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Alex and Jeff Henry's traditional masa mill and lunch counter by day opens on National Taco Day.

The state ethics commission has fined five former St. Louis-area political candidates with violating campaign finance disclosure rules.

by Audrey Dutton

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When the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade, it greenlighted the kind of near-universal abortion restrictions that Idaho lawmakers had spent the previous two years crafting. Gov. Brad Little said the state should turn to helping women who might otherwise have terminated pregnancies.

“We absolutely must come together like never before to support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies,” said Little, a Republican who supports the abortion ban. About 1,700 to 2,000 people a year in Idaho had abortions before the court ruling. “Families, churches, charities, and local and state government must stand ready to lift them up and help them and their families with access to adoption services, health care, financial and food assistance, counseling and treatment, and family planning.”

But since the June 2022 decision, Idaho has failed to deliver — even as other conservative states with abortion bans took steps to enhance their safety nets for families during pregnancy and after birth.

Idaho legislators disbanded a state committee that investigated the root causes of maternal deaths, making it the only state in the nation with no such mortality review.

They allowed two bills to die that would have put Idaho on the same track as nearly every other state with abortion restrictions — including Florida, Kentucky and Texas — by extending postpartum Medicaid coverage to 12 months. Idaho’s Medicaid coverage ends two months after birth, the minimum under federal law.

They turned down $36 million in federal grants to support child care this summer, while other states with new abortion restrictions — Alabama, Louisiana and Missouri among them — made investments in early childhood education and day care. Idaho lawmakers at the time attributed the decision to a pending audit of a different batch of grants.

Democrats generally support these kinds of measures, but Idaho Republicans dominate the state capitol and therefore control which bills move forward.

Rep. Brent Crane, a longtime Republican leader who chairs the House State Affairs Committee, said GOP lawmakers last year had hoped to put forward bills to improve health care and support for kids and families after the Supreme Court struck down federal protections for abortion rights. They instead got bogged down in debate over exceptions to the abortion ban.

“Idaho has some work to do,” Crane said. “Be patient with us.”

The need is urgent, according to Emily Allen, policy associate for the nonprofit Idaho Voices for Children. The state, she said, needs health care funding and other support in place to adjust to life after the abortion ban.

“Things have changed,” Allen said. “We can either bury our head in the sand, or we can respond with good policy that is very family-centric.”

But Blaine Conzatti, president of the Idaho Family Policy Center and a leading anti-abortion lobbyist, is not bothered by the lack of government support. Pregnancies, births and child care are not the purview of the government, he said, but of families, communities, charities and, most of all, churches.

“The Bible is clear, and the history of Christendom broadly is clear, that it’s the church’s responsibility to meet the needs of the poor and to ensure that people have the services that they need to live flourishing lives,” Conzatti said.

No action set Idaho apart from other abortion-ban states more than when the Idaho Legislature allowed its Maternal Mortality Review Committee to die this year. The committee had been granted unique powers to review private health care and other records of women who died during or within a year after pregnancy and draw conclusions about the root causes of those deaths.

Its budget of $10,000 a year came only from federal funds, so keeping the committee going seemed pro forma. Every single state, New York and Texas alike, had put one in place. But in Idaho, a lobbyist for an ultraconservative political nonprofit stood up and spoke against it at a hearing.

Fred Birnbaum, legislative affairs director of Idaho Freedom Foundation, said studying the causes of Idaho’s roughly 10 to 15 preventable maternal deaths each year risked inviting a push for more government support to help keep people from dying. And government support was anathema to his group.

“You know the old saying, ‘All roads lead to Rome,’” said Birnbaum, who testified against the committee’s creation on similar grounds in 2019. “Well, all government-created committees lead to the call for more government spending.”

Birnbaum’s assessment was partly correct. Idaho’s maternal mortality committee had made recommendations that could increase public spending, such as extending Medicaid coverage postpartum, expanding access to naloxone to prevent death from opioid overdose and providing better housing and child care support. But of the 52 recommendations in the committee’s final report, most called for no new government spending.

The role of such committees has not been so controversial in other Republican-led states.

The Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, for example, has been around for about a decade and is now “part of the entire effort” to reduce tragic outcomes from pregnancy and birth, said Chris Van Deusen, director of media relations for the Texas Department of State Health Services.

The Texas committee’s findings in 2018 that patients had bled to death in childbirth helped push the state to adopt recommendations and protocols for hospitals to train their employees to measure blood loss and to educate people on what is abnormal bleeding. Birth-related hemorrhage deaths started to fall the following year, Van Deusen said.

He said the committee has generally had the support of Texas lawmakers, who voted last year to adopt one of its recommendations and extend postpartum Medicaid coverage to 12 months.

Advocates for the creation of Idaho’s committee in 2019 pointed out how other states had helped reduce maternal death rates: seat belt laws in Nevada; substance use disorder treatment in Michigan; urgent messages to doctors and hospitals in Florida.

Lucky Bourn, the longtime Republican coroner of Minidoka County and a member of the maternal mortality committee, said its demise means Idaho will have no window into maternal deaths in the wake of its abortion ban, because the committee’s final report used data from 2021.

“I was very disappointed in the Legislature when they did not continue the funding of it,” Bourn said. “The thought that comes to my mind is, ‘With the change in the abortion laws in the state of Idaho, do you think that might have a correlation in the rise of the mortality rate of the women who don’t want to be pregnant?’”

The number of maternal deaths since the abortion ban took effect has not yet been reported. The committee believed it would have had 10 maternal deaths to evaluate from 2022 if it had continued.

ProPublica identified at least two deaths during pregnancy and childbirth that the maternal mortality committee could have evaluated. One death was from complications during childbirth in 2022, according to the woman’s obituary. The other was a murder-suicide this year that claimed the life of the pregnant mother and her toddler, according to the sheriff in the rural North Idaho county where she lived.

Little’s staff told ProPublica that he will bring forward a proposal in 2024 “to continue the work of this important committee.”

Lawmakers are also poised to consider other proposals that have previously gone nowhere. Idaho House Majority Leader Megan Blanksma, a Republican from Elmore County, said she is working on bills that would improve prenatal and postpartum health care, resume the study of maternal deaths and “support young families.”

Blanksma also said she will revive legislation to extend Medicaid coverage for postpartum care to a full year, a concept she said she dropped last session because of the ballooning cost of Medicaid.

Idaho state Rep. Megan Blanksma asks Rep. Dori Healey about the rationale for continuing the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee, which studied the root causes of preventable deaths during and within a year of pregnancy. Both lawmakers are Republicans. (Video screen capture from Idaho In Session)

“We are working on a full package to introduce come January,” Blanksma told ProPublica.

Conzatti, the anti-abortion lobbyist, advocates a more hands-off approach from the state.

Idaho has at least 16 “pregnancy resource centers” spread across every region of the state. Many in Idaho are Christian-oriented organizations that offer counseling, referrals and some material support like diapers. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the centers’ goal back when Roe v. Wade was in effect was to persuade women to carry their pregnancies to term rather than have abortions.

Few Idaho centers offer medical care beyond pregnancy tests and “heartbeat” ultrasounds.

But those centers are where Conzatti said people who have unplanned pregnancies should now look to for help. They embody his vision of a world before legalized abortion and before Medicaid got involved in the lives of poor families.

Crane, the Republican House leader, wouldn’t rule out state-funded support for pregnancy centers if there’s political will for it among lawmakers.

“Every option is on the table,” he said.

The Rolling Stones are getting even more fashionable as they get ready to launch Hackney Diamonds, their first album of new material in 18 years. The legendary rockers just announced they are collaborating with…

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Agri Stats lets meat processors coordinate their pricing. The Justice Department finally decided to go after what it calls collusion.

A change to public records laws, which takes effect today, allows legislators full discretion to retain, sell, or destroy their own documents.

Will they survive an intense and preposterous lobbying campaign by the U.S. platform giants to brand them as discriminatory against American companies?

by Brandi Kellam, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO, and Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. This story was co-published with Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This past May, we were working on a story about how the establishment and expansion of Virginia’s Christopher Newport University dismantled a vibrant Black neighborhood. When we asked university officials for archival material, we encountered something we hadn’t heard about before. We learned that in Virginia, the papers of state university presidents are largely exempt from public records laws.

We asked for several boxes containing some of the papers of Paul Trible, the university’s president from 1996 to 2022, which pertained to real estate acquisitions, board meetings and development projects. Since the city of Newport News seized the core of the Black community for a new campus in the early 1960s, Christopher Newport has bought almost all of the remaining homes there.

We hoped the records would show how Trible’s administration obtained properties in the Shoe Lane area abutting the campus and reveal any internal debates about its actions. We wanted to know whether the university encouraged or pressured homeowners to sell and whether it used or threatened to use eminent domain, the government’s right to forcibly purchase private property for public use.

As a public institution, Christopher Newport is subject to the state public records law. But the university would not let us see the vast majority of Trible’s documents. It cited a 49-year-old amendment, section 2.2-3705.7 of the Virginia code, exempting the “working papers and correspondence” of “the president or other chief executive officer of any public institution of higher education in the Commonwealth” from disclosure. Since Trible, now a Christopher Newport distinguished professor, was unavailable for an interview, the lack of access to his communications left unanswered questions, such as why the university’s governing board approved taking properties by eminent domain in 2005 after he publicly said there was no need to do so.

Virginia may have the broadest and most explicit exemption for college presidents’ papers in the country, based on a guide from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. While university presidents have said that public scrutiny would hamper frank dialogue and “reflective” decision making, the exemption renders their perspectives — and the schools’ inner workings — less visible to the media and Virginia taxpayers. Legislative proposals to repeal or narrow it have failed in the face of opposition from the higher education lobby.

Virginia universities aren’t required to invoke the exemption — they can provide the information if they choose. But we were far from the first journalists to be thwarted by this provision. It came into play in 2006 when Old Dominion University rejected a request from a Virginia newspaper for an evaluation prepared for its president of a mandatory course that students had criticized. William & Mary cited the exemption in 2007 in denying requests from news outlets and alumni related to a donor’s decision to revoke $12 million in pledges, though it later reversed itself and released a sought-after email. Also, in 2022, William & Mary withheld 17 pages from a public radio reporter seeking information about “lab school design concepts.” And the University of Virginia wielded the exemption during a firestorm in 2014 over a Rolling Stone article, which was subsequently retracted, about an alleged rape on campus.

Moreover, as Christopher Newport’s denial of our request for some of Trible’s papers highlights, the amendment doesn’t say how far back the exemption goes or whether it applies to former presidents. Open records advocates said that, based on their reading of the statute, the exemption should only apply to ongoing deliberations. Nearly 30 states protect such deliberations by university officials from disclosure.

“The intention of this exemption was to provide decision-makers with some breathing room to make decisions,” said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, a nonprofit that presses for access to public records. “It was never intended to be a black box in which all their papers and correspondence get put into and locked away forever.”

But the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council, a state agency that helps resolve public records disputes, has taken the position that the statute’s silence makes it impossible to set a time limit. “FOIA doesn’t address everything,” senior attorney Joseph Underwood said. “There are dark corners.”

In a 2004 opinion, the council’s executive director wrote that any cutoff date “would require clear language of intent from the General Assembly that the exemption no longer applies after a certain number of years after the creation of a record.”

Asked about Christopher Newport’s use of the exemption, university spokesperson Jim Hanchett said in a statement that the university “is committed to meeting its open government obligations and at all times acting in accordance with the Commonwealth of Virginia’s open record laws.”

In a Sept. 18 message to faculty and staff, Christopher Newport president Bill Kelly acknowledged that the university’s progress “has come at a human cost, and we must continue to learn about and understand our complicated history.” The city chose a site for Christopher Newport, which was then a branch of the Colleges of William and Mary system, on land “that was home to a valuable and well-established neighborhood,” Kelly wrote. “The residents of that neighborhood, most of them African Americans, lost their homes, many due to the use of eminent domain.” This “important chapter … is appropriately receiving renewed attention,” he added in an apparent reference to our Sept. 5 article.

Like Christopher Newport, Old Dominion and UVA have grown by displacing Black residents. An Old Dominion spokesperson said that it has focused on improving relations with the surrounding neighborhood and that students of color now make up the majority of its enrollment. UVA has established presidential commissions to examine its role in slavery and segregation, and has set a goal of developing 1,500 affordable units in university properties. Those schools also said that they abide by state public records law, giving similar explanations to Christopher Newport’s. William & Mary said it follows guidance from the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council and gives “careful consideration” to “the documents requested and the context in which they were created and have been used.”

To be sure, several states including Pennsylvania and Delaware go even further in shielding universities, though they don’t single out presidential papers. In Pennsylvania law, four universities — Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University and Lincoln University — are categorized as “state-related” rather than “state-affiliated,” a distinction that exempts them from disclosing most information. The University of Delaware and Delaware State University are not considered “public bodies” under Delaware law, though they receive taxpayer funding.

Enacted in 1968, Virginia public records law exempts officials such as the governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, state legislators and mayors. It added university presidents to the list in 1974, even as the Watergate scandal was prompting calls for increased transparency. James T. Edmunds, a Democratic state senator and a graduate of the University of Richmond’s law school, introduced the change. It was a turnaround from a stance Edmunds had taken the previous year, when he had supported a bill to make public the actions taken by university governing boards, saying that news reporters deserved more access.

After leaving the state Senate, Edmunds served on the board of the Virginia community college system and practiced law. His career came to an abrupt halt in 1987 when he admitted to stealing more than $170,000 from clients. He served 10 months in prison and surrendered his law license, which was reinstated in 1995. Edmunds died in 2008.

It’s unclear why Edmunds proposed the presidential exemption. His widow, Harriett Edmunds, who worked as a legislative aide before they were married, said she didn’t recall. “I do know that he was interested in the community college system,” she said. “That was one of his major, major interests.”

A November 2014 Rolling Stone article indirectly fueled a debate over Virginia’s presidential exemption. The article, which concerned an alleged rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, was discredited and retracted. But news outlets, hoping to sift fact from fiction and learn how the university handled sexual misconduct cases, barraged UVA with requests for its president’s correspondence. UVA deflected them, citing the exemption. A spokesperson said the university no longer has copies of those requests.

Amid the fallout, two legislators filed proposals in 2015 to eliminate the presidential exemption. Then-delegate David Ramadan, a former member of George Mason University’s governing board, who sponsored one of the bills, told us that he “thought there were a lot of good things” university presidents “were doing that should be out in the public and shouldn’t be hidden.”

The bills died in committee, but the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council took up the issue. College presidents fought back, arguing that secrecy was needed to foster candid discussions. “The removal of this exemption would hinder our ability to embrace reflective decision-making,” the Council of Presidents wrote in July 2015. “As the law currently allows, neither university presidents nor those that advise us are inhibited in communication due to fear of our preliminary discussions becoming public and thus inaccurately reported, taken out of context, viewed as final when far from it, and quite possibly politicized.” The letter did not address the exemption’s use to shield the papers of former presidents.

Among the signatories to the letter was Trible, Christopher Newport’s then-president. A former Republican politician and U.S. senator, he was Christopher Newport’s longest-serving president; its library is named for him and his wife. Ultimately, the advisory council called for tightening the exemption by limiting it to “working papers” and making available the correspondence of presidents and other officials, but the legislature didn’t adopt the recommendation.

Despite Christopher Newport’s denial of our request for Trible’s papers, our reporting continued to raise questions about his role in uprooting Black families. For example, we learned that, although university officials had vowed not to pressure residents to sell, Trible wrote to at least one homeowner, encouraging sales talks.

In July, we sent another request to Christopher Newport. We were interested in a house on Prince Drew Road, long owned by a Black family, that the university’s board had approved taking by eminent domain for a parking lot during Trible’s administration. A university spokesperson told us that its real estate foundation bought the building without resorting to eminent domain, but we wanted to learn more.

In response, the university said it had two pages of presidential correspondence about the property. It refused to give us those pages, citing the exemption. Trible again could not be reached for comment, and a university spokesperson did not respond to our request to contact him.

Louis Hansen of the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO contributed reporting.

A new federal initiative is bringing together climate scientists and community leaders to examine cities’ microclimates — and make them more resilient.

Black activists picketed the Veiled Prophet Ball, complaining that the organization was racist and elitist. A man dressed as the "Black Veiled Prophet" and his queen joined the protest.

Rowing was a very popular sport in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, receiving much newspaper coverage and drawing large crowds for races and regattas. A group of rowing medals in the Missouri Historical Society Collections attest to this popularity. There were numerous rowing clubs in St. Louis, and their members were considered local …

Continue reading "A Crack Four-Oared Crew: Rowing Medals in the Collections"

Terry Pierson of Fairview Heights, IL joined the Real Rock Army today … brought to you by Sievers Equipment and Sievers JCB! Terry’s enjoys listening to Vinyl Exam on KSHE....

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Terry Pierson of Fairview Heights, IL joined the Real Rock Army today

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The Riverboats at the Gateway Arch award guests one of the best views of St. Louis’ working riverfront, the Gateway Arch and the city skyline.   Narrated by the captain […]

The post St. Louis Riverfront Cruise appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

"That's just sad. He was somebody's son and somebody's brother. Police told me 70 gunshots were fired," Karen Condon, a neighbor, said.

The Hazelwood Police Department Criminal Investigation Team is leading the investigation.