid as much as $400 million in taxes. Thus, he maximized the amount of money at Leo’s disposal.

Now, Leo, 56, is positioned to finance his already sprawling network with one of the largest pools of political capital in American history. Seid has left his legacy to Leo.

“To my knowledge, it is entirely without precedent for a political operative to be given control of such an astonishing amount of money,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer at the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented. “Leonard Leo is already incredibly powerful, and now he is going to have over a billion dollars at his disposal to continue upending our country’s institutions.”

In a statement to the Times, Leo said it was “high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals.” Leo and representatives for Seid did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Marble Freedom Trust is a so-called dark money group that is not required to publicly disclose its donors. It has wide latitude to spend directly on elections as well as on ideological projects such as funding issue-advocacy groups, think tanks, universities, religious institutions and organizing efforts.

In an unusual maneuver, Leonard Leo was added as an officer to Barre Seid’s company. Seid left the company’s board, and his name was crossed out in state corporate disclosure filings. (Illinois Office of the Secretary of State)

The creators of the Marble Freedom Trust shrouded their project in secrecy for more than two years.

The group’s name does not appear in any public database of business, tax or securities records. The Marble Freedom Trust is organized for legal purposes as a trust, rather than as a corporation. That means it did not have to publicly disclose basic details like its name, directors and address.

The trust was formed in Utah. Its address is a house in North Salt Lake owned by Tyler Green, a lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Green is listed in the trust’s tax return as an administrative trustee. The donation does not appear to violate any laws.

Seid’s $1.6 billion donation is a landmark in the era of deregulated political spending ushered in by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. That case, along with subsequent changes and weak federal oversight, empowered a tiny group of the super rich in both parties to fund groups that can spend unlimited sums to support candidates and political causes. In the last decade, donations in the millions and sometimes tens of millions of dollars have become common.

Individuals could give unlimited amounts of money to nonprofit groups prior to Citizens United, but the decision allowed those nonprofits to more directly influence elections. A handful of billionaires such as the Koch family and Soros have spent billions to achieve epochal political influence by bankrolling networks of nonprofits.

Even in this money-drenched world, Seid’s $1.6 billion gift exceeds all publicly known one-time donations to a politically oriented group.

The Silent Donor

One day in November 2015, the employees of Tripp Lite, a manufacturer of power strips and other electrical equipment, gathered for a celebration at the company’s headquarters on the South Side of Chicago. Cupcakes frosted in blue and white spelled out the numbers “56.” An easel held up a sign hailing Tripp Lite’s longtime leader: “Congratulations Barre!”

A small, balding man with a white goatee and a ruddy complexion took the microphone. Barre Seid was known as someone who preferred to keep a low profile, but on the 56th anniversary of his leadership of Tripp Lite, he couldn’t resist the chance to address his employees. Later, as he bit into a cupcake, Seid posed for a company photographer, who later uploaded the photo to the company’s Facebook page.

Even this semipublic glimpse of Seid was rare.

For several decades, a select group of political activists, academics and fundraisers was ushered to Tripp Lite headquarters to pitch Seid at his office. Despite his status as one of the country’s most prolific funders of conservative causes, and despite his decades as the president and sole owner of one of the country’s most successful electronics makers, Seid has spent most of his 90 years painstakingly guarding his privacy.

There are no art galleries, opera companies, or theaters or university buildings emblazoned with his name in his hometown of Chicago. There’s even some confusion over how to pronounce his last name. (People who’ve dealt with him say it’s “side.”)

The Lever and ProPublica pieced together the details of his life and his motivations for his extensive donations through interviews, court records and other documents obtained through public-records requests.

One of the only photos of Seid that The Lever and ProPublica could find shows him as a 14-year-old walking in a small group across a college campus. Born in 1932 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Seid grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the oldest of two brothers, according to Census records. A precocious child, he was chosen for a special bachelor’s degree program at the University of Chicago, not far from his childhood home.

Seid attended the University of Chicago in the early years of the “Chicago school,” a group of professors and researchers who would reimagine the field of economics, assailing massive government interventions in the economy and emphasizing the importance of human liberty and free markets. After college, Seid served two years in the Army and eventually returned home to Chicago, according to testimony given decades later in a court case. He took a job as an assistant to an investor and businessman named Graham Trippe, whose company made headlights and would produce the rotating warning lights used by police cars, tow trucks and other emergency response vehicles.

By the mid-1960s, Seid had taken over as Trippe Manufacturing’s president. In the decades to come, the company, now called Tripp Lite, became a pick-and-shovel business of the digital gold rush. The company sells the power strips that supply electricity to computers and the server racks, cooling equipment and network switches that make data centers run. Business surged with the shift to cloud computing and the proliferation of vast data centers.

That boom vaulted him from the ranks of merely rich to the superrich. Seid was making around $30 million per year by the mid-1990s, tax records obtained by ProPublica show. His annual income, the vast majority of which came from Tripp Lite’s profits, took off in the mid-2000s and steadily rose, hitting around $157 million in 2018. Tripp Lite, which was 100% owned by Seid, contributed $136 million to his total income that year.

Even as Seid built a billion-plus dollar business, he drew scant public attention; Forbes never put him on its list of the wealthiest Americans, and business and political press rarely mentioned him.

Yet he was becoming a major donor. He gave at least $775 million in charitable donations between 1996 and 2018, a period in which he reported $1.7 billion in income, according to his tax records. Seid parceled out a small portion of those donations to Chicago-area universities, religious organizations, medical research and dozens of civic-focused groups.

While Seid has never spoken to the press about his ideology, evidence of his worldview has emerged here and there. His family foundation has supported the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, named after two of the Chicago school’s intellectual leaders, Gary Becker and Milton Friedman. He has also donated to the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit that has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric and misleading tactics to undermine climate science.

Seid appeared to be the donor (listed as “Barry Seid”) who gave $17 million to fund the distribution during the 2008 presidential campaign of millions of copies of a DVD of the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West.” The DVDs, which were sent specifically to households in presidential election battleground states, were criticized as virulently anti-Muslim.

Seid’s personality can be glimpsed in exchanges with George Mason University officials from the late 2000s to mid-2010s that came out in response to a public-records request by the activist group UnKoch My Campus. In the emails, Seid comes across as an intellectually probing figure, asking the dean of the law school to respond to news stories about the value of a law-school degree or the workings of higher education’s accreditation system. Seid drily addressed several administrators for the university, whose law school and economics department are known for their alignment with conservative, free-market principles, as “Fellow Members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.”

Seid appears to have continually sought new vehicles for dispensing his money and maintaining as much anonymity as possible. The GMU emails also show a redacted donor — who activists believed to be Seid based on other unredacted materials — routing donations to the school through DonorsTrust or the Donors Capital Fund, two donor-advised funds that provide an additional level of anonymity.

While the roots of Seid and Leo’s professional relationship aren’t clear, the two worked together at a small foundation Seid formed in 2009 called the Chicago Freedom Trust, a charity that gave out small grants to nonpolitical groups. Leo later joined the foundation’s board.

The GMU emails provide an inkling of the relationship between the two men. In early 2016, Seid emailed the dean of GMU’s law school and the head of a prominent American Jewish organization to urge them to work together. The dean, Henry Butler, forwarded Seid’s message to Leo seeking to better understand Seid’s intentions.

“Do you have any insight?” Butler wrote.

“I do not, but will find out,” Leo replied.

The Money

Billionaires tend to craft intricate estate plans to pass the family business to the next generation, fortified from taxation and protective of their vision. The apparently childless Seid didn’t have that option, but starting in April 2020, he set in motion a plan to make sure his fortune would go toward his favored causes.

That month, the Marble Freedom Trust was created, and Seid subsequently transferred his 100% ownership stake in Tripp Lite to the trust, according to the documents reviewed by The Lever and ProPublica.

In February 2021, Tripp Lite filed its annual reports with the state of Illinois as it had done for decades. But this time, Seid’s typewritten name had been crossed out as an officer of the company. Added as an officer, written in by hand, was Leonard Leo.

A Tripp Lite subsidiary in Nova Scotia, Canada, similarly removed Seid as a director and added Leo as a director in March 2021, according to disclosure filings.

Then, later that same month, Eaton Corporation, a large publicly traded company, acquired Tripp Lite for $1.65 billion.

The transactions appear to have been carefully sequenced to reap massive tax savings. Selling a company that has grown in value after decades of ownership is treated the same way for tax purposes as a person selling a share of stock. If the property has grown in value, capital gains taxes are due when it is sold.

But Seid transferred Tripp Lite to the Marble Freedom Trust, a nonprofit that is exempt from income tax, before the electronics company was sold. As a result, lawyers say, Seid avoided up to $400 million in state and federal income tax, preserving those funds for Leo’s operation.

“If the person who had owned the stock had sold the stock himself, he would’ve been taxed on the appreciation in the stock,” said Ellen Aprill, a tax law professor at Loyola Marymount University. “Whereas if you give it to the 501(c)(4), there’s no charitable deduction for giving the money, but you avoid the tax on all of that appreciation.”

Political advocacy nonprofits like the Marble Freedom Trust are formally called 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, after the section of the tax code. Informally, they are known as dark-money groups because donors can remain secret, in contrast to the public disclosures required of gifts to political campaigns or super PACs. While they can spend money directly advocating for or against candidates in political campaigns, such spending cannot be their primary purpose.

In giving to such a dark money group, Seid also avoided another federal levy, the gift tax, thanks to a change signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015.

There’s a reason why giving money specifically to a trust might have been attractive for an older and ideological donor such as Seid. The founding documents that lay out how the trust will spend money can be harder to change than the governing documents of a corporation, according to Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a professor at Notre Dame Law School.

Mayer added that while corporations usually have at least three directors, trusts can have just a single trustee in charge of the organization’s activities.

Leo is the trustee and chairman of the Marble Freedom Trust. In other words, Leo is now in charge of the massive sum of money.

The Rainmaker

For decades, Leo had served as a top executive at the Federalist Society, helping lead the influential Washington-based conservative lawyers group that serves as a launching pad for careers on the right.

But in early 2020, Leo made an announcement that suggested he was taking his successful model for reshaping the courts to remake American politics at every level: local, state and federal. In an interview with Axios, Leo said he was stepping away from his day-to-day role with the Federalist Society to take a more active role steering a network of conservative dark money groups.

The plan was to expand the network’s scope to “funnel tens of millions of dollars into conservative fights around the country,” according to Axios. What Leo did not mention in the interview was the imminent creation of the Marble Freedom Trust, his biggest-ever war chest.

Leo’s long career as both a legal activist and a prodigious fundraiser for conservative causes shows a steady march toward becoming a central figure in the Republican Party’s successful strategy to fill as many judicial vacancies as possible with young, conservative judges skeptical of the federal government’s power. He served as an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, helping the candidate take a step no other major presidential candidate had ever taken: releasing a list of names he would draw on to nominate to the Supreme Court.

Coming at a moment when conservatives were wary of Trump’s past leanings, the move bolstered his support among social conservatives. Leo stayed on as a judicial adviser during Trump’s four years in office. During that time, Leo helped the president appoint and confirm more than 200 nominees to the federal bench, most famously Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Leo’s efforts to reshape the country’s judicial system began long before Trump’s political ascent. In 1991, he joined the Federalist Society, which was then in its early years and only beginning to build a pipeline for conservative jurists.

In the view of Leo and his allies, the U.S. legal system had drifted dangerously far from its roots, establishing privileged classes and doctrines that were not enumerated in the Constitution and would be unrecognizable to the Founders. Those same courts had also empowered a class of unelected bureaucrats dubbed the “administrative state” to impose needless regulations and to endow the federal government with too much power. Like his close friend Justice Antonin Scalia, Leo argued for an originalist view of the Constitution — namely, that the country’s founding document should be interpreted strictly based on how its 18th century authors understood its words at the time.

In 2005, Leo and his allies formed a dark money network to rally support for George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But if Leo wanted to turn back the tide of what he saw as unchecked judicial activism, he needed to build something bigger, more lasting.

Leo set out to create a network of interlocking groups that could each play a part in returning the country to what he saw as its roots, whether by training future generations of Scalias, funding scholarship that made the case for originalism or bankrolling efforts to install conservative judges on the bench.

Between 2005 and mid-2021, Leo and his associates raised at least $460 million (not including the Marble Freedom Trust’s funds).

According to tax records, Leo’s network has funneled those hundreds of millions into ad campaigns and right-leaning groups. The Judicial Crisis Network — which is now called the Concord Fund and is headed by a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and Leo associate named Carrie Severino — has spent tens of millions airing ads during Supreme Court confirmation fights.

The group’s fundraising took off in 2016, when it led a campaign to block Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland’s confirmation. That year, Leo’s network received a $28 million infusion from a single anonymous donor. Leo and his network long refused to say who is paying for their advocacy campaigns.

Leo’s network has worked closely with Senate Republicans and has showered them with cash as well, recently donating $9 million to a dark money group affiliated with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

While Leo is best known for his influence on the Supreme Court, he and his network have also worked to shift the balance of power throughout the judiciary — in federal district and appellate courts, and state supreme courts, too.

At the state level, the network funds groups supporting conservative gubernatorial and legislative candidates. Leo’s nonprofits and their subsidiaries have recently pushed states to tighten voting laws, opposed the teaching of critical race theory in schools and financed organizations pressing states to remove millions of Americans from the Medicaid rolls.

But now, with Seid’s largesse, Leo has nearly four times the amount he raised over 16 years at his disposal and ambitions to match.

“I have a very simple rule, which is, I’m engaged in the battle of ideas, and I care very deeply about our Constitution and the role of courts in our society,” Leo told The Washington Post in 2019 when asked about his donors. “And I don’t waste my time on stories that involve money and politics because what I care about is ideas.”

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by Lylla Younes and Al Shaw

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This story was co-published with Investigative Reporters and Editors. It will appear in an upcoming special issue of The IRE Journal focused on pollution.

In November 2021, ProPublica published a series of immersive investigative stories about a statistical cancer-risk model created by the Environmental Protection Agency. Our reporting showed that although the model revealed increased cancer risk in communities all over the country, the agency did little to stop the toxic air emissions that were causing the increased risk — or even to inform affected communities.

Discovering the Information Gap

Building the project required that we develop a thorough understanding of a complex statistical model, ground-truth the sometimes unreliable data that had been self-reported by polluters, solve technical challenges associated with massive data sets and interview people who lived and worked near dangerous pollution.

The project builds on a series we worked on alongside The Times-Picayune and The Advocate of New Orleans in 2019. That project was about the residents of “Cancer Alley,” a region of southeast Louisiana home to many refineries and chemical plants. While residents had long complained that they were being sickened by industrial smokestacks, many regulators and corporate spokespeople argued the air was safe to breathe.

Companies that emit industrial pollution have long been required to report their emissions to the EPA, which makes the data public in an online database called the Toxic Release Inventory. But our reporting in Louisiana found that the TRI data is not precise enough to show the fine-grained degrees of risk in industrial areas, which left the people living closest to facilities unsure about their safety.

When we began researching how we might obtain data that would enable us to quantify pollution levels and cancer risk at a finer scale, we found out that the EPA had actually created its own high-precision model called the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators Model, or RSEI, which was capable of doing just that.

The trouble was, the EPA published the results of the RSEI model in an interface that makes it very difficult to understand where the pollution travels and how serious the associated cancer risk is.

RSEI uses emissions estimates industrial companies submit to the agency each year along with weather data and facility-specific information to estimate concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in half-mile-wide squares of land across the country. Using the powerful tool, we found that we could estimate how the emissions from, say, a plastics plant could be elevating the cancer risk near an elementary school several blocks away.

After we published a visual story about the dangerous concentrations of carcinogenic air blanketing neighborhoods in southeast Louisiana, we recognized the need for a deeper, national analysis. So we embarked on a two-year endeavor to identify toxic hot spots and to build an interactive map residents could use to look up the estimated cancer risks at any address in the country.

Taking the Investigation National

Expanding our original Cancer Alley analysis to include the entire country presented an enormous data challenge. The EPA organizes RSEI by splitting the entire country up into 810-by-810 meter grid cells. For each cell, there are rows for concentrations of every chemical attributed to each facility.

There are around 29 million 810-by-810 meter grid cells nationwide and more than 1.4 billion rows of data for a single year. Even using the largest database instance available on Amazon Web Services, it took up to a week to run queries on the data. Often, our queries took days simply to fail. It was a long, demotivating slog.

That’s when some colleagues told us about Google BigQuery, which is a Google Cloud services product that allows you to do SQL-style queries on very large data sets. Using BigQuery, code that once took a week to run finished in minutes.

Because of this dramatic speedup, we were also able to expand our ambitions. Averaging five years of data would make our analysis much more robust, since averaging across that time would account for a facility that happened to have had a particularly bad or good year in our observation data set. And because our analysis was meant to calculate incremental lifetime cancer risk, taking a five-year average instead of a one-year snapshot would result in a much more accurate estimate.

Loading in five years of RSEI data increased the size of the database from about 1.4 billion rows to about 7 billion rows. Yet BigQuery happily crunched through it.

When our code finished running, we had detected more than 1,000 toxic hot spots — some the size of a single grid cell, some encompassing entire cities or regions. We were also able to determine which facilities were responsible for the highest average cancer risks within a given radius surrounding them.

This led us to some shocking initial findings, one of which did not stand up to scrutiny once we started reporting it out.

Questioning Assumptions

Our colleague Ava Kofman started pursuing an initial finding that appeared to indicate that Boeing was responsible for substantially increasing cancer risk over the city of Portland, Oregon. But her interviews and comparisons with state databases showed that the company had actually misreported its data to the EPA, and that faulty data had shown up as a massive overestimate of risk in the RSEI model underlying our analysis. Boeing subsequently fixed the problem and sent amended data to the agency.

Ava’s finding led us to stop what we were doing and rethink our assumptions. We created a large-scale, systematized fact-checking process. We reached out to each of the top 200 facilities (ranked by the level of nearby cancer risk) to ask them if their emissions reporting was accurate — and if not, whether they would resubmit 2014-18 data to the EPA. Of the 109 companies that responded to us, 71% confirmed that their reported emissions were correct, and 29% noted errors, which we asked them to correct. We then worked with RSEI experts to adjust the output of the model to reflect the chemical concentrations the companies provided to us directly.

Finding Stories in the Data

Once we completed the nationwide interactive map, we had a trove of potential stories before us. Some of the hot spots we identified, like Cancer Alley and the Houston Ship Channel, were infamous. Others, like the cloud of toxic ethylene oxide covering a large swath of Laredo, Texas, were not previously known — even to residents breathing the contaminated air.

Seven more ProPublica reporters joined the effort. They fanned out to report out the conditions on the ground in some of the nation’s most toxic industrial areas and to investigate the state and local policy decisions driving the high emissions rates there.

Early on, we were interested in understanding which communities were most affected by the toxic pollution. Since RSEI data is available at the census-tract level, we were able to join our cancer risk estimates to demographic information. This analysis estimated that predominantly Black census tracts experience more than double the level of toxic industrial air pollution as majority-white tracts.

We were also curious about which companies were the primary drivers of the toxic pollution. We mapped the facility ownership profiles of the nation’s dominant chemical companies. We then computed the number of RSEI grid cells in which each company independently elevates cancer risk above various EPA risk thresholds. We published the results of this analysis in the first story of our “Sacrifice Zones” series.

After our stories and interactive news application launched, the EPA announced a raft of targeted actions and specific reforms including stepped-up air monitoring and scrutiny of industrial polluters. In February 2022, three Democratic U.S. representatives introduced a $500 million bill that would require the EPA to create a pilot program for air monitoring in communities overburdened with pollution.

Explore the interactive map and the stories that came out of it at propublica.org/toxmap.

by Sarah Alvarez, Outlier Media, and Emily Hopkins, ProPublica

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

Last November, Kristal Dailey looked at her weekly paycheck and realized about $150 was missing, a quarter of her take-home earnings from a factory just outside Detroit, where she makes just over $18 an hour.

“I’m like, ‘What the heck is this from?’” she said.

Dailey immediately reached out to her company’s human resources department. That’s when embarrassment and then anger replaced her initial shock.

Her check, she learned, was being garnished over a $1,500 debt that was at least five years old. The money was being taken by a collection company she’d never heard of, after a court hearing she hadn’t attended. The garnishment went on for more than eight weeks; no matter how much she worked, 25% of her wages were garnished.

“It was terrible,” she said. “I just had a baby, just got back to work. For them to start taking $150, $160 out was drastic to me.”

The original source of the debt was quite familiar to her: DTE Energy, the Detroit area’s largest utility company.

The company had quietly sold off Dailey’s debt in 2017, along with that of more than 290,000 other residential customers and nearly 14,000 commercial accounts, in a little-noticed financial maneuver, Outlier Media and ProPublica found.

The sale brought DTE just pennies for each dollar owed: $4.8 million in exchange for the right to pursue more than $282 million in debt. But for low-income customers whose debt was sold, it was a consequential event, thrusting them into the hands of a debt collector that aggressively sues people. Under Michigan law, these cases can result in creditors garnishing up to a quarter of a person’s wages, as well as refunds from their state income tax returns.

DTE officials declined to be interviewed and did not answer a list of detailed questions sent by reporters. Spokesperson Brynn Guster said in an email that the company is “focused on managing affordability for our customers” and that selling closed customer accounts lowers the burden on other customers.

The company’s debt sale practices are unusual. Outlier and ProPublica surveyed the 11 other investor-owned electric utilities that each serve at least 400,000 customers in the Great Lakes states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. All of them, including Consumers Energy, Michigan’s second largest utility company, said they do not sell debt. Five of the utilities also said they do not directly sue their customers over debt. The ones that do said they do so only on rare occasions.

Regulators in Michigan have paid little attention to DTE’s debt practices, even though utilities must receive the state’s approval for many other financial decisions. Outlier Media and ProPublica used a combination of publicly available disclosures, local court records and interviews with DTE customers to understand the scope of DTE’s debt sales.

These new findings follow a March investigative report by the news organizations that examined how DTE shut off customers’ power for nonpayment during the pandemic. DTE’s disconnection rate outpaced all other Michigan utilities owned by private investors and regulated by the state, according to this first-of-its-kind analysis.

Matt Helms, a spokesperson for the Michigan Public Service Commission, the state agency that regulates utilities and approves rate increases, said the commission is prohibited by state law from making management decisions for utilities, such as how they handle debt.

“Given statutory limitations, our focus is on ways to help customers from falling behind in the first place, avoiding situations where unpaid bills may end up in collections,” Helms said in an email.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who represents part of Detroit, has advocated for financial assistance that would help low-income people pay off utility debt. Informed of the reporters’ findings on DTE, she responded in an email: “Utility companies should not be in the business of selling consumer debt to debt collectors."

DTE, which serves Detroit and nearby areas where large numbers of low-income customers struggle to afford utilities, did not reveal to the regulatory commission which company or companies were buying its debt — only that the debt had been sold. Through a search of court records, reporters identified Jefferson Capital Systems, a Minnesota-based company that buys all kinds of consumer debt, as the purchaser of at least some of it. ProPublica and Outlier made numerous attempts to contact Jefferson, which is owned by a private equity firm, but the company did not respond.

Collection companies that aggressively use the courts rely heavily on the fact that many people do not show up for their initial court hearings or show up without a lawyer to argue the facts of the case. Creditors then win the case swiftly through a default judgment and, in Michigan, this allows them to garnish wages and state income tax refunds.

Experts familiar with these types of legal cases said some people ignore legal notices because they don’t recall a debt from years before or don’t recognize the name of the debt collection company.

For these collection companies, volume is important, according to attorneys and researchers familiar with debt collection. The more lawsuits the companies file, the more default judgments they are likely to get, and the better their chance to collect via wage garnishments. Even while shut-offs for nonpayment of bills were briefly paused in Michigan in 2020, Jefferson Capital’s lawsuits didn’t stop.

It “happens every day. Happens hundreds of times a day,” said Charissa Potts, a Michigan bankruptcy lawyer who worked briefly for a third-party debt collector. “That’s the basis of third-party collection. That’s the business model.”

In Detroit’s 36th District Court alone, the state’s largest, Jefferson Capital filed more than 1,000 cases related to old DTE debt in the first six months of the pandemic, including the suit against Dailey that June.

Years before, she had been shut off by DTE. She then moved in with her partner, and he put the utilities in his name, though she still helps pay that bill. When she was sued in 2020, Dailey was pregnant and working at an industrial-pump-making factory, where her job was considered exempt from the state’s stay-at-home order.

Dailey examines a summary of her remaining wage garnishments. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Court records say Dailey was notified in person of the lawsuit by a process server, but she disputes that she was ever informed. After the default judgment against her, she eventually negotiated a payment plan with Jefferson Capital that suspended the garnishment and reduced her monthly payments slightly. But that was not enough to make up for the months where 25% of her paycheck was gone. Day care costs allowed for very little room in her budget, and shefell behind on her car payment.

“It threw me so far behind on bills, I’m still trying to play catch-up,” she said. “Even now I can’t pay the amount I'm supposed to pay.”

An Unusual Tactic

DTE handles customers’ debt in a variety of ways, working with them on payment plans or pointing them toward financial assistance opportunities. It routinely outsources debt collection to private companies, which is not unusual for a large utility. In general, those collection companies call and mail customers and then keep a portion of what they collect but return most of the proceeds to the company that hired them.

Unlike many of its peers, DTE uses yet another tactic, one that can lead to a court judgment: selling uncollected old debt to third-party debt collectors. In a statement, Guster said the majority of the debt in the sale that affected Kristal Dailey was at least two years old. Guster also said DTE only sells debt from “closed” accounts, meaning after a customer is shut off or moves away from the service area.

Although most of DTE’s debt sale information is private, reporters found a few details in financial disclosures the utility filed with the Michigan Public Service Commission. Those records show that DTE has sold debt at least three times in the past 15 years.

Soulardarity, an energy justice group in Highland Park, a city surrounded on all sides by Detroit, has begun to push back at the commission, calling attention to the toll debt sales take on Detroit-area residents.

“It feels like there’s this long cobblestone pathway of financial hell that they are exacerbating and encouraging the existence of,” Rafael Mojica, program director for Soulardarity, said of the commission. “We find it unacceptable, and MPSC needs to find it just as unacceptable.”

Helms, the commission spokesperson, said in an email that the question of whether utilities should use debt sales is something the state legislature would have to address. In an interview, Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission, said the agency’s focus is keeping customers out of debt in the first place and that sales are “fairly rare.” But while the sales may be rare, they have included the debts of hundreds of thousands of ratepayers throughout the Detroit area.

Reporters searched thousands of pages of utility commission filings and found mention of three DTE debt sales, in 2008, 2014 and 2017. Jefferson Capital is not mentioned in those records.But Outlier and ProPublica were able to verify the sale of some DTE debt to Jefferson Capital, one of the largest collection firms of its kind, through an examination of court data from Detroit’s 36th District Court.

In response to a request for debt lawsuits brought by DTE or Jefferson Capital on behalf of DTE, the 36th District Court provided records showing Jefferson Capital filed more than 3,100 cases between January 2019 and April 2022. That number does not include cases where DTE isn’t named in the court’s electronic records. Reporters were able to find additional cases like these by observing virtual court hearings.

By contrast, 36th District Court records did not show any cases where DTE directly sued its customers over debt during those three years. Guster, DTE’s spokesperson, said DTE does not directly sue current or former customers over debt.

The lack of uniform court data makes analysis of Jefferson Capital’s lawsuits throughout the entire DTE service area impossible, according to a spokesperson for Michigan Courts.

Using the courts to target large numbers of people is typical in the debt buying industry, said Jeff Reichman, a data scientist with January Advisors and a collaborator of the Debt Collection Lab, a Princeton University project that tracks and visualizes debt collection lawsuit data. “These debt buyers have a legal operation across the country where they can file cases like a machine,” he said. Reichman said the volume of cases means judges have less time to spend examining them for flaws, such as debt that is too old to collect or debt that is owed by another person.

To show regulators how debt sales affect customers sued by Jefferson Capital, Soulardarity asked one of its volunteers, Stephanie Johnson, to testify at a utility commission hearing in January where DTE was seeking a rate increase that would bring in an additional $388 million in annual revenue from ratepayers.

Johnson racked up her debt to DTE over more than a decade beginning in the early 2000s. She said she was raising a family and then went back to college to finish her degree. Johnson had a payment plan that kept her utilities on as long as she paid DTE a fixed amount each month, but the payments weren’t enough to keep her from building up a big debt.

In 2016, when she was no longer able to keep up with her bill, she said, she fell off her payment plan, and her entire balance of more than $5,000 came due, as is typical when such payment plans fall apart. When she couldn’t pay, she said, she closed her account and her husband took over the utility bill.

A lawsuit from Jefferson Capital, which had purchased her old debt, followed four years later. Johnson suddenly had to scramble to find money.

Following a default judgment, she said, Jefferson told her it would accept a lump sum payment of $3,600 to satisfy the debt. She borrowed the money from her mother.

Johnson, who works at a social service agency, is incredulous DTE sold her debt for a fraction of its face value so that Jefferson Capital could make a profit.

“When I really reflect on it, all DTE had to do was reach out to me and say, ‘If you can pay this much?’” she said. “Instead they sever the relationship with you, and then they sell your debt.”

She added: “You're just trying to keep your life going. We are so dependent on electricity.”

All utilities have some portion of debt they determine is unrecoverable and write off their books. Utilities can then ask regulators to allow them to increase rates to cover these costs. The unpaid debt doesn’t make or break DTE’s bottom line. The amount that remains unrecovered is equivalent to less than 1% of the company’s average annual revenue, according to testimony on behalf of Michigan’s attorney general before the MPSC.

Consumers Energy, which serves about 1.8 million customers in Michigan, said it stopped taking customers to court over debt in 2019. The reason, a company spokesperson said, was the company “thought it was in the best interest of our customers.”

A spokesperson for ComEd, which delivers electricity across Northern Illinois, including Chicago, said the utility rarely takes residential customers to court over debt and can recover more money by continuing to collect on the debt than it would make in a one-time debt sale. Customers’ experience is another factor.

“ComEd wants all of our current and former customers to be treated fairly and with respect,” Tom Dominguez, communications manager for ComEd, said in an email. “By keeping this dialog open, we also have a chance to find one of our many bill-assistance options that can help these customers remain in service in the longer term.”

Dragged Into Court

Iris Foster-Ray joined her Zoom court hearing in May from her living room, alone, facing off against Jefferson Capital.

She ended up there after she lost control of her DTE debt during a period where one of her twin daughters was ill and her family was struggling with high medical bills. She said her daughter, who is now 20, has a rare circulatory disease, one that gives her heart palpitations and makes her prone to fainting. It took years of medical evaluation to properly diagnose her and, to help treat her condition, she needs to follow an expensive special diet.

Iris Foster-Ray (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Foster-Ray planned to explain all this to the judge, as well as how these financial stresses were worsened by Jefferson’s garnishment of $600 per month, which had begun in January. Foster-Ray, who works in billing at a local children’s hospital, was falling behind on her car payments, and her husband needed to pick up a second job.

Judge Ronald Giles sent her to a digital breakout room with an attorney representing Jefferson Capital. When they returned a few minutes later, they had not reached an agreement.

“I can’t afford that amount they’re taking out of my check,” Foster-Ray told the judge. “I have a disabled child, and I have a lot of medical —”

Giles cut her off.

“Hold on, hold on. I understand, but none of that deals with the issue,” he said.

That’s when reality set in. It was too late for Foster-Ray to defend herself against the original judgment, which had come at the initial hearing in the case.

Foster-Ray hadn’t been there that day. After she found the notice of the lawsuit on the door of her home in Detroit’s West Side, she didn’t know what to do. She’d never heard of Jefferson Capital and didn’t think it would be collecting on such old debt. Even after calling the company, she said, she still thought it might be a scam. So she ignored Jefferson’s notice.

With Foster-Ray absent from that initial hearing, the court had ruled in favor of Jefferson Capital by default. Foster-Ray spent half a day at the courthouse to file an objection to the garnishment. She thought she’d have the chance to explain her circumstances to a judge.

But the May hearing had one focus and it wasn’t whether she had to pay Jefferson Capital.

The court had already decided that; the only question on that day was how much she was going to pay each month.

Foster-Ray’s paperwork, redacted by ProPublica, showing the lien placed on her home by Jefferson Capital (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

An official from Detroit’s 36th District Court, who asked not to be named because they did not have permission to speak on this issue, said Foster-Ray’s experience is not unique.

The official understands how some people conclude that they don’t need to show up in court but emphasized how important it is to be there. “​If you get something in the mail from Jefferson Capital, the first thought in your mind is ‘I’ve never done business with Jefferson Capital, why am I going to respond to this?’” the official said. “I think that’show some of our litigants get into a little bit of confusion.”

There are few protections for people who get sued by debt collectors. No state requires legal representation for defendants in private consumer lawsuits, leaving many people to fend for themselves. The National Consumer Law Center rates Michigan worse than all but four other states, giving it an F for failing to protect its residents in debt cases because it allows wide latitude for creditors to seize Michiganders’ property and income.

“Listen, the system sucks,” said Sergei Lemberg, the founder of Lemberg Law, a consumer law firm representing debtors in 29 states. “It’s the haves against the have nots.”

Collectors are “hiring people who know what they’re doing, against ordinary people. And they’re prosecuting people in the courts, and people are helpless,” he said.

Kristal Dailey, who also filed an objection to her garnishment, certainly felt helpless. At a garnishment hearing, she negotiated a payment plan, but it still left her overburdened. She quickly fell behind in payments, and Jefferson Capital went back to court to garnish her wages again. She is looking for part-time work on top of her factory job to pay off the $800 she still owes.

“You don’t have options,” Dailey said. “You have DTE or you have nothing, and it’s unaffordable, but you don’t have a choice.”

In Foster-Ray’s case, she and Jefferson Capital agreed to a payment plan at her court hearing: $150 a month. If she misses a payment, the company can resume garnishing her wages.

Foster-Ray accepts responsibility for falling behind on her DTE bills, but said she wishes the utility hadn’t sold her debt to a third party.

“I could have done a little bit more at the time,” she said of not paying off her original debt after her utilities were shut off in 2017. “I did push it back to the back burner because my child was sick.”

Jefferson Capital recently placed a lien on her house that will remain there until her debt is paid off. In addition to the money she pays Jefferson Capital every month, she must also still cover the cost of DTE’s service.

Her family’s July bill for gas and electricity — paid through her husband’s account since hers was closed — came to more than $500. She’s considering filing for bankruptcy.

“It’s like I’m going to work just to pay them,” she said.

Correction

Aug. 19, 2022: This story has been updated to correct details in Stephanie Johnson’s experiences with DTE debt. She did not get shut off by DTE in 2016 but did close her account. She also faced a default judgment with Jefferson Capital before working out a payment to satisfy her debt.

by Megan O’Matz

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 decades, the League of Women Voters played a vital but largely practical role in American politics: tending to the information needs of voters by hosting debates and conducting candidate surveys. While it wouldn’t endorse specific politicians, it quietly supported progressive causes.

The group was known for clipboards, not confrontation; for being respected, not reviled.

But those quiet days are now over, a casualty of the volatile political climate of the last few years and the league’s goal of being relevant to a new generation.

In 2018, the league’s CEO was arrested, along with hundreds of other protesters, for crowding a Senate office building to demand lawmakers reject Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative accused of sexual harassment.

Two years later, the league dissolved its chapter in Nevada after the state president penned an op-ed in July 2020 accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy for opposing gerrymandering in red states while “harassing” the league in Nevada over its activism on the issue.

And two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the league’s board of directors called then-President Donald Trump a “tyrannical despot” and blamed him for inciting the violence and for threatening democracy. The league demanded his removal from office “via any legal means.”

As a result, the league is calling attention to itself and drawing criticism in ways that are extraordinary for the once-staid group. Republicans are increasingly pushing back hard against the league, casting it as a collection of angry leftists rather than friendly do-gooders.

And with more right-leaning candidates snubbing the league, voters are less likely to hear directly from those candidates in unscripted and unfiltered forums where their views can receive greater visibility and scrutiny. That pushback sidelines the league at a time when misinformation has become a significant force in elections at every level.

“The League of Women Voters, while that sounds like a nice organization, they don’t do a lot of nice work,” Catalina Lauf, a Republican candidate for Congress in Illinois, said in a video posted in May on Instagram, explaining her reasoning for refusing to participate in a league-sponsored debate.

The league, she claimed, “peddles Marxist ideology” and is “anti-American.” In an interview with ProPublica, Lauf cited the league’s support for the rights of transgender student athletes as one reason she is suspicious of the group. She also claimed the league has endorsed the defunding of police departments, though that is inaccurate. The league has, however, taken stands in favor of sweeping police reforms that would address brutality and racial profiling.

“They need to switch their brand fast,” Lauf said. “Because their hyperpartisanship is turning off a lot of women who just want common sense.”

Conservative candidates for school board and county supervisor in Wisconsin have fired similar broadsides when declining to participate in league debates. And in Pennsylvania this year, only 30% of Republican candidates completed the league’s VOTE411.org informational guide for the primaries, compared with 70% of Democrats, according to the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. The guide gives voters the candidates’ unedited answers to questions about their qualifications, priorities and stances on certain issues.

Elsewhere, Republican-led policies make it harder for groups like the league to add people to the voting rolls. In Kansas, because of a change in law, the league no longer registers voters — a task that has long been central to its mission.

Under its bylaws, the league does not endorse candidates. And by policy, board members can’t run for or hold any partisan elected office. Nor can they chair a political campaign, or fundraise or actively work for any candidate for a partisan office.

Just as its founders were crusaders, however, the league itself is outspoken on a multitude of issues, including supporting universal health care, abortion rights, affordable child care and clean water. The league has pushed for gun control measures since 1990. And it has been a strong voice nationally for campaign finance reform. In some communities, the league has even weighed in on zoning decisions.

Its viewpoints have long branded the league as a progressive organization. “They’re very fine, but they tend to be a little bit liberal,” the late Sen. Bob Dole, a Republican from Kansas, said of the league during a televised 1976 vice presidential debate in Houston.

The League of Women Voters holds a registration event in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2021. (Troy Stolt/Chattanooga Times Free Press/AP)

Those liberal leanings have been harder to ignore in recent years, forcing the league to defend itself against claims of partisanship.

After its CEO was arrested at the Kavanaugh protest in 2018, the league admitted in a statement that openly opposing a Supreme Court nominee was “an extraordinary step for the League,” but said it believed the action was warranted.

“This situation is too important to sit silently while the independence of our judiciary is threatened.” CEO Virginia Kase Solomón closed her legal case by paying a $50 fine.

The league’s chief communications officer, Sarah Courtney, told ProPublica in a written statement: “Organizations always need to change with the times and current events in order to stay relevant.”

She noted: “The League has been a force in American democracy for more than a century, and we expect to be around in another hundred years. We haven’t gotten this far by doing things the same way we did them in 1920.”

UCLA professor Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert, said that while it’s clear that the league has been more aggressive in taking on controversial issues, it’s the group’s core mission that puts it at odds with some politicians. Supporting voting rights, he said, can be seen as an attack on the Republican Party, which has pushed for laws that make it more difficult to register and to vote. (Republicans say they are doing so to protect the integrity of elections, though there is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud.)

“It’s hard to be seen as neutral when you have the political parties dividing over questions like voting rights,” said Hasen, who directs the law school’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, which is aimed at researching election integrity.

To Hasen, the league’s evolution is notable. “Generally, there’s kind of a caricature of the league as kind of a group of old women coming together for tea,” he said. “Whereas, I think the league has become much more of a powerhouse in terms of advocating for strong voting rights.”

“Dare to Fight”

It took women more than 70 years of agitating, organizing and marching to convince men to give them the right to vote in 1920. Once the 19th Amendment was ratified, these activist women were wary of the political parties, which wanted their votes but not necessarily their input.

“Women in the parties must be more independent than men,” the league’s founder, suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, wrote, according to papers kept by the Library of Congress. “They must dare to fight for what they believe is right.”

Catt worried that some women would come to believe that all virtue or all wisdom was held by the party, paralyzing their judgment.

The league, which was formed the same year women nationwide were finally granted the right to vote, dedicated itself not to political parties, or the men running them, but to specific causes. One cause helped forge its identity: educating league members and other voters at election time.

Members of the League of Women Voters pose at the Democratic National Convention in 1920 with a sign listing policies they supported. The league also presented policy ideas to the Republican National Convention. (Hartsook/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Its first political agenda was long, numbering 69 items, and was called a “kettle of eels” by the league’s own president. Many of those items, such as child welfare and access to quality education, have remained league priorities for decades — as has its commitment to voter education. In 2018 and 2020, the league and ProPublica worked together to produce a guide sharing basic, nonpartisan information to help citizens choose among candidates and obtain ballots.

For nearly a century, the league itself seemed to change little, but by 2018 it found itself at a crossroads.

Leadership hired consultants and began to look for ways to reach disillusioned voters, combat misinformation in elections and effectively respond to society’s escalating racial issues, including the disenfranchisement of people of color.

“Although it remains a trusted household name, many stakeholders cannot describe clearly the purpose of the organization and are unclear about its relevance,” a league consultant wrote in a 2018 report. “The membership is much older and whiter than the population at large, and League membership has steadily declined by almost a third over the past few decades.”

Membership plunged from 72,657 in 1994 to 53,284 in 2017, according to the report. (It has since climbed back up to over 70,000, the league said.)

The organization also faced greater competition. Dozens of new nonprofits had emerged to protect voting rights, including Indivisible, NextGen America, Color of Change and Hip Hop Caucus.

According to the consultant’s report, league members long knew that its homogenous membership limited its effectiveness and its appeal to a broader audience. So, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, the league issued a formal mea culpa.

In an August 2018 blog post, the league’s president and its CEO admitted that “our organization was not welcoming to women of color through most of our existence” and vowed to build “a stronger, more inclusive democracy.” Many of the early suffragists were also abolitionists, but after the Civil War, they were divided over whether to support the 15th Amendment, which at the time gave Black men, but not women, the right to vote. The fissure persisted for decades and had lasting consequences for the league.

“Even during the Civil Rights movement, the League was not as present as we should have been,” the post said. “While activists risked life and limb to register black voters in the South, the League’s work and our leaders were late in joining to help protect all voters at the polls.”

League of Women Voters CEO Virginia Kase Solomón speaks at a voting rights rally outside the White House in 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

In recent years, the league has been more visible in advocating for racial equity and fairness. It particularly focused on reducing barriers to voting in marginalized communities. The league has fought, for instance, against reductions in the number of polling places or voting hours in minority communities.

After a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd by kneeling on the Black man’s neck in May 2020, the league announced the next month that it would strongly push for reforms in the justice system, including changes aimed at preventing excessive force and brutality by law enforcement.

“The League of Women Voters of Minneapolis is not your grandmother’s League,” Anita Newhouse, the city chapter’s league president at the time, wrote in the MinnPost, a nonprofit news outlet, in August 2020. “We are still the nonpartisan education and advocacy group committed to empowering voters, but with a commitment to identifying racism and dismantling policies that suppress non-white votes.”

Advocates, Progressives or Democrats?

Even within the league, not everyone feels the group applies its principles evenly.

For five years, Sondra Cosgrove, a College of Southern Nevada history professor specializing in multicultural issues, ran the league in Nevada as it took on issues such as gerrymandering.

But she’s no longer part of the organization, and she wonders whether that’s because she was not always clearly in the Democrats’ corner.

In 2019, the league launched a 50-state Fair Maps strategy to combat racial and political gerrymandering. As league president in Nevada, Cosgrove began pushing for a ballot initiative that would create an independent commission to draw legislative district boundaries. The move would have taken power away from the Democrats, who controlled the statehouse and the governor’s office.

Cosgrove soon found the league’s ballot initiative challenged unsuccessfully in court by a Black activist and, later, by the Democratic governor, who did not allow petition signatures to be collected electronically during the pandemic.

About a week after her July 2020 op-ed accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy and “harassing” the league in Nevada, officials from the national league office emailed Cosgrove, instructing her to “stop making public statements online and in the media accusing the Democratic party of attacking the League of Women Voters.” The officials clarified that their position would be no different if Cosgrove was criticizing Republicans.

Cosgrove, however, said she told the league’s national office she wouldn’t seek its input on public statements. The league dissolved the state chapter not long afterward, in December 2020. Cosgrove and others quit the national organization and now are with another voting group.

“There was always the feeling the league was run by the Democrats,” said former Nevada league Treasurer Ann Marie Smith. “We tried to fight that to a large degree, but in my opinion the national league has gone down that road much further than they should have.”

Executives in the league’s national organization told ProPublica that the decision to shut down the state chapter was not an easy one and was made “after multiple attempts to resolve policy violations” that went beyond just the clash with the governor.

“Ultimately, the board had no choice but to disband the Nevada league to protect the entire organization,” Courtney, the league spokesperson, said. “Our northern Nevada local league has remained active with a dedicated group of members who are committed to rebuilding the league’s presence in the state.”

The league does sometimes call out Democrats.

In late July of this year, the league released an update on its Fair Maps initiative, saying it had organized public hearings in 24 states, used apps and software to test draw fairer maps in 38 states, and joined 11 state lawsuits and six federal cases challenging maps in California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. Two of those states feature Democrats in control of the state legislative chambers and the governor’s office. Five of them have Republican control. In the rest, control is split.

But, going forward, the league may find it more difficult to do the work it’s always done.

The league chapter in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, for instance, has faced what one member there called sustained opposition in recent years.

Complaints from a parent, who is also a Republican on the borough council, derailed the league’s annual Running and Winning high school program in 2019, which was to feature female speakers from both parties as a way to encourage young women to pursue careers in politics. The parent argued that the league had a political agenda and was excluding high school boys and male politicians.

Ultimately, the school district canceled the event.

Political tensions only got worse in the months that followed. When the newly created Laker Republican Club emailed an unsolicited mass membership appeal throughout the community, a league board member replied with an email questioning the morals, courage and patriotism of Trump and his supporters. The league defended her, saying she was speaking as a private citizen and she did not reference her role with the league.

Local Republicans running for borough council responded by refusing to participate in league debates in 2020. Former Mountain Lakes Mayor Blair Schleicher Wilson wrote in a local publication that she had been a member of the league for 25 years but now supported the candidates who shunned the league.

Wilson, a Republican, wrote that the local league chapter “has sadly lost their way.” In an interview with ProPublica, she added that she loved being involved with the league but believes it should stick only to voter advocacy. “I always thought their focus should be more on voter services,” she said. “That’s a perfect place for them.”

The chapter lost about 30 members because of the community tensions and is trying to rebuild, said former Mountain Lakes league President Mary Alosio-Joelsson, now the organization’s events leader.

She believes conservatives in Mountain Lakes have changed, not the league. “Many have moved so far to the right that anybody who is walking down the middle of the road looks like they’re on the left,” she said.

The shift in the country’s political climate also has far-reaching implications for what the league considers some of its most essential work. In Kansas, the organization halted registration work a year ago after a measure enacted by a Republican-led legislature made it a felony to engage “in conduct that would cause another person to believe a person ... is an election official.”

The league worried its volunteers could be prosecuted if someone mistakenly believed them to be election officials while registering voters. Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, a Democrat, agreed there were problems with the law and said she wouldn’t pursue cases of alleged violations.

“This law criminalizes essential efforts by trusted nonpartisan groups like the League of Women Voters to engage Kansans on participation in accessible, accountable and fair elections,” she said in a statement.

But Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, quickly retorted that his office would, indeed, prosecute alleged violators.

The league asked the Kansas Court of Appeals for an injunction that would temporarily prevent the law from being enforced, but the group lost and is now requesting a review from the state Supreme Court.

Despite the setback, Jacqueline Lightcap, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Kansas, said the league intends to continue to work to defend democracy and empower voters. But she said the mission has become harder. Even seeking dialogue with legislators on the ramifications of the registration law is difficult.

“We are not getting much traction,” she said.

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Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, an entire ecosystem of right-wing social media platforms has come into existence — from Gab (where the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter posted hateful screeds) to Parler (a hot spot for insurrectionary activities in the run-up to Jan. 6) to the former president’s own Truth Social (which was frequented by a fan of his who was recently shot to death after attacking a Cincinnati FBI office). This new wave of apps and sites follows in the footsteps of 4chan and 8kun, older internet message boards that continue to attract a sizable audience of conspiracy theorists and violent racists.

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Welton Chang knows this corner of the digital world well. A former Army intelligence officer and human rights activist, Chang runs Pyrra, a small tech startup dedicated to identifying and tracking the extremist ideas circulating in these spaces. Pyrra, which launched in early 2022 with $1.3 million in funding, monitors more than 20 alternative social media sites and online forums, scanning some 100 million messages per week.

Chang, a data scientist, says increased content moderation at major social media platforms — including the ouster of figures ranging from Trump to Alex Jones — has driven a sizable contingent of users to the spaces Pyrra tracks, which tend toward an absolutist view of free speech.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell me in simple terms what Pyrra does?

Pyrra is a threat intelligence company. We do three things: We collect content — publicly available information — from alternative social media sites. We use machine learning and advanced algorithms to detect violent threats, hate speech and disinformation that are popping up on these platforms. And then we display that information for our clients, either through reports or through a platform that we have.

We got our start in the human rights community. We were a project inside of Human Rights First [a U.S.-based advocacy group]. … We spun out of HRF as our own company in December 2021 and launched our platform earlier this year.

In general, what are the big extremist threats that you’re following these days? What worries you?

One is just the death of critical thinking and the amount of evidence-free speculation that becomes the truth, small-t truth, on these platforms. It can be something as innocuous as something done by some celebrity all the way to things that really have impacts on the health of our democracy.

But it’s also just the general lack of confidence in institutions writ large. … We’re at an all-time low in terms of government trust, based on all the different metrics that are out there. …

[This brings us to] the inherent incoherence of conspiracy theories and these really outlandish ideas about how the world actually works. People believe that the government is simultaneously totally incompetent and also all-knowing and all-seeing and capable of pulling off a massive effort like helping Bill Gates spread the COVID vaccine through mind control via 5G technology.

These are diametrically opposed ideas, yet folks are simultaneously believing both of them and saying, “This is what is happening in the world today.”

I’ve been really immersed in this stuff since 2016, and I’m still routinely appalled, surprised and taken aback by some of the things I read on these platforms. And maybe the day I become inured to this stuff is the day I need to leave the biz. But I’m still really shocked by the things I read.

Look at the Pew Research polls that are out there about how many people believe the core tenets of QAnon. I think we’ve entered a new phase in which social media has altered and warped how we encounter information, how we process it, how we internalize what counts as the truth. It’s having significant impacts on our democracy.

I really do believe that social media is an accelerator. …

An accelerator of societal disintegration?

Yes, yes, exactly.

You had an interesting Twitter thread about the disinformation you’re seeing around the Jan. 6 committee. Can you tell me about that?

On these alternative social media platforms, the narrative about Jan. 6 started getting pushed on Jan. 7. People started by saying it was antifa that was responsible. That got amplified by more mainstream characters, even Tucker Carlson talked about antifa maybe having a role in Jan. 6.

Right off the bat they were trying to deflect blame. You had card-carrying members of the MAGA community like [Jan. 6 protester] Ray Epps getting falsely accused of being FBI informants and being responsible for pushing people into the Capitol. He came out and said, “I was one of them [the pro-Trump movement], and they just kind of turned on me.”

All it takes is a single user on one of these platforms to write something outlandish without any factual basis or evidence. They’re not citing anything, they’re not looking at any hardcore piece of information or they’re taking things out of context. And that just gets endlessly amplified by other users. People who are not sophisticated consumers of information see that on these platforms, and they go: “I agree with that. That sounds plausible. It’s now the truth for me.”

If you ask people, “Who was responsible for Jan. 6?” significant numbers of people will tell you antifa had a role in Jan. 6. Multiple credible investigations have shown that antifa had no role in Jan. 6. … Yet this maintains a consistent narrative, and that narrative started spinning basically as soon as people were cleared from the Capitol building.

In the past that’s the kind of thing that would’ve happened on Twitter. But now it starts on the smaller platforms. It may eventually migrate to Twitter. But Twitter and the larger platforms actually do some content moderation, making it harder for this stuff to gain traction or get picked up.

These smaller places either don’t have the resources to do content moderation or don’t have the will to do it. They are allowing these narratives to fester and gain traction and eventually jump hosts.

Out of all the alternative social media apps and sites, which seem to be the most successful? Where is the energy?

It’s still 4chan. … One secret about 4chan is they actually have to do a significant amount of content moderation now — where they remove posts because of how bad and violent they are. There’s a massive amount of people on 4chan on a regular basis, who are frequent flyers on the boards. It’s still crazy there.

More than Telegram, an instant messenger service?

Telegram is also huge. Right now we track thousands of Telegram channels, but that’s just a drop in the bucket.

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Disclosure: ProPublica reporters used Pyrra this year for a brief trial period.

by Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel

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The United States has made a small but significant move toward creating a public system to allow millions of Americans to file their taxes for free.

The sweeping domestic policy bill passed by the House and Senate last week mandates that the IRS study options to provide a free tax filing option for Americans. That study represents a threat to the for-profit tax prep industry dominated by TurboTax, a product of the Silicon Valley company Intuit. President Joe Biden said he plans to sign the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, today, following the party-line vote in the House to approve it on Friday.

The bill provides $15 million to study how the IRS could implement such a program, how much it might cost and how Americans would view it. The report, which must include the input of an independent third party, is due to Congress within nine months of the bill’s passage.

Unlike many developed countries, the U.S. does not offer free tax filing services for taxpayers, who instead pay billions of dollars every year to highly profitable private tax prep companies.

The industry has tried to block or subvert a government free tax filing system for decades. ProPublica has reported for years on how companies have sometimes even tricked customers into paying for services that they should have gotten for free. Those articles led to investigations by federal agencies and states as well as a barrage of consumer legal actions. The reporting was also cited by Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, who was behind the new provision. The companies maintain they did nothing wrong.

“I’ve been working to allow taxpayers to file directly with the IRS for many years, and this is an important step toward achieving that goal,” Wyden said in a statement. “Reporting about industry scams certainly helped members see the importance of this issue and get this across the finish line.”

The last time the federal government attempted to provide free tax filing was back in 2002, under the George W. Bush administration. Back then, soon after the White House floated “an easy, no-cost option for taxpayers to file their tax return online,” Intuit and its lobbyists fought back hard. The result was a program that relied on Intuit and other private software providers to provide the service instead.

As we detailed in our story on Intuit’s 20-year campaign to prevent a government-provided tax filing service, the so-called Free File program was flawed from the start. Supposedly available to 70% of taxpayers, it only reached between 2% and 3% in recent years. After ProPublica reported that Intuit and others were intentionally making it harder for taxpayers to find the program online, there was renewed focus on Free File, including numerous investigations. The company stopped including code on its Free File website that made it harder to find the free version. Eventually, both Intuit and H&R Block, by far the largest providers, pulled out.

Through information forms like W-2s, the IRS already has the info on wages and other forms of income in its systems that it would need to provide such a service. A recent study by researchers from the Treasury Department, Minneapolis Federal Reserve and Dartmouth College found that “between 62 and 73 million returns (41 to 48 percent of all returns) could be accurately pre-populated using only current-year information returns and the prior-year return.”

At a Senate hearing in June, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she supported a new free filing service. “We need to develop a new system,” Yellen said in an exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “There’s no reason in the world that a modern economy shouldn't have a system that makes it easy for such a large group of taxpayers to file their returns.”

A spokesperson for Intuit reiterated the company’s opposition to the IRS offering a free public tax filing option.

“Decades of experience and numerous independent studies, polling, and in-depth research about the idea of an IRS-run tax preparation system show that taxpayers see an inherent conflict of interest in having the IRS be the tax collector, investigator, auditor, enforcer and now preparer when taxpayers want the IRS to focus on its core mission rather than spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a system that would disenfranchise millions of taxpayers and jeopardize their financial freedom,” said Intuit’s Rick Heineman.

In a recent settlement with state attorneys general, the company agreed to pay $141 million to filers who paid for tax prep services they were eligible to get for free. More than four million people are expected to receive payments of up to $90 each in the coming months. Intuit maintained it did nothing wrong.

A spokesperson for the IRS declined to comment on the provision to study free filing options.

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by Lisa Song

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Apartment hunting in New York City is a special kind of hell. Friends warned me before I moved here five years ago, sharing stories of cockroaches and sketchy real estate brokers, of paying $2,000 per month to live next to an early morning parade of garbage trucks. So when I landed my first apartment — with hardwood floors, a short commute and an in-unit washer/dryer for less than $1,850 a month — I thought I’d found a unicorn.

The unicorn turned out to be a pile of rotting meat in a trenchcoat. First my ceiling became waterlogged from my neighbor’s leaking radiator (while she was recovering from surgery). Then my radiator soaked the apartment of my downstairs neighbor (who was paying $3,000 a month even though there was no heat in her toddler’s bedroom). A feud between our landlord and the local post office ensured all of our mail was dumped onto the basement stairs, where it got stolen or buried under snow. When I could no longer use my radiator for fear of leaking water everywhere, the landlord suggested I deal with a historic cold snap by installing “extra thick curtains.” Once the weather warmed, a building down the block started hosting parties so loud they made my floorboards tremble until two in the morning.

I was determined to use some of my investigative reporting skills to find a better place to live. I set up spreadsheets, browsed government databases and questioned prospective buildings the way I would a reluctant source. It worked: My next two apartments were a huge improvement.

Of course, I was lucky: I’ve never faced a bidding war; I can work from home, so I choose to live farther from Manhattan, where rents are cheaper; I am able-bodied and college-educated and have the resources to avoid the worst landlords. Lower-income tenants and people with disabilities face far greater obstacles. Quartz recently reported that because landlords prefer tenants whose annual salary is 40 times the monthly rent, residents in Manhattan would need a household salary of $160,000 to afford the median rent for a vacant one-bedroom apartment. That’s more than twice the city’s median household income of $67,000 from 2016 to 2020. (Average rent for vacant Manhattan apartments reached $5,000 in June for the first time ever.)

With low vacancy rates, “landlords are in the enviable position of taking a pretty terrible apartment, charging a lot of money for it and when someone comes in basically telling them, ‘Take it or leave it,’” said Ellen Davidson, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, which represents low-income New Yorkers in housing court and other legal matters.

No amount of due diligence can solve the affordability crisis. But I hope these backgrounding tips can help you screen out some obvious bad actors. This guide is divided into three sections; the first two will help renters do their due diligence. Part three is a primer on tenant rights. I’ve also included anecdotes from ProPublica colleagues who shared their own renter horror stories.

Finally, these tips are far from comprehensive and biased toward my own priorities: I’m obsessed with flood risk (an occupational hazard of being an environment reporter), and as a pathetically light sleeper, I care a lot about ambient noise. (For additional coverage of New York housing policy and real estate, I recommend THE CITY, Gothamist, Curbed and Brick Underground.)

How to Research a Building and Landlord

Here’s a list from Curbed on where to search for apartments. I’ve also had luck with NYBits, where you can easily filter for no-fee apartments.

Once you’ve found an apartment you like:

Start with Who Owns What. Type in the building’s address to see the property owner, a summary of recent tenant complaints and other buildings owned by the landlord (or related entities). In my searches, I sometimes saw apartments in the same neighborhood with similar amenities and prices but vastly different histories of complaints. Who Owns What is an easy way to weed out specific buildings and owners from consideration.

The site was built by JustFix, a nonprofit that builds tools for tenant organizers. Check out their user’s guide and methodology.

Landlords often create LLCs that make it hard to identify a building’s owner, said Sam Rabiyah, data lead and engineer at JustFix, which pulls public registration files to map out the people behind these entities. Rabiyah said the tool was originally intended for housing advocates, but its audience has grown to include apartment hunters, journalists and city officials.

Screenshot from an address search in Who Owns What

Once you’ve selected a specific building, click on the “Timeline” tab for more details. The “Display” drop-down menu defaults to show 311 complaints tenants have filed with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. These complaints often involve pests, plumbing problems, or heat and hot water issues. You can also choose “DOB/ECB violations” in the drop-down to view buildingwide violations such as broken elevators or illegal construction.

To view the specifics of each complaint, click on “ANHD DAP Portal” at the bottom right. That will take you to another online tool from housing advocates, funded by city and state legislators, that shows a wealth of information about the property. You’ll be able to view individual complaint descriptions, along with building eviction stats and permit applications.

At this point you’ll have to gauge the seriousness of the complaints. If you’re a parent, complaints about lead paint or missing window guards could be major red flags. Rabiyah said it’s helpful to focus on the most common complaints: Those that involve pests or heat and hot water are hazardous and “very intensely disruptive to someone’s home,” he said.

I also recommend the “Summary” tab, which shows statistics for all the buildings owned by the same entity. The section on “Maintenance code violations” shows the rate of open violations across these properties compared to the city average. A lower rate could indicate a landlord who’s more attentive to building repairs. Rabiyah warned that the rate skews low for larger landlords, since they own so many units. He said this figure is more reliable when it comes to smaller landlords.

A caveat: Public housing isn’t subject to the same data disclosure policies as private landlords, so Who Owns What has limited insight into living conditions there. These buildings are owned and managed by the New York City Housing Authority. When you enter one of these addresses into the tool, it provides info on regulators and how to submit complaints.

Screenshots of Who Owns What for a public housing development in Brooklyn These links are at the bottom of every public housing address search on Who Owns What.

Remember, not all tenants feel comfortable filing complaints with the city, so there may be problems that never show up in official records.

“People don’t want to call 311,” said Larry Wood, director of advocacy and organizing at Goddard Riverside, a community-based nonprofit that offers a range of services including child care and a legal clinic. “Most tenants don’t want to rock the boat.”

Other issues may be seasonal or take a while to emerge.

(Illustration by Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

Sophie Chou, a ProPublica data reporter, spent months in an apartment that had raccoons living in the ceiling. At first it wasn’t a problem, she said, but over time the noise became unbearable. “Every evening it would literally sound like our roof was being demolished by rabid gremlins. It got so bad I didn’t want to sleep in my room anymore.” The landlord’s attempts to remove the raccoons didn’t work, Chou said, not even cutting holes in the ceiling and spraying raccoon repellant. Luckily, her roommate convinced the landlord to let them move out before the end of their lease.

Audio of the raccoons in Sophie Chou's ceiling, courtesy of her former roommate

Don’t forget to Google: Once you’ve identified the building’s owner, it’s worth typing their names into the search engine of your choice. You might find Yelp reviews for the management company or tenant reviews.

Keep an eye on the Landlord Watchlist, compiled by the city’s Office of the Public Advocate. The list scores multifamily rental buildings using data on open violations recorded by the city. The site also has a guide to tenants’ rights.

Learn about flood risk: The intense flooding from Hurricane Ida last fall led to horrific deaths and flooding throughout the city. I use the Risk Factor site, created by the nonprofit First Street Foundation, to screen for flood risk at individual buildings. (I wrote about the first version of the tool in 2020; it has since been updated with wildfire risk.) Enter your address to get the projected current and future flood risk at that location.

The Bedbug Registry: this site includes crowdsourced reports of bedbugs at specific addresses and hotels around the country.

Noise complaints: I’m eternally jealous of people who can sleep through anything. If street noise bothers you, check out the 311 noise complaints portal. Type in the building address and select “Noise” under “Problem Area.” Try searching for both summer and winter complaints; some areas get a lot louder in warm weather.

If you’re looking at apartments near hospitals, it’s worth checking whether you’ll hear a lot of sirens at night. I’ve found Reddit threads about neighborhoods with loud ambulances.

Noisy radiators are a true New York tradition. The heaters in my first apartment clanked all night long like an army of tiny elves were banging away with hammers. My landlord only offered Band-Aid fixes that did nothing to stop the noise. I even recorded the sounds to keep a document of my complaints. A good super might be able to fix the problem, but it could require more extensive repairs than the landlord is willing to make. While searching for my current apartment, I prioritized buildings with baseboard heaters, which are much quieter.

Lisa Song's clanking radiators, recorded at 5:13 a.m. on Feb. 20, 2018. What to Do When You View the Apartment (Illustration by Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

Talk to other tenants: In a city where many people dread small talk with strangers, it may feel awkward to lurk on the sidewalk until you spot a likely resident. But hearing directly from tenants is your most reliable source of intel. Arrive 20 minutes early for a viewing and talk to people you see in the lobby or walking in and out of the building. Ask them what it’s like to live there: How’s the landlord? Does the management company respond quickly to maintenance requests? Do residents’ packages get stolen? I chose my current place partly because the prior tenants told me they’d lived there for three years and were only moving because their kid needed their own room.

Bring all your documents: If you like the apartment, you’ll want to apply right away. The landlord or broker will ask for various documents, which may include:

• a copy of your most recent W-2

• a snapshot of your bank account

• your two most recent pay stubs

• a letter from your employer confirming your salary

• a copy of your driver’s license or other ID

• contact info for references

I always bring paper copies and store electronic versions on my phone. To secure the apartment, you may have to pay a security deposit, one month's rent and a broker's fee (if you used a broker). Many apartments also require application fees that you’ll need to pay with cash, a cashier’s check or money order.

If you can afford it: Once you move in, get renter’s insurance. I started buying it years ago after a friend’s apartment burned down, and it costs me $200 to $400 a year. My landlord also requires insurance as a condition of the lease.

Your Rights as a Renter

Nothing is foolproof. You can do all the research in the world and still end up with a dysfunctional building. Even luxury apartments aren’t immune.

All tenants have certain rights: You have the right to live in safe, pest-free conditions, with basic amenities such as heat, hot water and electricity. The city’s ABCs of Housing report includes helpful references.

Renters have the right to organize a tenants’ association, Wood said, and to use the building’s public spaces for their meetings. And, once you’ve lived somewhere for at least 30 days, the landlord cannot simply lock you out; a tenant is entitled to due process in housing court. This rule even applies to alleged squatters or other residents who can document as least 30 days’ occupancy, Wood said.

Some tenants have more rights: Anyone living in rent-regulated units, whether rent-controlled or rent-stabilized, has additional protections, including limits on rent increases. (For rent-stabilized apartments, the cap is set annually by the Rent Guidelines Board, whose members are appointed by the mayor; you can find the latest cap here.)

In an unregulated or “market-rate” apartment, the landlord can kick you out at the end of your lease for any reason at all, said Davidson, the Legal Aid attorney. The fear of being forced to relocate can lead tenants to avoid complaining about needed repairs, she said. Tenants in rent-regulated apartments, by comparison, have “much more power to be able to stand up for your rights.” Landlords can only terminate their leases if they have a good reason, such as showing that the tenant has been a nuisance or has violated the lease.

Some landlords will overcharge tenants by falsely declaring a rent-regulated apartment as market-rate. To fact check your landlord, here are two tools that let you request a unit’s rent history, which will show whether it’s really rent-regulated. (This information is only available to the current tenant, so you can’t use it to screen potential apartments.) Here are some general guidelines on rent stabilization and how to tell if a building contains at least one rent-stabilized unit.

Finally, if you moved into a building while the landlord was receiving a J-51 property tax abatement, then every unit in that building is rent-stabilized for at least the duration of that tax break (often lasting more than 20 years). The building and apartment may lose rent stabilization status only if the landlord follows correct procedures, Wood explained, and the landlord must notify tenants of when that benefit runs out. You can search for J-51 buildings by tax year and learn more about the J-51 program.

If you have a dispute with your landlord, try to resolve it directly with them. Wood said it’s important to build a paper trail in case you decide to take the case to housing court. If your landlord promises in a verbal conversation to fix something, send a follow-up email summarizing what you discussed, he suggested. If problems persist, you can escalate by calling 311. If much-needed repairs are required, for example, you can ask 311 for a housing inspection, which could put pressure on your landlord.

Wood also recommended Housing Court Answers and the Met Council on Housing, which provide advice and advocacy for renters throughout the city. (Wood is president of the board at Housing Court Answers.) Both groups may refer tenants to local community groups that organize collective action in their neighborhoods. Another group, Housing Justice for All, advocates for housing rights throughout New York state. For tenants struggling to recover their security deposits, the New York state attorney general’s office offers a mediation service.

In extreme cases, tenants can go to housing court. They can do that by filing a case against their landlord or withholding rent until the landlord initiates the process for a case, Wood said. Once that happens, tenants can use the paper trail they’ve built up to defend themselves.

But going to court comes with its own risks: Credit companies and tenant-screening apps collect renters’ names from court filings, so tenants can end up on a blacklist that makes it hard to rent again in the future, Davidson said. “There are no great solutions here.”

(Illustration by Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

When ProPublica reporter Lizzie Presser struggled with a bird infestation several years ago, she initially considered taking her landlord to housing court. Presser was living on the top floor of a building with exposed wooden beams. She’d loved the apartment until birds squeezed through holes in the ceiling. “Big black birds with yellow beaks” started “circling my bedroom,” Presser explained. “They soiled the whole place with feces. My super was no help. The only way I could figure out how to get them to leave was by putting on a bike helmet, opening my bedroom window, and thrashing a broom against the walls to scare them into looking for cold air.”

But fear of the blacklist convinced Presser not to start a case. She moved out as fast as she could, and found another tenant to take over the lease once management told her they’d patched the roof.

(Illustration by Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

Sometimes you’re stuck: ProPublica’s Lucas Waldron and his partner left California for New York in 2017. A friend of Waldron’s helped them scope out apartments ahead of time. The best option in their price range was one where the apartment was large but the building itself was a bit run-down, Waldron said. By the time they moved in, it had deteriorated considerably: There was a pile of trash in front of the mailboxes, along with human feces. The post office stuck a note on the door stating they would no longer deliver mail until it was cleaned up.

A note from the U.S. Postal Service to residents of Lucas Waldron's building

Waldron and his partner asked the management company for help. They sent messages collectively with their neighbors and filed 311 complaints. Nothing worked.

“We couldn’t break the lease,” Waldron said. “We even talked to a lawyer about it,” but they were told, he said, that “you’ve signed the lease, this is a contract, and it would be very difficult and very expensive for you to try to break it.”

The other option — subletting the apartment for the remainder of the lease — felt unethical, Waldron said, so they stayed for a year and left as soon as they could.

Wood said they might have had better luck with a different lawyer. Many private attorneys prefer to represent landlords, he said, and may not always have tenants’ best interest at heart.

Waldron said their next apartment was a huge improvement. His main takeaway from the experience was to “never get an apartment that you haven’t physically gone to yourself. And always vet who the owner is.”

Ruthie Baron, Sophie Chou, Lydia DePillis, Mariam Elba, Bianca Fortis, Lisa Larson-Walker, Brett Murphy, Cezary Podkul, Lizzie Presser and Lucas Waldron contributed tips, anecdotes and references.

Correction

Aug. 16, 2022: This story originally misstated a requirement for securing an apartment. You may have to pay one month’s rent, not first and last month’s rent.

by Ren Larson, Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill

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Military commanders have the power to detain service members ahead of trial through a process known as pretrial confinement. Commanders consider whether the suspect may flee or reoffend and if less severe restrictions can keep the person out of trouble. An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune into the Army’s use of pretrial confinement found that soldiers who were detained weren’t always the ones accused of the most serious crimes.

Below are examples of how a soldier accused of sexual assault and another accused of drug offenses were treated differently.

Christian Alvarado

Private first class

Olivia Ochoa

Private

Charged in total with:

Christian Alvarado:

• Nine counts of sexual assault involving five women
• One count of aggravated assault by strangulation
• Two counts of making a false official statement

8% of sexual assault cases tried or arraigned at courts-martial in the past decade resulted in pretrial confinement

Olivia Ochoa:

• Three counts of drug use or possession
• Seven counts of disobeying or disrespecting officers
• One count of failing to obey an order

18% of drug cases tried or arraigned at courts-martial in the past decade resulted in pretrial confinement

In deciding whether to place soldiers in pretrial confinement, commanders can consider previous misconduct. Their alleged misconduct included:

• Before the first sexual assault allegation, Alvarado was arrested by local police for firing a gun outside his girlfriend’s house. He was reprimanded by the Army.

• Ochoa was written up repeatedly for misconduct that included a messy room, not having enough water in her water bottle and being late to work.
• Ochoa was reprimanded when she and another soldier were accused of sexual harassment after repeatedly flirting and slapping each others’ butts and thighs during formation.
• She was punished for drinking.

Commanders also look at the nature of the offenses that may be tried at court-martial. Their alleged offenses included:

• Alvarado admitted in a statement to sexually assaulting a soldier named Asia Graham.
• He was accused of sexually assaulting an Army chaplain's assistant.
• He admitted in a text message that he had sexually assaulted and strangled a civilian named Lee, who agreed to be identified by her middle name.

• Ochoa admitted to consuming THC, the compound that gives marijuana its high.
• Army investigators found psychedelic mushrooms and what they believed to be a vape pen in her room.

Before invoking pretrial confinement, commanders can place restrictions on soldiers’ freedom. Their restrictions included:

• Protective orders required Alvarado to stay at least 100 feet away from Graham and the chaplain's assistant.
• Army commanders issued another protective order after Lee accused Alvarado of sexual assault. They then limited where Alvarado could be when he was at Fort Bliss. He could still live off post.
• He was required to check in with commanders multiple times per day, in person or by phone.

• Ochoa was limited to specific places on post at Fort Huachuca.
• She needed to sign out of her barracks and be accompanied by a buddy wherever she went.
• She was required to check in with the drill sergeant’s office hourly.

They allegedly broke their restrictions by:

• Alvarado failed to consistently check in with his commanders four weekends in a row.

• Ochoa visited stores from which she was barred on back-to-back days.

They were put in pretrial confinement for:

• Alvarado was placed in pretrial confinement eight days after a fourth and fifth woman accused him of sexual assault. This was a month after he first started to miss check-ins and nine months after the first two sexual assault accusations.
• He eventually spent 108 days in pretrial confinement.

• Ochoa was placed in pretrial confinement for refusing commanders’ orders to return to her room about three weeks after she was caught with drugs. A military magistrate ordered her release, saying she hadn't violated her restrictions. Commanders soon confined her again, immediately after she visited prohibited stores on post.
• She eventually spent 103 days in pretrial confinement.

They were convicted of:

Christian Alvarado:

• Sexually assaulting Graham and Lee
• Strangling Lee
• Lying to investigators

Alvarado was sentenced to 18 years in a military prison and given a dishonorable discharge. His case is under automatic appeal by the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, which can overturn convictions and reduce sentencing. In a letter, Alvarado told ProPublica and the Tribune that he is innocent. He and his attorney declined to answer the news organizations’ questions.

Olivia Ochoa:

• Consuming THC
• Possessing psychedelic mushrooms
• Disobeying or disrespecting superior officers four times

Ochoa was sentenced to time served after receiving credit for the more than 100 days she spent in pretrial confinement. She was given an other-than-honorable discharge, which her lawyer is appealing, and had to forfeit some wages as part of her plea deal. Ochoa and her attorney maintain that commanders treated her unfairly and that the length of time she spent in pretrial confinement was excessive.

Source: U.S. Army records of trial, disciplinary documents and criminal investigation reports; Army Court-Martial Information System.

Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on the Military Justice System

Graphic by Fernando Becerra and illustrated portraits by Kate Copeland for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

by Jeremy Kohler

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One of the nation’s biggest residential “clean energy” lenders has suspended making loans to homeowners in Missouri, citing economic conditions and a new state law that mandated more consumer protections and oversight.

Ygrene Energy Fund, based in California, said it will also stop lending in California, but will continue lending to homeowners in Florida, where it can make loans for wind and hurricane protection, a more viable business. No other states have large residential Property Assessed Clean Energy programs, although dozens of states allow them for commercial borrowers.

The measures in Missouri were signed into law last year, after a ProPublica investigation found that the high-interest PACE loans disproportionately burdened borrowers in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

A Ygrene spokesperson said Thursday that the company wanted to turn its focus to other areas of the country where it would find opportunities for profit. The spokesperson said that legislative reforms in Missouri were a “small factor” in the company’s decision to stop making loans to homeowners there, although a company executive said the reforms had likely contributed to a decline in loan applications.

In its investigation, ProPublica found that PACE lenders in Missouri, including Ygrene, charged high interest rates over terms as long as 20 years, collecting loan payments through tax bills and enforcing debts by placing liens on property — all of which left some borrowers vulnerable to losing their homes if they defaulted.

We analyzed about 2,700 loans recorded in the five counties with the state’s most active PACE programs and found that 28% of borrowers in predominantly Black neighborhoods were at least one year behind in repaying their loans, compared with 4% in mostly white areas. If loans are not repaid, the local government can seize a borrower’s property.

PACE was marketed as a way to finance energy-saving home improvements without upfront costs. Missouri law required the energy savings from each project to at least equal the cost of the loan, but many borrowers said they did not always see that much in savings. ProPublica found that while the state law authorized PACE programs to do audits to ensure that borrowers saved money on their energy bills, it did not require them, and PACE programs in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas did not typically perform them.

The programs targeted many vulnerable homeowners, including people who needed urgent repairs but had few options for credit. ProPublica found that some Ygrene loans in the St. Louis area were issued to owners of homes with exceptionally low property values; in several cases, the size of the loan exceeded what the local assessor said the entire property was worth. Ygrene and other PACE lenders had used private appraisals that were often much higher.

The new Missouri law required PACE programs to base loans on appraisals from local governments, a change that sharply curtailed the availability of loans to owners of homes with low property values.

The law also required that residential PACE programs be reviewed by the state Division of Finance at least every other year. Previously, PACE programs had to submit annual reports to the state, but ProPublica’s investigation found there was little oversight.

PACE officials and its lenders have said the program’s interest rates tend to be lower than those of some credit cards and of payday lenders, providing much-needed financing for home upgrades, particularly in predominantly Black neighborhoods where traditional lenders typically don’t do much business. Before the new law, Ygrene said, it beefed up its standards by making sure borrowers had a record of paying property taxes on time and by using more conservative property valuations to underwrite loans. The company said it has also reduced its delinquency rates since the program began making residential loans.

A Ygrene executive told the city of St. Louis’ Clean Energy Development Board on Wednesday that the company wanted a one-year break from making any new loans, starting Aug. 18.

“This is simply due to interest rates and economic conditions that are making the program not viable at this time,” Jim Malle, Ygrene’s director of government affairs, told the board. He also said the company had seen a reduction in new applications for loans “and we believe that is due to the Missouri legislation.”

The board, which only months ago had renewed Ygrene’s contract to act as its administrator for residential loans, said it could have found the company in default of its contract with the city but agreed to suspend the program for at least three months and reevaluate the decision quarterly.

Neal Richardson, executive director of the city’s development agency and a clean energy development board member, said the city would use money from the federal American Rescue Plan Act to help homeowners with energy projects and home repairs.

A representative for the St. Louis County PACE program, which also uses Ygrene, could not be reached for comment.

Ygrene had competed for market share in Missouri with another entity, Missouri Clean Energy District. While Ygrene dominated the market in St. Louis and St. Louis County, MCED operated mostly in St. Charles County, west of St. Louis, as well as across the state in the Kansas City area.

St. Louis County Assessor Jake Zimmerman, who has criticized PACE programs and last year urged the county council to “get out of this business,” said that while Ygrene's departure was good, he worried that other companies may get in the market.

David Pickerill, MCED’s executive director, said his district was still making loans but that business was “down quite a bit, I think, due to the economy and inflation and various factors.” He said it was possible “the people who were the best people to use the PACE program have already done so.”

Ygrene is not getting out of the lending business altogether. The company recently announced it had secured investments from two venture capital firms to expand other types of residential and commercial loans nationally, including those not secured with collateral. Ygrene also offers PACE loans for commercial projects; those loans have not attracted as much attention from regulators because they tend to involve borrowers with more experience and access to capital who aren't as likely as residential borrowers to default.

The company announced last year that it was offering PACE to homeowners in Ohio in a partnership with the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. The port authority had run its own successful small-scale PACE program that offered affordable loans in the northwest Ohio city. But port officials said they needed a national company to help offer loans statewide. Ygrene months ago removed any mention of Ohio from its website. Port officials have not responded to questions about the project’s status.

by Nicole Carr

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.

A group of Georgia mothers has been trying to get certain library books banned by reading sexually graphic passages aloud at school board meetings. Now, after the board barred one of the mothers from attending, the group is claiming in a federal lawsuit that their First Amendment rights have been violated.

In essence, members of the group, which has dubbed itself the Mama Bears, are arguing that they’re being censored — in their own pursuit of censorship.

At a February school board meeting in Forsyth County, Georgia, Mama Bears member Alison Hair wanted to draw attention to a book that was available at her son’s middle school library, according to the lawsuit. Turning to a page from “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel about a 9-year-old boy whose father was killed in the 9/11 attacks, Hair began to read: “I know that you give someone a blow job by putting your penis ...”

That’s as far as she made it before Board of Education Chair Wesley McCall cut her off. He reminded her of “the rules that we talked about in the beginning” of the meeting concerning the board’s policy about “profane comments.” He also let her know that “we understand your point” and stated that the district already has a vetting system in place “so these books are not read out loud to students.”

Hair continued to try to speak during her allotted three minutes, asking that she be given back the time that McCall spent interrupting her. “Here’s what I’m here to tell you,” she said. “I am here to confront evil.”

McCall cut her off again: “Your time is up.”

Hair returned to the Forsyth School Board meeting the following month, again attempting to read from a book and again getting cut off. The board later sent her a letter banning her from school board meetings until she agreed to follow board policies: “It was clear that your intent was not to comment to the Board in the public forum but was to disrupt the meeting of the Board of Education to draw attention to yourself and your beliefs.”

The lawsuit, filed in late July by the Institute for Free Speech on behalf of Hair, Mama Bears of Forsyth County, and Mama Bears Chair Cindy Martin, claims that “the Forsyth County School Board, embarrassed by debate about its choices, has gone so far as to silence and banish from its meetings any parent who simply reads aloud from its schools’ library books.”

Del Kolde, a senior attorney with the Institute for Free Speech Institute who’s representing the plaintiffs, said of the lawsuit: “It’s not about censoring the books. It’s about reading from the books in a public setting. We don’t see any irony.”

“To me, the irony is if you’re putting books in the system, why can I not read them in a public setting?” Hair told ProPublica. “But again, this is not about books. This is about my right to speak to the school board about concerns that we have regarding our children.”

According to Kevin Goldberg, an attorney and First Amendment specialist with the nonprofit free-speech advocacy group Freedom Forum, “There’s at least some merit to the suit. The premise is valid.” (Forsyth County Schools Chief Communications Officer Jennifer Caracciolo said the district and school board could not comment on pending litigation; individual school board members did not respond to requests for comment.)

Goldberg points out that “the First Amendment provides a right for parents to petition.” And he notes that “the suit is not the first of its kind and likely won’t be the last, because it has legs.”

Below, Goldberg provides commentary on the lawsuit. ProPublica has provided relevant excerpts from the suit to give some additional context to Goldberg's analysis.

Lawsuit: Plaintiffs — mothers who wish to protect their young children from Defendants’ questionable choices — want to exercise their right to criticize the placement of pornographic books in school libraries by accurately reading those books aloud at public meetings. The books’ language, after all, best illustrates why the parents contend the books are inappropriate for school. Plaintiffs want to read these books aloud because they want to elicit in these elected officials, and in their fellow citizens participating in the debate, the same emotions that struck them when they first read these words; embarrassment and motivation to action. They want their audience, including elected board officials, to hear the jarring, unsettling, and sexually graphic words in their original medium. If Plaintiffs cannot read these excerpts, then the power of their message is lost, indeed, the message itself is censored.

Goldberg: Parents have a right — and frankly, we want them to have a right — to be able to speak during these meetings. They also have a right to speak as they want to speak, and that right should be very broad. That’s why I think this case has some merit.

Lawsuit: At the February 15, 2022 school board meeting, Defendant McCall adopted the practice of opening every Public Comment period by purporting to read from the Public Participation Policy though he added language that cannot be found in the policy. This spoken variation of the policy adds a new category of things the boards can censor: A reading from something “inappropriate.”

“We want to remind our citizens that public participation is to present issues or concerns to the Board” [the lawsuit quotes McCall as saying] “but in doing so we do not allow profane comments or comments which involve inappropriate public subjects. If your comments include anything that you might read tonight is … inappropriate to being stated in public you will be instructed to stop.”

Goldberg: The policy as written is problematic, I think, from a First Amendment point of view. But certainly when you go off script, it raises a host of First Amendment problems, primarily because it tends to be vague.

The biggest problem with vagueness is that I don’t know how to moderate or calculate my speech, which means I’m likely to self-censor to not get in trouble. That is a clear First Amendment violation.

Vagueness also leads to selective enforcement. What we end up seeing here is one side being told to be quiet because they’re being inappropriate or disruptive.

Lawsuit: Protecting the innocence of Forsyth County’s children is central to Mama Bears and its members. Barring the availability of pornographic materials in school libraries is among the group’s chief concerns. …

The Mama Bears have identified over one hundred books they believe are inappropriate.

Goldberg: A stated purpose of their exercising their First Amendment right in this issue is to bar the availability of pornographic materials in school libraries. But pornography is protected by the First Amendment, and there’s no clear evidence that any of these materials are actually pornographic.

The First Amendment right of the parents is absolutely necessary for them to speak, to be a part of the process. It’s what makes the process work. It’s what helps us come to a final decision. But the parents should not be making that decision. The parents should not be imposing that decision. And that’s my real concern, that when they are imposing their decisions, their preferences on everybody else, we run into another First Amendment problem. They are now seeking to use the process to restrict the First Amendment rights of other parents.

Lawsuit: On March 17, 2022 Wes McCall sent Hair a letter banning her from attending future public meetings until she provided a guarantee in writing that she would follow the public participation rules and his directives. …

Though Hair did not attend any meetings after March 15, on May 11, 2022, the full FCS Board sent Hair a second letter, signed by each individual defendant Board member, confirming that she is banned from attending public meetings.

Goldberg: I would hope that they [the school board members] would be pushing to keep as many of these books in the library as possible, but they are at the same time shutting down speech.

Cohen v. California was a really fun and interesting case from the Supreme Court that was decided about 50 years ago. It’s best known as the “fuck the draft” case, where the guy wears the jacket in the L.A. County Courthouse that says “fuck the draft” on the back.

The court said, look, I mean, one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric. If you don’t like it, avert your eyes. We do not think that the mere presence of bad words is sufficient to punish somebody.

Well, I think that applies here. If you can use the words “fuck the draft” in a courthouse, you can use them in a school board meeting.

by Mike Hixenbaugh, NBC News

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This article was produced in partnership with NBC News.

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Weston Brown was scrolling through Twitter last month when he came across a video that made his chest tighten. It showed a woman at a school board meeting in North Texas, calling on district leaders to ask for forgiveness.

“Repentance is the word that’s on my heart,” she said near the start of the video.

For months, the woman in the clip had been demanding that the Granbury Independent School District ban from its libraries dozens of books that contained descriptions of sex or LGBTQ themes — books that she believed could be damaging to the hearts and minds of students. Unsatisfied after a district committee that she served on voted to remove only a handful of titles, the woman filed a police report in May accusing school employees of providing pornography to children, triggering a criminal investigation by Hood County.

Now, in the video that Weston found online, she was telling the school board that a local Christian pastor, rather than librarians, should decide which books should be allowed on public school shelves. “He would never steer you wrong,” she said.

The clip ended with the woman striding away from the lectern, and the audience showering her with applause.

Weston, 28, said his heart was racing as he watched and rewatched the video — and not only because he opposes censorship. He’d instantly recognized the speaker.

It was his mother, Monica Brown.

The same woman, he said, who’d removed pages from science books when he was a child to keep him and his siblings from seeing illustrations of male and female anatomy. The woman who’d always warned that reading the wrong books or watching the wrong movies could open the door to sinful temptation. And the one, he said, who’d effectively cut him off from his family four years ago after he came out as gay.

“You are not invited to our house for Thanksgiving or any other meal,” his mother had texted to him in November 2018, eight months after he revealed his sexual orientation to his parents.

Weston Brown shared texts that he'd exchanged with his parents with NBC News, including this one with his mother from November 2018. (Courtesy of Weston Brown)

Weston, who lives with his partner in San Diego, had long ago come to terms with the idea that he would never again have a meaningful relationship with his parents. He still loved them and desperately missed his younger siblings, he said, but he was done trying to convince his mom and dad that his sexuality wasn’t a choice or a sin. He was done challenging their religious beliefs and praying for them to change.

Until he saw the video of his mom at a school board meeting.

In recent months, Weston has watched as the same foundational disagreements that tore his family apart have begun to divide whole communities. Fueled by a growing movement to assert conservative Christian values at all levels of government, activists across the country have fought to remove queer-affirming books from schools, repeal the right to same-sex marriage, shut down LGBTQ pride celebrations and pass state laws limiting the ways teachers can discuss gender and sexuality.

Monica Brown, who served on a school district book review committee in Granbury, has called that process a sham. She filed a police report in May accusing school employees of providing pornography to children. (Screenshots of Granbury ISD video by NBC News)

Much as the seemingly intractable arguments over America’s pandemic response and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have led to fractured personal relationships in recent years, these clashes over gender and sexuality have pitted neighbors against neighbors, parents against teachers and — in the case of the Browns — a son against his mother.

“It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Weston said. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.”

Monica, 51, who has homeschooled all nine of her children and serves as the director of a private Christian education cooperative, declined to be interviewed or answer written questions. In a series of email exchanges with NBC News, she initially invited a reporter to discuss the article over dinner at her home in Granbury, but in a subsequent message, she said her husband would not allow the meeting, adding, “I have been advised to not speak with you at all.” Her husband also declined to be interviewed.

In public, Monica has denied targeting LGBTQ books. At a recent school board meeting, she said her only objective has been to protect children from sexually explicit content — gay or otherwise.

“There’s nothing about LGBTQ involved in this,” she said. “There are LGBTQ books that are sexually explicit, yes. They are wrong, too. If they are between men and men, women and women, cats and women, dogs and women, whatever, that is not appropriate educational content.”

That statement, however, doesn’t square with many of the books that she has flagged for removal at Granbury. Several of the titles on her list feature LGBTQ storylines, but contain no sexually explicit content. That includes “Drama,” by Raina Telgemeier, a graphic novel that depicts gay and bisexual characters navigating the routine awkwardness of middle school crushes.

Of the nearly 80 library books Monica and her supporters want removed, 3 out of 5 feature LGBTQ characters or themes, according to an NBC News analysis of titles posted on GranburyTexasBooks.org, a website where the activists have compiled parent reviews of books they want banned. In addition to sexually explicit content, the site calls for books to be removed for “normalizing lesbianism,” focusing on “sexual orientation” and promoting “alternate gender ideologies.”

Monica has also signaled anti-LGBTQ views in formal library book challenges that she’s sent directly to Granbury school officials, according to copies of the forms obtained through a public records request. In one instance, she criticized a biography of notable women in part because it included the story of Christine Jorgensen, a trans woman who made national headlines in the 1950s for speaking openly about her gender-confirmation surgery. She suggested replacing that book with a Christian biography series about girls and women who used their talents to serve God — “biographies of truly great Americans,” she wrote.

After watching the video of his mom at the school board last month, Weston skimmed through excerpts of the books she wanted pulled. It seemed to him that she and her supporters were pushing public schools to adhere to some of the same strict religious ideologies that he says he suffered under as a child.

Granbury’s Long Fight Over LGBTQ Library Books

• The public library’s refusal in 2015 to remove two LGBTQ books from the children’s section sparked a yearslong political battle that was still reverberating in last year’s school board elections.
• In January, school district superintendent Jeremy Glenn was recorded telling librarians that Granbury is a conservative town, and therefore there’s no place for books about sex and LGBTQ subjects in schools.
• The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas has called on the school district to apologize for pulling LGBTQ books from shelves.

He thought about all the students, at Granbury and across the country, who might benefit from reading the types of books that were off-limits to him growing up.

With tears in his eyes, he started to type a tweet on the afternoon of July 3.

“This is my mom,” he wrote, with a link to the school board meeting video. “Seeing her advocate for the erasure of queer representation is crushing. Coming up on the 5 year anniversary of being effectively cut off from my family and siblings after coming out in 2018.”

He hesitated, knowing he would be reopening old wounds for the world to see. He didn’t want to do anything to hurt the woman who’d raised him, he said.

But trying to get librarians arrested?

Weston added one more line to his post — “Much love to those standing up and pushing back for representation” — along with a rainbow flag emoji. And then he hit send.

“The Rejection You Have Chosen”

Weston has many fond memories growing up in the suburbs between Dallas and Fort Worth, about an hour from his parents’ current home in Granbury. He recalled summer days splashing in their backyard swimming pool, family ski vacations to Colorado and hours spent at the public library with his mom, who fostered his love of reading.

“I didn’t really have friends growing up, and going to make new friends via fictional characters was always something I looked forward to,” he said. “It was a beautiful way to leave my world and go somewhere better.”

But in a conservative Christian home, some content was off-limits.

Although the Brown family’s bookshelves were lined with classics, such as books from C.S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia” series, many popular titles were forbidden, Weston said. That included the Harry Potter series, which he said his mother, like many other conservative Christians, regarded as a satanic depiction of witchcraft.

Weston, the eldest child, said his mother also did her best to shield him and his siblings from words or images that might stir sexual curiosity. He remembered being told to look down at the floor anytime they walked through the women’s underwear section at department stores. Even as a child, he said, he was more intrigued by the marketing photos on display in the men’s section — though he didn’t dare tell anyone.

The lessons on purity didn’t stop after he became an adult.

In 2015, when he was 20 and still living with his parents, he returned home late one evening after seeing “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” a PG-13 superhero movie that his mother disapproved of. When he walked into his kitchen, he said, he found two pans of brownies waiting for him, along with a stack of articles printed off the internet about the corrosive influence of Marvel comics and films.

One pan of brownies was normal. The other had a label that warned it had been baked with a small amount of dog poop mixed in.

“Poo anyone? Just a little?” Monica wrote later, when she posted an image of the brownies on Facebook. “How much yuck is too much?”

Monica Brown posted this picture on Facebook after baking two batches of brownies — one normal, and one with dog poop mixed in — to teach her then-20-year-old a lesson on purity after he went to see “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” a PG-13 superhero movie that she disapproved of. (Courtesy of Weston Brown)

The moral of the illustration, which is popular among some evangelical Christians: If you wouldn’t eat brownies that might harm your body, then why would you expose yourself to movies, books or music that might harm your soul?

Her son was disgusted, but he didn’t push back on the lesson.

“She made her point,” he said, “and we never spoke about it again.”

That was the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage — a tectonic cultural development that disturbed many evangelical Christians. Afterward, Monica posted frequently on social media about the “dangerous” gay agenda that she believed was on the march across mainstream U.S. society. She warned in posts that Disney was secretly pushing LGBTQ lifestyles on children in movies such as “Toy Story 4,” and shared a link to a video alleging that pop star Katy Perry was conspiring with satanic forces to convince teens to embrace homosexuality.

Weston said he didn’t challenge his mom’s views while he lived with her. He’d spent years struggling to reconcile his desires with the religious values his parents had instilled in him — trying to convince himself that the butterflies in his stomach any time he was around one of the boys at church was just something friends felt for each other. It didn’t help, he said, that he’d had no meaningful sex education as a teenager — just a blanket instruction to abstain until marriage — and no understanding of LGBTQ identities or what those letters even meant.

But by 2018, he was 23, living on his own and finally confident enough to tell his parents what he’d always known about himself.

“Dear Mom and Dad, I’m writing this to share something that I’ve wanted to share with you yet have held back for a long time,” he wrote in an email to his parents in February 2018. “It is with great relief, clarity and vulnerability that I share this with you: I am gay.”

He ended the note: “I pray that you receive this with an open mind.”

That prayer, he said, went unanswered.

Over the next year and a half, he said, his parents tried to convince him that he was mistaken. Through a series of emotional lunch meetings, phone calls and text messages, he said, they urged him to see a Christian counselor in the hopes that he could learn to overcome his homosexual urges. They invited Weston to church — the one place where they would allow him to see his younger siblings — and openly wondered about what corrupting influences might have led their son down this sinful path.

For months, his mother sent him links to articles from Christian news sites with headlines like “Evidence shows sexual orientation can change” and “It’s not gay to straight, it’s lost to saved” — links that she was simultaneously posting publicly on Facebook. But after Weston made clear that there was no prayer or summer camp that would change who he is, he said his parents made clear that he was not welcome at their home, even on holidays or birthdays.

“You are not rejected, not at all, and never will be,” his father, James Brown, texted to him in October 2019, more than a year after he came out. “The lifestyle you have chosen goes against God and therefore that is the rejection you have chosen.”

His father added, “Have you ever considered the pain you have put your mother and I through?”

That same day, Monica sent him a message on Facebook to say that she was praying for dark forces to be cast out of him.

“I specifically come against evil that has entered you from the movie ‘It,’” she wrote, referring to the time when Weston, at around age 10, had watched part of the Stephen King mini-series about a murderous clown. “Clown demons have to go in the mighty name of Jesus.”

She ended the message, “I love you, Mom.”

“A Raging Fire”

Monica Brown’s campaign to rid schools of books that she considers obscene began late last year with a trip to the Granbury Middle School library, which sometimes hosts robotics competitions that her homeschooled children have competed in.

She started flipping through a few books while she was there and was disturbed by what she found, according to a May interview she recorded with The Blue Shark Show, a local far-right internet talk show hosted by a Republican former state legislator.

“What I saw was negative, dark — things nightmares are made of,” Monica said, without sharing more details.

Her sudden interest in library books coincided with a wave of similar book ban attempts across the country last year amid a growing conservative backlash against school programs and lessons dealing with racism, gender and sexuality.

The books that have drawn the most intense scrutiny, both in Granbury and nationally, are largely young adult novels and memoirs that contain passages with explicit descriptions of sex or rape, especially those featuring LGBTQ themes and characters. Defenders of these books argue that any sexual content is presented in the context of broader narratives that help teens understand and process the world around them.

The fight has been particularly heated in Texas, where Republican state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have gone as far as calling for criminal charges against any school staff member who provides children with access to novels, memoirs and sex ed books that some conservatives have labeled as “pornography.”

Monica didn’t say in her talk show interview whether she had reported her concerns to the school district. But in early January, Granbury’s schools superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, called a meeting with district librarians and shared that he’d started to get complaints about library books.

“Let’s call it what it is, and I’m cutting to the chase on a lot of this,” Glenn told the librarians, according to a secret recording of the meeting obtained by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune and first reported in March. “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out.”

When asked about his comments, Glenn released a statement in March saying the district was committed to supporting students of all backgrounds. And although he said the district’s primary focus is educating students, Glenn said “the values of our community will always be reflected in our schools.”

In the days after the meeting, district employees pulled more than 130 books off of school library shelves and announced the formation of a volunteer committee to review them.

Monica was one of the first residents appointed. From the start, she felt the process was a sham, she said in her Blue Shark interview. The first two meetings were held at times when she couldn’t attend, she said, and by the time she arrived at the third meeting, the committee had already voted to return most of the books to shelves.

Weston Brown’s social media posts show his disapproval of his mother’s attempts to remove library books she finds offensive. (Alan Nakkash for NBC News)

“That meeting was completely disrupted in the sense that we didn’t vote at all because I kept asking questions,” she said.

In the end, over objections from her and one other member, the volunteer committee voted to ban only three books: “This Book Is Gay,” a coming-out guide for LGBTQ teens by transgender author Juno Dawson that includes detailed descriptions of sex; “Out of Darkness,” by Ashley Hope Pérez, a young adult novel about a romance between a Mexican American girl and a Black boy that includes a rape scene and other mature content; and “We Are the Ants,” by Shaun David Hutchinson, a coming-of-age novel about a gay teenager that includes explicit sexual language.

The district returned dozens of other titles to shelves. Several of the books had no sexual content, the committee found. For the others, a majority of committee members believed that any descriptions of sex were age-appropriate when read in complete context.

Monica was outraged, she said on the Blue Shark Show in early May.

“I think they’re breaking the law,” she said.

That same week, she put that belief to the test. On May 2, she and another disillusioned member of the book committee filed a police report with Hood County Constable Chad Jordan alleging that the district was making pornography available to students, according to a copy of the incident report. Four days later, Hood County constables visited Granbury High School to investigate the claim.

In a letter sent to NBC News on Wednesday and dated Aug. 1, Jordan said his office could not release additional information about the case because the investigation remained active. In a statement issued in May, Glenn, the Granbury superintendent, said the school district was cooperating with law enforcement.

In the months since, Monica has continued to keep the pressure on, speaking at every school board meeting, filing more than a dozen additional book challenges and, in the process, becoming a prominent and polarizing figure in Granbury.

Her activism has been praised by several leading conservative figures in town, including members of the Hood County Republican Party and Melanie Graft, the school board member who selected Monica to serve on the book review committee. Graft, who rose to local prominence in 2015 while leading a conservative campaign to remove LGBTQ-themed picture books from the children’s section at Granbury’s public library, did not respond to messages requesting an interview.

Monica’s fight has also come at a personal cost. In social media posts and public remarks, she’s said the hours spent reviewing library books have required her to sacrifice time with her family and led to a barrage of personal attacks from residents who oppose her efforts.

In May, Adrienne Martin, a Granbury parent and chair of the Hood County Democratic Party, was recording on her phone as she confronted Monica outside a school board meeting.

“You want to have librarians arrested,” Martin said as Monica walked away. “That’s fascism. You’re a fascist.”

At a board meeting last month, Monica tried to explain why she’s fought so hard to remove books from a school district that her kids do not attend. She’s doing it, she said, for all the other children.

“I feel like it’s a raging fire,” she told the board, “and I’ve got a water pistol.”

“I Pray for You”

After Weston’s initial post criticizing his mother, he fired off several more tweets denouncing her efforts in Granbury.

It didn’t take long before the posts had reached his parents. His dad texted him to demand that he apologize to his mother.

“We have not come out against the LGBT Community,” his father wrote, insisting that their efforts at Granbury schools were focused on “pornography” and nothing else. “I know you are hurt by our decisions but we are also hurting and have been ever since you said you were Gay.

“We have not been hateful to you,” his father added.

Weston replied: “All I can say is I pity you and wish you the best.”

Soon, opponents of Monica’s efforts began posting images of her son’s tweets on Granbury community Facebook groups — making a family’s private rift public.

“Call your son and leave ours alone!” a woman wrote in response to one of Monica’s many public posts about obscene library books.

“Your crusade against books won’t bring your son back to you or make him straight,” another Granbury resident wrote. “Go home and look in the mirror, fix your house before you worry about others.”

Monica never publicly addressed her son’s tweets, but in response to a Facebook post about them, she wrote: “You can believe what you want about me. In the meantime, I will carry on doing my best to finish out my life for an audience of One.”

A couple of weeks later, she finally got in touch with her son. Two days after NBC News contacted her to request an interview, she texted him to let him know that she didn’t plan to share “personal family details” with a reporter.

“I did not come out against LGBTQ at all — ever,” she wrote, before adding: “I love you, and I pray for you.”

Weston studied the message, thinking back to all the hours he’d spent pleading with her to accept him for who he is rather than trying to control and change him. It hurt, having the woman who’d given birth to him tell him that his sexual orientation was an abomination.

He didn’t want to revisit that trauma, he said. He just wanted his mom to stop pushing her beliefs on other people’s kids.

Weston re-read her text message one more time. He started to type a reply, then stopped. Instead he closed the message and set his phone aside.

He’d already told his mom everything that needed to be said.

by Vianna Davila, Lexi Churchill and Ren Larson, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Kengo Tsutsumi, ProPublica

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If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can receive confidential help by calling the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network’s 24/7 toll-free support line at 800-656-4673 or visiting its website. You can be connected to a hotline staff member in your area or to the Department of Defense’s Safe Helpline.

U.S. Army soldiers accused of sexual assault are less than half as likely to be detained ahead of trial than those accused of offenses like drug use and distribution, disobeying an officer or burglary, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

The news organizations obtained data from the Army on nearly 8,400 courts-martial cases over the past decade under the Freedom of Information Act and analyzed a process known as pretrial confinement. The resulting investigation of the nation’s largest military branch revealed a system that treats soldiers unevenly and draws little outside scrutiny.

What is pretrial confinement?

When service members are accused of crimes, their commanders, who aren’t required to be trained lawyers, get to decide whether they are detained before they go to trial.

Here are the main findings from the investigation:

1. Soldiers accused of sexual assault are placed in pretrial confinement at lower rates than those charged with some more minor offenses.

On average, soldiers had to face at least eight counts of sexual offenses before they were placed in pretrial confinement as often as those who were charged with drug or burglary crimes, the news organizations found.

That disparity has grown in the past five years. The rate of pretrial confinement more than doubled in cases involving drug offenses, larceny and disobeying a superior commissioned officer, but it remained roughly the same for sexual assault, according to the analysis.

“Justice that’s arbitrary is not justice,” said Col. Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor for the Air Force. “It shouldn’t come down to the whims of a particular commander.”

2. Use of pretrial confinement varies from one Army post to another.

As a whole, the Army has used pretrial confinement in about 1 in every 10 cases handled by the branch’s highest trial courts over the last decade, but some posts employ it at a significantly lower rate than others, the news organizations found. For example, at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, defendants were confined ahead of trial 5% of the time in cases involving sexual assaults, while soldiers at another large Texas installation, Fort Hood, were confined almost 12% of the time in the same type of cases.

Pretrial Confinement Is Used Less Frequently in Sexual Assault Cases

The percentage of sexual assault cases that included pretrial confinement was lower than other types of cases at most Army posts. Shown are domestic posts that tried or arraigned at least 20 sexual assault and 20 other types of cases in the past decade.

Note: Numbers include Army general and special courts-martial cases. “Other” cases exclude those with murder charges. Among these 29 posts, the number of cases tried or arraigned varied, ranging from just over 40 to more than 800. The median installation had 66 sexual assault cases and 83 other cases. Source: U.S. Army Court-Martial Information System. (Ren Larson/ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) 3. Across the Army, soldiers charged with drug crimes are confined at an especially high rate.

More than 1 in 6 Army drug cases that went to courts-martial in the past decade involved a defendant who was put in pretrial confinement, twice the rate of sexual offense cases. Aniela Szymanski, a private attorney and U.S. Marine Corps Reserve judge advocate, said commanders often interpret drug use as jeopardizing the morale or safety of the unit, whereas they tend to view sexual assaults as a conflict between two people.

“I think that’s going to take some time for commanders to grow into having the same knee-jerk reaction to sexual assault offenses as they do to drug offenses,” she said.

4. The Army’s justice process is different from the civilian one.

Take the case of Christian Alvarado, an Army private first class at Fort Bliss who admitted in a sworn statement to sexually assaulting a fellow soldier in December 2019.

“She was drunk and so was I,” Alvarado wrote in July 2020. “We had sex, but she passed out.”

On the same day, Alvarado acknowledged that he had sex with another woman while she was intoxicated, which he said was wrong. He would not agree to a sworn statement about the second allegation because he said he believed it would just be “icing on the cake.”

At the end of the interrogation, Alvarado’s commanders didn’t place him in detention or under any restrictions beyond the orders he had already received to stay at least 100 feet away from the two women who had accused him of assault, according to records.

A month later, Alvarado assaulted another woman.

Had Alvarado’s case been handled by civilians and not the military, his written admission could have been enough evidence to quickly issue an arrest warrant and bring a criminal charge, according to two lawyers who previously worked for the El Paso County district attorney’s office.

“I would have felt comfortable charging at that point,” said Penny Hamilton, who led the Rape and Child Abuse Unit at the district attorney’s office and later served as an El Paso County magistrate judge.

In Texas’ civilian system, Alvarado would have then gone before a magistrate judge, who could set a bail amount in the tens of thousands of dollars. He’d only be released if he could pay the bond.

The military justice system has no bail. Many decisions about who should be detained for serious crimes before trial are made not by judges but by commanders, who are not required to be trained lawyers.

The Army eventually charged Alvarado with the three sexual assaults in late October 2020 and ordered him to stay 100 feet away from the third woman to accuse him. Still, he was not detained.

Lt. Col. Allie Scott, a former Fort Bliss spokesperson, said that the conditions to justify placing Alvarado in pretrial confinement were not met after the three assault accusations. She declined to answer additional questions seeking clarification, saying Fort Bliss would not comment on internal deliberations.

In June 2021, a military judge found Alvarado guilty of sexually assaulting two women, strangling one of them and lying to investigators. He was sentenced to 18 years and 3 months in a military prison and a dishonorable discharge. His case is under appeal.

Alvarado told the newsrooms he was innocent but declined to answer specific questions.

5. Despite calls for reforms, commanders still control many parts of the military justice system.

Congress passed reforms last year that stripped commanders of some of their powers related to certain serious crimes. The law created a new office of military attorneys, giving them, and not commanders, the power to prosecute cases such as sexual assault, domestic violence, murder and kidnapping.

But commanders retained prosecutorial control over other offenses. They also still control who is placed in pretrial confinement in all cases, serious and minor.

Army officials defended the system. They said that soldiers accused of violent offenses aren’t necessarily more likely to get pretrial confinement. “The nature of the offense is one factor to consider in a decision to put someone in pretrial confinement, but it is not the sole factor,” said Lt. Col. Brian K. Carr, chief of the operations branch at the Office of the Judge Advocate General’s Criminal Law Division, in an email. Characteristics of individual soldiers and their willingness to follow orders are also important factors, Carr said.

He said that, under military regulations, commanders must first decide whether there’s good reason to believe that a soldier committed a crime and is either likely to flee before trial or engage in serious criminal misconduct. Commanders have to consider if other restrictions, such as directing soldiers to remain in military housing or requiring regular check-ins with superiors, are sufficient to keep them out of trouble. They should also weigh a soldier’s military service record, character, mental condition and any previous misconduct.

Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on the Military Justice System