President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs on imports from foreign countries to pressure them to curb illegal immigration and the flow of illicit drugs. 

When he takes office in January, he’s said he plans to sign executive orders implementing a 25% tax on all imports from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% tax on Chinese imports.

In his first term, Trump also used the threat of tariffs to negotiate with countries including Mexico. And started an ongoing trade war with China.

West Virginians across the state have said they are struggling with the rising cost of living. Donald Trump won West Virginia with 70% of the vote. Economists say his proposed tariffs would make prices worse.

Experts said stronger tariffs could raise the prices of groceries and technology. The state’s largest trade partners would be hit and could retaliate, furthering the effects on West Virginia’s economy.

Here’s what to know about how Trump’s proposed tariffs could affect West Virginians. 

What is a tariff? 

A tariff is simply a tax imposed on the import of a foreign-manufactured good that domestic companies pay. However, companies usually offset the costs by raising prices, which consumers then pay.

For example, most bananas at American grocery stores are imported from Central and South American countries because they grow best in tropical climates. 

So, when there’s a tariff on bananas, the company bringing them into the country has to pay the extra tax when they arrive. The extra tax gets passed on and shows up on grocery bills. 

Tariffs are not a new economic tool and historically they’ve been used to generate revenue when countries were developing. But now, those taxes are primarily used as leverage for trade agreements or to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. 

Recently, the U.S. has imposed several tariffs on countries, including China, with the Biden Administration substantially increasing taxes on electric vehicles, steel, aluminum and lithium-ion batteries. 

Christina Fattore, a professor of political science at West Virginia University who specializes in international trade relations, said tariffs can start trade wars between countries when retaliation occurs or an “eye for an eye” scenario where consumers lose out in both countries. 

“Tariffs are supposed to strengthen domestic industry, but if that domestic industry doesn’t exist, you’re stuck paying it,” she said. 

Where does West Virginia import from and export to? 

In 2023, West Virginia exported $5.7 billion of goods to other countries. Canada, China, Japan, the Netherlands and Belgium are the largest recipients. The state’s top exports were coal and petroleum gas, vehicle parts, synthetic rubber and chemicals. 

“Canada consistently ranks as the state’s top trade partner, accounting for nearly 40% of West Virginia’s exports, particularly in coal, chemicals, and machinery,” said Andy Malinoski, spokesperson for the state Department of Economic Development.

That same year, the state imported $4.8 billion of products from Canada, Japan, Germany, China, and Mexico. Imports included steel and aluminum for vehicles and aircraft, electronics and industrial chemicals. 

Tariffs by the U.S. would increase the price of imported goods. If other countries retaliate with their own tariffs on U.S.-made items, industries that export to foreign markets would be impacted.

How will proposed tariffs on imports impact prices in West Virginia? Who pays tariffs?

Trump said in a recent interview that he couldn’t guarantee that his proposed tariffs would not impact consumer prices, and many economists agree that tariffs drive up prices. 

“I am really concerned about consumer prices — prices are going to go through the roof,” Fattore said. “Countries will retaliate with tariff taxes on their own.”

Grocery store items like fruits and vegetables would increase in price because the U.S. relies on other countries for produce. In 2022, Mexico alone supplied 51% of fresh fruits and 69% of vegetables that Americans buy. 

Gasoline prices could also increase from Canadian tariffs as the U.S. imports crude oil from the country. Some analysts have predicted gas prices could go up by 30 cents or more. 

Meanwhile, the price of new and used cars will likely increase as Canada and Mexico remain top suppliers of auto parts and imports to the U.S. American companies like Ford, Tesla and General Motors have factories in Mexico and about 76% of vehicles manufactured in the country are exported to the U.S.

Fattore said when global steel and aluminum tariffs were put in place in 2018, the prices of aluminum cans became more expensive, impacting canned goods, soda and beer. She said technology imports also suffered as Chinese tariffs hurt American businesses during the 2018-2019 trade war.

“If you’re thinking about buying a new car, getting a new phone or buying a computer, I would do that before Christmas or before Trump comes into office,” she said. 

How could a trade war affect West Virginia’s jobs?

A new trade war could hit American workers just as hard. Trump’s proposed tariffs could lead to the loss of over 344,000 jobs, according to a report from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. Those projections do not account for any future retaliatory tariffs from other countries. 

Fattore said tariffs can usually backfire and harm the job market as other countries retaliate with their own taxes on imported goods. 

“I wouldn’t expect more American jobs to come out of tariffs,” she said. “When Trump put tariffs on steel and aluminum, companies like Harley-Davidson actually exported jobs overseas so they could avoid paying import fees.”

Canada is West Virginia’s largest trade partner and tariffs would hurt manufacturers, especially car manufacturers who ship parts back and forth between the border, she said. 

In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, opening the door for freer trade between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. But it disproportionately impacted American manufacturers and pushed thousands of jobs to other countries, hurting places dependent on manufacturing. 

In West Virginia, places where steel jobs were significant like Weirton, lost thousands of jobs. 

In 2020, the Trump Administration reached a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico to replace NAFTA. 

The free trade agreement provided new provisions highlighting digital trade, requiring that 75% of automotive parts be made in North America and allowing the American government to conduct independent reviews of working conditions in Mexican factories.

However, the new proposed tariffs would effectively squash the 2020 deal on free trade between the three countries as it will need to be renegotiated. 
The U.S. has 14 free trade agreements with 20 countries, including Canada and Mexico. These agreements eliminate or reduce tariffs and other trade barriers to protect domestic investors.

How President-elect Trump’s proposed tariffs could further squeeze West Virginians’ wallets appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

By Jaymie Baxley

The remnants of Hurricane Helene destroyed thousands of homes during its catastrophic sweep through western North Carolina in September, leaving many people without a fixed residence in a region where homelessness was already on the rise.

The storm displaced residents like Bonnie Goggins Jones, whose mobile home in Buncombe County was rendered uninhabitable by waist-high floodwaters. She and her two teenage grandchildren now stay in a donated camper that Jones keeps parked on the property of a local church. 

“Being in a closed-in little spot and it’s something you’re not used to and never stayed in, and not having the clothing or the space to put the stuff that you have, and having kids — it’s just a hard thing,” Jones said of their living situation, adding that she misses the “little yard” and shade-casting trees of her old address in Black Mountain. “I mean, it’s not your home. It’s not like a home. You don’t have your own yard. I can’t even explain it.”

Jones knows she does not fit the stereotypical profile of a person experiencing homelessness. She “makes good money” in her full-time job as a transportation worker for the Asheville City Schools District, she said. 

Still, the loss of her home and nearly all of her possessions is a setback that will take more than a few paychecks to recover from. Between keeping her grandchildren fed and filling her camper’s generator with fuel to stay warm during the frigid mountain nights, Jones has little opportunity to save up enough money for a new place.

“It’s a struggle, no matter if you’re working or not,” she said.

Tina Krause, executive director of Hospitality House of Northwest North Carolina, has met dozens of families in similar situations over the past three months. Her organization provides transitional housing services in several of the rural communities that were hit hardest by Helene.

“In the beginning, it was hard for us to identify who was truly displaced and who was going to be able to stay in their home,” she said. “But over the last few weeks, we’ve really seen a lot more movement in people actually coming to the realization that they are not going to be able to live in their home, whether it was a rental home or it was the house that they grew up in.” 

Krause has noticed that most of the people currently reaching out to the nonprofit for assistance were not at risk of becoming homeless before the storm. Many of them are working adults with decent incomes or retirees on fixed incomes who had lived for decades in houses that were destroyed.

“There’s definitely a new face to homelessness now,” she said.

A worsening trend

Hospitality House is one of four organizations that are known collectively as a Continuum of Care — community partners that coordinate within an area to address homelessness. The Northwest NC Continuum of Care oversees the annual point-in-time count in seven of the counties in the federally declared disaster area for Helene. 

Conducted on a single night each January, the point-in-time count is a survey of people who are unsheltered or sleeping in cars, tents and other places not meant for long-term habitation. Data from the count is used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop strategies and policies to reduce homelessness. 

Numbers from the 2024 count have not yet been finalized by HUD, but an NC Health News analysis of preliminary totals from Hospitality House and other Continuum of Care organizations serving western North Carolina found that at least 2,609 people were experiencing homelessness in the 25 counties that were later included in September’s disaster declaration — a 20 percent increase from 2023’s count of 2,166.

More than 330 people were reported to be homeless across the counties — Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Mitchell, Watauga, Wilkes and Yancey — served by Hospitality House, up from about 270 people in 2023. Krause said the 22 percent increase was one of the largest ever recorded in her organization’s thinly populated swathe of the state.

“In the past, it may have been an increase of like 10 people,” she said, compared to 60 more in just a year. “This was a significant jump. While homelessness has always been a problem in our communities, we had improved on that number every year until [a couple of years ago] when it started to climb again.”

She believes the spike was caused, in large part, by the expiration of funding from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security — or CARES — act. The pandemic-era measure provided money for residents who were at risk of homelessness to stay in hotels to prevent overcrowding at local shelters. 

“So many people lost the hotel rooms that were being paid for under that COVID funding,” Krause said, adding that several homeless encampments popped up in the area after the program was discontinued.

Continuums of Care serving other parts of the region also saw significant growth in their homeless populations before the storm — even in communities where the situation had previously appeared to be improving. Data from the Gaston-Lincoln-Cleveland Continuum of Care showed a 21 percent decrease in homelessness in the three counties it serves from 2022 to 2023, but then a 16 percent uptick during this year’s count.

The largest over-the-year increase was recorded by the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care, which went from having 573 residents experiencing homelessness in 2023 to 739 in 2024 — a nearly 29 percent surge. Members of the organization’s leadership said a “change in methodology” contributed to the higher tally.

Hospitality House and the other Continuums of Care will conduct the point-in-time count for 2025 in late January. With an untold number of people now displaced by Helene, it is likely to be one of the most difficult counts in the region’s history. 

One of the biggest challenges, Krause said, will be finding and counting displaced residents who are staying in hotels with vouchers issued after the storm by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. More than 4,900 people were still participating in the voucher program as of early December, according to FEMA.

“We’re going to have to be very purposeful in looking at who’s in a hotel that’s being paid for by an agency, because those individuals can be counted in the point-in-time because they are literally homeless as long as they’re not paying for the hotel themselves,” Krause said, referring to the definitions of homelessness used by HUD. “We’ll have to increase the number of outreach teams we have going out and actually talking to people to see what their situation is.”

Lack of homes

The upheaval caused by Helene has been exacerbated by the region’s scant inventory of houses and its dearth of affordable rental options.

“We already are in one of the worst markets for rental properties here,” Krause said, adding that apartment seekers — particularly in Watauga County — often find themselves “in competition” with students from Appalachian State University who cannot afford to live on campus. “The availability of housing is just zero at this point.” 

The market isn’t much better for buyers. Western North Carolina’s popularity as a tourist destination has made it a lucrative setting for Airbnb operators, who have reduced the region’s long-term housing stock by converting residential units into short-term rentals.

In Asheville, the proliferation of short-term rentals has contributed to an 89 percent spike in home values, which jumped from a median of $199,800 in 2015 to $319,400 in 2021. A housing plan released by the city shortly before the storm noted that home ownership has become “unattainable” for workers earning “a median wage in Asheville’s top industries.”

“We have very high housing costs and very low vacancy rates,” said Emily Ball, manager of the city’s Homeless Strategy Division. “We know from national data that the primary indicator of rates of homelessness in any community are housing costs, and our housing costs have been just through the roof and increasing all the time.”

Ball’s department had been working with the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care to develop strategies to address the city’s growing homeless population, but Helene forced the agencies to shift their focus to more urgent needs. One of the most pressing tasks, she said, was finding a replacement site for a flooded shelter the city operated for people experiencing homelessness in the winter.

“We’re transitioning, I would say, from response to recovery and thinking more about long-term strategic recovery around Helene,” Ball said. “But this has been a very significant event, and it’s really taking up most bandwidth for most people still.”

Raising awareness

Ball believes the disaster has at least led to “heightened awareness” about the basic needs of unsheltered residents. 

“Before this storm, it was possible for people to not have a lot of empathy about, ‘If you’re homeless, where do you go to the bathroom, how do you charge your phone, and where are you going to take a shower,’” she said. “After the storm, we all lost power. We all lost water.”

The storm also had something of a silver lining, she said, for people who were already experiencing homelessness in the city.

“I think for a lot of folks who were unsheltered, their situation was probably a bit better after the storm than prior to the storm,” Ball said. “Newly across the community, we have people really caring about things like water and food distribution and the availability of portajohns outside.”

Brian Alexander, project manager for the North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness and the former executive director of Homeward Bound of Western North Carolina, said Helene made the plight of unsheltered populations hard to ignore. 

“People are in such extreme situations, having lost everything that they own, that there is a new awareness of the dangers of these kinds of situations,” he said. “Even though we’ve been living with this and people have seen it for a really long time, now that their neighbors who were housed lost their homes suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to figure out how to deal with this. We’ve got to figure out how to get these resources so that folks don’t have to do this anymore.’”

In the storm’s wake, there was an outpouring of support from sympathetic citizens and charitable organizations. 

Members of a Virginia-based ministry built more than 100 cabins for displaced residents in Black Mountain. Operation Halo, a charity formed in response to the storm, donated more than 160 RVs to people who lost their homes. 

But it remains to be seen how long the public’s compassion will last.

“My hope is that long term, that urgency that we feel right now after the storm to get people back in housing extends to our homeless neighbors, too, who have been dealing with this for years in some cases,” said Alexander, who added that “everybody deserves a home.”

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This story was made possible through a collaboration with Blue Ridge Public Radio. BRPR’s Gerard Albert contributed reporting from western North Carolina.

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The post Helene exacerbated rise in homelessness across western North Carolina appeared first on North Carolina Health News.

In the wake of the 2024 election, Barn Raiser talks to prominent Native leaders and mentors, who tell us in edited interviews how and why their communities have long endured, even in divisive and unsettled times.

Right now, all of us who live together on this earth face not just political instability but the “dual crises of climate change and social injustice,” according to Fawn Sharp, citizen of the Quinalt Indian Nation, in Taholah, Washington, and former president of the National Congress of American Indians.

“Now, more than ever,” Sharp says, “the world needs the wisdom, resilience and stewardship that Indigenous leaders uniquely bring. Our survival in this rapidly changing world may well depend on it.”

The views of each of those who spoke to Barn Raiser are deeply personal and rooted in their own unique cultures.

The Long View

For the past 16 years, the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project, at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, has hosted numerous programs in the arts, gardening, cooking, sports and more. The activities are designed to prepare Zuni youth to be healthy adults who can continue Zuni cultural traditions. Of Zuni’s 10,000 residents, almost a third are under the age of 18. Kiara Zunie, a Zuni tribal citizen and ZYEP’s Youth Development Coordinator, and ZYEP Operations Manager Josh Kudrna describe accompanying tribal youth on a recent visit to their people’s emergence place in what is now called the Grand Canyon. Zunie and Kudrna are joined in this interview by ZYEP Executive Director Tahlia Natachu-Eriacho, a tribal citizen.

Kiara Zunie: Backpacking down the Grand Canyon was a beautiful and humbling experience for everyone. We shared moments of aching legs, tingling fingers and shallow breathing from the weight of our packs. The journey reminded us that resilience isn’t just about physical strength, it’s about mental toughness, too. We took care of each another through consistent check-ins, positive encouragement and song lyrics. Each rugged step we took was also a reminder of our ancestors’ enduring strength and their prayers coming to fruition through a group like us.

Tahlia Natachu-Eriacho: This program is important for us because it acknowledges Zuni’s migration story. We Zuni people emerged from there and made our way to where we are now in Zuni Pueblo. The fact that we still live on the lands our ancestors intended us to be on is so powerful. And a privilege. Our reservation is where we are supposed to be.

We have been intentional about calling the trips to the Grand Canyon ‘visits.’ They’re not adventures or expeditions and other ideas that come from the goals of colonization. We are going to visit our relatives, to where our ancestors were, to places that have meaning for our culture and our identity and who we are today.

Josh Kudrna: During the three-day visit, we hiked 17 miles. That may not sound like a lot to people who run marathons, but it’s down about 7,000 feet to get to the water at the base of the canyon, then back up 7,000 feet. It’s very steep climbing, and all of our participants were carrying everything they needed—about 30 to 40 pounds—on their backs.

Ahead of time, I try to prep them for what’s about to happen, but it’s hard to conceptualize that after about three miles your legs will be quaking with every step. It’s very hard work, and they connect to the ancestors, who didn’t have fancy boots, who didn’t have internal-frame backpacks, but were still carrying their children and everything they needed on their backs as they continually went up and down the canyon.

Zunie: The day we hiked out of the Grand Canyon happened to fall on Indigenous People’s Day. We were nearing the top when we heard the echo of a drumbeat. The National Park Service had organized traditional dances to celebrate Indigenous culture. As we listened to the drums, I looked at the group, reminding myself of the journey we had just endured. Remembering the aches and pains and the moments of laughter and camaraderie, I started to cry.

A Place to Call Home

Good news is imminent at the Native American Community of Central Ohio (NAICCO), in Columbus. Executive Director Masami Smith and Project Director Ty Smith lead the urban-Indian organization and its activities on behalf of the cultural, community and economic development of the area’s Native people. Both Masami and Ty are enrolled citizens of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, in Oregon. A major project nearing fruition is LandBack NAICCO, with nearly $400,000 in donations and earned income that will allow the group to acquire land. The group is currently looking at land in Central Ohio and the broader Ohio area. According to the major Indigenous news source Native News Online, many Native communities  are finding ways to reconstitute portions of homelands and reservations lost in the process of European settlement. Ty tells us about NAICCO and its plans.

Ty Smith: The urban setting is different in many ways from Indigenous homelands on the reservations. You’re navigating two worlds simultaneously while trying to maintain balance and harmony in your life. The sense of home is strong for our Native people. But where do you find that in Ohio, which has no infrastructure for us—no tribes, which were expelled in the 1800s, no reservations, no Indian Health Service, no Bureau of Indian Affairs, no Bureau of Indian Education?

Because Ohio doesn’t include the tribes that were originally here, there are holes in the story. The dots don’t connect. Native people who have come to live here in recent years—for higher education, work and more—lean on each other. They come into NAICCO and start to make it home and make relations.

As an intertribal community, we bond in ways we never thought possible. A sense of togetherness and belonging has become the heart and soul of NAICCO. We all agree that we want a better tomorrow for our children. When you have that commonality, it speaks truth. It’s our foundation. The group becomes family, not by blood but by shared experience in the newfound Ohio home.

Since Masami and I came here in 2011, people have asked, “What if we could have our own place?’ While doing other programs, we never lost track of that: a piece of land in addition to our agency building on the south side of Columbus, a place we could call home, where we could connect with Nature.

We launched LandBack NAICCO in 2019, right before Covid struck. It didn’t get a lot of traction because of the pandemic. So we re-launched it in 2022. To our surprise, wow, in 2024 we have almost $400,000 to buy land that is not just ours, but where we can reawaken the Native within. Land that we don’t just walk upon, but where we engage in foraging, tending, stewarding, rewilding and conservation, where we can create a relationship with Mother Nature. How does Nature teach us, how do we take care of her? This is essential to who we are.

Native people have advocated for this idea, of course. It’s exciting, surprising and humbling that non-Native relatives, supporters, friends and allies have also rallied behind us and lifted us. Non-Native subject-matter experts, including conservationists and environmentalists, have told us that once we have the land, let them know. They’re there to offer resources, services, insight, wisdom. Very cool. Multiple organizations and private parties have come forward to participate as well. We don’t know how this will end. It’s hard to talk about because it’s happening right now, in real time.

We never imagined this in our wildest dreams. In these turbulent times, it gives you hope that there’s something good at hand. It points to a good life, not just for the individual but for the community. There’s hope here and a dream. LandBack NAICCO is about planting seeds for a better tomorrow.

Strengthening Connections

Anahkwet (Guy Reiter) is a citizen of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin and executive director of the grassroots nonprofit Menikanaehkem Community Rebuilders. The group has a range of supportive programming, including building solar-powered “tiny homes” for those who need shelter during life transitions, setting up women’s leadership and empowerment projects, including midwifery and traditional birthing practices, developing forest- and garden-based food sovereignty and advocating against proposals for dangerous open-pit mines and pipelines. Anahkwet talks about how his tribe understands the connections that strengthen individuals and communities.

Anahkwet: With the results of the recent election, hopefully people will now understand what this country has always been about since 1492. This moment is like many other moments in our Indigenous history with the dominant society. We at Menominee have been here before, unfortunately sometimes in more dire circumstances.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, our greatest enemy is the European mind, which comes in many shapes, forms, colors and creeds. It’s such a dangerous outlook because it’s based in fear. Through its languages, it perceives problems, defines them and builds things around them in ways that isolate a person—on a planet with 8 billion people. Anything built on fear and distrust never ends well. It’s a shaky foundation to build anything on.

Our Menominee language isn’t like that. It’s built on relationships, love and a connection to all things. The more we move in that direction, the stronger we will get. Indigenous leadership in this regard is already there throughout the world. It’s a question of others waking up to it and realizing it. Indigenous leaders have been present this whole time, but others haven’t seen them, haven’t taken the time to listen to them.

Our people are amazing at—and have mastered—resilience. Their deep connections to our culture and our language have kept them deeply grounded and able to withstand much struggle and oppression. Without those connections, you can see that a person might feel hopeless, lost, confused.

For us, struggle strengthens our connections. It alerts us to the importance of remembering who we are—our languages, our culture, our ceremonies. It’s a reminder to continue them. Our young people can see the sacrifices of their ancestors. They see the reason we’re still here, through all the things that happened to us. They see that our language, our culture and our way of life have held us together—have given us all we need in terms of hope, understanding and direction.

One of our greatest teachers is the Earth. If you slow down and listen, she’ll show you exactly what you need to know. If you want to build an organization, look to a forest. How does a forest have that much diversity, yet life thrives? What characteristics of a healthy forest do you see? In our teachings, in our culture, we talk about representation from grandma and grandpa trees, adult trees, teen trees, baby trees. They all need to exist within that ecosystem for it to be healthy. It doesn’t take long to understand the simplicity of it all. If you’re able to slow down and connect with the Earth, the answers are there.

When we went ricing this year, we took our young people along. [While ricing, one person poles a canoe through the shallow water of a wild-rice paddy, while the other uses sticks to tap the ripe wild-rice grains into the canoe.] It’s more than getting in a canoe, getting in the water and paddling, which is amazing in itself. Understanding the relationship the canoe has to the water and we have to the canoe, the connection to the trees, the land, the fish—all those things come into play. Before we go ricing, we pray. We ask for good days. We make sure everyone is safe.

The canoe in the water can teach you a lot of things about yourself. It can show you how you relate to another person. If it’s a windy day, you understand quickly how much teamwork ricing takes. When the wind is blowing hard in your face, the two of you are not going to make it across the lake if you don’t take the time to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, to work together. You’re also not fearful. You don’t make quick reactions. In this world, everyone wants quick this, quick that, but it’s not like that in the natural world.

Our people have stressed we must have good thoughts as we harvest this rice that has nourished our people for thousands of years. We harvest with a good heart and a good mind. We do it to feed our families, as well as other families, so they won’t go hungry. We think of all those who came before us, who treated the rice as we do, so it would continue to thrive. It will continue to take care of us if we take care of it.

All people around the world have gone through times like these at various points in their histories. In those times, they found strategies, ways to move forward. Today, there are good people and amazing things happening. Someone once told me in reference to a hurricane in Florida that all over the news you see what a tragedy it is. News shows show the destruction and the horrors.

But, this person said, remember to look for the helpers—helping, doing their work. The same is true now. Look for the helpers. They’re doing their work.

The post Hope in Turbulent Times: Native Leaders Take the Long View appeared first on Barn Raiser.

Lloyd Wright has worked with 10 presidents since the early 1960s and seen how both Republicans and Democrats have failed to address Black farmers’ civil rights complaints and correct institutional racism within the United States Department of Agriculture.

“Many Black farmers refer to USDA as being the last plantation, and the reason for that is, is that it really doesn’t change much from one administration to another, and in all cases, it’s not very good for Black folk,” said Wright, a Virginia-based farmer and retiree who served with the USDA for more than three decades. “There have been some [administrations] better than others.”

He knows first-hand the discrimination Black farmers faced — and the need to rectify their claims. He worked in multiple divisions throughout the years and was the director of the Office of Civil Rights from 1997 to 1998. He came out of retirement to serve as a consultant during former President Barack Obama’s first administration.

As President Joe Biden’s term comes to a close, many Black farmers are bracing for another four years of stagnation on the issues that have long plagued them. Many argue that progress has been insufficient, with a lack of accountability for the secretary of agriculture and limited oversight of local systems that distribute federal funds. 

This week, hundreds of Black farmers are gathering at the National Black Growers Council annual convening in Charleston, South Carolina, to provide resources and education to ensure Black farmers aren’t left behind. And with Inauguration Day steadily approaching on Jan. 20, the farmers have a lot to strategize over during this year’s convening. 

Trump’s Cabinet picks have also raised eyebrows. Stephen Miller, who’s expected to be the president-elect’s deputy chief of staff for policy, successfully blocked the $4 billion debt relief geared toward Black farmers during Biden’s administration. Trump also nominated Brooke Rollins, the CEO of the right-wing think tank America First Policy Institute, as the next agriculture secretary. Rollins would manage agriculture and welfare programs, including food quality, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and free school lunches, which have been vital for shrinking food insecurity and helping Black communities combat poverty.

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Read More: Justice Has Been Delayed for Black Farmers, and They’re Looking to the Next President for Answers

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Over the course of several administrations, Black farmers say the systemic problems they face — particularly within the USDA — have gone largely unaddressed. Under Trump’s previous tenure, there was little to no progress, with only 0.1% of emergency relief allocated to them. With the prospect of continued inaction, many fear that discrimination and unequal treatment at the USDA will persist for years to come.

In addition to Trump being back in the White House, Wright’s biggest concern is a narrow Republican majority in the House and three-seat majority in the Senate, and what legislation will be enacted to help, or hurt, farmers.

“For Black farmers, things that weren’t good before won’t get any better, but they may not get worse,” Wright told Capital B. 

He added: “It is not the fact that we’re going to have Trump in, it’s the fact that we lost the House and the Senate. It may be more difficult to get things into appropriation bills.”

What did the Trump administration do for Black farmers?

While Trump promised to “end the war on the American farmer,” his mission excluded farmers of color. Through his $22 billion Market Facilitation Program, which was designed to help farmers directly affected by foreign tariffs from China, nearly 100% of the bailout payments benefited white farmers, with an overwhelming majority going to those who are upper-middle class and wealthy. 

At the time, Sonny Perdue — the former Georgia governor who passed a tax bill to save his business and purchased land from a developer who he appointed to the state’s economic development board — served as the agriculture secretary. The program lacked oversight, failing to make sure the money went to farmers in need, according to the Government Accountability Office. The USDA’s internal auditors found the agency misspent more than $800 million, which included ineligible farms.

Farmers continued to feel the stronghold of the Trump administration even after he left office. 

Only months into Biden’s term, he passed the American Rescue Plan Act, which included a $4 billion debt relief program for farmers of color. However, they never got to see the relief. America First Legal — founded by Trump’s former adviser Miller — sued the USDA on behalf of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller for excluding white people from the relief. Banks also fought back against the program. 

As a result, it fell through. 

Trump also considered Sid Miller as the next secretary of Agriculture for the USDA. Ultimately, he nominated Rollins, who would be only the second woman to serve in this position.

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Read More: Racial Discrimination Lawsuit Against Federal Debt Relief Program Dismissed

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Wright suspects things will only get worse, especially on the local level with the county committees and with the civil rights division. For years, the Office of Civil Rights, of which Wright once served as director, has been in disarray. If a local county committee discriminates against Black farmers and they submit a complaint, “it’s not going anywhere because they don’t process them,” he said.

“You don’t have to hit us in the eyes every day to get our attention when it’s very clear in our history that, given enough time, folk will figure out how not to do something that’s designed to help Black folk,” Wright added. 

Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, it’s imperative that the next administration provides assistance to farmers because right now it’s stressful to be a Black farmer, said Julius Tillery, a fifth-generation cotton farmer in North Carolina who operates BlackCotton. 

“It’s a tough time. We’re having a rough year as well, but I think we could be able to make it through this year,” Tillery said. “We’ve been through worse, so let’s make the best of what’s coming next.”

Why are Black farmers disappointed in Biden? 

Though Trump hadn’t done much for Black farmers, in Wright’s eyes, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hadn’t done much better. He pointed to Biden’s appointment of Tom Vilsack as secretary of agriculture. He previously served two terms under Obama. During that time, Vilsack failed to address outstanding civil rights complaints and staked a claim that he helped increase the number of Black farmers and reduced funding disparities, which was inaccurate.

“I’m sure if Vilsack stayed secretary of agriculture and if the Congress had stayed Democrat, things wouldn’t have been great, but it would have been better,” said Wright.

Under Vilsack’s leadership, USDA employees foreclosed on Black farmers at a higher rate than on any other racial group between 2006 and 2016. The department approved fewer loans for Black farmers than under President Bush, and “then used census data in misleading ways to burnish its record on civil rights,” according to an investigation by The Counter. 

Also, Vilsack also played a role in the resignation of Shirley Sherrod, former Georgia state director of rural development for the USDA, whose remarks at an NAACP event were taken out of context. Though Vilsack later apologized and offered her another position, she declined. 

“To be honest with you, [the USDA] will continue to dismantle and be as dysfunctional as it relates to Blacks [under Trump], as was done under the Democrats — with the Clinton administration being the exception. And whereas Obama probably meant well, he gave us a secretary who was not very sensitive at all to Black issues,” Wright said.

These are a few of many reasons why Wright and others are relieved Vilsack won’t serve again.

Lawrence Lucas, a longtime advocate of Black farmers and president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, said he expects to see a “quick abundance of class actions” during the Trump administration filed against the USDA because of the failures of the current administration, such as the backlog of civil rights complaints that haven’t been addressed.

“I talked to farmers who are concerned about what’s going to happen next, and they are very pessimistic about the Trump administration helping them, but they’ve also been very disappointed with the Biden administration and the way they handle civil rights at USDA,” Lucas added. “It’s very shameful that much of the expectations we had going into a Biden administration has been very disappointing.”

Despite the criticism of Biden, he did a “decent job” of trying to get assistance to underserved farmers, which include Black folks who were locked out of resources during the Trump administration, said DeShawn Blanding, senior Washington representative for the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

Blanding pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act’s $2.2 billion Discrimination Financial Assistance Program for distressed borrowers who experienced discrimination in USDA farm loan programs prior to 2021. Rather than implement the $4 billion debt relief, Congress approved this new initiative. About 43,000 farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners received funds from the DFAP in July. U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, the vice president-elect, suggested in August the program is racist against white farmers. 

Farmer Dewayne Goldmon, also the senior adviser for racial equity to the Secretary of Agriculture, acknowledged the hardships farmers face today. The cost of production is exceeding revenue and because of input costs and lower commodity prices, it’s difficult to have cash flow, he said.

“You might have heard the expression when white farmers get a cold, Black farmers get pneumonia? Those who are struggling the most tend to be more deeply impacted,” he added. 

Goldmon emphasized the changes the Biden administration has made, ranging from supporting the Equity Commission and 1890 land grant institutions to shortening loan applications and removing bias from the lending process. The Department of Agriculture must continue to partner with community-based organizations and universities and build on the work of the previous administration to ensure equity, said Goldmon, who has been farming for 27 years.

“The situation that the Biden-Harris administration, that Secretary Vilsack inherited, didn’t come in one or 10 years,” he added. “When discrimination rears its legs ahead, then the discrimination suffered by previous generations has to be overcome by current and future generations, and that’s going to continue. Folks are just going to have to get accustomed to advocating to bring it forward — creative and effective solutions to deal with prior discrimination.”

How are Black farmers preparing for the future?

Some farmers told Capital B they are in need of emergency support now, and no matter who is in office, they still fear they won’t get the adequate support they need, said Charles Madlock, an urban farmer in New York. As a result, some may be forced to shut down their farms in the near future. 

So, what is the way forward?

Madlock, who started his journey in 2022, decided to turn from farming to advocacy when he learned about the challenges small farmers face to access resources and markets. Also, because he had a prior drug conviction, he was ineligible to receive any resources from USDA for up to five years.

The 40-year-old says he isn’t sure what policies will be passed or implemented under another Trump administration, but his focus is educating a new generation of Black farmers as well as Black communities.

“If they really want to recruit Black farmers … you can kill somebody and you still get funding. You can rob a bank and still get funding, but anything that’s associated with drugs, you can’t get federal funding. And funding is a barrier that will prevent Black people from becoming new farmers,” he said. “I could either try to become a farmer and take on farming full time, or I can try to educate my community and build more Black farmers because that’s kind of sort of really what we need within our community.”

Blanding and the Union of Concerned Scientists are “ready for a rapid response to keep this administration accountable and try and make it transparent about what they’re doing, and also holding Congress accountable to the policies that they put forward.”

“We’ve seen what a Trump 1.0 administration looks like. We’re cautious of what a 2.0 will look like … we’re trying to encourage Biden to institutionalize and preserve the work they’ve done … and that’s really our focus from now until January.”

The post Decades of USDA Racism Leave Black Farmers Fighting for Equality appeared first on Capital B News.

Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday afternoon, Dec. 12, that Breckenridge, having completed the multi-step training and certification process, has been designated as a Film Friendly Texas Certified Community by the Texas Film Commission.

“Congratulations to Breckenridge on earning the Film Friendly Texas designation and joining more than 175 other Texas communities that have received this recognition,” Abbott said in a news release. “Texas is brimming with promise, and I look forward to continuing to work alongside all of our communities to ensure they have the knowledge and tools needed to succeed. Through the Film Friendly Texas training and certification process, Texas communities are prepared to help match local businesses with production-related needs, creating jobs for Texas-based crew members and local residents, as well as spurring on-site spending at local businesses. I thank the Texas Film Commission for helping communities like Breckenridge market their unique appeal and support local job creation through media production.”

Breckenridge joins more than 175 Film Friendly Texas Certified Communities from across the state that receive ongoing training and guidance from the Texas Film Commission on media industry standards, best practices, and how to effectively accommodate on-location filming activity in their community.

“Congratulations to the City of Breckenridge for earning the Film Friendly Texas Community designation,” said Sen. Phil King. “This designation is a testament to the dedicated local leadership, the compelling history, and the natural beauty of Breckenridge. Thank you to the Texas Film Commission for this designation, which will create exciting economic opportunities for this community. I look forward to the continued growth of the film industry in Stephens County and across Senate District 10.”

Breckenridge City Manager Cynthia Northrop said City officials are excited to receive the Film Friendly Texas Community certification. “The City of Breckenridge is rich in unique history, boomtown legacy, and the rugged beauty of West Texas that features two lakes, prairie land, and breathtaking landscapes,” she said. “The Mayor and Commissioners continue to promote tourism in alignment with our strategic plan, and this partnership with the Texas Film Commission will serve to welcome the film industry to discover our diverse and beautiful community.”

At their June meeting, the City Commissioners approved an ordinance setting guidelines for filming in Breckenridge. Having such guidelines in place was one of three requirements for the city to become certified as a film-friendly city by the Texas Film Commission. The other two requirements were for City staff members to attend a workshop and to provide the commission with photos of potential film locations.

“So (the ordinance) really fulfills one of our strategic goals of promoting economic development and promoting Breckenridge as … a tourist destination,” Northrop said at the June meeting.

A couple of weeks before that meeting, Northrop and City Secretary Jessica Sutter attended a related seminar in New Braunfels, fulfilling that requirement, as well.

The guidelines passed in the ordinance authorize the City Manager to permit the use of any street, right-of-way, park, public building, equipment, or personnel for commercial uses in the filming or taping of movies, television programs, documentaries, commercials, training films, or other media, and related activities pursuant to the requirements of this article. Additionally, the City Manager can prohibit all filming or order cessation of filming when necessary to promote public health, safety, and welfare.

The ordinance also sets the permit requirements and the rules once a permit has been issued, such as notifying residents who might be affected by a film project in their neighborhood. For example, the guidelines state that the permit applicant will provide a written description of the schedule for the proposed production to the owners, tenants, and residents of each property in the affected neighborhood(s) or areas where filming is to occur. Click here to see the complete ordinance.

Last year, the city of Strawn in the southwestern corner of Palo Pinto County was used to film scenes for the miniseries “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” which premiered on Paramount+ in November 2023. Some scenes were filmed in Stephenville and other Texas communities, even though the story is set in Arkansas.

“This is great news for the City and another great step toward accomplishing our goals,” Sutter said in an email Thursday afternoon about the official Film Friendly Texas designation. A representative from the Texas Film Commission will make a presentation on the designation at the City Commission meeting in January.

For more than 50 years, the Texas Film Commission has helped grow local jobs and economies by promoting Texas as a destination for film, television, commercial, animation, visual effects, video game, and extended reality production. The Texas Film Commission in the Governor’s Economic Development & Tourism Office has attracted more than $2.5 billion in local spending and created more than 189,000 production jobs across the state from 2007 to 2024.

To explore all that Film Friendly Texas Communities offer, visit: gov.texas.gov/film/page/fftx_overview.

For cast, crew, and digital media job opportunities in Texas, visit: gov.texas.gov/film/hotline.

 

Cutline, top photo: Downtown Breckenridge offers brick streets and several 1920s-era buildings that might appeal to film makers. Other sites in the community, such as the parks, historical homes, the lakes, ranches, etc. also could be of interest. (Photo by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)

 

The post Governor announces Film Friendly Texas designation for Breckenridge first appeared on Breckenridge Texan.

MENDOCINO CO., 12/12/24 — State Route 162, also called Covelo Road, lies east of Highway 101, approximately halfway between Willits and Laytonville. After about 45 minutes of driving along windy roads and navigating tight turns, travelers emerge to overlook the green splendor of the Round Valley Reservation, home to the town of Covelo and the Round Valley Indian Tribes—a confederation of seven tribes forced to live together on Yuki tribal land in the 1850s. The path to this remote corner of Mendocino County is beautiful but arduous, with travelers losing internet access for most of the journey. The trip ends with a view of some of the most breathtaking mountains in Northern California, where colorful orange and red trees contrast with white snow on the highest peaks.

Despite the solitude that Round Valley provides, the region’s remoteness has greatly contributed to its lack of resources, particularly in terms of housing for tribal members. High construction costs and limited access to funding have led to a shortage of affordable housing for people on the reservation. According to the Round Valley Indian Housing Authority (RVIHA) directors, 91 Round Valley tribal members are on the waitlist for affordable housing units.

Last month, the housing authority announced it will be receiving $8.7 million in grant funding from the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) through its Homekey Tribal Program. The funds will enable the housing authority to complete Phase 5 of the Tribal Winds project, a multi-family housing development that’s already partially completed. The housing authority will contribute $30,000 annually from its own funds to support the growing housing development.

According to the housing authority, the Tribal Winds project already has 43 housing units completed on the reservation, including a mix of two-bedroom, three-bedroom and four-bedroom homes. One housing unit has five bedrooms.

The next phase is to construct 18 permanent rental units on 9.6 acres of land on Hatchet Mountain Boulevard, a section of grassy fields next to a paved road located about five minutes from the housing authority’s main office on Concow Boulevard. The new phase will be for Round Valley tribal members who are currently homeless or at risk of homelessness. The homes will be single-family units, with priority given to tribal members on the authority’s housing waitlist. The housing authority’s directors stated they are still ironing out the details of the application process for members who wish to apply.

The new development will include 10 two-bedroom homes and eight three-bedroom homes, according to directors. Although the housing authority originally petitioned for units with attached garages, they realized there would not be enough funding for them. Construction should begin in 2025.

 Darlene Crabtree, the authority’s finance manager, emphasized that the next phase of development will support families that have had trouble getting into affordable housing.

“We just need to put families in them, we want them to have a home,” Crabtree said in an interview. “It’s rewarding to see people in homes, and originally I wasn’t sure we were going to get the grant.”

Crabtree said that LACO, a Native American-owned civil engineering firm based in Ukiah, serves as the housing authority’s grant writer and was instrumental in securing this most recent grant.

“There’s so many people out there in different situations asking for this money,” she said. “But LACO does a lot of our writing, our engineering and architecture. They helped us a lot with this process.”

According to an HCD employee who declined to be named, the application process for grants under the Homekey Program is much less competitive than other state housing programs.

The Homekey Program includes several non-competitive aspects, including that funding is given on a first-come, first-served basis rather than through a competitive scoring system. In competitive scoring programs, applicants are ranked based on the goals of the housing development, its impact on the community and other guidelines.

Nonetheless, the HCD staffer explained that because California tribes had been ineligible for HCD programs until 2021, many tribal governments were unprepared for the Homekey Program’s grant-writing process and lacked sufficient information to complete their applications in a timely manner, negatively affecting tribal authorities’ ability to receive grants for developing housing.

Thus, the nearly $9 million grant secured by LACO for Round Valley was a win that both surprised and exhilarated housing authority directors. Crabtree said a part of the application process involved seeking feedback from Round Valley’s homeless population to identify their greatest needs.

“One of the requirements for the grant application was to have a meeting and hand out a questionnaire on what individuals want, and they mainly talked about housing,” Crabtree said. “This is the biggest grant we’ve been able to get this year. The whole concept of kids and families getting their homes, it’s exciting.”

The post Round Valley Tribes receives $8.7 million grant to develop housing appeared first on The Mendocino Voice | Mendocino County, CA.

Why Should Delaware Care?
About a quarter of Delaware adults live with a disability and, while voting accessibility in Delaware has improved, many still face barriers to exercising their right to vote privately and in person.

Emmanuel Jenkins drove past a dimly lit school on Election Day in November. His assigned polling place, the Woodbridge Early Childhood Education Center in Greenwood, had no signs, few cars and even less people — it was probably closed, he thought. 

Jenkins, a community relations officer with the Delaware Developmental Disabilities Council, drove to the nearest polling place, a fire station, where he was told he had to return to the school and drive around the back, toward the gymnasium, where voting was taking place. 

There were no signs directing people to the gymnasium and, if there were, people living with low vision would have difficulties finding the polls, he added. It would be difficult for a voter with limited mobility to find and travel to the gymnasium if paratransit dropped them off in the front of the building, Jenkins said. 

“Voting should be at least the one thing that we have no barriers to,” said Jenkins, who lives with cerebral palsy. “It is our right; it is our responsibility, and if we cannot exercise, are we really part of the United States of America?”

About one in four adults in Delaware live with a disability and physical or environmental barriers at polling places are encroaching on their most fundamental civil right — voting. Physical barriers around parking, entrances and exterior pathways may discourage people living with disabilities from exercising their right to privately vote in person, according to advocates. 

In 2024, some voters with disabilities reported improvements in accessibility at polling places compared to past elections, but accessibility issues still persist.

Nationwide, among in-person voters in 2022, the rate of difficulties was over three times higher among people with disabilities than those without disabilities, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission 2022 Disability and Voting Accessibility Survey. 

About 20% of in-person voters with disabilities reported difficulties, compared to 6% of voters without disabilities, the survey found. 

During the 2024 elections, the Community Legal Aid Society Inc. (CLASI) continued its years-long effort to survey polling places to ensure they’re accessible to Delawareans living with disabilities. 

Monitors from CLASI surveyed over 90% of all polling locations statewide and over 93% in Kent and Sussex counties, covering 258 locations overall, according to Joann Kingsley, a voting rights advocate with CLASI’s Disabilities Law Program. 

While the final survey results have not been published, the organization is “pleased that preliminary figures suggest improvements in accessibility,” she added. 

Voting should be at least the one thing that we have no barriers to.

Emmanuel jenkins, delaware development disabilities council

John Nanni, who is living with post-polio syndrome and uses a wheelchair, had a “great” experience voting in the 2024 election compared to 2020. On Election Day 2020, a line of voters wrapped around the Crossroads Presbyterian Church in Middletown, Nanni’s assigned voting place. 

Poll workers didn’t pull elderly folks or people living with disabilities out of line to avoid the wait then. But in 2024, workers pulled people living with disabilities out of the long lines and had them enter the building to vote first. 

“I know they don’t do that in a lot of places, but they did at this polling center, which was great,” Nanni said. 

By law, all voting places must be accessible to people with disabilities. All voting places are equipped with a Universal Voting Console, a headset and audio-tactile ballot handheld device that allows voters with low vision and others with disabilities to vote unassisted. 

As a result of CLASI’s 2022 report, the DOE removed 11 locations due to accessibility issues for the 2024 election, according to Cathleen Hartsky-Carter, community relations officer with the Delaware Department of Elections.

Seven locations were removed in Sussex County and four were removed in New Castle County. Polling places are removed from the list if appropriate accessibility changes cannot be made and new locations are added. 

Polling places are open to making accessibility adjustments, but the buildings often don’t have the needed funding to make the facilities accessible on a regular basis outside of Election Day, Hartsky-Carter added.

Accessibility monitored across Delaware 

Joann Kingsley looked down at her phone as the screen lit up her face amid the November election night. She looked up and counted the blue accessible parking spaces at the First Baptist Church of Milford, a bustling polling place she was monitoring for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 

Her eyes darted around the parking lot as she rapidly read out criteria for which she was looking.

There was no significant slope, potholes or identifiable cracks in the lot — good. There were over a dozen handicapped parking spaces near the entrance, but they were not identified by vertical signs — not good. 

Kingsley would later find that the church entryway wasn’t wide enough for a wheelchair to fit through without both doors needing to be held open.

Monitors survey parking entrances, accessible parking spaces, exterior pathways, building entrances and the interior voting area for ADA compliance. They then enter their findings into an online survey tool. 

CLASI compiles its findings and presents them to the DOE in order to improve voting accessibility for future elections. 

Signage was a widespread issue at Delaware polls during the 2022 election, especially for directing voters with disabilities to accessible parking, routes and entrances, according to CLASI’s 2022 report. 

Monitors found polling locations without any directional signs, while others had signs pointing voters in the wrong or opposite directions, the report found. Additionally, nearly a third of monitored locations in 2022 had inaccessible parking issues. 

“It is not OK for people to just find a reason not to make change,” Emmanuel Jenkins said. “Voting with barriers will discourage people, and already does.”

Nancy Lemus was impressed by the accessibility capability of her son’s polling place. 

Lemus, a member of the Delaware Developmental Disabilities Council, accompanied her 19-year-old son, Christopher Garcia, who is living with disabilities, to vote for the first time during the 2024 election. 

She didn’t expect the New Castle polling place to have accessible equipment that would help her son be able to make his selections on the voting screen. She went into the polling place to ask if they had the needed accessibility control before she took her son out of the car. 

“I was surprised, I was impressed,” Lemus said. “I went in there with expectations that they wouldn’t have it.”

Lemus said she hoped the accessibility control would be made available at local libraries for people with disabilities to become familiarized with technology before elections.

The post Delaware poll accessibility improved for voters with disabilities in 2024 appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Every morning, for years, Josana Pinto da Costa would venture out onto the waterways lining Óbidos, Brazil, in a small fishing boat. She would glide over the murky, churning currents of the Amazon River Basin, her flat nets bringing in writhing hauls as the sun ascended into the cerulean skies above.

Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa in Portuguese. It feels as if the “sun has gotten stronger,” so much so that it’s led her to shift her working hours from daytime to the dead of night.

Abandoning the practice that defined most of her days, she now sets off to the river in the pitch dark to chase what fish are also awake before dawn. It’s taken a toll on her catch, and her life. But it’s the only way she can continue her work in the face of increasingly dangerous temperatures.

“A lot of our fishing communities have shifted to fishing in the nighttime,” said Pinto da Costa, who advocates nationally for fisherfolk communities like hers through the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil, or the Movement of Artisanal Fishermen and Fisherwomen of Brazil.

Moving from daytime to overnight work is often presented as the most practical solution for agricultural laborers struggling with rising temperatures as a result of climate change. But it is no longer simply a proposal: This shift is already underway among many of the communities that catch, grow, and harvest the world’s food supply, from Brazil to India to the United States. Studies show the most common means of adapting to rising temperatures in most crop-growing regions has been to start working when it’s still dark out, or even to shift to a fully overnight schedule.

“The obvious piece of advice that you’ll see given is, ‘Work at night. Give workers head torches,’ and so on,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “But the reality is, that can lead to other rights violations, other negative impacts.”

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That’s been the case for Pinto da Costa and her fishing community in Brazil. Nighttime work has been an additional hardship for a community already struggling with the impacts of climate change. The region has experienced decades of severe drought conditions, causing fish to die off and physically isolating people as waterways dried up.

Research shows that regularly working during the night is physically and mentally disruptive and can lead to long-term health complications. Nighttime fishing is also threatening social and communal routines among the fisherfolk. A daytime sleep schedule can curb quality time spent with loved ones, as well as limit when wares can be sold or traded in local markets.

It’s also impacting their ability to support themselves and their families through a generations-old trade. “We’ve actually been working more hours with less food, with less production,” said Pinto da Costa, noting that working at night has made their work less efficient and led them to find less fish. “This is across all regions of Brazil,” she added.

The impact of a shift to nighttime hours is an understudied piece of the puzzle of how climate change and rising temperatures threaten the world’s food supply and its workforce. But for many experts, and those on the front lines, one thing is clear: Overnight work is far from a straightforward solution.

“It’s a very scary time for us,” said Pinto da Costa.

Outdoor workers, with their typical midday hours and limited access to shade, face some of the most perilous health risks during periods of extreme heat. A forthcoming analysis — previewed exclusively by Grist — found that, on average, the amount of time considered unsafe to work outside during a typical 9-to-5 workday will increase 8 percent by 2050, assuming greenhouse gas emissions stay on their current trajectory.

Led by Naia Ormaza Zulueta, a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Mehrabi, the analysis measures the number of extreme heat days by geographic region, and then breaks down daily and hourly temperatures by the estimated amount of population exposed. The research reveals that an estimated 21 percent of the global population already faces dangerous levels of heat stress during typical workday hours for more than a third of the year. By 2050, without cuts to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions (known as the “business-as-usual” scenario), that portion will jump to 39 percent.

“The number of days that people will experience a violation of their rights to a safe climate is going to substantially increase, but then also the number of possible working hours in a season, and productivity, is going to be substantially reduced,” said Mehrabi. “It’s a massive lose-lose situation.”

Their analysis finds that outdoor agricultural workers will encounter the largest health-related risks, with laborers in some areas being hit harder than others.

India, in particular, is projected to be one of the countries whose workforce will be most exposed to heat stress under the business-as-usual climate scenario. There are roughly 260 million agricultural workers in India. By 2050, 94 percent of the country’s population could face more than 100 days in a year when at least one daytime working hour exceeds a wet-bulb temperature of 28 degrees Celsius, or 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit — a conservative threshold of what is considered safe for acclimatized workers experiencing moderate rates of work. (Unacclimatized workers, or those unaccustomed to working in such environments, will face greater levels of heat risk at the same temperature and amount of work.)

In Brazil, another of the world’s top agricultural suppliers, heat risk is not as dire, but still poses a substantial risk for outdoor workers, including Pinto da Costa’s community of fisherfolk. By 2050, roughly 41 percent of the country’s population could experience more than 100 days a year when wet-bulb temperatures exceed the recommended threshold for at least one hour a day, according to the Boulder team’s analysis.

Mary Jo Dudley, the director of Cornell University’s Farmworker Program and the chair of the U.S. National Advisory Council of Migrant Health, said that the analysis is significant for what it reveals about the human health consequences of extreme heat, particularly as it relates to the world’s agricultural laborers. She’s seeing more and more outdoor agricultural workers in the U.S. adopt overnight schedules, which is only adding to the burdens and inequities the wider workforce already suffers from. This is poised to get worse. Zulueta and Mehrabi found that 35 percent of the total U.S. population will experience more than 100 days of wet-bulb temperatures exceeding 28 degrees C, or 82.4 degrees F, for at least one hour a day every year by 2050.

“This transition to a nighttime schedule pushes an extremely vulnerable population into more difficult work conditions that have significant mental and physical health impacts,” said Dudley.

Rebuking the human body’s circadian rhythms — that 24-hour internal clock that regulates when you sleep and wake — ramps up a person’s risk of health complications, such as cardiovascular disease and types of cancer, and diminishes their body’s ability to handle injury and stress. Working untraditional hours also can reduce a person’s ability to socialize or participate in cultural, communal activities, which are associated with positive impacts on brain and body health.

Women are particularly vulnerable to the social and economic impacts of transitioning to nighttime schedules. Despite making up nearly 45 percent of artisanal fishers in Brazil, women receive lower pay than their male counterparts. That means that when harvests decline with nighttime fishing, their margins are even smaller.

In the Brazilian state of Bahia, tens of thousands of women fishers work to collect shellfish en masse, while in Maranhão, women fisherfolk herd shrimp to the shore using small nets. Clam harvesting in Brazil’s northeast is also dominated by women. Because these jobs traditionally happened during the day and close to home, they allowed women to balance cultural or gendered family roles, including managing the household and being the caregiver to children. Shifting to evening hours to avoid extreme heat “poses a fundamental challenge,” said Mehrabi. “When you talk about changing working hours, you talk about disrupting families.”

Overnight work comes with other risks too. In many areas of Brazil, nighttime work is “either impossible” or “very complicated” because there are procedures and regulations as to when fisherfolk in different regions can fish, said Pinto da Costa. Nighttime fishing is regulated in some parts of Brazil — measures that have been shown to disproportionately impact artisanal fishers.

Even so, says Pinto da Costa, many are braving the risks “just to reduce the amount of exposure to the sun.”

“Honestly, when I saw that this was accepted in the literature, that people were giving this advice of changing their working shifts to the night, I was shocked,” said Zulueta, the author of the Boulder study, citing a paper published earlier this year where overnight work is recommended as an adaptation tool to reduce agricultural productivity losses to heat exposure. Under a policy of “avoiding unsafe working hours,” shifting those hours to the nighttime “is not a universally applicable solution,” she said.

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Growing up a pastoralist in Ahmedabad, India, Bhavana Rabari has spent much of her life helping tend to her family’s herd of buffalo. Although she now spends her days advocating for pastoralists across the Indian state of Gujarat, the routine of her childhood is still ingrained in her: Wake up, feed and milk the herd, and then tend to the fields that surround their home.

But extreme heat threatens to change that, as well as the preservation of her community. When temperatures soar past 90 degrees F in Ahmedabad — now a regular occurrence — Rabari worries about her mom, who hand-collects feed for their buffalo to graze on. Other pastoralists are nomadic, walking at least 10 miles a day herding cattle from region to region in the hunt for pastureland.

“If we lose our livestock, we lose our culture, our dignity,” said Rabari. “If we continue our occupations, then we are dignified. We live with the dignity of our work.”

But rapidly rising temperatures are making it hard to hold on to that dignity of work. “The heat affects every life, every thing,” said Rabari.

Working overnight is a tactic Rabari has heard of other agricultural workers trying. But the idea of tending to the herd in the dark isn’t something she sees as safe or accessible for either her family or other pastoralists in her community. It’s less efficient and more dangerous to work outdoors with animals in the dark, and it would require them to overhaul daily lives and traditions.

“We are not working at night,” said Rabari. But what the family is already doing is waking up at 5 a.m. to beat the heat, collecting milk from their buffalo and preparing products to sell in the market during the dusky hours of the morning.

Rabari’s family and other pastoralists across Gujarat are increasingly in an untenable position. Hotter temperatures have already caused pastureland to wither, meaning animals are grazing less and producing less milk. More unsafe working hours means lost work time on top of that, which, in turn, changes how much income pastoralist families are able to take home.

The result has been not adaptation, but an exodus. Most pastoralists Rabari knows, particularly younger generations, are leaving the trade, seeking employment instead as drivers or cleaners in Ahmedabad. Rabari, who organizes for women pastoralists through the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan, or the Pastoral Women Alliance, says women are most often the ones left behind to tend to the herds.

They “have to take care of their children, they have to take care of the food, and they have to take care of the water,” she said. “They face the heat, they face the floods, or the excess rain.”

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Halfway across the world, April Hemmes is facing off against unrelenting bouts of heat amid verdant fields of soybeans and corn in Hampton, north-central Iowa. A fourth-generation small Midwestern farmer, Hemmes works more than 900 acres entirely on her own — year in and year out.

The Midwest is the largest agricultural area in the United States, as well as one of the leading agricultural producers in the world. It’s also an area that has been battered by human-caused climate change. In fact, scientists just recently declared an end to the drought that had devastated the region for a whopping 203 weeks. The conditions impacted crop yields, livestock, the transportation of goods, and the larger supply chain.

Hemmes has the luxury of not having to face the same degree of heat stress that Rabari and Pinto da Costa are confronting elsewhere in the world, per the Boulder analysis. When compared to India and Brazil, the U.S. is on the lowest end of the worker health impact scale for extreme heat. And yet, heat is also already the deadliest extreme weather event in the U.S., responsible for more deaths every year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.

A few years back, while building a fence on her farmland, Hemmes suffered her first bout of on-the-job heat exhaustion. Suddenly, her heart started to race and her body felt as if it began to boil from within, forcing her to abandon her task and head indoors, away from the menacing heat. It was a wake-up call: Ever since, she’s been hyper-cautious with how she feels when tending to her fields.

This past summer, the heat index repeatedly soared past 100 degrees in Hemmes’ corner of Iowa. She found herself needing to be extra careful, not only pacing herself while working and taking more frequent breaks, but also making sure to get the bulk of the day’s work done in the morning. She even began starting her day in the fields an hour or so earlier to avoid searing temperatures compounding with brutal humidity throughout the afternoon.

“This [farm] has been in my family for over 125 years,” she said. “I do everything from banking to planting to spraying, everything. So it’s all on me, and it’s my family farm. I’m very proud of that.” In 1993, her dad and grandfather both retired, and she took over operations. She’s been more or less “a one-woman show” since. Keeping her farm well-managed is a responsibility she doesn’t take lightly. “You do what’s best for the soil. Because that’s the inheritance of future generations,” she said.

When Hemmes looks at how to prepare for a future with hotter working conditions, she knows one thing: Nighttime work is out of the question.

Not only are summertime mosquitoes in Iowa “terrible after dark,” but Hemmes says some of the chemicals she uses are regulated, restricting her from spraying them during the nighttime. In addition, she would need to get lights installed throughout the fields to alleviate the risk of injury when she uses equipment, and she would be even more fearful of that equipment breaking down.

“It would take more energy to work at night,” said Hemmes. “I think it would be far more dangerous … to work after the daylight was gone.”

Like Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is involved in advocacy for her community. With the United Soybean Board, Hemmes advocates for women in agriculture. With more resources at her disposal than Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is focused on how to ensure solo-farming operations like hers have access to the technology they need to overcome heat spells — and never have to seriously consider an overnight harvest schedule.

On her own farm, she’s invested in “expensive” autonomous agriculture technology that allows her to take breaks when she needs to from the blistering sun. And she would like to see more precision technology and autonomous agriculture tools readily applied and accessible for farmers. She currently uses a tractor with an automatic steering system that improves planting and plowing efficiency and requires much less work, which she credits as one of the pivotal reasons she’s able to successfully manage her hundreds of acres of fields on her own.

She also hopes to see farmers tapping into their inherent flexibility. “What farmers are is adaptable,” she said. “I don’t have an orchard on my farm, but if I did, and I saw this thing [climate change] coming, you know, maybe you look at tearing the trees out and starting to plant what I can in those fields. Maybe the Corn Belt will move up to North Dakota. Who knows, if this keeps progressing?”

In Gujarat, Rabari and the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan are working to secure better representation for pastoralists in policymakers’ decisions about land use. The hope is for these communities to inform policies that would allow pastoralists job security and financial safety nets as climbing temperatures make it difficult to work and turn a profit.

Women pastoralists in particular are entirely left out of these policy spaces, said Rabari, which isn’t just an issue of exclusion but means their unique ecological knowledge is lost, too. “We have a traditional knowledge of which grass is good for our animals, which grass they need to eat so we get the most meals, how [they] can be used for medical treatment,” she said.

Pinto da Costa and the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil are also advocating for monetary relief from the Brazilian government to offset the losses her fisherfolk community has faced from climate change and shifting work hours. In addition, she is looking for technical support to improve fisherfolk’s resources and equipment.

“I have maintained my energy and motivation to continue to fight for our rights,” said Pinto da Costa.

For all, it’s a race against time. Eventually, even working at night may not be enough to keep outdoor agricultural work viable. The Boulder researchers found that an overnight working schedule will not significantly alleviate dangerous heat stress exposure risk in key agricultural regions of the world — particularly across India. After all, heat waves don’t only happen during the day, but also take place at night, with overnight minimum temperatures rising even more rapidly than daytime highs.

Zachary Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who has separately researched the impact of overnight work adaptations on global agricultural productivity levels, said the Boulder team’s analysis has a “novel” result, and lines up with what his team has found.

“Warming past 2 degrees C, which we will experience over the next 30 years, would mean that even overnight shifts wouldn’t recover productivity,” said Zobel.

“How do you solve a problem like that?” Mehrabi said. “The reality is that the workers most at risk are the people contributing least to the climate change problem. That’s not to say that we can’t have better policies around hydration, shading, health. But it’s just kind of trying to put a BandAid on a problem. It doesn’t actually deal with the problem at its root cause, which comes down to this trajectory of fossil fuel consumption and emissions.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat is forcing farmers to work overnight, an adaptation that comes with a cost on Dec 11, 2024.

By Will Atwater

People use single-use plastics multiple times every day — shopping bags, fast-food containers, disposable forks and spoons, sandwich wrappers and countless other items. Given the abundance of these items, it’s not a surprise to find increasing amounts of plastic debris in the environment. 

However, a recent study examining the types and origins of microplastics in a western North Carolina watershed found that some particles are also hanging out in the air.

Jerry Miller, lead researcher and environmental science professor in the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resources at Western Carolina University, said his research has revealed that a big source for microplastics is in the atmosphere. 

“The atmospheric particles end up in the water, they get into the sediment […], and then they can be transferred up the food chain,” he said. 

Miller shared the research earlier this week at a North Carolina Water Resources Association event at Raleigh’s McKimmon Center.

The research focus was Haywood County’s Richland Creek watershed and two tributaries. One of the research goals is to fill in information gaps about the impact of microplastics in freshwater rivers and streams in the southeastern U.S., Miller said.

“We’re catching up with what’s been done in marine environments and coastal environments, but we still have a ways to go.”

Researchers discovered that roughly 90 percent of the microplastics were fibers, with three primary types of plastic present: polystyrene, polyamides and polyethylene. These plastics are used to make items such as sportswear and other types of clothing, takeout food containers, foam packaging and water bottles.

The study also revealed that the quantity of microplastics, as well as large pieces of plastic debris, increased in parts of the watershed that were closer to development, implying that  human activity is likely the primary source of the contamination. 

But the report noted that “microplastics concentrations were also elevated” in remote parts of the tributaries with limited development, “suggesting atmospheric deposition was an important microplastics source.” 

Miller’s discussion of the sources and distribution of microplastics in this western North Carolina watershed comes at a time when efforts to curb plastic pollution have stalled.  

The fifth session of the international Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution closed in South Korea earlier this month without a treaty. More than 100 major countries failed to reach any consensus on the terms of an agreement to curb worldwide plastic pollution. 

Here in North Carolina, efforts by groups and municipalities across the state to establish single-use plastic bag ordinances have also been stymied as the General Assembly signaled that it doesn’t support such moves.

Meanwhile environmentalists say that recycling — which is what opponents of reducing plastic production point to as the fix for the global crisis of plastic pollution — is a profoundly broken system that doesn’t work.

A growing problem

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, microplastic compounds are fragments smaller than 5 mm in length, roughly the size of an eraser on the end of a pencil. However, microplastics can break down into smaller particles, some invisible to the naked eye, known as nanoplastics. These substances are believed to be able to last hundreds, even thousands, of years in the environment.

Globally, more than 430 million tons of plastic is produced annually. Some plastics break down into these microplastic particles, and a significant amount of them ends up in the ocean, where marine animals swallow them. That’s one way they enter the food chain, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme.

In 2021, the United States alone generated between 40.1 million and 51 million tons of plastic waste. Of that amount, somewhere between 32 million and 43 million tons ended up in landfills, according to data provided by Statista, a research and marketing firm. 

In 2023, Duke researchers led a study that revealed a possible link between nanoplastic particles and a brain protein that may result in increased risk for Parkinson’s disease and some forms of dementia.

Previous studies have revealed that humans ingest about a credit card-size amount of microplastics weekly and suggested links between microplastic ingestion in people and inflammatory bowel disease. There’s also some suggestion that microplastics can alter how hormones function in the body. A study published in 2019 estimates that humans may inhale 74,000 to 121,000 microplastic particles annually.

“We ingest microplastics all the time,” said Anna Alsobrook, watershed science and policy manager at MountainTrue, an environmental advocacy group based in western North Carolina.

“The more plastics that get produced, the more microplastics we ingest. We are continuing to see more and more linkages of microplastics to chronic health problems.”

‘Culture of convenience’

Despite the mounting evidence that plastic pollution poses a risk to the environment, animals and humans, getting people to curb dependence on single-use plastics has proven to be a challenge.

“We live in a culture of convenience,” said Jason Love, one of the co-contributors of the watershed research and associate director of Western Carolina University’s Highlands Biological Center. “Instead of going and getting tap water, why not get a plastic bottle out of the fridge?”

He noted, “All these things contribute to the issues we’re having now. It’s going to take some deep discussion about what we want as humans and what’s most important.”

Further complicating the discussion about the dangers of microplastics is the fact that they are  hard to detect in the environment, said Annika Willis, a UNC Chapel Hill undergraduate majoring in environmental science. Willis is one of several UNC students involved in research projects at the Highlands Biological Center.

“Even though I was aware of microplastics, until doing this research, they weren’t really on the top of my concerns because I was never really visually interacting with them,” Willis said. 

“This research is really important to educate the public on the fact that these particles are in our bodies and they are having impacts,” she said. “But I feel like that’s not necessarily common knowledge or knowledge that people want to take into consideration when enacting policy.”

Where do we go from here?

Part of the conversation society needs to have about plastics has to include an economic perspective, said Erin Flanagan, an undergraduate environmental studies major at UNC Chapel Hill. She is also part of the group conducting research at the Highlands Biological Center.

“With a lot of environmental pollution, I think you can’t talk about mitigation and policy without talking about classism,” Flanagan said. “If you can’t afford a nice glass water bottle or to wear all natural fibers, [or ] to not eat frozen dinners in a plastic container every night…”

“There’s the issue of people not being able to afford more safe alternatives to plastic and the influence that plastic companies or corporations that use plastic to package their products have,” she said.

Textile fibers were part of the microplastics researchers found in the Richland Creek watershed.  When clothes are washed, they release microfibers and contribute microplastics that end up in the environment and the food chain. 

There are some bags on the market that are designed to limit the release of microfibers when washing clothes. One item on the market is the GUPPYFRIEND. Priced at around $35, the instructions say to place “synthetics and other delicate clothes” into the bag during the laundry process. The microfibers are trapped in the bag and can be discarded into the trash. 

Requiring plastic producers to take responsibility is the only way to create lasting change when it comes to reducing plastic waste, environmental advocates say. They argue that multinational petroleum companies, such as Shell, should be required to help fund recycling programs and mitigation strategies like installing microfiber filtration systems at municipal wastewater treatment facilities.

Given the complexity of the problem, it’s going to take multiple strategies to resolve it, Alsobrook said. Engaging local elected officials is an essential first step.

“The best thing we can do as a society is to produce less plastic, and to start that yesterday,” she said. “To do that, we need policies that limit single-use plastic production and their products. Contact your state legislators today and tell them to enact policies that protect us from plastics and their toxins.”

The post Nowhere to hide: Microplastics are polluting western North Carolina watersheds appeared first on North Carolina Health News.

LIVINGSTON — From the hillside above her home on Suce Creek, Maggie McGuane has a clear view of the property a Miami-based investment firm is eyeing for a luxury resort development. 

The lower boundary of the empty three-lot parcel is easily identifiable. It’s been planted in winter wheat, highlighting the right angles that form the property’s lower edge. The upper lot has more relief, stretching up a pine-dotted hillside.

McGuane has climbed above the cottonwoods that shelter her house from Park County’s infamous wind — blowing moderately on a late October day — to explain why she finds a proposal to put 100 cabins, a restaurant and a spa in this tucked-away slice of Paradise Valley a “uniquely mysterious” prospect. 

The mystery pertains to peculiarities of the 90-acre property, which is still listed for sale, and the inscrutability of the parties involved: an out-of-state landowner named Robert Pappert whom McGuane has been unable to reach outside of communications with his attorney and realtor, and Flex Capital Group, an out-of-state real estate developer that’s an unknown quantity in Montana.  

McGuane has been unofficially appointed by her neighbors to lead the charge against the development, which has generated difficult conversations about zoning in the two months since the proposal came to light via an email exchange unearthed by a local nonprofit. McGuane and others argue that the development is out of alignment with the area’s predominantly rural character, and a poor fit for a community eager to avoid the breakneck development that’s reshaping nearby Bozeman, a rapidly growing college town of 57,000 that was recently crowned one of the country’s “coolest” small cities. 

Though McGuane is well aware of an outpouring of interest in the amenities Paradise Valley has to offer, aesthetic and otherwise, several features of Flex’s plan have challenged her understanding of the voracity of the land lust transforming Paradise Valley, the place she scattered the ashes of her mother, actress Margot Kidder, and the home she said she can’t imagine leaving.

Suce Creek is a relatively tight drainage perpendicular to Paradise Valley, a wider valley that has long been a thoroughfare for ranchers raising cattle, anglers casting for trout in the Yellowstone River, and tourists eager to spot geysers, grizzlies, wolves and bison in nearby Yellowstone National Park. Even without a zoning district precluding the type of commercial resort development Flex has in mind, McGuane finds it hard to imagine more than 100 structures and 400 parking spaces packed into a 90-acre property with so much slope. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” McGuane said, going on to describe the land as “rattlesnake-crusted, barren [and] windblown.”

“Barren” pertains to water availability, which McGuane said is “core to this battle,” especially given an active lawsuit between Pappert and neighboring landowners and the fact that several of her neighbors have had to redrill their wells in recent years in search of a reliable water supply. 

Pappert, a North Carolina-based dentist, acquired a right to some of Suce Creek’s water when he purchased the property in 2014. Since it’s not a particularly senior right, scant water is available to the property owner during the dry months of the year. A three-year legal battle produced a recent water court ruling finding that Pappert is entitled to 40 miner’s inches of water (roughly 450 gallons per minute), but whether he has access to that water via an easement across his neighbor’s property remains legally unresolved.

Another access issue pertains to roads. Though the property is just a few miles from two major north-south routes — Highway 89 and its cousin to the east, East River Road — Suce Creek Road is a gravel road prone to drifting in with snow when Park County’s winter winds kick up in earnest. 

Finally, there are concerns of the horned, hooved, furred and fanged variety. On a recent fall day, dozens of cattle roamed above a cattle guard posted with an “open range” sign. The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, just a couple of miles up-drainage from Pappert’s property, supports the kinds of large mammals that need distance from people to thrive, including moose and rarer animals. In 2006, a trio of teenage hikers spent nearly two hours tucked into the fetal position to protect themselves from a charging grizzly bear. 

Up on the hillside, McGuane takes a break from throwing a stuffed octopus for Penny, her copper-colored mutt, to relate the story of a black bear that frequented the drainage from 2018 to 2022. He was first seen as a small cub near her house. Her husband dubbed the bear Darren. 

McGuane’s not sure what happened to the bear, but she suspects a neighbor shot him. She knows plenty of people in Park County don’t share her views about large carnivores — or any number of natural resource issues, for that matter — which is part of the reason she’s been so struck by what she describes as consensus around the Suce Creek development.

“It’s amazing to see everyone in agreement — and this is Park County-wide. I have grown up around these things being huge battles. This is my first experience with a proposal that, across the board, everyone thinks this is a bad idea,” she said. “This development has challenged all of our notions of how far things could go, how nonsensical the growth could be.” 

‘THE Z WORD’

Like other residents of southwestern Montana, McGuane learned about the development from the Park County Environmental Council, a 34-year-old nonprofit perhaps best known for a successful multiyear campaign to fend off an exploratory gold-mining operation in nearby Emigrant Gulch that state environmental regulators permitted in 2017. Curious if murmurs about a new development in Suce Creek were founded, the group submitted a record request to the county planning department in early October.

“This is my first experience with a proposal that, across the board, everyone thinks this is a bad idea.”

Suce Creek resident Maggie McGuane

The request produced about a dozen emails between Park County Planning Director Mike Inman and Nir Balboa, one of Flex’s managing partners. Balboa described the property’s location and inquired about what sort of environmental reviews would be required for a 100-cabin development sketched out in renderings for Flex projects in Utah and North Carolina that he described as “identical to” the company’s plans for Paradise Valley. The documents show small, flat-roofed cabins with lots of right angles and glass situated near 27,000 square feet of shared amenities: an airy 200-seat restaurant, a pair of indoor pools with a view into surrounding green space, an event space and a storefront for recreational gear.

The renderings generated an immediate stir on social media. (“Tell these derivative traders that don’t give a flying damn about this place that they are not welcome here,” software executive and local lodge owner Jeff Reed wrote on his Facebook page shortly after Park County Environmental Council shared the renderings. “Make this an election issue for our county commissioners.”)

Park County fields inquiries from developers trying to understand the regulatory lay of the land in the county “fairly frequently,” Inman told Montana Free Press in a recent interview. It doesn’t take long to give interested parties the broad outlines: There is a sign ordinance along Highway 89 as well as five smaller citizen-initiated zoning districts scattered throughout the county, but there is no county-wide zoning. Local review requirements for most commercial projects — including those like Flex’s — are therefore extremely limited, he said. Substantive project reviews would instead go through state agencies such as the Montana Department of Natural Resource and Conservation, which would examine the water-availability piece of the equation, and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, which would review project components pertaining to wastewater management and public waterworks. 

“Nobody wants things in their backyard, which we hear a lot, but there are no guardrails,” he said. Inman and the appointed, volunteer-staffed county planning board he works with spent several years developing a proposal for an agricultural and residential preservation zoning district (previously dubbed a “conflict mitigation zoning district”) that would have allowed local elected officials to weigh in on proposals like Flex’s, as well as other commercial enterprises such as tire dumps, asphalt plants, wind farms, chicken processing facilities and shooting ranges. 

County commissioners voted to put that proposal on ice in 2022, partly due to the logistical challenges of taking public comment during the COVID-19 pandemic. It generated intense interest: 226 pages of comments regarding the zoning proposal landed in county employee inboxes. In an interesting twist, anti-zoning and pro-zoning contingents banded together to halt it. One side argued that it went too far, and the other said it didn’t go far enough.

“Fear runs both sides,” Inman said of the two camps’ unusual cooperation. “When you are operating out of fear, it is really difficult to have consensus and productive conversations.”

The community fears that county planners are grappling with now underscore why it’s better to discuss growth before conflict around a specific proposal sharpens the debate, Inman said. “I’m really amazed at how [the Suce Creek proposal] has blown up, for something that may not even get built.”

Whether Flex is casually interested in Pappert’s property or fully committed to pursuing a Paradise Valley development is a source of widespread speculation in Park County seat Livingston and beyond. Billed as an “innovation-oriented real estate investment firm with fully integrated acquisition, development and property management expertise,” Flex was founded in 2020 by real estate and hospitality executives with experience in the Miami and New York City real estate markets. The company did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment. 

Property owner Pappert declined to be interviewed, but the realtor representing him told MTFP on Dec. 3 that Pappert is still accepting offers for the property, which has been listed intermittently since 2021. It’s currently listed for $3.9 million. In 2014, the year Pappert bought it, it was listed for $800,000.

Park County Environmental Council Co-Director Max Hjortsberg said the Suce Creek proposal strikes him as a “very Big Sky-esque” development slated for an area that has retained its agricultural foundation and “quiet social fabric.” “This is indicative of a new type of development,” he said. “[We’re] being sought after by a different level of developer and investor.”

Since the nonprofit received its record request, Hjortsberg said, it’s learned that Flex has approached at least two other Park County property owners with purchase offers. (They were declined.) “They’re doing their due diligence, so we think they’re very serious and definitely making a play at this development opportunity,” Hjortsberg said.

Erica Lighthiser, Hjortsberg’s co-director, said she doesn’t particularly relish the marathon time commitment involved with zoning questions — “the ‘Z’ word,” she calls it — but she’s grateful that the Suce Creek prospect has reignited conversations about community planning.

“We need something, because otherwise it’s this slow erosion of this ecosystem and this area where there’s a little development here, a little development there. And all of a sudden, we’re like everywhere else.”

NEXT STEPS

To Lighthiser’s relief, conversations about the Suce Creek development aren’t confined to social media — they’ve spilled over into the City-County Complex, the nexus of local government for the 18,000 people who live in Park County. 

Lighthiser said she’s encouraged that county residents voted in June to deny Referendum One, which would have repealed the county’s existing growth plan and effectively kneecapped a county-wide zoning initiative. To the chagrin of planning proponents, a sister initiative, Referendum Two, did pass. As a result, any new county growth policies — or amendments to the existing one passed in 2017 — won’t be implemented unless they garner the approval of voters living outside of Livingston and Clyde Park, Park County’s only incorporated communities. 

On Nov. 20, the commission held a workshop on growth before a standing-room-only crowd in the City-County Complex’s Community Room. Though the workshop wasn’t explicitly about the Suce Creek proposal — the county attorney advised against discussing developments that may eventually come before the commission — the project came up frequently in public remarks during the hour-long meeting. 

“We need something, because otherwise it’s this slow erosion of this ecosystem and this area where there’s a little development here, a little development there. And all of a sudden, we’re like everywhere else.”

Park County Environmental Council co-director Erica Lighthiser

First up to the microphone was Suce Creek resident Richard Walker, who said Flex’s project would jeopardize his water and, by extension, his property value. He said five of the “dozen or so” families living in the drainage have had to drill deeper wells in the decade since he moved into the area, and he’s heard of similar issues in more southerly drainages. “If this property goes in at Suce Creek, the water usage is going to render our properties worthless,” he told commissioners. “We won’t have water.”

A couple of attendees advised commissioners to consider their legacies, and to act proactively and swiftly to initiate county-wide zoning. Kevin Johnson, who described himself as living “within eyeshot of the Suce Creek project,” implored the commission to preserve Livingston and Park County’s “old-school charm.” Still others cautioned that without guardrails, the area is destined for the growth-related issues that have afflicted other communities like Bozeman and Big Sky.

Leslie Fiegel with the Livingston Chamber of Commerce and It’s My Land, a landowner rights organization, offered a different view. Park County residents have had lots of opportunities to participate in planning discussions, she said, and the outcome “has played out the way that it should.”

“This is not a time for political division. This is not a time for blaming others or companies that want to start a new business,” she told commissioners. “Thank you for what you’ve done up to this point. … We have your back.”

Park County’s three commissioners stayed quiet through most of the meeting. Toward the end, though, they opened a window into their views about where one person’s property rights end and another person’s start — the tension at the heart of so many land-use debates, both locally and West-wide.

Mike Story, who is midway through his term, described the Suce Creek development and the discussions it’s engendered as “an ongoing thing” and encouraged Park County residents to keep reaching out for conversations. He said he’d like to see similarly packed meetings in Park County’s less populous areas — places like Clyde Park, Emigrant and Gardiner — “just [to] have ideas out there that we can look at.”

Commission Chair Clint Tinsley, whose term is up at the end of this year, said there are options the commission can pursue now, but they’ll require a lot of hard conversations — a nod to how “beat up” commissioners have gotten in meetings about previous zoning proposals.

“If the majority of this community wants zoning, that’s probably where we need to go,” said Tinsley, who formerly led Livingston’s public works department. His seat will be assumed by Jennifer Vermillion, a Shields Valley hay and pig farmer, in January.

Brian Wells, an Emigrant business owner appointed to fill a commission vacancy in 2023 and recently elected to serve a four-year term, said in his careful drawl that he would like the planning department to evaluate growth-wrangling options that other counties with similar populations and political leanings have pursued.

“We’re a pretty diverse and divided community,” he said, “but one thing we have in common [is] most everybody I talked to would like to see some kind of guardrails, some kind of protection.”

MONTANA MICROCOSM

For nearly two months, McGuane has made it her mission to learn the public and private tools Suce Creek residents can use to protect their drainage. They’ve mulled over county-wide zoning and citizen-initiated zoning, purchasing the property outright or encouraging a land trust to make an offer. 

No solution is perfect, McGuane says, so they’ve also hired an attorney to represent their interests if the sale goes through and Flex forwards their proposal to state regulators. (DEQ spokesperson Rebecca Harbage told MTFP on Dec. 3 that DEQ hasn’t fielded any proposals or outreach from Flex.)

In the meantime, McGuane said she and her neighbors are “in a weird state of limbo.” But that status hasn’t been without benefits, she said. 

“This is the most perfect tiny example of the conflict all over the state. So much of it is just the conflict between people from remarkably varying backgrounds with big financial losses and gains on the line,” she said. “If we can do a good job working through this, I would love for this to be a good example for the rest of the state.”

The post Unpacking a ‘uniquely mysterious’ development proposal in Paradise Valley  appeared first on Montana Free Press.