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Emails and Lead - |
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The delete button central to the latest chapter in a century-old pollution tale
By Robyn Wisch
Union Pacific says the Environmental Protection Agency destroyed email records that would have hurt its case against the company in an ongoing court battle over who should pay for a decade-long lead cleanup operation in Omaha. |
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Upfront - |
Recall efforts heavy on politics
Two groups of local citizens are leading separate recall efforts aimed at Mayor Jim Suttle. But, one of those groups doesn’t actually want to see Suttle go.
An exploratory committee of Omaha citizens angry about tax hikes announced at a Thursday press conference that it was in the beginning stages of gathering information about the recall effort the very beginning. |
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News Hound - |
Education, health care and politics
Gov. Dave Heineman spent $47,000 on a report that found the state will pay $526.3 million to $765.9 million more over 10 years to expand Medicaid for low-income Americans because of the federal health care reform bill. Then he told state education leaders that federal health care reform will mean reduced funding for education in Nebraska, so they’d better fight for a repeal of the bill. |
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Rough Start - |
Privatizing child welfare in Nebraska hasn't delivered the reform it promised
by Hilary Stohs-Krause
Privatizing child welfare in Nebraska has not gone smoothly.
Six private agencies were originally to take charge of foster care and family services, while state employers continued as caseworkers. But before deals were to be signed with private agencies in November of last year, the Alliance for Children and Family Services dropped out because of financial concerns. |
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Up Front - |
State sued for abandoning prenatal care for undocumented women
The fight for universal access to prenatal care for Nebraska women is headed for the courts. Nebraska Appleseed has filed a class action lawsuit against the state Department of Health and Human Services. |
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News Hound - |
City of Fremont: Tax hike needed to pay for immigration law
Fremont citizens may soon pay some of the financial costs associated with their approval of a controversial immigration ordinance, including about $25,000 annually to its author. They’ll have a chance to weigh in on an 18 percent property tax increase Aug. 31 at a City Council hearing.
If approved, the tax would cost the owner of a $200,000 house about $116 more next year. City officials say the increase is needed to help pay for an estimated $750,000 annual legal defense of the voter-approved ordinance that would ban undocumented immigrants from living and working in the city. |
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Homestretch Challenge - |
Scottsbluff attorney has fewer than 80 days to convince Nebraska to put the Meister in the governor’s mansion
by Sean McCarthy
On a punishingly hot and humid Friday, Mike Meister was outside Blue Line Coffee in Dundee, using a small window of time to talk on the phone about a hail estimate on his car. The few minutes of personal time before he was slated to speak with The Reader was a rarity in a campaign that will see little rest if Meister is to mount an effective race against a popular Republican governor in a predominantly conservative state.
A few weeks ago, Meister was working at his law office in Scottsbluff when Mark Lakers dropped out as the Democratic candidate for governor after filing a donor list that included pledges who said they not only did not donate to him, but that they supported incumbent Gov. Dave Heineman. |
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Up Front - |
Latino political participation highlighted in report
Nebraska has moved in the past decade from guaranteeing the rights of Latino immigrant workers and helping their children attend college to denying them prenatal care and considering legislative attempts to mirror stringent, controversial immigration laws in Arizona.
These sharp differences are highlighted in a recent report by the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Office of Latino/Latin American Studies (OLLAS). |
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News Hound - |
Nebraska GOP members support ending ending birthright citizenship
Add Reps. Adrian Smith and Jeff Fortenberry to the growing list of congressional Republicans calling for the end of birthright citizenship guaranteed in the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1968 in an effort to protect the rights of freed slaves and their families. Sen. Mike Johanns and Rep. Lee Terry, too, said they’re interested in considering the issue.
“I don’t think the 14th Amendment was meant to apply to modern circumstances,” Fortenberry said during a town hall forum in Fremont last week, according to the Fremont Tribune. |
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The Jump - |
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August is not the best month for local sports fans. While the non-stop debating and screaming ESPN has perfected might make it hard to differentiate today from a jam-packed sports day in the spring, don’t be fooled. These are the dog days. Perhaps the only month of the year where we spend more time talking about sports than we do actually watching sports. |
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Betting on Arizona - |
Analysts: A state-level immigration law in Nebraska could be a boon to a Heineman
Senate run
By Rob McLean,
Gov. Dave Heineman’s announcement that he might support a potential Arizona-style immigration law in Nebraska may indicate that the Republican leader plans to challenge Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson in 2012, said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. |
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The News Hound - |
Starbucks union shuts down coffee house in protest
Not even those willing to cross a picket line could get a venti mocha frappuchino Aug. 5 after Starbucks staff shut down the store near 15th and Douglas for about 45 minutes.
The baristas the first in the country to join the Starbucks labor union walked out of the store in protest after district manager Jenny Rojas declined to discuss demands like restoring benefits to pre-recession levels and improving work safety.
Employee and organizer Tyler Swain said the union has about 300 members nationwide. He told The Reader the world’s largest coffee chain began cutting benefits in 2008. The company cut one personal day every six months and cut by half the amount it would pay for health care. Swain said the store failed to protect employees by not including items like burn packs and pain relievers in first-aid kits.
“They doubled the cost of our health insurance, reduced staffing levels, cut our hours, all while demanding more work from us,” shift supervisor Sasha McCoy said in a press release. “Starbucks is now more than profitable again. It’s time for management to give back what they took from us.”
Starbucks earned more than $2.6 billion in its fiscal year’s third quarter, which ended in June according to a press release.
The staff returned to work after meeting with Rojas. Swain said some of the staff’s safety concerns were addressed immediately, but the union plans to address others in a planned meeting with Starbucks regional vice president Brett Battes. |
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The Jump - |
Would it be too sappy to call the new Sarpy County ballpark a field of dreams?
Yes, yes it would, but I can’t help it. Right now it’s a baseball field surrounded by corn and dirt roads.
In less than a year, however, the new ballpark will be a modern, fan-friendly, appropriately sized gem of a stadium. Cup holders, theater style seats, luxury suites, all the amenities you’d expect from a new ballpark are there. So are some of the minor league hooks you’ve seen elsewhere, from a wiffle ball field for the kids to seating on a grassy hill behind the outfield wall. |
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Wheel Tax and Boot Straps - |
Suttle says the city’s $33 million budget gap is all of our mess
by Brandon Vogel
Mayor Jim Suttle has opened four recent community budget forums with the same message:
“I didn’t create this financial situation, and neither did you.”
But citizens would have to pay for it through $44 million in new taxes under Suttle’s 2011 city budget, amounting to about $209 more per household. Suttle said the city must either increase revenues to close an anticipated $33.5 million budget gap or cut city services. |
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Up Front - |
What does a Michigan oil spill mean for Nebraska?
A leak in a Michigan oil pipeline caused up to a million gallons of fossil fuel to seep into the Kalamazoo River and travel at least 35 miles downstream by July 29. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm feared a “tragedy of historic proportions” if the oil reached Lake Michigan some 80 miles away. |
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News Hound - |
An update on the Fremont ordinance
Hours after The Reader went to press last week, the Fremont City Council suspended the controversial city ordinance banning undocumented immigrants from living or working in the city. And on Wednesday, U.S. District Court Laurie Smith Camp said she would decide after Aug. 16 whether lawsuits challenging the ordinance filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund fall under her jurisdiction. |
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Pro-Life Politics - |
Bill to restore prenatal care for some 800 mothers flounders
By Sean McCarthy
The immigration reform debate tends to neatly separate key players into two groups: legal United States citizens; and those who are not. However, a state bill that would provide prenatal care for pregnant women regardless of citizenship illustrates how the issue becomes far murkier when it involves children born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
Proponents hope immigration politics won’t trump child welfare, and that the bill will have new life.
Babies that do not receive prenatal care are three times more likely to have a low birth weight and five times more likely to die than babies who receive prenatal care, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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Up Front: Dept. of Energy Ethanol pipeline not yet feasible - |
Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry wants the federal government to help pay for a $3.75 billion pipeline that would transport 240,000 barrels of ethanol a day from corn fields near Mitchell, S.D., to oil-thirsty New York markets.
But the U.S. Department of Energy said the country’s first ethanol pipeline which would be the longest in the world would only be feasible with “significant” increases in demand or increased percentages of ethanol in gasoline blends.
Terry and Iowa Rep. Leonard Boswell cosponsored a bill in February that would provide federal loan guarantees for the project. The bill remains in committee.
Poet Ethanol Products, an ethanol producer based in Sioux Falls, S.D., and Magellan Midstream Partners, an Oklahoma pipeline company, hope to have the pipeline running by 2015.
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News Hound - |
Post: Terry gets ‘so drunk’
The New York Post’s Page Six columnist said he caught Rep. Lee Terry disregarding House Minority Leader John Boehner’s advice to avoid female lobbyists in an effort to avoid appearance of wrongdoing before the 2010 midterm elections. The reporter said Terry asked a “giggling” female lobbyist at the Capital Hill Club in D.C., “Why’d you get me so drunk?” He then changed the subject to his three kids and how hard it is to pay their college tuition after noticing the nearby journalist, the paper reported. Roll Call verified the exchange, but its anonymous source said the question did not appear to be flirtatious.
Terry issued a statement saying, “The repulsive innuendo of the New York Post characterizing me as someone who socializes with female lobbyists is absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent false.”
The news cycle didn’t get much friendlier for Terry on Saturday, when AOL News reported that he’d spent $5,812 for catering services. Terry said those funds were used for coffee at the Nebraska Congressional Breakfast, which the state’s delegates take turns hosting.
“I agree the cost for coffee service alone is outrageous,” Terry said in a statement, “but that’s an issue my office has taken up with the caterer and House Admin.”
Omaha man stabs stepmother to death
Police will charge David Brannan, 21, for murdering his stepmother Tracy Brannan, 33, early July 24. Harold Brannan, 60, and David had non-life threatening injuries, though Police say David’s injuries were self-inflicted. The Omaha World-Herald reported Tracy immigrated to America from Scotland to marry Harold in May. |
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Community Cop - |
South Omaha’s ‘fearless’
female police captain comes from the neighborhood
by Hilary Stohs-Krause
The new captain of Omaha Police Department’s southeast precinct now oversees family and friends in the same district where she was born and raised. Katharine Gonzalez has spent five of her more than 16 years in the force working in the southeast precinct. And she feels at home there.
“It’s a melting pot,” said Gonzalez, who often gets her lunch from a taco truck about a block from the station. “It’s a wonderful place. There’s lots of community support.”
Gonzalez, 38, took over the position in February, after serving as acting captain for more than a year at the Criminal Investigations Bureau. She joined the department in 1994 after graduating with a degree in psychology and criminal justice from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“It was a very eye-opening experience,” she said. She met people who had $5 to last them two weeks. “I didn’t realize what a sheltered life I’d lived.”
Quality of life is a theme that arose time and again as Gonzalez talked about her goals for the precinct in her crisp white office, located in the precinct headquarters at 2475 Deer Park Blvd.
“We’re here to combat violent crime, but a lot of that stems from other issues,” she said. |
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