PIEDMONT, S.D. – Three lawmakers who represent this Meade County city hope to change weak state mining laws that allowed a proposed limestone mine to be sited without notification or input by any local officials or residents.

The plan by Simon Contractors to begin mining limestone on 300 acres within the city of Piedmont and in the surrounding Black Hills came as a shock to locals, who only learned of the mine project through an October notice in a local newspaper.

Piedmont is located along Interstate 90 about midway between Rapid City and Sturgis.

Piedmont residents shocked by new mine coming to town

A lax state mining law and lack of county land-use regulations allowed the operation to be approved without input from the public or local government.

South Dakota News WatchBart Pfankuch

Simon, a French-owned, Wyoming-based mining and materials company, said it has acquired state approval and private landowner agreements to allow limestone mining on 10 parcels of land in and around Piedmont. The mine is expected to start running in August and operate through 2043, according to Simon.

Simon followed lax state mining laws that allow mining of sand, gravel and limestone without a formal permitting, notification and public input process required of more invasive hard rock mining operations. The lack of zoning ordinances in Meade County also enabled the mining company to develop its plans without county input.

Opposition to the mine has crystalized quickly in Meade County, where residents have held meetings and created a Facebook page that had 700,000 page views in its first month. More than 700 people have signed up for regular emails about the project.

“We have rights, even if they tell us we don’t have rights,” said Chris Greenberg, who recently retired to Piedmont. “I can’t come into your yard and dump a load of garbage, but yet they can come in and tear up the land, and bring dust and noise and blasting?”

The three Republican lawmakers from Meade County – Rep. Kathy Rice, Rep. Terri Jorgenson and Sen. John Carley – have teamed up in an effort to support Piedmont residents and to prevent similar mining operations from popping up suddenly in other communities around the state.

“There’s a lot of mining to be done and the question is, ‘Does it have to be done right next to houses, and does it need to be put in after the homes are already there?’” Carley said. “If you moved into a community and there’s already a mine or industrial or commercial operation, you get to make that conscious decision. (But) this is a very different situation because there’s already a community established, and (the mine) is in a very visible, dust-oriented area.”

So far, the lawmakers said they hope to file bills in the 2026 legislative session that would increase public notification requirements, require environmental impact statements for sand and gravel mines and tighten up state regulations that allow some mining operations to proceed without a permitting process.

Seeking environmental impact data

Rice told News Watch that she is investigating two options to help Piedmont residents now and to strengthen sand, gravel and limestone mining laws in the future.

Rice said she realized that any laws passed in the 2026 legislation will likely be enacted too late to help Piedmont residents who are opposed to the limestone mine.

Yet Rice said she’s looking into whether a state law could be passed to require an environmental impact statement for gravel mines just as the state requires them for more extensive gold or silver mining.

“We need to know how it’s going to impact our water and our air and the communities that are there,” she said. “We can’t just tear apart a hill and not know what it’s going to do to the community that’s there.”

Rice said she isn’t sure yet whether she will file a bill but plans to contact the Legislative Research Council to determine how such a bill could be drafted.

“They (mining companies) can afford an impact study,” Rice said. “There’s millions of dollars in minerals in the Black Hills, so it shouldn’t just be a $100 license fee for the whole state and you can do as many mines as you want.”

Rice said she also intends to contact the landowners who have agreed to allow Simon to mine for limestone on their land and perhaps persuade them to change their minds.

“Simon has the license but does not have lease agreements,” Rice said. “So I wonder, what would make them stop from signing the agreements?”

Packed house at public meeting

The latest discussion of how to respond to the limestone mining plans came during a crowded public meeting held Nov. 20 at the Elk Creek Resort in Piedmont that drew about 250 residents.

Carley, who hosted the meeting at the resort he manages, said he intends to file legislation that would require greater public notification of proposed sand, gravel and limestone mines.

Under current state law, more invasive hard rock mines, including for silver and gold, require a full state permitting process that includes environmental studies, public notification and public hearing processes as well as approval by the state Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

The proposed limestone mine in Piedmont fell under state sand and gravel mining laws that allow a mine company to obtain a state license that enables them to mine anywhere in the state where they own land or have landowner permission. That law does not require prior notification of neighbors or local governments and does not require a public hearing or state or county permit.

Carley said he is researching a bill that would require notification of proposed mining operations to all property owners within a certain distance of the mine.

The Simon Contractors limestone mine also was not subject to county zoning ordinances that could have restricted where it was built. Meade County voters have rejected prior ballot measures to enact zoning ordinances.

Some residents suggested the county might need to revisit the possibility of creating zoning guidelines that could provide protections or distance setbacks for communities or individual landowners. 

Carley said the Meade County legislative delegation also plans to seek regulatory changes within the DANR that would further protect existing homeowners.

During an hourlong discussion on Nov. 20, attendees brought up a number of questions and concerns regarding the mine and the process of approval. Among them:

• Will property values fall and will it be harder for mine neighbors to get property insurance?
• How much noise will mining operations create?
• How will air quality be affected by dust and will drinking water wells be contaminated?
• Are mining operations expanding in the Black Hills and in the Northern Hills in particular?
• Why does Simon have a relatively small surety bond requirement for mine reclamation?
• Can watershed protection rules be used to block this mine or other proposed mines?

Two chairs were set aside at the front of the room to accommodate Simon Contractors representatives who were invited, but both seats were left empty throughout the meeting because they didn’t show up. Simon did not return a call from News Watch seeking comment.

Some neighbors have hired Yankton attorney Nick Moser, who represented dozens of East River landowners in their mostly successful battle to stop the Summit Carbon Solutions carbon pipeline from being built on their land.

Attorney pushes grassroots pressure

Moser praised the residents for attending the meeting and urged them to continue to reach out to state and local officials to take action to prevent the mine from opening.

“Keep the pressure on and make your voices heard,” he said. “Be engaged, talk to your elected officials and encourage them to make reasonable policy that (prevents) things like the mine that is being proposed right in your backyard, (because) that’s not reasonable and that’s not what you want.”

Carley said he is hearing from concerned residents frequently but noted that most are not opposed to mining in general but want greater controls that protect neighbors and communities.

“Many of the calls go this way, ‘You know, I’m not against mining, mining is an important industry in South Dakota that is doing well in this state,'” Carley said. “I’m against the mining when it’s in my backyard or when it’s going to cause noise or dust or watershed problems. That’s what I’ve heard the community is concerned with.”

This story was produced by South Dakota News Watch, an independent, nonprofit organization. Read more stories and donate at sdnewswatch.org and sign up for an email to get stories when they’re published. Contact investigative reporter Bart Pfankuch at bart.pfankuch@sdnewswatch.org.

POWDER RIVER BASIN—Brian Mealor scanned the prairie east of Buffalo, but his mind drifted west to a haunting scene in northern Nevada. 

In the burn scar of the Roosters Comb Fire, a single unwelcomed species had taken over, choking out all competitors. Mealor saw few native grasses or shrubs, scarcely a wildflower. 

Not even other weeds.

“Literally everything you see is cheatgrass,” Mealor recalled of his June tour of the scar. “I just stood there, depressed.”

Mealor already knew plenty about the Eurasian species’ capacity to decimate North American ecosystems since he leads the University of Wyoming’s Institute for Managing Annual Grasses Invading Natural Ecosystems. But he was still shocked walking through the endless cheatgrass monoculture taking over the 220,000 once-charred acres northwest of Elko. 

The same noxious species, he knew, is steadily spreading in Wyoming.

The ecological scourge made Silver State officials so desperate that they were planting another nonnative, forage kochia, because it competes with less nutritious cheatgrass and offers some nourishment for native wildlife, like mule deer. 

“They’ll just die, because there’s nothing there,” Mealor said. “That’s why we have to do stuff. Because we could turn into that.” 

Scientists, rangeland managers and state and county officials are doing everything in their power to prevent Wyoming from becoming another landscape lost to cheatgrass. There’s a powerful new herbicide that’s helping. And funds enabling the spraying of hundreds of thousands of acres are being secured and raised. Yet, Wyoming is still losing its cheatgrass fight, and ultimately far more resources are needed to turn it around.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Bob Budd, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “The magnitude of the need is utterly staggering. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade. That’s daunting.”

Budd voiced that warning Tuesday while addressing a statewide group that focuses on bighorn sheep, which depend on seasonal ranges being invaded by cheatgrass. A recent study co-authored by Mealor underscores the need to act soon to protect Wyoming’s wildlife. UW researchers concluded that cheatgrass, which is only edible in spring, could cost northeast Wyoming’s already struggling mule deer half their current habitat in the next couple of decades.

On Nov. 6, the Sheridan-based professor joined fellow academics, biologists and volunteers on a field trip to a mixed-grass prairie. Like the Nevada burn scar, this was a Wyoming landscape on the mend from wildfire. In fact, it wasn’t a grassland until last year. 

Before Aug. 21, 2024, the ground where they stood had been considered the best of what’s left of northeast Wyoming’s sagebrush biome. 

Transformation

A lightning storm that sparked a conflagration abruptly ended that era. Over the course of two days, the House Draw Fire tore a 10-mile-wide, almost 60-mile-long gash into the landscape, inflicting over $25 million in damage. In a fiery blink, the native plant community mostly disappeared. 

Once-prized sagebrush within roughly 100,000 acres of the burn area is basically gone, a worrisome loss of habitat for the region’s already struggling sage grouse. What grew back isn’t a monoculture, like in Nevada. Native species are easily found. But portions of the Powder River Basin’s rolling hills are now dominated by big densities of cheatgrass and Japanese brome, another invasive annual grass. Without mature sagebrush shrubs to compete with, there’s reason to believe the invaders, which flourish with fire, will expand their grip. 

“It’s not like you have a fire and all of a sudden you’re just completely covered with cheatgrass,” Mealor said. “There’s a lag.” 

The Johnson County Natural Habitat Restoration Team is throwing everything it can at the fire scar to try to prevent invasive grasses from taking over. Armed with $12 million in state funds, crews will aerially spray some 120,000 acres with a cheatgrass-killing herbicide. Aerial sagebrush seeding is also underway on 3,000 acres of burned-up sage grouse nesting habitat. And there are even funded plans to build hundreds of simple erosion-controlling Zeedyk structures to protect the wet meadows within the fire scar. 

Yet, on a broader scale, Mealor is a realist about the immense challenge of keeping cheatgrass and its noxious counterparts at bay in Wyoming, let alone enabling sagebrush to stage a comeback — a costly, complicated feat. 

“If we were talking about a 25,000-acre fire here and there,” Mealor said, “it would be a little different.” 

About a half-million acres of northeastern Wyoming burned in 2024, the state’s second-largest fire year in modern history. Wyoming lawmakers agreed to carve out $49 million for wildfire recovery grants statewide, less than half of Gov. Mark Gordon’s requested amount. Optimistically, Mealor said, the awarded sum might be enough to treat a million acres. That sounds significant — it’s half the acreage of Yellowstone. But cheatgrass is spreading just about everywhere in a state that spans 62 million acres.

“If you think about it from a statewide level, it’s not a lot,” Mealor said of the funding. “That’s not an attack. I’m not downplaying the importance of the money that was set aside by the Legislature for this. It’s a lot of money. But it’s also not enough.” 

The governor, who’s a rancher by trade, has voiced the same concern. Pushing for $20 million in cheatgrass spraying funds during the Legislature’s 2024 budget-making process, Gordon acknowledged Wyoming is “losing the battle” against invasive annual grasses. Lawmakers ultimately agreed to $9 million, less than half the requested amount, according to the budget. 

‘Best of the best’

The incursions that cheatgrass, Japanese brome and fellow invasives medusahead and ventenata are making into Wyoming rangelands are significant because of what’s at stake. The Equality State is the cornerstone of what remains of the sagebrush-steppe biome, a 13-state ecosystem vanishing at a rate of 1 million-plus acres per year.  

“Half of the best of the best is in Wyoming,” said Corinna Riginos, who directs the Wyoming science program for The Nature Conservancy. 

The Lander-based scientist is spearheading a Camp Monaco Prize-winning project that seeks to safeguard the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from cheatgrass. The flanks of the ecosystem, such as the Golden Triangle, southwest of the Wind River Range, contain some of the most expansive unbroken tracts of sagebrush remaining on Earth. Distribution maps show that almost all of those areas are in Wyoming. It’s no coincidence that the same places also host remarkable biological phenomena, like the world’s largest sage grouse lek and longest mule deer migration. 

Riginos’ research is focused on defensive measures to catch and kill cheatgrass early on, when it exists at low levels. Keeping the invasion out of core tracts of sagebrush, she said, is a more efficient use of funds than trying to shift heavily contaminated landscapes back to what they used to be. 

“Maybe we live with what they are, we cope with it, rather than trying to recover from it,” Riginos said of cheatgrass-dominated areas. 

Within Wyoming, invasive grass experts don’t have to go far from the world’s most unsullied sagebrush stands to find heavily infested landscapes. In June 2024, Riginos toured cheatgrass treatments in the Wind River Indian Reservation’s Washakie Park area. Although they stood about 40 straight-line miles from the Golden Triangle, scientists, wildlife managers and weed experts on the tour were surrounded by hillsides purple-hued from cheatgrass. 

“You have to respect it, as an organism,” Riginos said. “The adaptability and just kind of sheer ability to get a toehold and take over is pretty remarkable.”

Cheatgrass gets its name from its ability to “cheat” surrounding vegetation out of moisture and nutrients. Its mechanism for success is essentially a head start. It germinates in the fall and starts growing in cold temperatures. Then it overwinters, matures, throws off prolific amounts of seeds and dies by midsummer when native grasses and forbs are much earlier in their life cycle. 

On top of the advantageous life cycle, the West’s ever-increasing, climate-driven wildfires help cheatgrass flourish. When a cheatgrass-infested area burns and becomes more cheatgrass dominant, it’s more prone to burn again, creating a vicious feedback loop. 

Giving cheatgrass yet another advantage, research has shown the plant in North America adapts well to different locales. That trait enables it to flourish in a wide range of temperatures and moisture conditions across the West, Riginos said.

“I feel that this is the most existential, sweeping threat to our western ecosystems.” 

Corinna riginos

“I don’t want to see the West become a wasteland of cheatgrass, I really don’t,” she said. “I feel that this is the most existential, sweeping threat to our western ecosystems. It really concerns me.” 

Closing in

All those traits have enabled an impressive, though foreboding, expansion. Since its introduction from Europe in the 1800s, cheatgrass has spread to all 50 states and parts of Canada and Mexico. There are signs it’s not slowing down. Rangeland ecologists have detected an eightfold increase in cheatgrass across the Great Basin since the 1990s, according to the National Wildlife Federation. 

Simultaneously, sagebrush-dominated landscapes have sustained a decline. A 2022 U.S. Geological Survey report found that an average of 1.3 million acres are being lost or degraded every year. That’s an area larger than Rhode Island.

Although the spread of Wyoming cheatgrass hasn’t been as overwhelming as in lower-elevation, drier western states, the invasion has, and continues to be, successful. A whitepaper distributed by the Wyoming Outdoor Council in the state Capitol during the 2024 funding fight reported that invasive annual grasses already affect 26% of the Equality State’s landmass, which pencils out to over 16 million acres.

Historically, Wyoming land managers believed that much of the nation’s least-populated state was too high and too cold for cheatgrass to gain much ground. But the climate has tilted in its favor, according to Jeanne Chambers, an emeritus U.S. Forest Service research ecologist who has studied cheatgrass for decades.

“Cooler temperatures, especially those cold nighttime temperatures, used to keep cheatgrass at bay,” Chambers said. “But now that things are warming up and people and livestock and animals are all over the place, the propagules — the seeds — are getting everywhere.” 

As a result, slightly lower-elevation reaches of Wyoming, like the Bighorn Basin, are seeing more and more cheatgrass, she said. The same goes for where the salt desert transitions into sagebrush in the state’s southwestern corner.   

“Those areas are pretty vulnerable,” Chambers said. 

Wyoming specialists in those communities corroborate the claims.

“Cheatgrass is moving into our county, primarily on the south end — but it’s not exclusive to the south end,” Sweetwater County Weed and Pest Supervisor Dan Madson said. “There are hot spots throughout the county invading mule deer, antelope and elk habitats, as well as sage grouse core areas.” 

Some of the encroachments are well north into the Green River Basin and Red Desert, noted sagebrush strongholds. North of Rock Springs, north of Superior and in the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge are all places being actively invaded, Madson said.  

Sweetwater County is scaling up its response, Madson said. The county is spending about $750,000 to spray nearly 12,000 acres of cheatgrass this year and plans to treat more like 15,000 acres in 2026. 

But money is a limiting factor. Wyoming landscapes have been the recipient of many millions of federal dollars, including from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which have complemented the state’s contributions. 

Still, the pace of infestation statewide and in Sweetwater County far exceeds the total resources available. 

“We could easily, easily triple that [15,000 acres] in a year,” Madson said, “and still have enough to do for the rest of my career.”

Funding issues aren’t only due to federal government turmoil. One potential pot of $11 million that would have been directed toward spraying evaporated when the Wyoming Senate opted to forgo a supplemental budget. 

“That money got lost,” said Budd, at the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “It actually hurt some parts of the state that were doing a very good proactive job, managing to keep cheatgrass down.”

‘Defending the core’

The upper Green River Basin is one example of a landscape where cheatgrass advances have been reversed. Its remoteness, harsh climate and high elevation helped, but those factors alone didn’t prevent a slow incursion of the virulent vegetation early in the century. By 2014, for example, hues of red and purple — hallmarks of cheatgrass — were painting the ridges rising over Boulder Lake. 

The Sublette County Weed and Pest District fought the invasion with repeated treatments. In 2018 alone, some 30,000 acres of the western front of the Winds were aerially sprayed. It worked. 

By the summer 2020, no cheatgrass was being detected at Boulder Lake, once a hotspot, District Supervisor Julie Kraft said. Nowadays, she said, no major problem areas remain in Sublette County.

Kraft even felt “good” about the future of her cheatgrass fight, expressing uncommon optimism for those grappling with an organism overtaking so many places. 

“A couple of years ago, I might not have said the same thing,” Kraft said. “But with this new tool, and particularly because of the influx of money that came [during] the [Biden] administration, it allowed us to do so much more.” 

That new tool is an herbicide, Indaziflam. It’s a product, also known by its trade name, Rejuvra, that provides far more enduring protection against cheatgrass than any previous chemical treatment. It works by attacking the seedbank and shallow root structure of cheatgrass, while not infiltrating the soil deep enough to kill perennial native grasses and plants like sagebrush. 

“It depletes it down until there won’t be a seedbank of cheatgrass anymore,” Kraft said. “We’ve seen that on our sites. Year one, you can go out and grab handfuls of cheatgrass seed off the top of the soil. Year two, you can’t find those handfuls anymore. By year three, you can’t dig [cheatgrass seeds] out of the bottoms of sagebrush.”

The June 2024 outing that drew Riginos, the Nature Conservancy scientist, to Washakie Park along the east slope of the Winds included a stop at an experimental Indaziflam treatment plot. 

Although a mix of the herbicide had been misted over strips of cheatgrass nearly four years earlier, its effect remained obvious and unmistakable. Curing, purple drooping brome blanketed untreated strips, and native green grasses filled the niches between. 

“It’s holding still,” said Aaron Foster, Fremont County’s weed and pest supervisor, who led the cheatgrass treatment tour on the reservation. “It’s been holding now for four growing seasons. Pretty impressive.”  

Indaziflam is a relative newcomer to Wyoming’s cheatgrass-killing battle. The Environmental Protection Agency didn’t clear it for use on rangelands until 2020. Some federal authorizations came even more recently, with the Bureau of Land Management approving its use in July 2024, after years of urging from western states including Wyoming. 

“With this approval, Indaziflam will be eligible for application on 18 million acres of BLM land in Wyoming,” Gordon said in a press release, noting the policy change would have been “even more welcome” if BLM had made the announcement before states and counties were planning their spraying season.  

Judicious spraying

Out of necessity, Wyoming’s weed and pest districts and federal land managers are extremely strategic about where to put Indaziflam. It’s notoriously costly. Typically, time in the air is the biggest expense in aerial weed spraying work. But that’s not the case with the Envu-produced chemical. At Washakie Park, Foster reported paying $42-$43 per acre in product alone, adding up to about triple the cost of the helicopter. 

Kraft, in Sublette County, didn’t mince words about why Rejuvra’s so pricey. 

“It was a specialty herbicide used on specialty crops — almonds, I believe,” Kraft said. “They found out it worked on cheatgrass and now they have this western monopoly on this herbicide that works great. It’s expensive, and it goes up every year.” 

A Wyoming sales representative for Envu stood behind its breakthrough chemical’s high per-ounce cost. Compared to competing herbicides that need to be sprayed more often, in the long term Rejuvra is a bargain, David Collins said. 

“It’s actually the cheapest product to utilize,” he said. “You’re applying it once instead of every year or every other year, and you’re also saving on application cost.”

With limited resources, Fremont County’s spraying plan is to focus on swaths of the landscape that haven’t been extensively invaded: the Absaroka and Winds foothills toward Dubois and the Red Desert are two examples. But the “core problem area” — the cheatgrass-infested county center, which has lots of human disturbance — is considered a much lower priority, Foster said.  

“I think you have to kind of accept that we’re going to have cheatgrass forever.”

Aaron foster

“I think you have to kind of accept that we’re going to have cheatgrass forever,” he said. “And areas like that are going to be impacted by it most severely forever, too.” 

Out where the House Draw Fire burned, the Johnson County restoration team is planning to spend big on Indaziflam — spraying burned areas that are now grasslands and unburned sagebrush to the tune of $9.3 million, consuming more than three-quarters of its state grant.    

Ultimately, those tending the fire’s scar opted not to spray immediately. Instead, they took a breath, collected data on where cheatgrass and Japanese brome now dominate and where native vegetation grew back.  

“If we were to spray in the black, without knowing that any of the perennial vegetation was going to survive, it could have just been bare ground for four or five years,” said Jaycie Arndt, a University of Wyoming assistant research scientist. 

Now, more than a year after the House Draw Fire burned, its scar also hosts big concentrations of some native grasses, too. Western wheatgrass and blue grama were two species that also surrounded the weed scientists and landowners on their recent tour. 

Healthy native grasses can be one of the best defenses against cheatgrass.

“Sometimes the focus needs to be more on maintaining and increasing our perennial grasses and forbs as competitors,” said Chambers, the longtime Forest Service researcher. Cheatgrass, she added, is “naturalized” into a lot of western landscapes and is “always going to be there on one level or another.” Retaining native vegetation helps maintain resiliency to the attack. 

The House Draw Fire recovery plan also calls for facilitating the return of the ever-depleting sagebrush biome. Ultimately, the state sunk $2.5 million into aerial sagebrush seeding — a technique that’s never been used in Wyoming. 

“This whole thing was an experiment,” said Todd Caltrider, a terrestrial habitat biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “I looked for literature on aerial seeding for sagebrush in the Northern Great Plains, and there wasn’t any.” 

Caltrider spoke from a private land monitoring plot southeast of Buffalo, where sagebrush seedlings, reaching a few inches skyward, could be seen sprouting from the soil. They were among the cherished few. Results were worse than anticipated, with seedlings growing back at an average rate of one plant per acre. 

Even without cheatgrass to compete with, sagebrush comes back painstakingly slow. Individual plants can take decades to mature. But after a wildfire, the ecosystem evolved to recover even more slowly than that: Wyoming big sagebrush takes as long as 200 to 350 years to return to dense stands of mature plants, research has found. 

“If that’s the case, of course we’re not seeing any [recovery],” Mealor said. 

The UW weed scientist’s feet lingered in the burn scar of what was once the Powder River Basin’s best sagebrush. Because of the House Draw Fire, it might functionally be a grassland for the rest of his life. The hope, of course, is that it won’t be a sea of cheatgrass.

The post Inside Wyoming’s fight against cheatgrass, the ‘most existential, sweeping threat’ to western ecosystems appeared first on WyoFile .

Megan Harrigan hurried around the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor in September, gathering clients and bringing them to the back corner of the church where there was a makeshift clinic of folding tables and metal chairs. Each client was homeless, and most had an opioid addiction. Harrigan knew them all by name.

Between helping patients get referrals for opioid treatment medication, providing care for wounds that can come with opioid use, checking on clients she hadn’t seen in a while, and joking with other staff of the street medicine team, Harrigan talked with a Maine Monitor reporter about a shift she has witnessed in recent years: more older adults are doing harder drugs. 

Harrigan, a mental health and rehabilitation technician, first started helping people with addiction more than 20 years ago. At that time, her older patients primarily struggled with prescription opioids. But regulatory crackdowns on overprescribing meant some of those patients turned to illicit drugs, now largely fentanyl, Harrigan said.

What’s more, she’s now working with more older people, a surprising observation as illicit drug use typically declines after young adulthood.

The opioid epidemic is still primarily a problem among younger people. But as it has worn on, a change has been happening that’s largely gone unnoticed. The Maine Monitor analyzed Medicare claims data to show for the first time that the number of Medicare patients in Maine, ages 65 and older, who received buprenorphine treatment for their addiction to opioids increased about 70 percent between 2019 and 2023.

This increase is large, but it represents a small number of all patients: about 450 more people seeking help at different health care systems and doctors across the state. It means the change might be imperceptible to individual medical practitioners. But some are starting to notice the increase in their every day, and it is worrying to them. They wonder if it is the start of a trend. 

“Eventually they’re going to age, and our drugs are not stopping,” said Harrigan, a liaison with OPTIONS, a state-coordinated initiative that stands for Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety. 

In Maine, some family doctors, addiction treatment providers and public health officials have seen anecdotal increases in older adults struggling with opioid use, pointing to the potential emergence of a growing problem in pockets of the state.

However, other organizations, including MaineHealth Behavioral Health based in Westbrook and the Bangor Area Recovery Network in Brewer, said they have not seen a notable increase in the older patients they serve. 

Meanwhile, total overdoses in the state continue to plummet, and older adults account for a relatively small portion of those overdoses. Mainers 65 and older made up 23 percent of the state population but just 12 percent of nonfatal overdoses last year and 13 percent so far this year, according to the most recent state data.

Those between ages 35 and 44, in comparison, made up 12 percent of the population and 26 percent of nonfatal overdoses last year. It means some experts are hesitant to focus on a segment of the population with less need.

Gordon Smith, the state director of opioid response, said each age group deserves attention, but he has limited resources and a responsibility to focus on the most vulnerable groups. He added that opioid use disorder is an “adolescent onset disease,” and the vast majority of people who struggle with substance use started before they were 18, which is why prevention efforts focus on younger age groups.

“I have to be responsible for all my age cohorts, and where is the biggest struggle? Where is the biggest bang for my buck?” Smith said. “A lot of people want to — and this is not wrong — to put more into the adolescent population and deal with prevention because you have more years of life lost.”

As Maine’s population continues to age, others said the state should start planning for how to address what might become a growing problem.

Kaylie Smith, a licensed clinical professional counselor in the addiction care program at Northern Light Acadia Hospital in Bangor, works as a therapist for older adults receiving methadone or buprenorphine for an opioid addiction. While adults 65 and older make up only about 3 percent of her roughly 400 patients, she said that number has doubled during her decade working there. She thinks the trend will continue.

“It’s almost a special niche group, but I think it’s important to talk about because our population is aging,” Kaylie Smith said. “Maine is one of the oldest states in the nation, and that is impacting how patients are presenting with us.”

‘It’s all fentanyl’

Walt Bresnahan, now 68, first started taking opioids in his 30s after an old injury from playing sports started flaring up. He got a prescription for Percocet and became addicted, he said.

Bresnahan, of Old Orchard Beach, is now sober two years and seven months. He spends his time volunteering at the Portland Recovery Community Center. He hasn’t seen an increase in older adults attending the community center, but he said older people can be particularly hard to reach.

“The older generation right now is the Boomers,” he said. “What is the one thing that comes with those generations that sticks out more than anything? It’s pride.”

It can be harder for older Mainers to disclose they have a problem in part because they may feel more stigma than younger generations, according to those who help people with addiction.

Leon Licata, pastor at the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor, said he’s been stunned to see older people he serves getting involved in street drugs. People over 65 make up a small portion of those using the church’s warming and cooling center — he guessed maybe 5 percent — but anecdotally he has seen their numbers increase significantly in the last couple years.

A woman in her 70s at the shelter who spoke to a reporter insisted she had not used drugs in 30 years. Licata, who knows her, said that wasn’t true, but “they’re not going to tell you.”

Older adults with opioid use disorders may not look like the stereotype, said Dr. Rachel Solotaroff, clinical advisor for substance use disorder services at Penobscot Community Health Care based in Bangor. Most of her older patients smoke, rather than inject, and it’s more often women — usually “very frail women,” she said. She added that her observations are limited to those who are seeking help.

“It’s all fentanyl,” Solotaroff said, referring to the powerful synthetic opioid. “I haven’t seen heroin in a long time, nor prescription opioids.” 

Often her patients started with prescription opioids, but then their use evolved to more illicit substances, Solotaroff said. And sometimes they’ve had long periods of sobriety in between, until they face a crisis such as losing their home.

Maine has made a significant effort to improve access to life-saving medications for opioid use disorder and harm reduction services such as safe syringe exchanges, Solotaroff said. But she believes the state needs to take more of a population-health approach to helping older adults, which would entail creating interventions designed specifically for this group.

“You also need an intentional focus by policymakers, by people who design these systems, on this population as distinct from a group of folks in their 40s or a group of folks in their 20s,” Solotaroff said.

Gordon Smith said his office looks at demographic data about overdoses every week. He pointed to initiatives such as youth recovery coaches as evidence of age-targeted programs.

“We have all kinds of strategies that look at particular populations, and we’re talking every day about whether it’s middle-aged people or older people,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether you are 13 or 83, we’re going to have as many options available to people as possible.”

‘Maine is no exception’

Multiple health officials said older Mainers are likely to feel most comfortable talking to their primary care doctors. Solotaroff and two primary care doctors told The Monitor they are seeing increases in older patients struggling with opioid use disorder, although most hadn’t tracked it with data.

The nation as a whole is seeing a marked increase of older adults with an addiction to opioids. A recent study found a 9,000 percent increase in overdose deaths of older adults from fentanyl mixed with stimulants, such as cocaine and methamphetamines, over the past eight years. 

Between 2014 and 2023, the number of overdose deaths from any opioid among people 55 and older increased threefold nationally and fivefold in Maine, according to a KFF analysis. Nationally, adults 65 and up experienced the largest increase in drug overdose rates of any age group from 2022 to 2023.

“I think the trend is clearly an issue, and Maine is no exception,” said Dr. Noah Nesin, a family care doctor and medical director of research and innovation at Community Care Partnership of Maine.

Nesin estimated that “overwhelmingly” people over 65 with opioid use disorder largely still use prescription opioids, but some people on the younger end might also have started using illicit opioids.

“It used to be earlier in my career that you would never see somebody in rural Maine, which is where I practiced, who had an opioid use disorder to anything other than prescription,” Nesin said. “Now we do see in , and in others where opioid use disorders are treated, people over 65 who have used illicit drugs like heroin and fentanyl.”

While Mainers 65-plus make up a small percentage of overdoses in the state, Nesin said he’d expect most of those overdoses to be fentanyl, not prescription opioids. It should raise alarms, he said. (The state does not publicize data showing the number of overdoses by age in each county.)

“We have to be alert to the possibility that a population of people for whom we previously didn’t have to consider illicit drug use as part of their addiction, that has to be considered and explicitly evaluated,” he said.

Doctors are prescribing far fewer opioids now, while prescriptions for buprenorphine, which treats opioid use disorder, have jumped. It was the top prescribed controlled medication in Maine last year, according to the state’s Prescription Monitoring Program.

While more people are seeking help, they may not always find it valuable. Nationally, fewer than 40 percent of Medicare beneficiaries with opioid use disorder received treatment that met quality metrics, according to a recent study published in Health Affairs.

Recognizing and treating opioid use among older adults comes with a unique set of challenges, said Dr. Erik Steele, a family physician at Martin’s Point primary care in Brunswick, who has been a doctor for 30 years. Opioid use can have cognitive effects that mimic aging issues, such as memory loss, ability to function and fall risks. An older patient may have more health conditions and prescribed medications that interact with opioids in different ways, and they may have chronic pain with few non-opioid treatment alternatives, he said. 

Primary care doctors sometimes struggle to start conversations with older patients about opioid use because they don’t want to offend people in their care. When he does random drug testing and pill counts on older patients who have been on opioids for more than a decade, Steele said they often are surprised and insulted. He said he suspected family physicians might be less likely to do random drug screens on a 75-year-old who has been on opioids for 10 years than a 40-year-old who has been on them for five years.

“There’s no question that asking somebody, in common parlance, ‘Are you addicted to your medication?’ is a challenging conversation and is potentially a barrier to asking it,” Steele said. “As you do more and more of this work, you do get more comfortable asking the question.”

With older patients, Steele said, it’s especially important to figure out if they are physiologically dependent on the opioids, meaning they would experience withdrawal symptoms, or if they are pathologically dependent, meaning they are using opioids to treat an underlying issue such as post-traumatic stress, anxiety or depression — in an escalating manner to the point where it becomes an illness. There isn’t good data currently about how many older patients are pathologically addicted to opioids, he said.

‘It reflects broader shifts’

A growing number of Medicare recipients in Maine are getting buprenorphine to medically treat opioid use disorder.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of Medicare recipients in Maine receiving buprenorphine, who were 65 and older, increased from 638 to 1,087, according to a Maine Monitor analysis of Medicare claims data. That’s a 70 percent increase, while the overall population of Mainers 65 and older grew 12 percent during that time. 

The numbers are likely an undercount because The Monitor did not include totals for categories of buprenorphine that were suppressed because they were too small for Medicare to publish. The numbers also do not include how many people took other drugs, such as naltrexone and methadone, to treat opioid use disorder. 

Christy Daggett, CEO of Aroostook Mental Health Services, said any increase in older adults seeking treatment is a hopeful sign that they feel more comfortable reaching out for help. The facility’s total number of Aroostook County patients in treatment for opioid use decreased 12 percent between fiscal years in 2020 and 2025, but clients who were 65 and older increased slightly from 14 to 21.

Even as more older adults are seeking treatment, it can be difficult for them to continue taking opioid treatment medications when they need higher levels of care for other health problems. Multiple providers told The Monitor that nursing homes and assisted living facilities are not equipped to handle people with opioid addictions.

Kaylie Smith, from Northern Light Acadia Hospital, said treatment should be more available in all health care settings. Sometimes her patients have a hard time going to rehabilitation facilities because they can’t get their methadone, which is often dispensed at regulated clinics.

“For them to go without their medicine, it’s just not realistic because that would totally destabilize them in different ways,” Smith said. “It’s like you’re choosing which way you want to be destabilized.”

In 2022, Amelia Hersey tried to change that. As a physician’s assistant specializing in geriatric substance use, she spent a year working with a dozen nursing homes across the state to establish and expand their policies to better serve residents with addiction.

“We made very little gains, unfortunately,” she said, and “met a lot of resistance.” 

The only nursing homes that ultimately updated their practices were the two where she was already employed. There was near constant turnover in nursing homes, forcing her to retrain new people and get buy-in from new administrators, she said. In addition, staff are overworked with limited capacity for more tasks.

The Maine Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes and assisted living facilities, said these facilities are already caring for more residents with substance use disorders. 

“This isn’t uncommon anymore,” said Angela Cole Westhoff, president and CEO of the industry group. “It reflects broader shifts in both the population and the challenges people are living with as they age.”

Maine Monitor reporter Taylor Nichols contributed data reporting to this story.

This story was made possible in part by a workshop on reporting on aging, convened by the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

The damming of California’s rivers has been hugely consequential to the economic, cultural and ecological geography of the North State. Here in Shasta County, the erection of the Shasta Dam has been lauded by the Bureau of Reclamation as a monumental feat of American engineering, generating local jobs and pivotal to “[benefiting] millions of people miles away,” by means of irrigation and power generation.

But like the construction of all hydroelectric dams in the area, someone paid the price. In the case of the Shasta Dam, it was a community of Winnenem Wintu whose village was flooded as the Sacramento River was dammed in the 1930s. Other Tribal communities were also forced from their homes with the development of hydroelectric dams in the adjacent counties which straddle the ancestral homelands of the Wintu, Pit River, and Maidu Tribes.

But in the years since the initial dispossession from their land, first by the federal government’s illegal confiscation and then by flooding, the Indigenous peoples of the North State have frequently challenged both their physical displacement and the ongoing extraction of resources from that land — the latter of which has often occurred at the hands of the power industry.

Over recent years, researchers at the University of California have set out to document that long arc of Indigenous resistance in the North State through a series of interactive “StoryMaps” that are included in a larger corresponding curriculum for public use.

Carrying our Ancestors Home, is a California-focused educational tool first established at UCLA, which now features new multimedia StoryMaps focused on the history of what has become known as California’s North State. The StoryMaps combine written text, photos, videos, and links to readings that teach users about Indigenous resistance, leveraging primary sources and interviews with Tribal members themselves.

To visualize the history of Indigenous activism among the Maidu and Pit River nations, UC Davis scholars Beth Rose Middleton Manning and Marc Dadigan — who also freelances for Shasta Scout — mapped areas of the North State’s mountainous terrain that have been successfully reclaimed by Tribes after previously being held by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E).

Speaking to a reporter this week, Middleton described the scene of one of the team’s interviews with a member of the Pit River nation. It’s a moment that crystallized for the researcher the disparity between the use of land long stewarded by Tribal communities and the lack of benefit they’ve received from those infrastructural projects.

“We were standing out there with two Tribal members, and there’s power lines buzzing overhead, and these are from projects that were put in almost a century ago,” Middleton recalled. “But these Tribal members were never serviced by that power. They still aren’t.”

What the StoryMaps also lay out are the dubious means by which the state and federal government obtained Tribal land on which many hydroelectric dams exist today.  In the 1850s, federal agents were deployed to Northern California to negotiate “treaties” with Tribes for millions of acres of reservation land that were to be allotted to Indigenous peoples. But many of those treaties were never ratified by the federal government, effectively disenfranchising Native signatories of their rights to the land in spite of the signed contracts.

“Where people thought they had some protected rights to land, those were actually lands that were opened up for settlement,” Middleton explained, noting that this was just one bureaucratic means by which California Tribes were displaced, a betrayal that occurred in conjunction with the state-sponsored genocide of Natives up and down the state.

Diving deep into the legal battles that ensued between Tribes, PG&E, and the federal government in the aftermath of Native dispossession, the StoryMaps focus on specific actions such as the Battle of Four Corners that occurred in 1970, when a group of Pit River Tribal Members engaged in occupation of federal lands, resulting in their violent arrests.

“Pit River people eventually developed a clever legal strategy with their attorney Aubrey Grossman, a veteran litigator of the civil rights movement,” narration from a StoryMap titled From Occupations to Land Back explains. “They would get arrested for ‘trespassing’ and force PG&E and the federal government to prove in court [that the government] actually had title to the lands.”

Other themes addressed in the StoryMaps include the Indigenous stewardship of the Maidu people, and how damming of the Klamath River not only severed their access to the land they once cared for but wrought immense ecological damage on populations of fish and beavers.

The text cites some of the Maidu’s precolonial and sustainable practices as relates to seed gathering and fish harvesting. When gathering roots, for example, Maidu people left enough seed for regenerating the plants in the next season, and, when fishing, they released fish who had yet to lay their eggs.

By platforming Tribal members to tell their own stories in their own voices as part of the StoryMaps, Middleton said, “we’re inviting people to look at these recordings and documents and think about what happened with treaty-making, with the development of hydro facilities, with the seizure of Native lands for both public and private purposes.”

Each StoryMap within the larger curriculum includes a series of reflection questions, with which students or anyone engaging with this resource can ask themselves about how this history still resonates today. “To me, that’s the essence of learning,” Middleton added, “looking at and listening to information, and then really thinking about it. That’s our goal.”

The curriculum was created for use by the University of California, but any member of the public can now access the material for use with a class, or on their own. Other topics covered in the curriculum include protection of the genetic data of Native communities, responsibly archiving Indigenous art and cultural objects, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which is designed to facilitate the recovery and return of Native ancestral remains to modern-day Tribal members.

Find the curriculum here.

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Do you have a correction to share? Email us: editor@shastascout.org.

Yes

The American Farm Bureau Federation’s 2025 Thanksgiving Dinner Cost Survey finds that the average price of the classic holiday meal for 10 people is about 5% lower than in 2024.

The decline is driven primarily by a steep drop in turkey prices—down roughly 16% from 2024—as supplies recovered from earlier losses caused by highly pathogenic avian influenza. With flocks rebuilt and production stabilized, the cost of the turkey fell enough to outweigh price increases in several side dishes.

Items such as sweet potatoes, some vegetables, and dairy products rose in price this year, while a few other components saw modest declines or remained steady.

Overall grocery inflation remains a factor for many households, but the turkey reduction exerted such a strong influence on the total basket that the combined meal cost decreased compared to last year. 

This fact brief is in response to online conversations such as this one.

Sources:

American Farm Bureau Federation – Cost of Thanksgiving dinner declines
FoodDive – Lower turkey prices slash Thanksgiving dinner costs in 2025
FarmProgress America – Turkey flock at 40-year low, wholesale prices up 40 %–75 %

Editor’s note: Due to the sensitivity of this article, student sources were kept anonymous. 

Latino and white communities are intertwined in the Roaring Fork Valley, yet young immigrants, or children thereof, have felt threatened under President Donald Trump’s administration in the wake of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity across the country.

Though Mexican restaurants are local favorites and the Día De Los Muertos procession is a popular tradition in Carbondale, members of the immigrant community are facing a daunting reality. The Roaring Fork School District was 56.6% Latino during the 2024-2025 school year, according to the Colorado Department of Education’s demographic data. To be exact, 3,311 of the 5,842 students identified as Latino.

Interviews with local Latino students revealed the underlying fear surrounding ICE operations and other multi-cultural challenges that immigrants and first-generation Americans face.

“I consider myself American,” an 18 year old from Roaring Fork High School said. “But it can be hard to be prideful in that.”

She said her dual identity — a balance between her Mexican heritage and American citizenship — is beautiful, but can also be challenging. She is the first person in her family to be born in the United States and have experienced growing up here. She’s grateful to have access to so many new opportunities, yet humbled by some of her family members’ comparable disadvantages.

She not only has to guide her younger siblings, but her parents as well. She said that she has had to navigate school events, federal student aid and college applications alone.

“As the oldest, I’ve been forced to grow up faster than everyone else,” she said.

Growing up in the Valley, she often felt left out. She, along with other interviewees, described a social divide between Anglo and Latino students that can exist, and that friend groups are often composed of either or.

On a national scale, she feels like she has fallen victim to generalizations. “They [immigrants] are being categorized as criminals, but we’re not. It’s such a small group of people who are,” she stated.

She felt like Carbondale had always been safe, but under the Trump administration, she and her family have been afraid to travel, or even at times leave the house. Her parents, who have lived and worked in the Valley for over 20 years, began the process of switching bank accounts into her name due to the looming threat of deportation. She sometimes fears “the worst case scenarios.”

“What if they are not at my graduation?” she wondered.

Another student at Roaring Fork, 17, described how she often doesn’t feel like she is considered American, despite being born here. She feels like some only consider Americans as “white,” and, because that does not apply to her, she feels foreign.

She described the fear that surrounded Trump’s first election and the possibility of her parents being deported. In his second term, those fears have felt even more real as she’s watched the impact ICE has had on immigrant communities.

She’s also experienced an increase in discrimination directed towards her and other Latinos. She wondered if it was still there when she was little, but naivety blinded her. In January 2025, she visited North Carolina where a man yelled at her and her family, “Go back to your country.”

“We can’t even travel out of the fear of ICE,” she said.

Although she is a citizen, she said she felt relief when the school district enacted a policy promising that ICE would be unable to enter the schools without a warrant.

Voces Unidas de las Montañas, an organization based in Glenwood Springs that advocates for Latinos’ rights and well-being regionally, is helping pave a path through the uncertainty.

“Our larger mission is to make the Western Slope, and therefore Colorado, more equitable for all,” said Alex Sánchez, the president and CEO of Voces Unidas.

The organization has a 24/7 emergency hotline that acts as a tool to report and/or request information regarding missing family members, or to report ICE or supposed ICE activity. Voces Unidas investigates and verifies such reports.

“It’s critical for the times we live in. It’s important that we also confirm when it isn’t ICE, when it isn’t immigration control,” Sánchez said. “Because the people impacted by ICE are traumatized by any rumor, any insinuation that ICE is in their communities. We don’t want schools half empty, and we don’t want people to stop being able to go to work or use public transportation. We don’t want people to stop enjoying their lives out of fear.”

“It’s also critical, obviously, to confirm and report when there is, in fact, ICE activity, and when there is an operation in our community,” he continued. “Because people are literally being picked up off the streets and families are being separated.”

A third high school senior said that her parents, and most immigrants, come to the United States to try and create a better life for their family and themselves. She said that the same people who fly Trump flags may be kind to her face, but ultimately supported a government that wished her family had not come to the United States.

She described how scared she was before her mother had officially attained citizenship.

“I was terrified. ‘What if my mom doesn’t come home? What if my dad isn’t there?’” she said. “No child should have to experience that.”

“ICE is tearing families apart. What we need is to bring people together,” she added.

The post Balancing fear with the American Dream appeared first on The Sopris Sun.

Braving an early, frigid morning, Peyton Levi and Kyra Wilson joined a cluster of citizens protesting outside the state Department of Environmental Protection headquarters.

The two Marshall University seniors joined the group of nearly 30, holding up signs opposing the data center complex proposed between the towns of Thomas and Davis. The project has garnered backlash from communities across West Virginia.  

“I’m tired of seeing West Virginia as an extraction state,” said Wilson, a creative writing major from Wayne County.

Inside the agency’s headquarters, a seven-member board was preparing to hear initial legal motions in a case brought by three citizen groups trying to block the Tucker County project. 

Here’s what West Virginians need to know. 

Why are the citizen groups appealing the permit? 

When it applied for a state air pollution permit for a natural gas plant to power its data center, Fundamental Data, LLC, asked the WVDEP to keep several lengthy sections of its application secret. 

Citizen groups objected, saying the information kept confidential included material they needed to determine how the company calculated the expected air emissions.

The WVDEP allowed the information to be kept confidential, and in August, approved the permit. The next month, Tucker United, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Sierra Club appealed the agency’s decision to the West Virginia Air Quality Board, a quasi-judicial panel that hears such matters. 

The citizens are ultimately asking the panel to revoke the air permit. They list more than a dozen specific objections, most importantly challenging the DEP designating the project as a “minor” pollution source. The citizens contend that the power plant should be considered a larger air pollution emitter and be subject to more stringent regulations.

But the citizen groups are also seeking the release of the confidential information. The secrecy makes it “impossible for the public to review, check, verify, or understand these emissions calculations,” the groups stated in their appeal.

What happened at the first air board hearing?

While protesters stood outside the building during the November hearing, the Air Quality Board considered the citizen groups’ request for access to information WVDEP withheld from the permit application.

Fundamental Data has cited trade secrets as the reason for omitting sections of their application. And, according to the state agency, the company has met the state’s business confidentiality standard. 

“The agency is required by state law to evaluate those claims, and the WVDEP conducted a full legal and technical review before determining which materials met the criteria,” said DEP spokesperson Terry Fletcher. 

The agency also made sure that any information needed to determine emissions was publicly available through nonconfidential alternatives, Fletcher added.

The company, through the protective order, has agreed to share a portion of the redacted information with Mike Becher, the attorney representing the citizens, and Dr. Ranajit Sahu, their expert witness. But the redacted information will remain concealed from the public. 

While the citizens made progress in getting access to the hidden information, the board threw out two of the 17 issues raised by the citizen groups.  

The seven-member panel granted WVDEP’s request to dismiss the groups’ complaints that the agency didn’t consider air emissions from other sources like truck traffic and that the project is meant to power a data center complex.  

The board refused to throw out the groups’ challenge to the project’s “minor” pollution source designation out of hand. That issue, which the state agency raised in its motion, will be taken up during the next hearing. 

What’s next?

Starting on Dec. 3, the air board will hear testimony on the merits of the citizens’ appeal. 

The parties will call witnesses to testify on the matter. The WVDEP said they will make the engineers who were involved with drafting, reviewing and issuing the air permit available to testify. The citizen groups say they have an expert to review the calculations in the permit. The company’s attorney said that they don’t plan to call any witnesses but will cross examine witnesses. 

Why does this matter?

As developers propose — and political leaders back — large data center complexes in Tucker, Mason and Mingo counties, those communities have grown frustrated about the lack of transparency. 

And that frustration has also spread to other West Virginians.

“There’s just very little information out there. It’s almost like it’s a done deal before people even find out about it,” said Charleston resident Norma Heim, who joined the rally at the WVDEP building. “I feel like the people should have had and should still have a voice in this.”

So far, all the air permit applications submitted to the WVDEP for such projects have been heavily blacked out, hiding information from the public, and communities have struggled to get information to address their concerns. 

Earlier this year, Gov. Patrick Morrisey asked the Legislature to pass HB 2014 to encourage data center projects. That bill, which passed into law, also stripped away local communities’ ability to restrict noise, lighting, or land use from such projects. Now, this appeals process is one of the few avenues left to challenge these projects. 

Drew Galang, a spokesperson for Morrisey, called the legislation “transformative” allowing West Virginia to “attract the industries of tomorrow.” He also said that the bill is designed to benefit the entire state. The tax revenue will go toward infrastructure improvements, essential services, future economic development investments and lowering the income tax, Galang added. 

Despite not living in Tucker County, the prospect of a data center complex being built between Davis and Thomas is personal for Heim. Like generations of West Virginians, she grew up visiting the Canaan Valley and Blackwater Falls each year. 

“It’s part of our blood,” said Heim. “There’s so few places like West Virginia that are just special, that have the kind of resources and beauty. And I just feel like this is just taking us down a road we don’t want to go.” 

Citizen groups challenge secrecy and pollution concerns in Tucker County data center air permit decision appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

When Makeesha Munro and her partner Travis Jones started their farm in Collins, Missouri, they didn’t expect to be traveling across the state to sell the culinary mushrooms they grow. 

Jones was semiretired and looking for a way to leverage their property for additional income. One night, they decided to dive into farming mushrooms. After a few late-night online purchases, Root 54 Farm was up and running. 

They made some mistakes along the way. But with the help of a now-defunded program from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, they spend almost 15 hours a week traveling to various farmers markets and selling to other buyers in Sedalia, Joplin and Springfield. 

“Owning a business is overwhelming,” Jones said. “Farming is overwhelming. When the two come together, it’s super overwhelming. So we are really grateful to people who help.” 

The Heartland Regional Food Business Center was a part of a Biden administration program aimed at increasing the resilience of local food systems following the COVID-19 pandemic. The program aimed to help small and midsized farms with things like market access and technical assistance to help them grow and maintain their businesses.

But under Trump administration budget cuts, USDA terminated the program. 

Now, its leaders are figuring out how to move forward under a new moniker — the Heartland Regional Food Business Coalition — and without the millions of dollars in federal funding once used to support their work. 

The program reimbursed farmers for big purchases and helped make connections between farmers and potential buyers. Jones and Munro were never selected for monetary support, but the connections they made helped their business take off. 

“We met a lot of the people we needed to meet,” Jones said. 

What’s next for the regional food business centers? 

Heartland was one of a handful regional food business centers established by the USDA. It officially launched in 2023 to help farmers across Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma and some Arkansas counties. 

The group was slated to get $25 million in funding over four years. But it only made one round of grants to farmers before the rest of the funding was rescinded this summer. 

In the only round of grant funding under USDA, Heartland provided nearly $4 million in financial assistance to 90 farmers after receiving nearly 500 applications from across the region. 

Heartland was preparing for the second round of Business Builder grants — nearly $9 million in funding — and expected over 1,000 farmers to apply. Instead, it got word that federal funds may be pulled. 

The group and its farmers ended up waiting six months to see if that money would actually be paid out. 

One farmer was a sunflower producer who was looking for funds to upgrade his packaging process. 

“He was ready and poised to expand his market this year,” said Katie Nixon, who currently shepherds the coalition through New Growth, a rural community development corporation in El Dorado Springs, Missouri. 

Because the funding comes as reimbursements, farmers had to make the upgrades before they could see any of the money. 

“You’re paralyzed — you’ve gotten this grant and they say, ‘If you spend the money, you’re not going to get reimbursed,’” Nixon said. “So do you say, ‘Well forget it, I’m just going to go my own way and lose $50,000, or do you wait?’” 

Along with programs like Local Food for Schools, which was also eliminated earlier this year, the federal initiative was part of a larger effort to promote local food systems across the country. 

“They took the conditions of the region and really focused to amplify that to provide an unmet demand from the rest of the nation,” said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “They were investing in scaling very regional specialized products.” 

Support from the regional centers across the country resulted in more than 2,600 new partnerships between farmers and buyers, a June 2024 USDA brief said. 

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The June data also showed the program taking off. Farmers were starting to report improved processing, distribution, storage and aggregation of regional food products as a result of the support from their regional centers under the initiative. 

Part of the reason for the success is because the money was there to actually keep people involved in the conversation. There are so many demands on small farmers, Nixon said. Without the possibility of some financial support, it can be difficult to prioritize where to spend your time. 

“This just helped (relationships) become stronger and more formalized, because you had money to help keep people at the table,” Nixon said. 

“We know that a lot of food and farm businesses came to us for technical assistance because they saw the Business Builder opportunity,” Nixon said. “So having that funding to be able to offer really gets people motivated.” 

Only a small portion of federal farm support goes to producers of specialty crops, which includes produce like fruits and vegetables or nursery crops, Quigley said. 

In the 1970s, the U.S. was a net exporter of those specialty crops. By the mid-1990s, it became a net importer. Still, in 2020 speciality crops contributed nearly $54 billion to U.S. agriculture’s $363 billion in cash receipts, USDA data from 2022 show. 

“We have plenty of land and the way that our food system is organized right now, with commodity crops — most of those are grown specifically to send somewhere else to export,” Nixon said. “What if even just a sliver of that energy was actually to domesticate real food products?” 

For smaller farmers, having dedicated support for funding and market access could make a huge difference in their success. 

Heartland hosts monthly new farmer calls and connects farmers with established mentors to help them grow their specialty crop. 

“They were connecting these farmers who might not have immediately known how to get connected to a distributor,” Quigley said. “I think a farmer could figure it out, but it might take them two full years, potentially three different growing seasons … to figure it out.” 

From July 2023 to June 2024, the centers nationwide formalized more than 250 partnerships for their farmers. In the last six months of 2024, they finalized 466. 

They were trying to reach the farmers who traditionally don’t receive USDA loans, Nixon said. 

Nixon and her colleagues are looking for sources to make up for some of the lost USDA funding. But what exactly that will mean is still unclear. 

“Local food is not easy,” Nixon said. “We’re trying to make it easier.” 

How to build out a regional food system 

Part of the difficulty in building up more regional food systems comes from connecting farmers to wholesale buyers who need large quantities of produce. 

That was some of what the regional centers were aiming to address. 

“In some cases, they connected small farmers to an aggregator, or someone who brokered purchases, then they were able to aggregate them, buy from all these small farmers and then sell to a single buyer,” Quigley said. 

That structure could help incentivize larger purchasers like food banks, states or school districts to buy more local food. 

Because of the control wholesale grocery suppliers have over those markets, it can be more difficult for businesses to stray away from what has become the mainstream model for buying food. 

Quigley pointed to agreements the USDA has with states that let states take a more hands-on approach to local food purchasing. 

“That brings those contracts down from a national scale or a 12-state scale, down to a single-state scale,” Quigley said. “It allows for a greater number of farmers and businesses to be able to successfully bid on those contracts. They don’t have to have a distribution network to serve 12 states, they can just serve a single state.” 

A 2020 local food marketing survey found that the number of farms selling locally produced food fell by 12% nationwide from 2015 to 2020. 

Still, Missouri is seeing some growth when it comes to produce farmers. The 2022 Census of Agriculture in Missouri found that the number of farms working in greenhouse, nursery and floriculture production had grown to 485 in 2022, up from 348 in 2017. 

In 2021, more than 90% of the farms selling food directly to consumers were considered small farms. 

“When you buy from somebody local, your money stays local,” Munro said. “When you’re in the local food business, you really get to know people, and we really do support each other. It’s part of what I love, it is a community.” 

The post The USDA defunded a program aimed at helping small farmers. What’s next for the Missouri farmers who relied on it? appeared first on The Beacon.

A newly reorganized N.D. Interagency Council on Homelessness could have an early crisis on its hands because of significant changes to federal homelessness funding. 

A Nov. 13 directive issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) signaled a funding shift away from long-term permanent housing solutions toward shelters and transitional housing. 

For the YWCA of Cass-Clay, which assists women and children suffering homelessness – often because they were victims of abuse, the loss of federal funding could be drastic for some of its housing programs. 

The YWCA received HUD grants issued through the state’s Continuum of Care (COC) arm annually since 1989. It currently has three – one transitional housing, one permanent and one specifically focused on domestic violence. 

YWCA CEO Erin Prochnow said 45 of the organization’s 97 housing units are at risk of being lost because of the funding priority shift and the grant uncertainty going forward. 

“I believe that this will make some folks homeless again,” Prochnow said. 

Timing has also changed for applying for grants and disbursement, with a Dec. 12 deadline to submit to the state COC, which will then apply to HUD. 

This rushed timeline has created some anxiety about when funding that is eventually disbursed will actually come in.

“On the first of January, I don’t know if I have a transitional housing program,” Prochnow said. “The first of March, I don’t know if I have a permanent supportive housing program.” 

Besides those 97 units, the YWCA also offers emergency shelter for an average of around 350 women and children every day, she said. 

Currently, around seven grants, both federal and non-federal, help fund the various YWCA programs, she said. 

“We, collectively as service providers, know what works and have demonstrated we know what works,” Prochnow said. “There’s just not enough funding to go around to meet the growing demand, and our community locally in Fargo-Moorhead has grown.” 

Jennifer Henderson, director of community housing and grants management at N.D. Housing Finance Agency (NDHFA), said since the HUD directive just came out, they are still trying to get a better understanding of the funding situation and the timelines. 

“It’s going to be a significant change,” said Henderson, the new chair of the homelessness council. “We do anticipate that when all of the dust settles, we’re going to have some organizations who have been recipients who may not have funding. (Then the question is) how do we fill those gaps with other resources, if we can.” 

Henderson said North Dakota usually has a higher percentage of funding coming from HUD through the COC that goes to permanent housing, so “funding may look different this next year,” she said. 

Hope for a fresh start 

Despite the looming challenges, those working with people experiencing homelessness hope bringing back the statewide council could lead to more momentum for tackling the challenge. 

Gov. Kelly Armstrong reestablished the Interagency Council on Homelessness on Nov. 14. The council will be tasked with recommending “strategies to wipe out homelessness and prevent its underlying causes,” according to the executive order. 

“Homelessness is such a complex issue that state, local and private entities should not address it independently,” Henderson said. 

“That’s ultimately the goal of the council, to coordinate state policy, to ensure there are good working relationships between state agencies and our homeless providers, and come at homelessness with a unified, coordinated response,” Henderson said. 

The council was previously established in 2004 and started creating a 10-year plan for addressing homelessness. After developing the plan, the council lost momentum between 2018 and 2021, and was never reauthorized during Gov. Doug Burgum’s final years in office. 

“We see an incredible opportunity to align strategies across the state,” Chandler Esslinger, executive director of Fargo-Moorhead Coalition to End Homelessness and board chair of the N.D. Coalition for Homeless People. 

“Across the state, we’re continuing to see an increase in homelessness,” she said. 

Esslinger said the situation stabilized a bit during the pandemic, particularly as funding for things like rental assistance trickled down to the states, but the state is now back to a “cliff” which  developed prior to the pandemic and is moving toward a “crisis.” 

Sister Kathleen Atkinson, executive director of the low-barrier Ministry on the Margins in Bismarck, which offers homeless people a safe place to shelter nightly, said she’s excited about the work a renewed council could achieve. 

“In a state like North Dakota, homelessness is going to need to be addressed from the state,” Atkinson said. “I’m very much a supporter of help and guidance from the state in a regional way.” 

Jena Gullo, executive director at Missouri Slope Areawide United Way in Bismarck which runs a shelter, said she’s hopeful now that the council has been reorganized. 

“I feel it will be very action-oriented,” Gullo said, while leading around 40 people on a mile-walk through Bismarck Nov. 18, tracking the route many homeless people take on the city’s southside. 

“I’m hopeful that the interagency council, not just in Bismarck, but throughout rural communities in western North Dakota, will be able to get some funding to be able to do what we know works,” Gullo said. 

One issue Gullo currently faces is her shelter no longer has the funding to be open around the clock – something it’s not been able to do since March.

With colder weather looming, and no other shelters open in the daytime in Bismarck, the homeless population has to roam. 

“When we’re open 24/7, we know that 80% of the people we serve don’t return to homelessness,” Gullo said. 

Bismarck-Burleigh Public Health is in the process of creating a community triage program that would provide for a more coordinated response to homelessness in the capital than is currently available. 

A complex, growing issue 

From last October through September, over 6,500 people either experienced homelessness or were assisted by prevention programs or rapid re-housing statewide, according to the N.D. Homeless Management Information System.

More than 3,800 people experienced homelessness in North Dakota and more than 2,400 used emergency shelters across the state. The overall numbers have grown by around 100 over the past year.

 Eviction rates also appear to be rising. According to the Legal Services Corporation’s eviction tracker, Cass County had the highest number of evictions at 32 in the most recent data available. 

Williams County had the highest rate of filings in June, with nearly 6 of every 100 renter households reporting an eviction. 

From 2020 to 2024, evictions rose in North Dakota, from around 1,700 to over 2,500 per year, according to a state of housing report by NDHFA.

Cass, Burleigh, Ward and Williams counties accounted for 71% of all evictions. 

Eviction judgments on tenant credit reports often lead to difficulty securing housing and in some cases can lead to a downward spiral of housing insecurity, employment and health issues. 

A new state law passed in March gives tenants the right to seal eviction records, but only after all judgments are satisfied and only seven years after a case. 

A severe shortage of affordable rental units statewide exacerbates these issues. Home costs have risen by around 19% in North Dakota since 2020, and rental rates are around 39% higher, according to data from Zillow. 

“Some of the answer to homelessness is simply having available housing, and housing that is affordable and attainable,” Henderson said. “Really, it means having enough housing available that everybody has an opportunity to access it.” 

The LSC reports 38.4% of renters in the state are “rent burdened,” meaning more than 30% of a household’s gross income goes toward housing costs, including rent and utilities. 

“It just says a lot about the levels of precarity about people’s housing situations, and there’s no county in North Dakota that’s not touched by eviction or housing instability,” Esslinger said. 

North Dakota renters were able to utilize federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan funding through the N.D. Rent Help program run by the Department of Health and Human Services, but this has now expired. 

The program helped cover rent costs, rent arrears, utilities and other expenses, with $149 million distributed to renters in the state between October 2022 and August 2025. 

One major change the YWCA has seen in recent months is an increasing number of elderly women seeking shelter at their facilities, Prochnow said. 

The average age of clients is usually around 32, typically a mother with a child or two, she said. 

“In the last week of October, we had seven women aged 57 and older, several of them in their 80s, seeking service, because they couldn’t make do any longer on their fixed incomes and had nowhere else to go,” Prochnow said. 

She said YWCA services aren’t designed for being an emergency shelter for people in cognitive decline or with advanced medical or functional needs. 

“What I see happening is that the YWCA and organizations like ours are the safety net that families have when the rest of the world turns away,” Prochnow said. “If you deplete that safety net, what happens? I think that’s the question our communities need to solve.” 

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Thousands of Alaskans who rely on the federal marketplace for health insurance are experiencing sticker shock as they apply for coverage for the coming year. That’s because key health care subsidies that have helped millions of Americans afford their insurance are set to expire.

As Congress continues debating whether or not to extend the tax credits, some Juneau residents are growing increasingly worried about how sharp premium hikes will hit their wallets, and their access to life-saving health care.

David Elrod books performers for the Crystal Saloon in Downtown Juneau. He’s worked in bars for nearly 20 years, and he’s never had a bar job that offered health insurance. Right now, he pays about $60 a month for a basic plan through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

When he went to apply for his 2026 plan, he got quite a shock. The number on the screen said $1,030 a month. 

“It was pretty scary to see,” Elrod said. “And that’s not even including dental, which I’m obviously going to skip this year.” 

He said the plan still had a $2,500 deductible — the amount he would have to pay each year before insurance kicks in.

“This is not like a Cadillac health insurance plan,” he said. 

He isn’t the only one seeing a massive jump in their premium payments. Federal subsidies that keep plans in the health care marketplace affordable are set to expire if Congress doesn’t act to extend them by the end of the year. In fact, the question of whether or not to extend the subsidies was the fundamental debate behind the recent, record-breaking government shutdown. 

The state estimates that 27,000 Alaskans buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act. KFF Health News reports that nationwide, enrollees who benefit from federal subsidies will see monthly payments increase on average by 114% if federal subsidies disappear. But Alaskans could see much higher jumps. 

The Alaska Beacon reported earlier this fall that the average monthly insurance payment for Juneau residents using federal insurance will rise from $124 to more than $1000 if the subsidies expire – likely causing some to opt out of insurance

For Elrod though, going without insurance isn’t a good option. 

He has a condition that requires expensive medication to prevent blood clots from forming.

“If I don’t take this medication, yeah, blood clots will come back. They will kill me,” he said. “I’m gonna try to cut back to one pill a day instead of two pills a day. You know, it’s like, those are the decisions that I’m having to make right now.”

For people in Juneau struggling to afford the health care they need, Heidi Adams says she and her team may be able to help. Adams is a care navigator with JAMHI Health & Wellness.

“Everyone’s situation is so very different, and so by coming in, we can assist them with connecting,” she said. “But also if we can’t meet those needs, who might be able to in a way that’s affordable or easily accessible.” 

JAMHI is a health nonprofit in Juneau. It provides primary care services and behavioral health treatment, regardless of insurance. With Alaska having some of the highest health care costs in the nation, care is often already out of reach for many Juneau residents. 

Now, with subsidies potentially ending and upcoming restrictions to Medicaid, Adams said she thinks the nonprofit will see an increase in people seeking medical care.

“We can assume we’re going to see a much larger population coming in because they can’t afford it any other way,” she said.

Randy Garcia also works at JAMHI. He assists in the intake process and supports medical providers.

He said JAMHI is a safety net for moments like this, when nothing else feels like an option. 

“It’s a scary moment, especially when things that are expected are being taken away or stopped, and you don’t know where to turn,” he said. “Well, you can always turn to JAMHI.” 

Open enrollment on the federal marketplace lasts until Jan. 15. For coverage that begins with the new year, the deadline is even sooner – on Dec. 15. 

In the meantime, Elrod said he’s waiting as long as he can to finish his application, in the hopes that something changes. 

Correction: This story has been updated to correct that the Beacon reported that federal insurance will rise from $124 to more than $1000 if the subsidies expire.