Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
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Alonzo Denney sets his phone on the conference table, pulls up a family photo and starts counting. There are 11 living relatives, including him, now sharing ownership of 80 acres along the Bazile Creek in Knox County, land originally allotted to their ancestor by the federal government. Then Denney does some quick math. He might, he says, be paid around $25,000 if this land, now mostly flooded and unusable, was placed into a flowage easement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Denney,...
There's a map tacked up on the wall in Kameron Runnels' office – squared lines and small text showing who owns what pieces of the Santee Sioux reservation. Six of the squares, big chunks of land, are labeled the same: "school land." Runnels, the tribe's vice chairman, said he always wondered what exactly that meant. Two of the squares are colored in green – land the tribe pays the state almost $65,500 per year to rent and farm, even though it's within reservation boundaries. When Nebraska was...
Rancher Lemoyne Dailey says he's careful about how he "makes his footprints" when he works on his land near Thedford. The rolling Sandhills are fragile, Dailey said, the grasses and sands easily torn up and tough to restore. Over the past decade, Dailey has been fielding visits from utility workers surveying his land, planning a power transmission route and asking for a signature on the dotted line. He's one of a group of Sandhills landowners steadfastly refusing to sign. "You don't know the...