Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
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SCHUYLER – His eyes are tired from scanning the conveyor belt. His feet and back are sore after hours of standing in his steel-toed boots. His brain is fried from searching for faulty welding and chipped paint on the more than 1,000 metal pieces that whiz past him on the belt during the graveyard shift. Marco Gutiérrez has spent the past eight hours inspecting tiny parts that will become car seats in Ford F-150s and Chevy Malibus. Before that, he put in a shift at Panda Express, cooking ba...
Justin Harris could use the money. The McCook farmer and businessman is already behind on last year’s property taxes, and still owes $3,200 that’s growing with interest. And Harris is also missing out on a tax rebate thanks to a much-misunderstood change that Nebraska lawmakers made earlier this year. It’s costing him $1,300 – money he could have nabbed had he paid his property taxes by Dec. 31, 2023. “There was no chance for us to be able to take advantage of that discount because we're living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. The vast majori...
The envelope didn't surprise Dru McMillan. But when she opened the letter and read the number, she felt sick. "If you agree with the determination, please submit a draft in the amount of $21,042.73 within 30 days," it read. McMillan is a Lincoln therapist. She has long served a majority of patients who use Medicaid, the government-funded cheap or free insurance, to pay for mental health care. The letter came from an auditor working for one of three massive insurance companies the State of...
While Pete Ricketts was governor, he and his parents spent serious money supporting state senators – and opposing fellow Republicans who had displeased the governor. Longtime observers say that money helped morph the Legislature, making it less independent and more partisan. In January 2017, Patrick O'Donnell entered the Nebraska State Capitol's cavernous legislative chamber, air heavy with the echo of history's fierce debates and whispered negotiations. The longtime Clerk of the Legislature s...
Three taxidermied penguins preside over Room 426 in Allwine Hall, standing atop a row of metal cabinets in the back corner. The Antarctic birds are locked in an everlasting staring contest with a stuffed hornbill whose craned neck protrudes from a bookcase holding a row of primate skulls. To the students who file into professor James Wilson's mammalogy class, these are ordinary sights. What grabs their attention on this Monday afternoon are the short stacks of paper spread neatly across the... Full story
In 2020, as the country voted in and then sweated out a razor-thin presidential election, the voters of Clay County in rural south-central Nebraska participated in numbers never seen in this century. The number of potential voters living in the county had barely budged since 2016. And yet, during the 2020 election, some 507 more voters cast ballots than had in 2016 – a 16% spike. In total, some 84% of Clay County's 4,271 registered voters cast ballots, far higher than Nebraska's statewide t...
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,...
One word best defines how Megan Landes-Murphy and her husband Tom Murphy met, made career choices and launched a unique-to-Nebraska business. Sheep. Neither spent much time around the animals while growing up in northwest Wisconsin and the Omaha area, respectively. Now, they have sheep, a few chickens and two Great Pyrenees dogs named Milo and Birdie on their 12-acre ranch east of the small south-central Nebraska town of Lawrence. Two years ago, Landes-Murphy launched Kestrel Ridge Pellet Co.,...
The Kansas City Royals game played through the car radio as Jeff Hovden drove south on a Friday night. Jeff and his son Jack had tickets for the next day. During the drive, the broadcast team noted the strong Omaha contingent in attendance, many sporting jerseys with the name "Bohm" across the back. The next day the Hovdens experienced it in person. "It was pretty impressive," said Hovden, a Phillies fan and car wash soap salesman from Vermillion, South Dakota. The "Bohm" on the many jerseys...
Pricking his finger with a small needle, Anthony Warrior squeezed a drop of blood onto the test strip. As he saw the number illuminate, the then-40-year-old Absentee Shawnee citizen and Muskogee descendant knew his days of bad eating had caught up with him. With his weight nearing 500 pounds and his blood sugar dangerously high, Warrior was facing a future of possible blindness, kidney failure and limb amputation – all complications of unchecked diabetes. If he didn't address his eating h...
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...
A few years back, a lucky tip came my way about an impending immigration raid in O'Neill. I don't recall a lot of details about what was expected to happen, but the tip was "you'd better be there tomorrow morning." As I drove up Highway 281 toward the north-central Nebraska town, I settled in behind what seemed like an endless line of SUVs with blackened windows also driving northward. It turned out they were mostly agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who were headed to...
At peace. That's how Jordan Larson felt back in Lincoln after her fourth, and likely final, Olympic Games this summer. Her journey to tranquility started well before Paris, before capping an unprecedented career with the U.S. national team by winning silver, even before returning to her alma mater to help coach a championship contender. "This last two years really has been a journey of pure reflection ... of healing," Larson said at an August press conference. "I'm soaking in the essence of...
The group of teachers had a straightforward but daunting assignment before them: How could Cody-Kilgore, a small district nestled in the Nebraska Sandhills, buck the trend of rural decline and revitalize the school? Teachers Stacey Adamson and Tracee Ford latched onto an unusual idea that started as a joke – one that grew more unusual as it progressed. What about a grocery store run by students? Now nearly two decades after the idea first surfaced, the Circle C Market – a student-run gro...
Bob Decker thought he'd get an early start on golf one morning this summer when he headed to Omaha's Steve Hogan Golf Course. Instead, he ended up providing swarms of mosquitoes their breakfast, lunch and dinner during his round at the nine-hole course. "I was slapping mosquitoes off my legs the whole time," he said. "Thus the reason for my poor score ..." Decker wasn't imagining things. Compared to last year, mosquito numbers have jumped significantly across Nebraska, nearly doubling in...
The year was 1974. It was early fall. Or was it late spring? Never mind all that, Gary Hergenrader says. It isn't the season he remembers today, but the site: the old campground across the water, a dozen red cabins clinging like ticks to the canyon walls, the lodge overlooking Keystone Lake, the geology exposed in the rocky shelves above. Before retiring in 2005, Hergenrader served nearly 25 years as the Nebraska state forester. But back in 1974, he was a 34-year-old professor at the University...
Phil Whitmarsh starts a lot of conversations with an offbeat question: Have you ever played a 500-year-old guitar? Eventually, he'll hand you Mary Kate. The instrument resembles a Fender Telecaster, the six-string synonymous with Americana twang and favored by artists like Bruce Springsteen. Mary Kate looks and plays like a Telecaster, but the sound is different. It's the wood, says Whitmarsh. That wood once helped hold up the old Woolworth warehouse in Omaha's historic Old Market. In a few...
In a time before Prohibition, tiny Wilber, Nebraska, produced something nearby metropolis Omaha envied. Today, more than a century later, Wilber is trying to make Omaha jealous again. In its heyday, the Wilber Brewing Company produced 40,000 barrels of beer per year, and almost all of it was consumed by residents of the small town, located 40 miles southwest of Lincoln, and nearby communities. Gary Wooten, secretary of Wilber Czech Brewery Company LLC, said his organization wants to bring back t...
Data breaches are on track for a record year in 2024 as cybercriminals increasingly hunt for valuable information. On average, a data breach exposing sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, has around 172,000 victims, according to a ConsumerAffairs analysis of the Identity Theft Resource Center's database from 2018 to the first quarter of 2024. These breaches cause headaches for consumers, who then need to check if their information is secure elsewhere because they are now more... Full story
Have you been to the grocery store or courthouse lately and been approached in the parking lot by not one, but two people seeking signatures on initiative petitions concerning abortion rights? Confused? You’re not alone. For what appears to be the first time in history, Nebraskans are being asked to sign not one, not two, but three petitions seeking to determine if and when a woman can have an abortion. And, according to Secretary of State Bob Evnen, if more than one petition makes the ballot, t...
Nebraska residents should have easier access to public records under a bill that, in effect, overrules a recent Nebraska Supreme Court decision allowing the state to charge high amounts for retrieving public records. Gov. Jim Pillen signed Legislative Bill 43, adopting the First Freedom Act and new public record provisions, on Wednesday, March 27, after it unanimously passed in the Legislature, 39-0. The bill went into immediate effect due to an emergency clause. The emergency clause was added to an amendment inspired by Lincoln Sen. Danielle...
Shayla Staab buried the brim of her suede hat into her phone, pushing through disappointment to see what went wrong. The 16-year-old barrel racer had just completed her first run of the competition and was already analyzing videos. "It's a lot harder than it looks," Shayla signed to her dad. Despite her disappointment, Shayla left the Lancaster County event center on March 9 with a first place win in her division. Not bad for a self-taught racer. Unlike most of her fellow competitors, Shayla...
Sunshine Week is March 10 through 16, and this year, there's an even greater need for you to get involved.Sunshine Week annually celebrates freedom of information laws in every state. It also salutes efforts by good government advocates and journalists to use and ensure the effectiveness of those laws to get the information we need as self-governing citizens. The name is a play on the commonsense words spoken more than a century ago by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that "Sunlight...
Nebraska is now down to one surgical abortion provider less than a year after lawmakers passed a 12-week ban. The Bellevue clinic founded by the late Dr. LeRoy Carhart – once one of only three providers in the country to perform third-trimester abortions – no longer does surgical procedures but does offer patients abortion pills, clinic employees confirmed to the Flatwater Free Press. That means Nebraskans who want a surgical abortion or who are past the cutoff for the abortion pill must go to...
Thoughts that keep a news publisher awake at night: Would Benjamin Franklin cringe at the tardiness of mail delivery? Franklin, publisher of “The Pennsylvania Gazette,” first ran Philadelphia’s post system and, in 1753, was appointed joint postmaster for the 13 colonies. By 1758, Franklin’s actions established a means to send newspapers via post service. Winifred Gallagher, in “How the Post Office Created America: A History,” gives Franklin credit for instituting an order that newspapers...
