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Andrew Bailey laid out the proposal in 2021 before he was attorney general. His office won’t clarify whether he still believes the changes should become law

The Independence Day holiday ends with gun violence in St. Louis City. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police are investigating around a half-dozen shootings Wednesday morning.

To drive down costs, insurers are bypassing hospital system pharmacies and delivering high-priced infusion drugs, including some used in chemotherapy, via third-party pharmacies. Smarting from losing out on billing for those drugs, hospitals and clinics are trying to convince states…

This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund. For the previous two chapters in this series, see Ready or Not: St. Louis grapples with climate change

For two years, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has pushed unsuccessfully to allow government agencies to withhold more information from the public and charge more for any records that are turned over. And according to a 2021 memo obtained by The Independent, one of the architects of Parson’s plan to weaken government transparency laws was Andrew […]

The post Memo shows Missouri AG helped craft governor’s plan to weaken open records laws appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Billions of snow crab have disappeared. The Indigenous people of St. Paul Island depend on them for survival.

Most intrusions have been innocuous, but a nefarious plot could bring down the grid. Experts have suggestions for improving security.

At least five separate shootings occurred in a matter of hours on July 4. One person was killed, and six others were injured.

by Caleb Bedillion, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and The Marshall Project. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In April, the Mississippi Supreme Court changed the rules for state courts to require that poor criminal defendants have a lawyer throughout the sometimes lengthy period between arrest and indictment. The goal is to eliminate a gap during which no one is working on a defendant’s behalf.

That mandate went into effect Saturday. But few of the state’s courts have plans in place to change their procedures in a way that is likely to accomplish what the justices intended.

A survey of courts by the Daily Journal, ProPublica and The Marshall Project found that some local court officials are unaware of the new rule. Others have not decided how they will respond. Some officials suggested that their current practice of appointing lawyers only for limited purposes will fulfill the new requirement, even though those attorneys do little beyond attending early court hearings.

That reporting suggests that impoverished defendants in many Mississippi counties are likely to remain deprived of meaningful legal assistance as they wait, often in jail, for prosecutors to decide whether to pursue felony charges.

“There’s really not a plan,” said Chuck Hopkins, a judge in a county-level justice court in northeast Mississippi’s Lee County. He fears that if officials don’t come up with one, the court could be “hung out there waiting for a lawsuit to happen.”

André de Gruy, who runs Mississippi’s Office of State Public Defender and is recognized throughout the state as an expert on indigent defense, said just four of the state’s 23 circuit court districts have asked him for advice on how to comply with the new rule. He responded by developing a model process they could use.

After someone is arrested for a felony in Mississippi, that person has an initial appearance in court. A judge informs the defendant of the charges against them, sets the conditions for being released from jail, and appoints a lawyer if the defendant can’t afford one. Under current rules, in many courts that lawyer handles just the initial appearance and, in some cases, an optional preliminary hearing when evidence is presented. After that, the lawyer exits the case.

Only after the defendant is indicted, which often takes months, is another lawyer appointed. Critics have dubbed the period between lawyers the “dead zone.”

Mississippi gives district attorneys unlimited time to indict someone after an arrest, and it’s among a handful of states where defendants can be jailed indefinitely as they await indictment, according to recent research by Pam Metzger, a legal scholar who runs the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law.

“Mississippi is among the worst of the worst on this issue,” Metzger said.

Cliff Johnson, a lawyer who pushed for the revised indigent defense rule, has documented how those two factors — the lack of an indictment deadline and the lack of legal representation in the “dead zone” — can cause defendants to be jailed for months or years. Without a lawyer, defendants may have a hard time fighting their charges or striking plea deals.

Cliff Johnson, head of the Mississippi office of the MacArthur Justice Center, speaks in Hinds County Chancery Court in Jackson in May. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)

Johnson, who leads the Mississippi office of the MacArthur Justice Center, a civil rights law firm, said advocacy organizations like his will monitor courts for compliance with the new rule.

“This structural change means nothing,” he said, “if local judges don’t create and implement new comprehensive plans for indigent defense.”

Patchwork of Court Systems Handle Indigent Defense

The new rule on indigent defense makes one key change: It says a lawyer may not withdraw from a case pending indictment until another has been appointed.

Ordering that change now looks like the easy part. Implementing it is another story, largely because of the patchwork of courts in Mississippi.

Criminal defendants may move through as many as three different court systems, each with its own system of public defense, as they go from arrest to a plea deal or verdict.

Mississippi is one of only eight states without state oversight of public defense, according to the Sixth Amendment Center, which advocates for robust indigent defense. Instead, local governments bear almost all the responsibility of providing poor criminal defendants with an attorney, as guaranteed by the Constitution.

A few local governments employ full-time public defenders. Most rely on part-time public defenders or contract with private attorneys. They all generally have high caseloads.

Now, officials in those different court systems must figure out how to ensure that defendants maintain legal representation as they move from courtroom to jail to courtroom.

To understand how courts will do that, the Daily Journal, ProPublica and The Marshall Project contacted officials in all 23 circuit court districts, most of which cover more than one county, as well as more than a dozen officials in municipal courts and separate county-level justice courts. We spoke with more than 20 judges, public defenders, prosecutors, court clerks and private defense attorneys.

Only a few circuit districts said they were working to have a new policy by Saturday, including two on the Gulf Coast and one in southwest Mississippi. Many other court officials said they don’t know exactly how they’ll coordinate among the appointed lawyers who represent defendants, sometimes briefly, in court. Some officials worry they’ll have to pay to defend people who have charges pending in a different jurisdiction.

In Tupelo, located in northeast Mississippi’s Lee County, officials say they’re struggling to figure out how to bridge the gap between the municipal court, where people charged with felonies often have their initial appearance, and circuit court, where those charges are ultimately decided.

Indigent defendants are represented in Tupelo’s municipal court by a full-time public defender, Dennis Farris. He generally makes a case for a low bond so his client can be released from jail and advises the defendant on whether to request a preliminary hearing.

But after the initial hearing is held or the defendant waives their right to it, the municipal court loses jurisdiction over felony cases.

Dennis Farris, seen here in 2019, is the public defender in the city of Tupelo’s municipal court. (Adam Robison / Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal)

City officials agree that the new rule means Farris cannot withdraw from those cases, but they want local circuit judges to agree to appoint felony public defenders immediately after the preliminary hearing is held or waived so Farris can focus on the job he’s paid to do in municipal court.

Officials in the municipal court for Southaven, in the Memphis suburbs, want their circuit judges to agree to the same thing.

Farris spends most of every workday in municipal court, handling the steady stream of misdemeanors and felony initial appearances, with little time to tend to cases that will eventually be handled by another court system.

“If I’m still on those cases, what am I supposed to do? Send a bill to the county?” he asked. “I’ll do what I can. But I’m only one person.”

Lee County’s justice court faces a different, but common, challenge in following the new rule: The private attorney who handles indigent defense typically has a limited role. Dan Davis handles only bond reductions, weeks after a defendant’s initial appearance in court.

Davis doesn’t attend initial appearances and rarely requests preliminary hearings for his clients. He acts on behalf of defendants only if they remain in jail after 30 days. If so, he contacts them to gather information to file a bond reduction motion.

“If someone bonds out, my part is basically done” except in rare circumstances, Davis said. “They’re off my list.”

Given that the justice court has limited expectations of what he must do, Davis believes he fulfills his obligations to defendants.

He anticipates little change in how he does his job under the new rule. Since he never files motions to withdraw from his cases, Davis said, he will remain a defendant’s attorney until an indictment, and the new rule will appear to be satisfied.

But he believes it is “very unusual” for a defendant to require much legal assistance after bonding out. If he were to find his workload increasing, he may not want to keep the job. Hopkins, the justice court judge, said the county may need to find a full-time public defender.

Experts say during the first few months after someone is arrested for a felony, there’s important work to be done: interviewing witnesses, securing evidence, perhaps seeking an early plea deal. If someone is jailed for months without being indicted, their attorney can ask the DA what’s taking so long or file a motion to dismiss the case.

Justin Cook, the former head of the state public defender’s association, warned attorneys against superficial adherence to the new requirement.

“You owe an indigent defendant effective representation under the Constitution,” he said. “You are not nominally their lawyer. You are their lawyer, and you have duties and obligations to them.”

An Alibi That Grew Cold

A case in Hinds County that is wending its way through federal appeals shows what can happen if an appointed lawyer doesn’t act early and aggressively to investigate a defendant’s claims of innocence.

Sedrick Russell has spent more than 15 years arguing in court filings that he lacked representation after he was arrested for a nonfatal shooting with no eyewitnesses.

Sedrick Russell claims in court filings that he didn’t have a lawyer for 14 months while he was jailed at the Raymond Detention Center in Hinds County, Mississippi, awaiting trial. That includes eight months as he awaited indictment. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)

From his arrest in December 2006 until February 2008, Russell claims, he spoke with a public defender just once, briefly. During that time, he sent seven handwritten letters to the court alleging that his right to a speedy trial had been violated and complaining that he hadn’t spoken to an attorney.

Russell has claimed in court filings that at his preliminary hearing in January 2007, he tried to tell a lawyer with the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office about an alibi. But he didn’t get far.

Russell claims that before the shooting, he got into a car driven by a friend he knew only as Ron Ron, and the two left the site where the shooting later took place.

“The assistant public defender who came to his preliminary hearing brushed off Russell’s request to get Ron Ron to testify, telling Russell, ‘It was just a preliminary.’ She never came back,” U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves later wrote, after Russell had appealed his conviction.

In February 2008, the state trial judge removed the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office from the case and appointed a private lawyer, Don Boykin. Within about a month, Boykin told prosecutors that Russell intended to raise an alibi defense. But Boykin never found Ron Ron.

Russell was convicted in a jury trial in January 2009 and sentenced to two life terms because he had been deemed a habitual offender.

In April 2008, Sedrick Russell wrote to a judge and complained that he’d been deprived of meaningful legal representation and had lost contact with a potential alibi witness. (Obtained by Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal)

It took years for Russell to exhaust his appeals in state court. When he took his case to federal court, Reeves ruled that Russell had been denied his Sixth Amendment right to an attorney, even though, as far as the local courts were concerned, he was represented by indigent counsel the entire time. The judge determined that Russell had been “completely abandoned by counsel” for 14 months, including eight before he was indicted.

Reeves vacated Russell’s conviction but stayed his order pending an appeal to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In May, the appeals court reversed Reeves’ ruling and reinstated Russell’s conviction. The three-judge panel ruled that Reeves had overstepped his limited authority to overturn a state court, given a federal law that sets a high standard for doing so. The court also expressed doubt about whether Ron Ron even existed, let alone whether his testimony would’ve exonerated Russell.

Alysson Mills, Russell’s federal court-appointed attorney, said her client intends to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cook, who handles state-level appeals for indigent defendants, said at least half of the defendants he represents claim that key witnesses or other evidence have gone missing. But he can’t introduce new evidence on appeal, and even if he could, it can be difficult to verify those claims.

“Hopefully that is what will get remedied by this new rule,” Cook said. “People can meet with their lawyers and that investigative work can happen early.”

Gail Lowery, the head of the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office, said she has discussed Reeves’ ruling with attorneys in the office. She said she stressed the need to investigate cases early and to locate key witnesses or evidence before it can be lost.

Lowery said she doesn’t know whether Russell’s public defender ignored his alibi claim. She didn’t work there at the time, and two key people involved have since died. But if his claim was ignored, Lowery said, “that will never happen again.”

Gail Lowery, chief public defender for Hinds County, testifies about the need for more public defenders during a hearing hosted by the Jackson delegation of the Mississippi Legislature at the state Capitol in March. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)

The public defender initially assigned to a case, she said, interviews the defendant, typically within a week of an arrest, and seeks to identify witnesses and key evidence.

“That pre-indictment time, it’s critical. We’ve been doing it, but we’re shoring it up in light of the changes” to the rule on indigent defense, Lowery said. “I’m reminding everyone, we need to be vigilant.”

She acknowledged, however, that there’s limited time for investigative work given caseloads and limited resources.

Johnson, the MacArthur Center head who pushed for the rule change, knows this.

“The next step in our fight,” he said, “is to convince legislators to provide our public defenders with resources equal to those given to prosecutors and law enforcement.”

The path they have taken includes a potential lengthy negotiated rulemaking process.

Increasing cancellations of convention plans and business investments are starting to damage Florida’s economy.

by Mark Olalde and Umar Farooq, ProPublica, and Anna V. Smith, High Country News

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.

At night, the lights of Lake Havasu City’s hotels, boat launches and neighborhoods reflect off the reservoir that gave this busy Arizona tourist town its name. The federal government dammed the Colorado River just downstream in the 1930s, providing the water and recreation opportunities that have allowed the community to flourish.

The opposite side of the reservoir is dark and so quiet that water lapping on the shore and bats clicking overhead can be heard over the distant hum of boat engines. This is the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe’s reservation in California. The water that rose behind Parker Dam to create Lake Havasu washed away homes and flooded about 7,000 acres of fertile Chemehuevi land, including where members grazed cattle.

The communities across the reservoir reflect the vast divide in economic opportunities between Indian Country and the rest of the West, which has been perpetuated, in large part, by who received water and who did not.

In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government owed tribes enough water to develop a permanent home on their reservations and that their water rights would hold senior priority, meaning they trumped those of others. In the Colorado River Basin, most tribes, even in a drought, should get water before Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

More than a century later, only a few basin tribes have benefited from this system. Of those that have, some live near federally funded canals and pipelines that can deliver water to their land, others received money to build their own water systems and some negotiated for the right to market their water to other users. The Gila River Indian Community, for instance, recently struck a deal with the federal government to forgo using some of its water in exchange for up to $150 million over the next three years, depending how much water it conserves, and $83 million for a new pipeline.

But most of the basin’s 30 federally recognized tribes have faced seemingly endless barriers to accessing and benefiting from all of the water to which they’re entitled. The Chemehuevi’s reservation fronts about 30 miles of the Colorado River, yet 97% of the tribe’s water remains in the river and ends up being used by Southern California cities. The tribe never receives a dollar for it.

The Chemehuevi Reservation Fronts About 30 Miles of the Colorado River Boundaries of Native American reservations and trust land are from the 2018 U.S. census. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

The water that has already been guaranteed to basin tribes but remains unused totals at least 1 million acre-feet per year — nearly one-tenth of the Colorado River’s flow in recent years and nearly four times the Las Vegas metro area’s allocation. If sold outright, this water would be valued at more than $5 billion, according to a ProPublica and High Country News analysis. For the Chemehuevi, a tribe with about 1,250 members, that means the amount of water it has on paper but doesn’t use would have a one-time value of at least $55 million.

Steven Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, grew up testing his mettle against the Colorado River’s currents, swimming across its cold waters upstream of the reservoir. He still thinks of the river in terms of struggle. But now, it’s a struggle for the tribe to get the same help from the federal government to access water as others have, or, if not, to get compensation for what’s legally theirs.

“All that development and governmental support that they provide every state, that should be the same thing they provide to tribes,” Escobar said. “We’ve had to fight for everything out here.”

Steven Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, says it has been a struggle for the tribe to get the same help from the federal government to access water as others have. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica and High Country News)

As demand on the Colorado River far exceeds its supply, tribes worry that they’ll never receive the water they’re owed.

The Chemehuevi are left in a bind. The tribe doesn’t have the pumps or other infrastructure necessary to deliver its full allotment of river water to its reservation. While the federal government gave the tribe a grant to build a small reservoir, neither it nor the state of California has allocated money to build a larger delivery system.

Even as a backup option, the tribe is unable to lease its water to other users, like rapidly growing cities, or earn money by leaving it in the river to preserve the waterway. Antiquated laws and court rulings typically allow tribes to be paid only to conserve water they previously used. Any changes to how a tribe could market its water would take an act of Congress.

“This is a long-standing problem,” said Mark Squillace, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School. “From the perspective of the people using that water, why would they pay when they’re already getting it for free?”

The Law of the River at Work

A half-century ago, the Bureau of Reclamation began construction on a massive canal called the Central Arizona Project to send the waters that flooded the Chemehuevi’s land 336 miles across the desert to Phoenix and Tucson. The pumps that power the system, which help deliver the state’s share of the Colorado River, are the largest single consumer of electricity in the state.

Meanwhile, the Chemehuevi rely on a single diesel pump to draw water six stories up to the plateau where they live above Lake Havasu.

The Chemehuevi reservation in the foreground and Lake Havasu City in the background. The reservation fronts about 30 miles of the Colorado River, yet 97% of the tribe’s water remains in the river. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica and High Country News)

For at least 50 years, the river’s decision-makers have recognized this disparity in water access. In 1973, a body called the National Water Commission submitted a report to Congress: “In the water-short West, billions of dollars have been invested, much of it by the Federal Government, in water resource projects benefiting non-Indians but using water in which the Indians have a priority of right if they choose to develop water projects of their own in the future.”

For tribes, the first challenge is securing their water rights. After the Supreme Court’s 1908 decision confirming tribes’ right to water, two paths emerged to quantify and settle the amount and details of those rights. Tribes could, with the backing of the Department of the Interior, negotiate with the state where their reservation is located. Or they could go to court. Fourteen basin tribes are still in the midst of this process, but either path they choose presents trade-offs.

Tribes that negotiate typically need to trade some of the water they believe they’re owed in exchange for money to build water-delivery infrastructure. They can also trade their water priority — leaving them more susceptible when allocations are cut, a reality that’s already threatening to curtail tribes’ water amid the West’s ongoing drought.

For tribes that choose to go through the courts to get their water, there’s no opportunity to negotiate for funding for canals, pipes and pumps, meaning there’s no way to move the water they’re awarded onto a reservation.

“It’s not enough to have the right to the water,” Squillace said. “You also have to have the infrastructure.”

Highlighting the difficulties in converting rights to water on paper into actual water on a reservation, tribes around the West that secured a negotiated settlement for their rights only increased their agricultural land use by about 9% and saw no increase in residential or industrial development, according to estimates from a recent study published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

And if a tribe can’t move water, it often can’t monetize it.

Colorado River Indian Tribes farmland. The tribe recently got a bill through Congress that will allow it to make millions of dollars from leasing its water. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica and High Country News)

Laws passed between 1790 and 1834, known as the Indian Non-Intercourse Acts, have the effect of prohibiting tribes from leasing water beyond the borders of their reservations without congressional approval. Settlements also typically bar them from permanently selling their water and often prohibit their right to lease it.

“This Is What’s Left”

Politicians packed a conference room at the Arizona Capitol in April, where they unveiled an agreement to pay the Gila River Indian Community millions of dollars to leave its water in Lake Mead. Officials took turns at the lectern extolling tribes for their role in preserving the Colorado River.

“We don’t have any more important partners in this effort than in Indian Country,” Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau said.

When the Gila River Indian Community negotiated its water rights, the Central Arizona Project had begun carrying Colorado River water near its reservation south of Phoenix and the tribe had some political clout after spending millions of dollars on lobbying. Those advantages allowed the tribe to negotiate tens of millions of dollars for infrastructure to deliver its water and the right to lease tens of thousands of acre-feet to nearby cities and a mining company. Its settlement has now made the tribe a well-compensated partner in conservation efforts.

“These are truly historic investments in directly tackling the challenge presented to our state and our region by the historic drought,” Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said during the April news conference announcing the deal to trade more water for money. The tribe declined requests for additional comment, as it is negotiating further water deals.

Colorado River Basin Tribes Face Hurdles Using Their Water Rights

Across the Colorado River Basin, tribes have fought for years to benefit from their water rights. But because of the fraught process to secure rights and move that water onto reservations, many have yet to realize the full benefit of what’s rightfully theirs. Here are a few examples.

In central Arizona, nearly two-thirds of the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe’s surface water allotment flows down Granite Creek, where the town of Prescott can use it for free.

In Colorado, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe irrigates about a third of its arable land, as it searches for $100 million needed to repair a dilapidated canal system.

Just east of Phoenix, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community is neither using nor leasing about 61,000 acre-feet of its water, the volume that 540,000 Phoenix residents use in a year. A clause in the tribe’s settlement bars it from leasing much water.

Several tribes have secured the right to lease, but it’s been case by case. With the support of Arizona’s senators, the Colorado River Indian Tribes got a bill through Congress that gives it that right. President Joe Biden signed it in January. The law helped in “stabilizing more of our sovereignty of our natural resources,” Chairwoman Amelia Flores said.

The law only gave that right to one tribe.

For the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the roadblock is a quirk in the laws that settled its water rights, which prohibits the tribe from using the portion of its water held in Lake Nighthorse, a reservoir in Colorado, for agriculture. But that’s precisely why the tribe needs it.

Chairman Manuel Heart is tired of neither getting the full allocation of water nor being compensated for leaving it in the system for the benefit of others.

“If you guys want to use it,” he said, “then pay us.”

Even if tribes were able to negotiate their way out of their water-leasing woes, for some, it isn’t about getting the highest price for a culturally significant resource.

The Tohono O’odham Nation leases just a fraction of its water and isn’t looking to market more. “We were told by our elders that we should never sell our water,” San Xavier District Chairman Austin Nunez said.

The Chemehuevi, by contrast, can’t access or lease most of their water. Their rights were quantified and settled via the courts in the 1960s, at a time when the tribe didn’t have federal recognition. So it didn’t receive infrastructure funding.

Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, would prefer to use his tribe’s water, not lease it. He wants to expand pumping capacity and construct a cascading series of reservoirs. Once the Chemehuevi access the water, they could use it for more houses to bring enrolled members back to their land, new businesses to provide jobs and increased farming to grow the reservation’s economy.

Escobar talked about his dreams and the difficulty in developing Indian Country as he drove past the frames of unused greenhouses, evidence of a failed venture. Near a field where the tribe’s single tractor was working the soil, Escobar described the Chemehuevi’s agricultural plans. Behind him, Lake Havasu covered soil that could’ve been productive fields or pastureland. In front of him stretched sandy desert where the federal government said the tribe should harvest crops.

“This is what’s left,” he said of the tribe’s potential farmland that wasn’t submerged by the reservoir. “It’s sad.”

After the once-nomadic Chemehuevi fought for recognition of their tribe and their reservation, they partnered with the University of Southern California to develop a plan to farm 1,900 acres using the 11,340 acre-feet of water per year, about 3.7 billion gallons, that the government allotted them — at least on paper. But, in a good year, the Chemehuevi farm only 80 acres, growing melons for food, devil’s claw for basket weaving and cottonwoods for a riparian restoration project.

If it can’t transport more water to expand the farm, Escobar said, the tribe could accept leaving water in the river in exchange for compensation. “We want to be a benefit to the system,” he said, “but right now, they’re making it hard.” Many non-Indigenous people, and a few tribes, around the basin earn money limiting their water use, whether by fallowing farm fields or ripping out lawns.

Why shouldn’t all tribes be paid, Escobar asked.

The Gene Pumping Plant near Lake Havasu lifts water hundreds of feet to the Colorado River Aqueduct system, which delivers it to Los Angeles, San Diego and other cities. Southern California gets about 25% of its water from the Colorado River via the aqueduct. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica and High Country News) How We Calculated the Monetary Value of Tribes’ Unused Water in the Colorado River Basin

Putting a dollar value on tribes’ water rights required establishing the amount that was quantified but unused. To do this, ProPublica and High Country News examined tribes’ settlements for the volume of their water rights. We found many of these documents in the University of New Mexico’s Native American Water Rights Settlement Project digital repository.

Once the amount was summed, we subtracted any water that had been developed on a reservation, leased to other users or injected into groundwater. We obtained these figures from Bureau of Reclamation and Central Arizona Project data, interviews with 20 tribes’ leadership and other sources. Research from the Ten Tribes Partnership and the Water & Tribes Initiative filled in data gaps.

To estimate the monetary value of this water, we consulted urban water districts, water sales consultants, tribes and researchers to find case studies where Colorado River Basin water had been leased, sold or otherwise marketed. This list of deals ranged from the Upper Basin System Conservation Pilot Program paying between $191 and $353 per acre-foot of water savings — adjusted for inflation — to Colorado-Big Thompson Project water shares selling for more than $90,000 per acre-foot this year. We gave extra weight to deals involving tribes, namely the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California paying the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe $185.56 per acre-foot via a forbearance and the federal government paying the Gila River Indian Community $400 per acre-foot for compensated conservation.

We then selected a discount rate — options ranged from 2.5% at Reclamation to 6% at the Texas Water Development Board — to convert an annual leasing or forbearance price into a one-time price to purchase that water.

Remaining conservative, we arrived at an annual price of $250 per acre-foot sold at a 5% discount rate — $5,000 to buy each acre-foot of tribes’ quantified-but-unused water rights.

It turns out that the ethics official who recommended that Khan recuse herself from a case involving Meta is an owner of Meta stock.

On July 5 and 6, 1995, the Grateful Dead with Jerry Garcia would play their final shows in St. Louis. Two fans would die and 108 would be injured

St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann is not running for a sixth term in 2026. He sat down with STLPR's Jason Rosenbaum to explain what's changed in Missouri politics since he started out in the late 1980s — and what needs to be done in the St. Louis region.

I've been thinking all evening about just how crazy this latest court order from Louisiana is. You really have to read it to believe it. The whole 155-page opinion is an insane, rambling stew of right-wing paranoia about "mass censorship" and "unrelenting pressure" from an Orwellian White House that you'd sooner expect to see at ...continue reading "Right wing paranoia takes over the judiciary"

Bethany Key of St. Clair, MO 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.

Editor’s Note: This week Construction Forum Drone Photographer/Videographer Louis Kelly, owner of Drone Eagle, LLC,  captured demolition underway on two office buildings in Downtown West at Jefferson and Market. The office buildings, formerly owned by Wells Fargo, will make way for two hotels and an apartment building. Green Street Estate Ventures acquired the buildings from […]