The federal government has canceled a $5.3 million grant that Vermont planned to use to
provide universal access to reliable internet service. 

The Digital Equity Capacity Grant was intended to support Vermont’s Digital Equity Plan, outlined in March 2024.

“Vermont’s DE Program was going to improve the lives of Vermonters who can’t access the internet—whether because they can’t afford devices or don’t have the skills to take advantage of all the opportunities that come with being connected,” Vermont Community Broadband Board Executive Director Christine Hallquist said in a press release from the organization. “Taking this funding away now will severely limit our work and will mean many Vermonters will be left behind.”

The Digital Equity Program addresses barriers to broadband internet, telehealth care and digital literacy access. 95% of Vermonters can identify with one or more of the prioritized demographics for targeted digital equity initiatives, according to Vermont’s Digital Equity Plan.

President Donald Trump ordered the grant’s cancellation. In a May 9 letter from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Darren Olson, the institute’s grants management officer, said the president determined that the Digital Equity Capacity Program was created and administered using “unconstitutional racial preferences.”

The Vermont Community Broadband Board is exploring legal options to oppose the cancellation and has contacted the State Attorney General’s Office, according to its website.

“Without targeted investments in digital access and literacy, many Vermonters will be unable to access the resources necessary for job training, career advancement, and economic mobility, ultimately deepening existing disparities and limiting opportunities for economic growth,” the board’s digital equity officer, Britaney Watson, said in the release.

Vermont’s implementation of the Digital Equity Act, passed under the Biden administration, would provide devices for people facing financial barriers, as well as online training programs to prepare Vermonters for remote work. The program would have also awarded subgrants to local organizations working to provide internet accessibility throughout the state, according to the release.

A Sept. 30th study by the Center on Rural Innovation found that rural areas with higher broadband adoption and more small broadband service providers have stronger, more dynamic local economies. They reported that rural counties with fiber broadband adoption rates of over 80% have significant advantages over those with low adoption, including 213% higher business growth, higher self-employment growth, GDP growth and per capita income growth.

The broadband board said in the release that it will continue to work with the Vermont Attorney General’s Office and Vermont’s congressional delegation to determine their next legal, political and programmatic steps in continuing their digital equity efforts. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Federal government cancels Vermont’s $5.3 million digital equity grant.

GREEN RIVER—After a four-minute elevator descent into the bowels of southwest Wyoming, dropping deep enough to bury the Empire State Building, a Tata Chemicals trona miner drove two Wyoming journalists in a truck 8.5 miles through catacombs, crossing under unaware motorists on Interstate 80 above, to where a crew was using an electric boring machine to chew into a wall of trona.

The visitors — briefed on safety protocols and equipped with underground attire and emergency devices — trudged through fresh mud bubbling with methane. Sections were added to a chartreuse inflatable tube that unrolled like a party favor and blew fresh air at the miners, who had just finished patching a small water line break. 

Beams of light from hard hats swiveled and sparred in the tunnel as the earth moaned and machinery hummed. Soon, the machinery funneled a stream of sandwich-sized chunks of trona onto a fast-moving conveyor that would eventually deliver it to the surface to be processed into a fine, white powder and shipped around the world.

Have you ever brushed your teeth with toothpaste? Drank beer from a bottle or stared at the road through a car windshield? The white stuff — sodium carbonate (Na₂CO₃) to be precise — calms your heartburn and washes your socks. Check under your sink. Take a look in your bathroom cabinet. Many of those taken-for-granted products you use daily require an ingredient sourced from the depths of southwest Wyoming, and the sweat of underground miners.

Tata’s mine, along with its soda ash processing facilities at the surface, is among four such operations in Wyoming — all clustered in an area near the towns of Green River and Granger. Combined, they produce about 10 million tons of soda ash annually and feed 90% of the nation’s soda ash consumption. Wyoming producers make up more than 14% of the global market, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Soda ash, in fact, accounts for more than half of Wyoming’s global commodity exports with a whopping $1.3 billion worth of shipments annually, according to industry officials and state economists.

Wyoming coal can’t say that. Not even close. 

Despite the industry’s global importance and massive operations, employing some 2,500 workers in the state, it plods along without much fanfare. Unless you live in the region, you might not even know about trona or its role in everyday life.

“If you’re in Cheyenne and you say ‘trona’ or ‘soda ash,’ a lot of people will say, ‘What’s that?’” said longtime Green River resident Stan Blake who served as House District 39 representative from 2007 to 2020. The business, perhaps, is guilty of being kind of boring, or simply void of political drama, Blake suggested. “It’s just been steady for years and years, so it doesn’t get talked about much.”

It was a mystery, even to many who began their careers in coal mining and wound up at this trona mine. “I wasn’t even aware of trona until I came to Wyoming,” said Mine Electrical Planner Kale Pitt. When asked about the significance of the industry, another Tata miner said, “Other than they make glass and soap out of it, that’s about all I know. It’s a good way to make a living, I guess.”

The miner turned his headlamp and went back to the business at hand.

He was spot on, in Blake’s estimation, who was never a trona miner himself. He spent more than 30 years on the rails and in train yards rather than chipping at trona in Wyoming’s subterranean, but he knows his Green River neighbors and notices toys in driveways.

“The level of lifestyle out here is higher, probably, than a lot of other places in the state,” Blake said. “It seems like everybody’s got a boat and they go out to Flaming Gorge and fish. And everybody — all the miners — like to hunt. The [trona] mines are really, really relevant here in Sweetwater County, that’s for sure.” 

Perhaps less glorious than coal, less loud than oil, there are changes afoot in the trona industry with implications, both good and potentially not so good, for Wyoming.

Optimism and expansion 

Baking soda and Range Rover windshields aside, Wyoming trona mine owners have been scrambling to meet new opportunities while bracing for headwinds.

“The world has an insatiable appetite for soda ash.”

Jon Conrad, Tata Chemicals

On the opportune side, there’s wildly escalating demand for batteries and solar energy panels across the globe, according to industry reports. Though the business of toothpaste and baking soda doesn’t change much, global manufacturers are keen on ramping up production of energy components vital to meeting low-carbon initiatives. They can’t do it without more trona processed into soda ash. And Wyoming has a lot of trona — the largest known deposit in the world, according to industry and federal officials. Ninety percent of the world’s mineable, or “natural,” trona ore is right here in southwest Wyoming, they say.

“The world has an insatiable appetite for soda ash,” said Wyoming Tata’s Director of Governmental Affairs Jon Conrad, also a former Wyoming legislator. By Conrad’s estimation, the industry in Wyoming aims to expand — perhaps even double production in the next eight or so years.

In addition to Tata’s plans to crank out more soda ash while trimming its cost of production, neighboring producer WE Soda — with a larger operation than Tata’s — has launched a multi-billion-dollar expansion that’s crossing permitting milestones. A big part of that effort, “Project West,” will include “solution” mining, or pumping water into the trona deposits to flush the material to the surface rather than sending legions of boat-owning miners underground, according to the company.

Federal regulators also recently advanced permitting for a potential fifth trona operation in the region — Pacific Soda’s proposed Dry Creek Trona Mine project, which would also pull trona via water injection-and-return wells. The operation would create an estimated additional 300 full-time jobs in the region, according to the company.

All of that optimism and investment, however, might stand a little broadside to some shifting market and political winds.

Shifting markets

Wyoming’s trona industry has, for decades, won an advantage for producing “natural” soda ash. It’s pretty simple: mine the rocks, crush them, dissolve and dehydrate the mineral and ship it to customers. But for the past couple of decades, China and Turkey have ramped up production of synthetic soda ash — a product derived from flushing sodium carbonate-containing material from more prevalent, less pure deposits.

Synthetic soda ash threatens to beat out natural soda ash on price, according to industry officials. Though Wyoming producers claim their product is superior for both its quality and lower-carbon footprint, natural soda ash producers must find efficiencies to lower their cost of production.

Solution mining is one major cost-efficiency strategy, according to Conrad. Another is finding alternatives to expensive electrical power and other forms of energy. 

Mining trona and processing it into soda ash requires a lot of electricity — about a continuous 32 megawatts at Tata Chemicals, according to the company. One megawatt is enough electricity to power about 750 homes. Tata produces about 90% of its own electricity, via coal and natural gas burners, which also generate steam used in the refining process. But the operation relies on utility provider Rocky Mountain Power for the rest of its electricity needs, and those costs keep climbing. Tata wants to reduce or eliminate its reliance on Rocky Mountain Power by incorporating nuclear energy.

Last year, the company inked a letter of intent with BWXT Advanced Technologies to install up to eight nuclear microreactors on site, boosting Tata’s self-produced electrical power to about 40 megawatts — enough to meet expansion plans without increasing its reliance on Rocky Mountain Power. “The microreactors offer a carbon-free, reliable source of energy that can support [Tata Chemicals’] operations and contribute to the state’s energy portfolio,” the company said in a prepared statement.

But even the industry’s best-laid plans to increase its competitive edge could be derailed by politics. President Donald Trump’s tariff wars take particular aim at China, which accounts for about 10% of Wyoming soda ash sales. If the country retaliates with its own tariffs, it could be a major blow to the industry, according to University of Wyoming Associate Professor of Economics Rob Godby. It might even dampen the industry’s plans to expand operations.

“That could be a really significant impact on our [soda ash] exports,” Godby said.

Back underground, Mine Production Supervisor Eric Castillon proudly described a continual process of increasing production efficiencies in a never-ending effort to sustain the company’s competitive edge.

“This is the trona capital of the world,” Castillon said over the hum of a mobile conveyor carrying rock to the surface. “I can see this mine going for another 50 to 100 years. Trona’s not going anywhere, as long as there’s a need for it.”

The post From toothpaste to beer bottles to industrial batteries, the world relies on Wyoming’s ‘white gold’ appeared first on WyoFile .

ITHACA, N.Y. — The city of Ithaca’s eight historic districts encompass about 10 percent of the city’s total area, holding 650 homes, businesses and accessory buildings. On Wednesday, the city’s Common Council started discussions over whether those numbers should be capped, at least temporarily.

Like with plenty of other urban planning policies, historic districts are something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, they can preserve a neighborhood’s architectural and aesthetic character, and help prevent development from disrupting the local context.

On the other hand, historic districts can create a regulatory burden with additional taxpayer costs that enforcement and bureaucracy require. They have also been occasionally characterized as a tool of gentrification, where the increased cost of home upkeep caused by the regulation forces out lower-income families in favor of higher-income households.

In a city like Ithaca that struggles with housing supply and has seen a rapid rise in home values, while also being very sensitive to changes in aesthetic character, the conversation around historic preservation can be a tense debate. That was on display in Common Council’s chamber in City Hall last night, when Fifth Ward Alderperson Clyde Lederman introduced a resolution calling for a five-year moratorium on the creation or expansion of historic districts within the city limits.

Lederman said the moratorium, as proposed, would last for either five years or until the introduction of a revised Comprehensive Plan for the city, whichever comes first.

“I’ve never heard a kind word from anyone in the city about the benefits of historic preservation in their neighborhoods,” Lederman said. “It incurs a lot of costs, it makes development or updating existing homes harder, especially for folks who don’t have a lot of money or resources as Cornell might have.”

Lederman said he’s received pushback from constituents about expanding historic districts, and particularly regrets voting to accept a $17,000 state grant in October to study expanding the boundaries of the DeWitt Park Historic District.

“I know we have tax credits that people can be eligible for if they’re compliant,” Lederman said. “But as pointed out to me since then […] they can be clawed back, they’re very difficult to obtain, and they’re only really easy to obtain if you’re spending a lot of money on a project, so my sense was that it would be good not to expand historic districts more, given our housing shortage, until the next Comprehensive Plan was completed.”

Mayor Robert Cantelmo asked that the discussion on Wednesday be preliminary and no votes be taken, to allow for further discussion when Planning Department staff could prepare materials for council to review, and Lederman agreed.

Alderperson David Shapiro, of the Third Ward, said he agreed with Lederman’s overall point but countered that he has heard from several constituents about the value and importance of historic districts and preservation.

City Historic Preservation Planner Bryan McCracken was on hand to field questions from council, and expressed concerns that if passed, the grant awarded last fall would be rescinded, and that owners of locally but not nationally historic properties would not be eligible for tax credits. McCracken also worried that it would interfere with city plans to hire a consultant to design an Accessory Dwelling Unit compatible with Historic Districts — to note, there are existing ADUs designed for Historic Districts, like 201 West Clinton Street.

Fourth Ward Alderperson Patrick Kuehl asked what number of buildings in the district have used historic preservation credits. McCracken said he didn’t have that information, as it was a state decision to award credits and is not handled locally.

Lederman said he appreciates the work of the Ithaca Landmarks Preservation Commission (ILPC), the body that primarily handles historic preservation matters for the city and can approve or deny certain renovation or development efforts in historic districts, and values historic preservation overall. But he said the downsides outweigh the benefits at this point.

“We’ve got a real housing crisis,” Lederman said. “Going through the commission for folks just really slows things down immensely. Any change to the exterior goes to the commission, it often takes multiple meetings. For anyone who’s got a job or isn’t prepared to spend enormous amounts of money on the exterior of their home […] it really becomes extremely burdensome.”

Lederman argued that further expansion of the city’s historic district would make more homeowners have to shoulder the costs and administrative challenges that can be associated with historic preservation of a house. He said 10 percent of the city being historically designated is “excessive” already.

In response to Lederman’s comments, McCracken stated that most minor projects are approved at the staff level — of about 100 historic district renovation or construction projects reviewed last year, only 23 were upgraded to ILPC review, and most of those only needed one or two meetings.

Cantelmo was more circumspect. He asked if the city’s planning staff could provide data on what impact historic preservation has had on housing development, its costs and its impacts.

“Anecdotally, Bryan has told us that there are many ways for us to do historic preservation that do not run contrary to our broader development goals,” Cantelmo said, specifically requesting documentation on best practices and cost analysis.

Even Second Ward Alderperson Ducson Nguyen, arguably the most pro-development council member, found Lederman’s arguments too harsh. Fifth Ward Alderperson Margaret Fabrizio said she isn’t in favor of the resolution, but acknowledged that some of the “hoops” for renovation or development in historic districts could be examined and potentially changed to make them less onerous.

On the other hand, Fourth Ward Alderperson Patrick Kuehl said he felt that the historic district in his ward on East Hill has been used to divide the community and that he considered it damaging. Kuehl made a motion to table the proposal for further discussion, which was accepted by a 6-3 vote.

Going forward, the Planning Department will provide data to council members, who will submit their questions back to staff. When responses are ready to those questions, the next public discussion will be held.

The post City mulls moratorium on expanding historic districts appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

MUSKEGON—New luxury homes, yacht slips, and trendy hotels and restaurants are cropping up along the glittering waterfront of this west Michigan city.

Nothing unusual for the Lake Michigan coast, long known for beach towns that cater to summer vacationers and wealthy second-homers. But to those familiar with Muskegon’s blue collar history, it’s a stunning transformation.

Not long ago, the shore of the 4,232-acre Muskegon Lake, a drowned river mouth that connects the city to the big waters of Lake Michigan, was so fully dominated by polluting factories that you could tell which ones were operating by the color of the water that day. It took decades of activism and more than $80 million to repair the damage, mostly on the public dime. 

The result is a lake with cleaner water, a gentler shoreline and better habitat for fish and wildlife. Good for swimming, fishing, boating and — for investors with the means to buy the land that industry left behind — capitalizing on the view.

“Are you looking for the ultimate first-class waterfront community?” asks an advertisement for Adelaide Pointe, one of several new developments cropping up on vacant former factory sites. 

A two-bedroom condo there lists for upwards of $700,000.

To many, the lake’s emerging cachet is something worth celebrating. It brings people, tax revenue and other benefits to a shrinking city of 37,000 people, where the median household income is nearly $25,000 below the state average. 

But Jen Sanocki and many of her neighbors feel conflicted. They look at the new homes, marinas and vacation rentals catering to wealthy out-of-towners, and wonder who, exactly, was meant to benefit from the cleanup that taxpayers funded.

“It’s going to bring some economic value to my neighborhood and Muskegon in general,” said Sanocki, president of Muskegon’s Nims Neighborhood Association. “But it does kind of feel like we’re creating a gated community on the water.”

Muskegon Lake and its namesake city are at a familiar crossroads for Great Lakes manufacturing communities that, after decades of industrial abandonment, suburban flight and economic malaise, have been made marketable again thanks to a massive publicly funded cleanup of the region’s most polluted waterways.

It leaves residents, policymakers and developers to grapple with a tricky question: Can cities like Muskegon embrace the wealthier newcomers who now want to live there, while ensuring that residents who endured the city’s darkest years get a fair share of its brighter future?

From ruin to rebirth

This story is part of a Great Lakes News Collaborative series examining the region’s “blue economy,” a term used to describe communities whose wealth is derived from and dependent upon water.

The term inspires visions of people living in harmony with nature. But for much of the Great Lakes’ modern history, it meant letting industry exploit the region’s abundant water for profit, with little concern about the consequences. 

Fishing species out of existence. Carving shipping channels to connect the Great Lakes to the ocean, which opened a gateway for invasive species. Building shoreline factories to easily access shipping routes, and then dumping toxic waste in the water.

Like many other Great Lakes waterways, Muskegon Lake became a casualty. 

“The stink from factories was the smell of money, as people referred to it,” said Alan Steinman, who has spent decades studying the lake and is the Allen and Helen Hunting Research Professor at Grand Valley State University’s Annis Water Resources Institute. 

Lumber barons built mills on the waterfront starting in the mid-1800s and then filled in the shallows with sawdust and debris until the lake had shrunk by 16%. When there was nothing left to log, heavier industries moved in: steel, paper, a coal-fired power plant and factories building car engines and war machines. 

Many of those who could move, did. Amid white flight to the suburbs, Muskegon’s white population dwindled from 98% in 1940 to 55% today. Those who couldn’t move — either because of their economic circumstances or racist housing policies — remained in the shadow of industry.

The lakeshore was so ugly and unsafe, Muskegon was built with its back to the water.

City Manager Jonathan Seyferth, a longtime resident, spent his childhood swimming at what’s now the local Boys & Girls Club, without realizing it sits on waterfront property. Virtually all of the windows faced inland.

“The lake was an afterthought,” Seyferth said. “It was a resource that we used.”

The Clean Water Act of 1972 ended the era of unregulated dumping, but it would take decades more to recover the water quality and habitat that had already been destroyed.

The United States and Canadian governments added Muskegon Lake to a list of 43 Great Lakes Areas of Concern — the region’s most degraded waterways — and partnered on cleanups with a citizen group known today as the Muskegon Lake Watershed Partnership.

As industry gradually retreated from the lakefront, those partners stepped in to dredge contaminated sediments, excavate hundreds of millions of pounds of industrial debris, plant trees and reopen wetlands. 

In the early days, a cleaner lake seemed so out of reach, “we had to prove to people that it was even possible,” said Kathy Evans, a longtime member of the watershed partnership. 

“They had to see it to believe it.”

But after several decades and more than $80 million (mostly federal dollars with other public and private sources mixed in), the lake is now clean enough to remove from the Areas of Concern List — and for a new debate about how its future should look. 

Who benefits?   

On a macro level, cleaning up Muskegon Lake has been an economic boon for Muskegon.

Researchers at Grand Valley State University found in 2018 that the local economy had enjoyed a 6-to-1 or better return on investment, including rising housing values and more tourism. The rate of return is climbing higher as developers remake the lakefront.

But in a working class city that is 30% Black, some fear the benefits of Muskegon Lake’s cleanup are accruing primarily to wealthy, mostly white newcomers while racial minorities and low-income residents get pushed out of the newly desirable neighborhoods. 

There’s a term for the phenomenon: “eco-gentrification.”

“There’s a lot of perceived positives” stemming from the lakeshore’s redevelopment, said Marria McIntosh, who leads an anti-gentrification nonprofit called Thredz Inc. “But how can our community benefit from it?”

No fewer than four major residential or mixed-use developments are planned or underway on the former industrial sites along the water, most of them made possible with the help of state and locally public incentives. When finished, they’ll boast a combined thousands of housing units and investments approaching $1 billion. For-sale signs have cropped up on other properties.

Ryan Leestma, who owns the Adelaide Pointe development on the site of a former steel foundry with his wife Emily, said the new condos, marinas, breweries and other amenities, help Muskegon compete with other waterfront cities that have built their economies around a wealthier clientele. 

“We have more beaches than anybody else. We have more state parks than anybody else,” said Leestma. “But certain demographics wouldn’t go to Muskegon because there wasn’t premium product.”

Amid Muskegon’s newfound popularity, the city’s average home value has skyrocketed from $109,000 in April 2020 to $174,000 today. 

The average resident’s paycheck hasn’t grown in equal measure, leading to worsening income inequality and housing affordability issues that have been made worse by investors buying affordable homes in the neighborhoods near the water and flipping them into vacation rentals.

The risk is “a glittering lakeshore in one corner of the city, and then in the other corner you’ve got a bunch of houses in ruins and dilapidated infrastructure,” said Amanda Buday, a Grand Valley researcher who has studied residents’ attitudes about the Muskegon Lake cleanup. 

A push for access and affordability

Another key tension point: How to ensure the average person can easily access the cleaner lake their tax dollars paid for, when the shoreline is ringed almost entirely by private property.

For decades, many of the vacant former factory sites along Muskegon Lake were treated as de facto parks, accessible to anyone who cared to wander in with a fishing pole. But recently, fences have been erected on the perimeter of some, while others have filled in with homes and boat storage garages. 

“It’s a huge topic,” said Sanocki, the neighborhood association president. The lake’s cleaner image means “people want to look at it, people want to be at it, people want to see it. People want to touch it.” 

City officials too have a desire for more public parks and beaches, Seyferth said. But they can’t force investors who bought the former factory sites to maintain unlimited access just because their predecessors did. 

“If the city was able to fork over a couple million bucks, we could go buy a piece of property and it wouldn’t be a problem,” Seyferth said. “We can’t afford to do that, so it ends up being more piecemeal.”

Instead, the city is mulling new public access requirements for waterfront developments, and has teamed up with the local chamber of commerce and other allies to persuade developers that open waterfronts are good for business. At Adelaide Pointe, for instance, the Leestmas have agreed to open their shoreline to the public in exchange for permission to use the municipal marina’s boat ramp and lift.

At another planned development called Windward Pointe, on the 122-acre site of the former Sappi paper mill, city officials negotiated public features like boardwalks and fishing docks and an option to buy several lots for a public park. 

And they recently unveiled a vision to expand the public lakefront near downtown Muskegon by swapping a city-owned campground for part of a property that now houses a boat storage facility, and then buying additional land from a shipping port company. 

City officials are also trying to combat gentrification by building affordable housing on city-owned lots and capping the number of short-term rentals allowed in Muskegon. 

“We’re starting to see Muskegon mentioned in the same breath as Grand Haven, Holland, Traverse City and Ludington when it comes to places that people think of vacationing and being on the beach,” Seyferth said. But avoiding negative consequences for longtime residents is “something we’re really conscious of.”

McIntosh said while it’s encouraging to see developers making portions of their properties accessible to the public, it’s not a substitute for truly public land. She wonders whether low-income and minority Muskegonites will feel welcome. 

“If I’m walking down that sidewalk and I’ve got my 5-gallon pail, and I’ve got my fishing rod, and I’ve got my cutoff shorts and my white T-shirt that is not so white anymore … and you in your $700,000 house are looking out your window, and you see me,” she said, “public don’t seem so public at that moment.”

The past is never far behind

Those who pushed for Muskegon Lake’s recovery say they’re now focused on protecting the investment taxpayers made in a cleaner lake, while managing new environmental challenges that the cleanup program was not designed to address.

Climate change is warming the water and fueling toxic algae blooms. PFAS foam showed up last year, its source unknown. And the new wave of shoreline development raises the potential for habitat destruction and polluted runoff from chemically-fertilized lawns, rooftops and parking lots.

“I just hope that we don’t have any more of our restored habitat ruined,” Evans said.

She was referring to Adelaide Pointe, which has been cited by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) for violations including dredging the lake bottom, damaging wetlands and covering a habitat restoration project with rock rubble.

Many Muskegon residents were angry about the violations — a furor that only grew when they learned of a March 7 letter in which the owner, Leestma, begged a top Trump administration official to “override” EGLE’s authority.

Writing to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Leestma complained of being “targeted” by state regulators and implied Muskegon residents should be thankful for his development. He called it “sorely needed,” while comparing Muskegon to Detroit and Flint and falsely claiming it has “half the education and half the median income of the rest of the state.” 

Muskegon’s household income is 65% of the state average. It has a slightly lower percentage of high school graduates than the state average, and half as many bachelor’s degree holders.

McIntosh, the anti-gentrification advocate, saw the letter as offensive but unsurprising.

“That’s the kind of mindset that people bring,” she said. “Like, ‘you should be happy we’re doing anything in your broke community… and most of the developers feel that way.’”

Leestma eventually reached a settlement with EGLE that requires him to repair some of the environmental damage, and imposes fines that vary from about $200,000 to $500,000 depending how thoroughly he complies. 

He may have a polarizing personality, he told Bridge Michigan, and he regrets the letter. But he sees his development as a step toward a prospering Muskegon that has “room for everyone.”

“If this site was totally fallow and there was nobody here, there’s no spending going on whatsoever,” he said. “But I can tell you, there’s 200 more employees now than there were a year and a half ago.”

Unfinished business, unresolved debates

Meanwhile, the legacy of Muskegon’s industrial past still looms over the effort to remake the rest of the waterfront.

At the former Sappi paper mill property, redevelopment plans call for a mixed-use district with housing, a marina, shops and parks. But first, someone needs to clean up the pollution Sappi left in the soil and groundwater, including PFAS and explosive levels of methane. Taxpayers are again dipping into their pockets, this time with a $15 million state cleanup grant.

Rory Charron, chief operating officer for developer Parkland Properties, said the company has experience making dirty sites clean and usable again. The long-term goal, he said, is “doing something safe and meaningful for Muskegon and West Michigan, which will serve as a catalyst for future economic growth and development.”

While she watches that process play out, Evans is keeping an eye out for opportunities to shield more of the lakeshore from development. A “for-sale” sign recently cropped up on a wooded wetland where a creek drains into Muskegon Lake.

“We should get that,” she said, before listing off all the potential benefits for fish, wildlife, and the public. 

She knows Muskegon’s economic fortunes and development patterns will only keep changing, and debates about the benefits and drawbacks of those changes aren’t going anywhere. 

But amid it all, she said, she hopes that “people in the future feel like they belong to the lake, rather than the lake belonging to them.”

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The post An $80M cleanup made Muskegon Lake trendy. Will ‘eco-gentrification’ follow? appeared first on Circle of Blue.

In the United States, farmers have access to federally subsidized crop insurance — a backstop that affords them some peace of mind in the face of extreme weather. When droughts, floods, or other natural disasters ruin a season’s harvest, farmers can rely on insurance policies that will pay out a certain percentage of the expected market value of the food, saving them from financial ruin. 

But that insurance program could become strained as global warming worsens, bringing more uncertainty to the agricultural sector.

A new study models how harvests in the U.S. Corn Belt — the swath of Midwestern states including Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa that produce the vast majority of the nation’s corn — could fluctuate over the next few decades under a warming scenario projected by United Nations climate scientists. The researchers compared these results to a scenario with no warming, in which tomorrow’s growing conditions are the same as today’s. They found that, as temperatures continue to rise, the nation’s corn growers are likely to see more years with lower yields — and the losses they incur during those years will also be greater. 

The study projects that the likelihood of corn growers’ yields falling low enough to trigger insurance payouts could double by 2050, creating financial strain for both farmers and the government. 

The findings demonstrate how growing climate impacts like unprecedented heat could destabilize the business of growing food and the nation’s food supply. Reduced corn yields would be felt widely, as the crop is used to feed cattle, converted into fuel, and refined into ingredients used in processed foods, among other applications. 

“Corn is so essential to the U.S. food system,” said Sam Pottinger, a data scientist at University of California, Berkeley and the lead researcher of the study. “There’s the corn we eat, but we also feed it to the livestock. It’s just an absolute cornerstone to how we feed everyone in the country.”

In recent years, climate change has strained the U.S. property insurance market, as insurance companies have raised homeowners’ premiums and in some cases pulled out of risky areas altogether. Pottinger’s study seems to reflect similar cracks in the federal crop insurance system, which wasn’t designed to account for the kind of yield volatility farmers are likely to experience if the rise in global temperatures continues unmitigated. 

First established in the 1930s as an agricultural support in the wake of the Great Depression, the Federal Crop Insurance Program, or FCIP, got permanent authorization from Congress in 1980. Not all farms can afford these policies or choose to enroll in them: The program covered about 13 percent of U.S. farms in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. 

Data suggests that the way federal crop insurance is currently set up is most attractive to the nation’s largest farmers — for example, as the number of farms insured under FCIP decreased from 2017 to 2022, but the number of acres insured went up. Meanwhile, smaller farms and those that focus on specialty crops such as fruits and vegetables are less likely to have federal coverage. Farmers who go without insurance are on their own when extreme weather strikes, forced to rely on savings to make up for lost income or reach out to other USDA subagencies for support. 

Rising temperatures have already taken a major toll on the FCIP. Climate change drove up federal crop insurance payouts by $27 billion in the period between 1991 and 2017, according to a Stanford University study. A separate 2023 report by the Environmental Working Group, an activist group focused on pollutants, found that federal crop insurance costs grew more than 500 percent over a roughly two-decade period ending in 2022. 

Given this astronomical jump, Pottinger was not sure if he and his colleagues would see another significant increase in costs in their projections for the future. The team used a machine learning model to simulate growing conditions under one of the more moderate warming scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.’s top body of climate scientists. 

The team’s results were “eye-popping,” said Pottinger, who at one point worried they’d made a mistake in the calculations. To contextualize the results, he mentioned the 2012 to 2013 growing season, which was especially bad for corn farmers, with yields around 23 percent lower than expected. “What our simulations are saying is: That year was bad, but that kind of a bad year is going to happen a lot more often.”

Eunchun Park, an assistant professor focused on agricultural risk at the University of Arkansas, said the paper’s methodology was sound and its findings are “well aligned” with his previous research on crop insurance. (Park did not participate in the study; he is, however, engaged in similar research with one of the study’s co-authors.) 

Stephen Wood, an associate research professor at the Yale School of the Environment, agreed about the methodology but noted that the study’s loss estimates may be on the high end — since the algorithm used by the researchers didn’t account for farmers planting different crops or changing planting strategies after a bad harvest. “It’s a good analysis, but it’s probably a maximum impact, because there are adaptation measures that could mitigate some of that,” he said.

Park noted, as the paper does, that the FCIP isn’t prepared for the kind of yield volatility that climate change is creating. Under the program’s Yield Protection plan, for example, farmers can insure their crops up to a certain percentage of their actual production history, or the average of a grower’s output over recent years. If a farmer’s yield falls below that average, say, due to extreme heat or a hail storm, then the plan will make up the difference. 

But averages do not reflect dramatic dips or spikes in yield very well. If a farmer’s yield is 180 bushels of corn per acre one year and then 220 the next, they have the same average yield as a farmer who harvests 150 bushels per acre and 250 bushels per acre over the same time period. However, the latter scenario costs the insurance provider — in this case, the federal government — a lot more money. 

Pottinger and his team say lawmakers could ease the financial burden on farmers and the FCIP by tweaking the nation’s farm bill, which governs U.S. agricultural policy roughly every five years, so that the FCIP rewards growers for using regenerative agriculture methods. These practices, like planting cover crops alongside commercial crops and rotating crops from field to field, help boost soil health and crop resilience. 

Wood’s previous research has found that agricultural lands with more organic matter in the soil fare better in extreme weather events and see lower crop insurance claims. And other research has shown cover crops confer some resilience benefits against droughts and excessive heat. 

Regenerative agriculture techniques may, however, cause lower yields in the early stages of implementation. “Crop insurance doesn’t have a good way to recognize that right now,” said Pottinger. 

Both Park and Wood predicted that the Risk Management Agency, the part of the USDA that regulates crop insurance policies, may be reluctant to change its approach to regenerative agriculture. “There’s some resistance there,” said Wood. 

Pottinger emphasized that while his team recommends making crop insurance more inclusive to regenerative agriculture practices, his report does not try to “dictate practice” for farmers. He thinks growers should decide for themselves whether to try cover cropping, for instance. “Farmers know their land better than anyone else,” he said. “And they should really be empowered to make some of those decisions and just be rewarded for those outcomes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As temperatures rise, the US Corn Belt could see insurance claims soar on May 14, 2025.

Maine’s new energy-efficiency plan is projected to lower electricity bills for the state’s residents — even those who don’t directly benefit from its rebate and incentive programs. The plan, set to go into effect in July, is heavily focused on getting electric heat pumps in as many homes as possible. It comes as…

With almost all precincts reporting in Oklahoma’s State Senate District 8, Republican Bryan Logan handily won a special election tonight to represent the open seat in eastern Oklahoma through 2026. A pastor and general contractor from Paden, Logan carried each of the five eastern Oklahoma counties that span SD 8. He received 61.62 percent of […]

The post SD 8 election: Bryan Logan wins eastern Oklahoma seat appeared first on NonDoc.

Lea este artículo en español aquí.

Athletes from more than two dozen area schools competed at the 20th annual Unified Gifted Games held on May 9 at Andy Hardin Stadium at Hollister High School.

According to Sam Sauer, a Gilroy Unified Adult Transition Program teacher, 25 schools attended the games. 

“I first participated back in 2010, ” Sauer said. “That was my first Gifted Games, and I have seen it grow significantly over the past 15 years or so.”

According to Sauer,  this year’s event included many different sports and activities, such as softball, the long jump, and the football throw, as well as inflatables. 

“We are having an amazing time, as always,” Sauer said. “We love this event and look forward to it every year.”

“I think this event is awesome,” said Hollister High Behavioral Support Supervisor Vanya Robles Davidson, adding that everyone was “having a terrific time.”

Cristina Vasquez’s son, Mateo Sotomayor, participated in the wheelchair race.

“We love it,” Vasquez said. “I hope we can do it more times in the year. My son was very excited and trained a lot.”

The post Area schools participate at 20th annual Unified Gifted Games appeared first on BenitoLink.

Rural hospitals across the country are shuttering their labor and delivery doors, leaving millions of women – including Mississippians – without maternity care. 

The growing epidemic of closures hasn’t affected Mississippi as much as other states in recent years – but most of Mississippi’s rural hospitals already don’t deliver babies, according to a report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, an organization that focuses on solving health care problems by reforming insurance payments. 

Only one rural hospital in Mississippi closed its labor and delivery unit between 2021 and 2025, the report found. However, the vast majority – 68% – of rural hospitals in the state do not have a labor and delivery unit. Most of the 50 rural Mississippi hospitals not delivering babies never did, or stopped long ago, while four have closed their delivery services within the last 15 years. 

Now, the problem that has plagued Mississippi is spreading across the U.S., where nearly two rural hospitals each month have stopped delivering babies since the end of 2020, and more are announcing closures for 2025. That’s more than 100 rural hospitals in just under five years.

Addressing rural maternity care is key to mitigating maternal mortality in America – which continues to have the highest rate among high-income nations, the report’s authors argued. 

“Over 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable with appropriate prenatal, labor & delivery, and post-partum care,” the report read. “Although improvements in maternity care are needed in all parts of the country to reduce mortality rates, one of the greatest challenges is in rural areas, because most rural hospitals are no longer providing maternity care at all.”

Across the country, less than half – 42% – of rural hospitals currently offer labor and delivery services. 

The study also looked at travel times to labor and delivery units for women using the distance from hospitals without labor and delivery services to hospitals with those services. It found that in most urban areas, the travel time to a hospital with labor and delivery services is under 20 minutes. In rural areas, women face travel times of at least 30 minutes, but often 50 minutes or more. 

At 35 minutes, Mississippi’s median travel time is similar to the country as a whole. 

The rural hospitals that have stopped delivering babies in Mississippi since 2010, according to data from the Mississippi State Department of Health, are: the south campus of Anderson Regional Medical Center in Meridian; the community campus of Merit Health Natchez; Magee General; and Greenwood Leflore.

Despite Meridian being one of Mississippi’s larger cities, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) defines it as rural. 

Authors of the study offered several recommendations to stakeholders, most of which centered around reforming payments to hospitals. 

One of the biggest challenges for small hospitals providing maternity care is that physicians and staff must be standing by 24 hours a day, but are only paid when they deliver a baby – even though rural hospitals may experience many days when there are no deliveries.

Another problem with payment methods, according to the report, is that insurance companies often pay more for C-sections, meaning hospitals and clinicians that support natural childbirth may lose money – even though there have been national efforts to reduce C-section rates, which are highest in Mississippi. 

The report stressed that the biggest problem is not with Medicaid or uninsured patients. The primary cause of overall losses on patient services at rural maternity care hospitals is private insurance companies paying rural hospitals less than what it costs to deliver services to patients. 

“Rural maternity care is in a state of crisis, and more women and babies in rural communities will die unnecessarily until the crisis is resolved,” the report stated. “Federal and state government officials and private employers must take immediate action to ensure that all health insurance plans are paying adequately to support high-quality maternity care in every community.”

Vermont’s Roman Catholic Diocese, now seeking to reorganize its depleting finances in U.S. Bankruptcy Court after settling 67 priest misconduct lawsuits, is bracing for a new wave of child sex abuse claims.

The state’s largest religious denomination paid out $34.5 million to survivors in the two decades between when news of a nationwide scandal broke in 2002 and its filing for Chapter 11 protection last fall.

As part of the bankruptcy process, all pending and future lawsuits have been placed on hold, with Judge Heather Cooper inviting accusers who haven’t reported abuse before to join the case as potential creditors.

As a result, 118 people have submitted confidential claims, records show — almost double the number of previously settled lawsuits.

The bankruptcy court doesn’t have the authority to hold hearings on any of the allegations, which are sealed from the public and the press. Instead, the judge has scheduled a non-evidentiary “presentation of survivor statements” for Wednesday at 10 a.m. at Burlington’s Federal Building.

“For many survivors, it took years and a lot of courage to come forward, so when the diocese filed for bankruptcy, it robbed those survivors of their opportunity to stand in front of a jury of their peers,” said Brittany Michael, a lawyer for a federally appointed committee representing creditors with abuse claims. 

“We know that the opportunity to speak in court can be an important part of the healing journey,” Michael said. “The survivors’ statements are a way to at least tell their story.”

The diocese, facing allegations of priest misconduct dating as far back as 1950, is the nation’s 40th Catholic entity to seek bankruptcy protection, it notes on an explainer page on its website.

Under federal law, the diocese must present the court with a tally of its financial assets and liabilities and petition for Chapter 11 help. The judge, in turn, will decide whether to allow church leaders to develop a reorganization plan that would require approval from both the court and creditors.

Seeking “full disclosure and transparency,” abuse claimants are seeking church records detailing not only a reported $35 million tied to the diocese’s headquarters and its state-level holdings but also all the community operations it oversees, starting with 63 parishes with an estimated collective worth of $500 million.

The resulting findings are expected to spark future debate on whether abuse claimants and other creditors will be limited to compensation from the church’s headquarters or also could be reimbursed through local assets.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s Roman Catholic Diocese faces 118 more clergy misconduct claims.