Aggregator

Creve Coeur was incorporated in 1949 when the entire population of Creve Coeur was estimated at 1,000. William M. Seymour, a retired mechanical engineer, was named Creve Coeur's first mayor.

A smash-and-grab at a south county jewelry store leads to an arrest. The police say this man is responsible for more than a dozen other burglaries.

The holiday bustle has made it to St. Louis Lambert International Airport, with Thursday and Friday being the busiest travel days this week.

The Jefferson County Council is taking up a controversial resolution at Thursday night's meeting.

Bob and Joann Baehr loved going to the original Mainlander at the corner of Hanley and Bonhomme in the late 1960s to early 1970s Clayton. It was one of their regular haunts — a place they'd go before or after bowling at Tropicana Lanes or dancing at the Chase Park Plaza.

by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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

When the Biden administration said it had reached a “historic” legal deal with Northwest Indigenous tribes last week to save endangered salmon, no one could agree on what it meant for the tribes’ costliest and most controversial demand: the removal of four hydroelectric dams that hinder fish from their migration out to sea and home to reproduce.

Some said the deal, in promoting renewable energy that can replace hydropower, virtually ensures the dams on Washington’s Snake River will come down. Others said the White House did little for dam removal because it punted the question to Congress.

Largely overlooked in the debate was one seemingly technical provision that is far less open to interpretation and of great importance to the tribes. Not only does the deal offer $1 billion in new funding for Columbia River salmon restoration, but for the first time it also grants states and tribes control — not the Bonneville Power Administration, which sells hydropower from Northwest dams — over how that money gets spent.

The shift, while not flashy, addresses one of the biggest sources of frustration for tribes that ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting highlighted in the investigation “Broken Promises.”

“We don’t need an energy agency to be telling us how this fund should be utilized,” said Yakama Nation council member Jeremy Takala.

The Bonneville Power Administration, which has historically decided how salmon recovery money gets spent, is under a sometimes conflicting mandate: to sell hydropower from federal dams and operate as a for-profit business, but also to save salmon harmed by that hydropower production.

The Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica investigation found that Bonneville time and again prioritized its business interests over efforts to restore salmon populations. It actively pushed back on tribal initiatives and flatlined budgets in ways advocates said starved recovery efforts, even as the agency raked in record revenues.

Under the new agreement, Bonneville will invest $300 million over 10 years into salmon programs, including habitat restoration and much-needed upgrades to fish hatcheries, overseen by tribes and the states of Oregon and Washington. Companies and families that buy power from Bonneville will pay some of the cost in the form of an estimated rate increase averaging 0.7 %, and the agency will recoup the rest by selling more power to California.

That comes on top of a previously announced $200 million that Bonneville agreed to pay for a separate tribal plan to reintroduce salmon in areas blocked by dams. Additional money will come from the federal budget, rather than Bonneville ratepayers. In all, the Biden administration says it expects the government to spend $1 billion on state and tribal salmon recovery in the next decade.

Apart from that $1 billion, the administration also said it would look at doubling total fish and wildlife spending to meet all the needs identified by states and tribes, with the money to come from U.S. taxpayers, via Congress, and not customers of Bonneville’s power.

Plenty of money has already been spent on efforts to remove threats to salmon other than dams — digging new stream channels and placing downed logs in them for example — with little to show for it.

But programs run by the Northwest’s tribes have produced some of the few success stories. State fish and wildlife employees have often worked collaboratively with tribes on those projects.

With the new agreement, Bonneville will pay an annual lump sum that states and tribes will decide independently how they’ll spend.

Corinne Sams, a member of the governing board of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and chair of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, said the tribes have already identified $1 billion in backlogged projects in the Columbia basin.

“For far too long, preventing salmon extinction has been viewed as a cost. Salmon restoration needs to be considered an investment in our shared future,” Sams said.

Sams said she saw an acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty and expertise that she never had before during the negotiations, including visits by several White House staff members to traditional fishing grounds and restoration sites.

“They actually got to see and feel our connection to our first foods and our resources, and how we care for them in our daily lives,” Sams said. “They were able to witness that, and that’s never happened.”

Other provisions in the agreement, such as exploring new sources of energy other than dams in the region, also give priority to projects started by tribes.

Shannon Wheeler, chair of the Nez Perce tribe, said he was disappointed the agreement didn’t assure that the Snake River dams will be breached to help salmon. But he said that in giving tribes control over funding, the agreement is an acknowledgment the U.S. has failed to honor tribal sovereignty in salmon recovery. Government treaties in the 1850s promised that the tribes’ access to salmon, and their way of life, would be preserved.

“It’s an understanding that the tribal position and expertise in this area needs to be considered,” Wheeler said. “I think that’s an important step in the right direction.”

Bonneville officials did not address the move to give tribes and states increased control over salmon spending when asked.

A spokesperson instead provided a statement from the agency’s chief executive officer, John Hairston, praising the agreement as a whole: “BPA sought to provide our ratepayers operational certainty and reliability while avoiding costly, unpredictable litigation in support of our mission to provide a reliable, affordable power supply to the Pacific Northwest.”

The Public Power Council, a coalition of utilities that buys electricity from Bonneville, has been adamantly opposed to the agreement. The council said it’s not concerned about the increased funding for salmon recovery or giving control of the spending to tribes. But it is concerned about other provisions.

“We cannot emphasize enough that this is but one change,” the council said in a statement about the increased salmon funding, “and there is still substantial uncertainty in many key areas.”

Opponents of the legal agreement, including the Public Power Council, are particularly concerned that it leaves supporters of dam removal the option to file new lawsuits if they feel it’s necessary.

In the past, when Bonneville had struck funding agreements with tribes, those deals were contingent on promises that tribes wouldn’t sue over the dam system. Some tribes signed those agreements to pursue habitat restoration while others did not and stayed in court. But under this agreement, the additional funding has no contingencies. It only says the current lawsuit alleging violations of the Endangered Species Act is on hold for five years.

Advocates for keeping the Snake River dams also are unhappy with the Biden administration’s promise to explore future alternatives to hydropower in the Northwest. The industry has said replacing the dams with other sources could drive up electric rates by 40%.

Tribal leaders say the Northwest’s unusually cheap electricity only exists thanks to hydropower, which is generated at the expense of salmon.

For Takala, the agreement with the Biden administration represents an opportunity for tribes to show the federal government the way toward healing the damage 20th-century dam construction inflicted.

“Displaced tribal members, impacted salmon runs — the list goes on of impacts that we’re still seeing to this day in some of the broken promises that haven’t been lived up to,” Takala said. “Yet, this gives us an opportunity to show the region, probably show the country, this could be done in a responsible manner.”

The restaurant explores the culinary traditions and flavors of China, Korea, and Japan.

Pretty much everyone who's attended has fallen in love with Music at the Intersection. We're talking not only critical acclaim but also just your average St. Louis concertgoer. As proof, we point to the crowds that packed the Grand Center stages in September.

Same day John Jacob Ehlinger posts bail, prosecutors in St. Louis County charge him with additional assault

They say across the country the relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and law enforcement has been broken for decades.

by Robin Urevich, Capital & Main

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

The Los Angeles Housing Department has ordered the owners of four buildings meant to house some of the city’s poorest residents to stop renting rooms to tourists, following a review that was prompted by reporting by Capital & Main and ProPublica.

The news organizations documented how some owners of the buildings, known as residential hotels, were advertising short-term rentals online despite a 2008 law aimed at preserving the rooms as residential. Landlords who convert the buildings to other uses or demolish them must replace the units or pay into a city housing fund.

The new enforcement actions bring the number of residential hotels cited by the Housing Department for violating the residential hotel law to 21. The agency had sent violation notices to 17 residential hotels within weeks of the Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation.

In all, about 750 residential hotel rooms could be turned back into low-cost permanent housing for LA residents who have few other options — if the city’s citations are upheld in court and if the city aggressively enforces the law.

The most recent Housing Department orders to stop renting to tourists were issued earlier this month to the Hollywood Hills Hotel, which offers rooms with city views for up to $200 per night; the Motel 6 San Pedro; the Central Inn Motel near the University of Southern California; and the Royal Hawaiian Motel in Mid City. The Hollywood Hills Hotel is permitted to offer some rooms to tourists, but inspectors found more rooms were rented short-term than is allowed.

Dinesh Vora, one of the Central Inn’s owners, said he plans to appeal the Housing Department orders. “To have someone say you can only rent long-term, that wouldn’t be sufficient for us,” Vora said. Ricky Patel, the registered agent of the Royal Hawaiian, declined to comment on the enforcement or whether the hotel intended to appeal. “It’s a touchy subject,” Patel said. One of the owners of the Hollywood Hills Hotel, Cole Harris, declined to comment on Dec. 12 because, he said, he wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations. And managers didn’t return phone messages left at the hotel. The owner of the Motel 6 didn’t respond to calls or emails.

The Royal Hawaiian Motel in Los Angeles, California (Barbara Davidson for ProPublica)

Sixteen of 17 hotel owners who were cited for failure to comply with the residential hotel law in July appealed their notices to the Housing Department’s general manager and attended hearings conducted by phone between September and November.

A department hearing officer recently denied appeals from eight of those hotels, including the American Hotel in the Arts District and the H Hotel and Hometel Suites in Koreatown, which were highlighted in our initial story for transforming their buildings into boutique hotels. The agency postponed five other appeals involving hotels that have signed contracts to provide temporary homeless housing through the city’s Inside Safe program or that said they were considering participating in the program.

Capital & Main and ProPublica found that the mayor’s marquee homeless initiative has given funding to eight residential hotels, even though they are already meant to provide housing to low-income people. Some residential hotels were awarded contracts despite appearing to violate the residential hotel ordinance.

In evaluating the evidence in the American Hotel case, Housing Department hearing officer Andre Brown noted the city’s declared housing and homelessness emergency and wrote that the residential hotel ordinance had been passed to address “a severe shortage of decent safe and sanitary rental housing in the City resulting from the loss of single room occupancy and residential hotel units.”

None of the hotel owners disputed the city’s allegation that they offered short-term rentals, but they argued that they’d done so legally because they paid hotel taxes to the city. The hearing officers, however, said the hotel owners violated a clear ban on offering their rooms for rent on a nightly or weekly basis, known in city law as transient use.

“It is undisputed that the Residential Hotel Ordinance (RHO) prohibits transient use of units that have been determined to be Residential Units,” Brown wrote in the American case.

Frank Weiser, an attorney who represents all eight hotels, including the American, said the hotels plan to appeal the city’s decisions in federal court. On the one hand, the city has been treating them as residential hotels barred from renting to tourists, he said, but on the other, it has openly accepted tax payments from the hotels for doing just that.

“The city was collecting an enormous amount of tax,” Weiser said. “It’s totally contradictory.”

City housing inspector Jean-Claude Olivier said at the American appeal hearing that payment of hotel taxes doesn’t change the approved building use, and Brown noted in his decision that the ordinance doesn’t address such situations.

Just one hotel, the 25-room Knights Inn near Dodger Stadium, won its case. A hearing officer found the hotel wasn’t given sufficient opportunity to appeal its residential hotel designation and that there wasn’t enough evidence to show the hotel had ever been residential.

Mayor Karen Bass, who recently heralded bringing 21,000 homeless Angelenos into temporary housing in the last year, has signaled that she thinks the residential hotel law might need an overhaul.

In an executive directive in November, she said some of the hotels might not meet current building code standards and ordered the Housing Department to report on the city’s residential hotel supply, the hotels’ occupancy rates and recent enforcement so that city officials could recommend ways to update the law.

The report hadn’t been made public as of Wednesday afternoon California time.

Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed research.

December 21 is the first day of winter, and the Grateful Dead is helping welcome the season by treating fans to a winter solstice playlist. The band announced the new playlist on Instagram, which is made…

Source

New video shows a St. Louis Police SUV running a red light moments before it smashed into Bar:PM early Sunday morning.  The video, posted to Twitter last night, shows the SUV on South Broadway headed north, past the intersection at Nagel, and blowing through a red light.

The UMass professor details a reduction in wage inequality unseen in the U.S. in half a century.

by Sergio Hernandez, Alex Mierjeski, Al Shaw and Mollie Simon

Every year, the Supreme Court’s nine justices fill out a form that discloses their financial connections to companies and people. Until now, however, those disclosures and connections haven’t been mapped, aggregated and made searchable. Using our new database, you can now search for organizations and people that have paid the justices, reimbursed them for travel, given them gifts and more.

Access the full database on our website.

The $215 million deal made headlines, but the industry pay gap persists, along with new cases of sexual harassment.

The country may have a long way to go in its decarbonization goals, but these stories show signs of progress.

The Fosen wind farm was built illegally. Now the Norwegian government is paying to keep it running.

More than two dozen countries pledged to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050. But experts say the promise is “meaningless.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: In order to bring a plurality of voices to our storytelling, the Missouri Historical Society frequently asks guest writers to contribute to History Happens Here. The views and opinions expressed by guest contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missouri Historical Society, its affiliates, or …

Continue reading "The Austrian Boy Who Became Chinese"