Letters to Santa first began regularly appearing in newspapers around the 1880s. Every December since then, newspapers across the nation have published children’s heartfelt letters as a celebration of the season. Wausau Pilot & Review is continuing that tradition this Christmas. By publishing these messages, we hope to spread joy by sharing the words of the children in our community, whose wishes and dreams are inspirational in themselves.

Writing letters to Santa is an age-old tradition. Children are encouraged to write their letters to Santa and send them to us. The newspaper will publish letters received in a special section on Dec. 24.

Teachers and schools are encouraged to send letters from students as well. For example, elementary schools throughout the country have taken the opportunity to teach students about letter-writing and then send each class’s letters for publication in local newspapers. Email editor@wausaupilotandreview.com for details.

Letters may be emailed to editor@wausaupilotandreview.com, entered in our online form or mailed to Santa in care of Wausau Pilot & Review, 500 N. Third St., Wausau, WI 54403. Please include the age of the child writing the letter. In order for letters to be published, we must receive them no later than 5 p.m. on Dec. 22. Handwritten letters may be scanned for publication purposes and artwork is encouraged – after all, children’s drawings are as much a delight as the letters themselves.

Fill out the form below to submit letters and artwork. Happy holidays to all!

A snowstorm that swept western Missouri last year left a patient waiting on critical medication they needed to ward off seizures.

That patient ended up in a hospital to deliver a dose of the drug.

Now, with an increasing number of rural residents relying on mail service to get their prescriptions — and the U.S. Postal Service set to cut some services to more remote areas — medical professionals worry about the consequences.

“What I’m concerned about from a rural health standpoint,” said Tessa Schnelle, the director of pharmacy at the Cass Regional Medical Center in Harrisonville, Missouri, “is some of the things that we even see now with mail order becoming more exacerbated.” 

The USPS didn’t meet its delivery goals in Missouri this year. Now, to save more than $3.5 billion a year, the Postal Service announced a “Regional Transportation Optimization” plan that would centralize service around regional hubs like Kansas City and St. Louis. 

Instead of twice-a-day pickup and drop-off at local post offices, the USPS is planning to reduce those services to once a day. 

The Postal Service says the plan could mean an additional day in transit for some mail. Medical professionals in Missouri say that slowing the mail could threaten the ability of their patients, particularly in rural areas, to get timely delivery of prescriptions that are critical to their health.

Postal Service officials promise that deliveries should still reach mailboxes within current delivery times. But after delays and spotty service, Missourians fret that things will get worse. 

Goals for delivery time lowered

The change in services comes as many Americans embrace mail-order prescriptions and as rural pharmacies close their doors. 

Between 2018 and 2023, retail pharmacies in rural communities decreased by nearly 6%, a study from the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis found. It’s a nationwide trend in rural and urban areas: pharmacies in urban areas declined by 3.4% over the same time. 

New 2025 delivery target information published by the Postal Service found that it fell short of its fiscal year 2024 delivery goals. The 2024 targets called for delivering a single piece of first-class mail within two days after it’s dropped in a collection box 93% of the time. Actual deliveries hit that mark 86.9% of the time. 

Now, the Postal Service lowered the targets to 87% for the budget year that started in October. 

In Missouri and Kansas, the percentage of mail that met the two-day first-class mail delivery goal fell to 85.9% in 2024 from 90.4% in 2023. 

“The Postal Service has … decided that the best way to achieve targets is to lower them,” Steve Hutkins, a retired English professor wrote on his Save the Post Office website. “Expect things to get worse before they get any better.” 

The Missouri Farm Bureau and U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley criticized the proposal, saying USPS is prioritizing urban customers over rural ones. 

How could the USPS plan impact patients? 

The slowdown and missed targets trouble Schnelle as she works to support her rural patients.

An additional day in processing medication could present challenges for patients whose insurance companies don’t refill medications before a certain time. That makes it less likely that a patient would be able to call in their prescription early if they are anticipating delays in the mail. 

“I don’t see it being a positive impact for patients,” Schnelle said. 

And worries persist that more medications might go bad if deliveries take longer. Many medications are sensitive to temperature changes that could make them less effective, Schnelle said. 

The Missouri Rural Health Association said it is too early to tell how much the plan may impact service, but the group’s executive director has concerns given service disruptions she’s seen over the past few years. 

“I’m not sure if this is necessarily the answer to make service delivery better,” said Heidi Lucas, the group’s executive director. (Lucas sits on The Beacon’s board of directors.) “If medication is lagging and not in a climate-controlled environment for a couple of days as it awaits delivery, that could be a massive problem.” 

USPS is currently making the case for the plan to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which doesn’t have total power to veto the changes. The commission is expected to release a nonbinding opinion on the plan in January. 

Most prescriptions delivered through the mail are sent first-class. A top Postal Service official told the commission in October that single-piece first-class mail would be slowed the most by the changes. That means that 68% of first-class mail volume in rural communities could see potentially slower services. 

The plan comes as USPS started to walk back some other consolidation proposals in September for Florida, California and Tennessee, which would have slashed some operations at local offices. 

That walkback was considered a win by the American Postal Workers Union, which criticized the “chaotic implementation of changes” to the USPS. 

The union said despite the reversal in California, Florida and Tennessee, it’s advocating for mail to be processed locally. 

“The union has consistently advocated that mail generated in a local area, for delivery in the local area, should stay and be processed and sorted in the local area,” the APWU wrote in a press release.  

The post Prescription delivery in Missouri faces delays under USPS rural service plan appeared first on The Beacon.

As a matter of routine last spring, University of Montana graduate student Erin Dozhier would settle into their home office on the north end of Missoula and prepare for a barrage of questions about houseplants and parrots. The queries came from public school kids hundreds of miles away, their worlds temporarily connected to Dozhier’s through a version of Zoom often utilized by therapists for virtual counseling. Usually, Dozhier would start with their most tried-and-true strategy for building rapport with young clients.

“Number one, if you want students to talk to you, ask them about their pets or show them your pet,” said Dozhier, whose parrot Alfie often made appearances in such sessions.

Dozhier is one of a growing number of students from UM’s social work, school counseling and mental health counseling programs who have delivered such services for K-12 children in Montana’s far-flung rural districts. What began as an experimental effort to address the mental health side of school safety has, over the past five years, evolved into a fixture both for the university’s Safe Schools Center and for the small schools it serves. Dubbed VAST — short for Virtually Assisted School Teams — the program now boasts six grad students and 22 participating districts stretching from the Bitterroot Valley to the North Dakota border.

The free counseling services VAST has made available to young Montanans highlight a growing focus among leaders across the state’s education continuum on student mental health. According to Montana’s latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 43% of responding high school students reported feeling sad or hopeless for two or more weeks in a row, and more than a quarter had seriously considered suicide — the highest annual rate since 1991. Educators often point to rising rates of youth anxiety and depression as a contributor to the steady decline in statewide academic performance, and for schools large and small, financial and hiring difficulties frequently stand in the way of providing robust mental health resources. Even outside the K-12 system, such support for students in Montana’s more rural communities may be dozens if not hundreds of miles away.

For program leader Tammy Tolleson Knee, who serves as school support liaison for  UM’s Safe Schools Center, the issues VAST was crafted to address have only become more pressing since the pandemic and speak to social and societal forces at work well beyond a school’s hallways. She told MTFP that as of this week, 53 K-12 students in Montana have been referred to the program for one-on-one counseling, with more than a dozen more referrals expected.

“One of the great hardships for families is just what’s happening with the economy,” Tolleson Knee said. “And when families are stressed, kids become stressed.”

Some districts, including in the northeast Montana town of Bainville, have been relying on VAST for years to meet the needs of their most vulnerable students. Other districts such as the Broadus Public Schools have only recently joined the program but are already reporting an impact. Broadus school counselor Dori Phillips told Montana Free Press that in the two months since the district formalized its participation, she’s already referred six students to one-on-one tele-counseling through VAST.

“I don’t know where I would be without the help with those particular kiddos,” Phillips said.

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When Dan Lee first envisioned the VAST program in 2019, he saw tele-counseling as the preventative prong in a larger effort to address student safety. As then-head of UM’s Safe Schools Center, Lee heard time and again from educators that shortages of mental health professionals in rural communities posed a significant hurdle to getting children the help they needed before their personal struggles reached a critical level. The challenge, Lee told MTFP, was in developing an initiative that didn’t reinforce misconceptions — tied to school shootings — about mental health as a public safety concern.

“One of the concerns we had was we can’t criminalize mental health,” said Lee, now the dean of UM’s College of Education, which houses the campus’ various counseling programs as well as the Safe Schools Center. “We can’t say if you are depressed, you are a threat. You can’t do that. When you’re depressed, it doesn’t mean you’re a threat to anybody. So we didn’t like the idea of classifying mental illness as a threat to schools because it’s not.”

VAST, which kicked off during the 2020-21 academic year with two participating schools, fit neatly into a collection of services Lee and his cohorts developed for Montana schools, providing a compassion-centric therapeutic tool to complement the center’s more site-specific threat assessments, staff training and its 24/7 school safety hotline. At the same time, Lee said, the initiative began giving UM students greater access to the clinical hours needed to obtain their degrees and licenses, hours that can be difficult to get.

“We can’t say if you are depressed, you are a threat. You can’t do that. When you’re depressed, it doesn’t mean you’re a threat to anybody.”

Dan Lee, dean of UM’s College of Education

In the years since, VAST has increasingly filled a void in rural communities with participating schools. Tolleson Knee recalled the story of one student who had previously received counseling in a community an hour away from home, until the family’s finances could no longer sustain the costs of travel and treatment. Her colleague, Safe Schools Center Director Emily Sallee, added that even if families are able to sustain private mental health services, outside professionals may not be effective at coordinating with in-school staff. By comparison, VAST relies on teachers and school counselors — the latter a state-mandated position in public schools — to coordinate with UM-side practitioners and keep them informed about any developments in a student’s life that may go unseen or unacknowledged in a tele-counseling session.

“There’s this huge wraparound piece that’s often missing when kids are accessing counseling outside of schools,” Sallee said, “and it’s a huge part of how all these people can be supporting this kiddo, not just the counselor.”

For Deborah Ith, the team-centered aspect of the program has been an important facet of her VAST experience this fall. A doctoral student in UM’s school psychology program, Ith currently has three teenage students in rural schools that she meets with remotely at least once a week via a paid, HIPAA-compliant version of Zoom. Their struggles have primarily been interpersonal ones, Ith said, and on a couple of occasions have risen to the level that Ith has reached out to the school counselor and parents to develop a group plan of support.

“Sometimes that means trying to support parents because that’s really scary,” Ith continued. “When you’re a parent and you have somebody call you up and be like, ‘Hey, this came up, this is going on, you need to know about it, this is what we talked about as a way to support and this is what you can do to support them,’ that’s really hard to hear sometimes.”

Even as VAST participants continue to provide such day-to-day services for a growing collection of rural schools, Tolleson Knee is identifying opportunities to expand the program’s offerings even further. She told MTFP that starting this spring, the Safe Schools Center plans to try out a hybrid version of VAST in one Bitterroot Valley school that will include a monthly in-person counseling session for students on top of three monthly tele-counseling sessions.

The University of Montana isn’t alone in recognizing the challenges rural schools face in providing adequate mental health support for their students. The nonprofit Montana Small Schools Alliance has developed its own 24/7 crisis support app, which mental health resources director Cindy Fouhy said has so far been accessed by more than 20,000 students across the state. In addition, the alliance — in partnership with the Montana Professional Learning Collaborative — has developed a free tele-counseling model of its own. Like VAST, the focus is primarily on Montana’s smallest and most resource-starved schools where dedicated one-on-one intervention simply isn’t available.

“You go to these small schools and they may not even have a certified counselor,” Fouhy said. “If they do, he or she is also teaching classes and doing 500 other things.”

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The factors that make mental health support in rural communities so difficult can also fuel the very stressors that necessitate such support in the first place. Consider Broadus, a town of fewer than 500 people anchored to the vast prairie of southeastern Montana. The local K-12 school boasts a student population of roughly 225, some of whom travel up to 70 miles one way to attend Power River County’s sole high school. According to data from the Office of Public Instruction, more than a third of the student population is classified as economically disadvantaged.

Politics, drought, alcohol use — there are a lot of issues influencing local families, said Broadus school counselor Dori Phillips, and those pressures “trickle to our students.” Professional help is more than 80 miles away in every direction. Stress and geographic isolation are exacerbated by a persistent social stigma around seeking mental health treatment, one that Phillips has struggled, family by individual family, to overcome.

“Getting our families to commit to taking their kids for help is almost impossible in many cases,” Phillips said. “I have very few students on my caseload. I think there’s three total that actually travel out of town to get help.”

Broadus Public Schools used to offer more robust mental health services for students through the state-sponsored Comprehensive School and Community Treatment program, or CSCT. But the district’s access dried up about two years ago following legislative changes to how services were administered, and the availability of a part-time school psychologist has largely served during emergencies or as a backup on days when Phillips isn’t working. So when Phillips heard of VAST in a statewide association email, she instantly saw the prospect of free, in-school tele-counseling as a carrot for local families.

“I can work with kids on friendship issues, I can help kids if they’re having trouble managing homework or learning organizational skills, those types of things,” said Phillips, whose school counseling license is distinct from the licenses granted to clinical therapists. “But when you have a family who deals with the loss of a parent or a caregiver, you have a family who goes through even a nasty divorce or a child who has a lot of trauma from their early years, those are things that they really need a private counselor for. Someone who’s licensed and knows how to work with kids.”

In just two months, the number of Broadus students receiving tele-counseling services through VAST has grown to six, and Phillips said she’s working to connect three more students with the program.

“Getting our families to commit to taking their kids for help is almost impossible in many cases.”

Dori Phillips, Broadus school counselor 

A few hundred miles to the north, Bainville school counselor Amy Iversen said the number of students she’s referred to VAST has grown from two students in 2022 to seven last school year. She described the ag-and-oil community as similarly small, with 172 students across all grades, and similarly isolated, with the closest larger population center lying across the state line in Williston, North Dakota. For Iversen, UM’s program came along at a critical time for several students who showed signs of behavioral issues or depression and whose families lacked the resources for private counseling.

“They can come in and talk to me about it, but then you know what? They’re going to see me again in class in two days and they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, crap, is she going to say something?’” Iversen said. “They probably don’t want me to know all their secrets. I’ve got kids in the school, some of them are friends with my own kids. It’s awkward for them, so when you’re in a small school, it helps with that confidentiality.”

In some cases, parents have commented to Iversen on a noticeable difference in their child’s confidence, self-esteem or coping skills as a result of ongoing therapy. And while school-based counseling has its limits — like the services provided by traditional school counselors, VAST is not offered during the summer break — Iversen hopes the mental health skills students glean during the school year can see them through the off months.

“That’s better than not getting anything,” Iversen said.

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Dozhier, the UM grad student, didn’t have to look much farther than their own childhood in a small Oregon timber town to understand the issues facing the young Montana clients they counseled last spring. Kids are smarter and more observant than people think, Dozhier said, which means when pressures like joblessness, food insecurity or substance abuse weigh on a household, children pick up on it. They may act out or isolate themselves, sometimes without knowing why, and the last thing such a student can focus on is learning.

“Their thinking brains are off,” Dozhier said.

Dozhier’s parrot Alfie may help break the ice, but helping a child navigate issues they may not fully understand requires more than just talking about pets and plants. In sessions with VAST, Dozhier said they primarily utilize a style of counseling called play therapy, allowing a student to play freely with whatever toys they choose. Their actions may give the counselor some subtle insight into what’s going on in their lives, Dozhier said. Fighting between toys could, for example, be indicative of difficult relationships with siblings or other family members and help guide a counselor’s questions.

“Even though it looks like play, we find that pertinent themes come up in play, even without specifically saying, ‘Hey, how’s your relationship with your brother?’” Dozhier said. “It’s almost like watching a theater play that doesn’t have a lot of words and kind of using that to draw conclusions.”

Ith’s work with older students this fall has also underscored the added stress coming to age in a smaller community can place on a 21st-century teen. She acknowledges that the rural nature of the schools she serves through VAST can help reinforce a sense of support, giving some students an awareness that others around them recognize the experiences they’re going through. But it’s a “double-edged sword,” she said, one that can make it difficult to find new peer groups or move past incidents of bullying. 

At the Montana Small Schools Alliance, Fouhy notes that social media and technology can exacerbate such issues in ways older generations may not fully understand.

“The kids can’t get away from stressors,” Fouhy said. “In the 80s, kids could go home and if they had to fight at school, they wouldn’t have to worry about it again ’til Monday. But now it just goes on and on, and the conflict and the stress that’s just in their pocket is significant.”

Remote delivery of the one-on-one services that can help students process such situations does pose challenges, and leaders at VAST are quick to note that the program isn’t a solution for budgetary shortfalls or hiring challenges. Dozhier and Ith both credit the effectiveness of their work to individuals in the communities they’ve served — school counselors, teachers, parents. Tele-counseling initiatives haven’t sought to replace those voices but rather to create oases in Montana’s rural desert of outside mental health services, and Tolleson Knee has heard from past participants that the anonymity of therapy was a key motivator.

“When you do live in those small communities, it’s just so hard to be objective,” Tolleson Knee said. “I heard students and family saying it was so nice to know we weren’t going to like have this intense session where we’re talking about really personal stuff and then run into [the counselor] in the grocery store.”

The experience of meeting such a need fits well with Dozhier’s long-term professional goal of returning to rural Oregon as a counselor, and they are slated to return to the VAST cohort of practitioners-in-training this spring as it branches into in-person service. But while the program is great at doing what it’s doing, Dozhier recognizes even private counseling has its limits. A few sessions with a therapist won’t erase the issues that arise for a child when, say, a parent is overworked, stretched thin and struggling just to put food on the table. When it comes to improving mental health, Dozhier said, the challenge is far more systematic than one school, one university or one counselor can handle alone.

“The answer to all of this kid’s woes is maybe not counseling for a year,” Dozhier said. “The answer maybe to so many of these woes would be to reduce stress on the family, and that’s something that our systems aren’t set up to do.”

The post University of Montana program tackles counseling shortage in rural schools throughout the state appeared first on Montana Free Press.

North Atlantic right whale calving season began with a calf sighting off South Carolina Nov. 24.

The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.

Lucia McCallum is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

The faint smell of incense and a familiar scene of narrow aisles stocked with local food greet visitors to the Plainfield Co-op. The single 1,200-square-foot room in Plainfield village boasts a wood-paneled ceiling and can be thoroughly perused in minutes.

“It feels like a trip to the 1970s,” co-op board secretary Andy Robinson said.

Unsurprisingly, the storefront can be traced back to 1978 when early co-op members purchased the space — partly inspired by the back-to-the-land movement of the time. The business has been there ever since. 

But the old building has been showing its age. Now a recent move to address that reality has changed the trajectory of both the co-op’s future and that of another prominent local business: Plainfield Hardware. 

Co-op members voted by a 156–34 margin in June to purchase and relocate to the significantly larger 2,500-square-foot hardware store on Route 2 in East Montpelier, Robinson said, about 2 miles away. The store was up for sale, and in August the co-op bought it for about $2 million. The purchase included the business of the store and will see a merger of its workforce with existing co-op staff, said Robinson. 

The change comes at what seems to be a significant time for co-operative businesses in the region as another food co-op within a 30-minute driving radius, the Buffalo Mountain Co-op in Hardwick, has undergone significant changes. It moved in 2022 from a spot of comparable size to Plainfield’s to the building of the former Hardwick Village Market on Mill Street. Further back in time, in 2008, the Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier went through its own expansion.

Robinson said matters of necessity rather than preference drove Plainfield members’ relocation votes.

“It’s an old building, it’s cramped, it’s in a fairly inaccessible location,” he said, “and given the size and the amount of product you can put on the shelves and many other things, it has struggled to be profitable.”  

Angie Domino, who has worked for the co-op since 2010 and is currently its chief buyer, cited forces beyond the village to blame. She said the pandemic and the closing of Goddard College dealt blows to business. 

“Goddard College used to have a big part of the liveliness of this area,” she said. “When it was full, there were new students coming in with fresh energy, fresh ideas. They were shopping at the little shops.”

Robinson said the board first began looking for future locations two years ago, partly inspired by other co-ops expanding. A federal grant of about $30,000, handled by the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, paid for a chart of options for the co-op.

One option would have been to renovate — a solution that promised a setback in 2027 when the town plans to reconstruct Main Street. Somewhere during the process, Robinson said the hardware store came up for sale. The projected cost of buying the business, which includes a greenhouse and a deli, was $2.15 million.

Starting this past spring the co-op raised $475,000 in gifts and member loans, then received about $1.4 million from lenders. The co-op sealed the deal Aug. 7.

“I think we are part of a larger movement,” he said.

He said the Plainfield Co-op hopes to diversify inventory in a way that echoes Hardwick’s Buffalo Mountain Co-op, which expanded its inventory of more conventional products when it moved. Though the Plainfield Co-op hasn’t begun to sell products in the new location and doesn’t have a finalized date for its full opening, its leaders want to switch from a 70% to 30% ratio of organic to conventional products to a 60% to 40% balance. 

The ratio “will evolve based upon what members and customers actually purchase,” said Robinson.

Matt Cropp, executive director of Vermont Employee Ownership Center, said the Plainfield Co-op came into being in the ’60s largely because community demands for organic and health-focused foods. He compared the co-op’s current transition to Burlington’s City Market’s decision to move downtown and add more conventional products to its inventory in 2000. 

“When they moved downtown, the agreement they had with the city was that they would also stock conventional foods to sort of be able to be a grocery store that was more serving the needs of the whole city, not a subgroup of the city,” he said.

Transitions like those come with tradeoffs, Cropp said. The same goes for adding more co-op members, he said, which the Plainfield outfit is hoping to do with scaling up. 

“When you have an organization that has 10,000 members, right, and a board with like nine people, most people aren’t going to have personal knowledge of most of the board members,” he said. “And so there’s kind of a different relationship there, a bit more alienated and requires more intentional approaches to governance and community building, versus a smaller co-op that can kind of ride on the coattails of existing community social capital.”

Melissa Bounty, executive director of the Central Vermont Economic Development Corporation, worked with the Plainfield Co-op board on the move, which was one of the organization’s priority projects this year. She agreed there are tradeoffs when co-ops expand. 

“The higher that number (of active members) goes, the better increase of capacity and support and services you would have,” she said. “You also do have more complexity to manage, and I can see how that could create problems.” 

Robinson said the co-op board is looking into transportation arrangements to help locals get to the new store.

Some members such as Domino, the chief buyer, worry what leaving will mean for the vitality of the village, even while recognizing the co-op can’t thrive there anymore. 

Domino has lived in Plainfield on and off throughout her life and said she’s always felt a strong sense of community cultivated by local stores such as the co-op. In recent years she’s seen many of those businesses shutter, such as the River Run restaurant in 2011 and Red Store filling station not long after.

“What will happen if the co-op also closes and leaves the village?” she asked. “What will be left here?”

Robinson said he feels some of the same emotions, but he is also optimistic the new location can maintain the co-op’s values and provide an all-in-one shopping experience.

“I’m okay and happy with the move, and I have some nostalgia. This is not binary,” he said. “You can have both of those things going on at the same time, right?”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Plainfield Co-op balances nostalgia and growth with planned expansion .

A commercial chicken flock in northeastern Oklahoma has been culled after testing positive for the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus.

Almost half of Texas counties have nowhere to get prenatal care, let alone deliver a baby. This plan offers legislative proposals to shore up what’s left.

On Nov. 20, the Biden administration released a list of proposals for long-term management of the Colorado River. The river, which provides water to 40 million people across seven Western states, 30 tribes and parts of Mexico, is in crisis. Climate change, drought and overuse have depleted its flow by 20% since 2000. After months of stalled negotiations among the Colorado River Basin states over how to address the chronic water shortages, the federal Bureau of Reclamation has now released four alternatives for managing the Colorado River.

It’s unclear how the states will respond to the proposals, despite dire warnings that climate change will further stress the already overtaxed water supply. Meanwhile, there is uncertainty over whether or how the incoming Trump administration will impact negotiations.

The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — have long clashed with the Lower Basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — over who should bear the brunt of future cutbacks from the beleaguered river. After failing to reach an agreement earlier this year, the Upper and Lower Basin states filed two competing proposals for the river’s long-term management to the federal government. Despite their current legal obligation to send a certain amount of water downstream, the Upper Basin states argue that they should be able to send less, while the Lower Basin states, which use much more water than their Upper Basin neighbors, contend that any cuts should be shared more evenly across the region during times of scarcity. Meanwhile, the Colorado River Basin tribes, which have historically never received their fair share of water, and conservation organizations have also submitted their own proposals for consideration.

The ongoing conflict has sparked fears that the states will end up embroiled in litigation after the current agreement expires.

The current crisis came to a head in 2022, when water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropped so low that they threatened hydropower generation. In response, the states adopted a short-term agreement to cut water use and raise the reservoirs’ water levels in 2023. But those rules expire in December 2026.

The Bureau of Reclamation was hoping that the states would come to an agreement over how to share the river’s dwindling water supply long before that deadline, but so far, negotiations have been mired in gridlock. The ongoing conflict has sparked fears that the states will end up embroiled in litigation after the current agreement expires.

Here’s what you need to know about the latest proposals, and what might come next:

Reclamation’s four alternatives were light on the details.

The proposals provide little advice about how, exactly, to divvy up the water; the agency says they are merely intended to provide “a path forward” for negotiations.

The first option focuses on what federal agencies can do in the absence of an agreement among the states to protect “critical infrastructure.” Shortages would be determined by the elevations of Lakes Powell and Mead, which serve as holding tanks for the Upper and Lower basins, respectively. Cuts would be distributed based on the region’s arcane water rights system, in which older rights take priority. The second “hybrid” proposal combines the first one with comments from tribes and other stakeholders. The third, which incorporates comments from environmental organizations, suggests that Lower Basin cuts should be triggered by water levels in reservoirs as well as factors like rain, snowmelt, and river and groundwater flows across the basin, rather than concentrating solely on Mead and Powell. The fourth is a hybrid of the proposals submitted by states, tribes and conservation organizations, with multiple options regarding which entities would bear cuts  

Notably, the Biden administration did not include in their entirety either of the proposals from the Upper and Lower Basin states. “Clearly, Reclamation is laying out options that have a compromise built in, or incentive for compromise,” said Edith Zagona, research professor of water resources engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The proposals are broad, and experts caution against reading too much into them. Many more details about how the cuts will be determined and shared still need to be hashed out. “It’s hard to know where this is going,” said Mark Squillace, a natural resources law professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

So far, water managers are remaining relatively tight-lipped about what they think of the alternatives.

In a press briefing after the alternatives were released, Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the primary negotiator for Arizona, said that the various proposals had some really positive elements. At the same time, however, he said he was “disappointed that Reclamation chose to create alternatives, rather than to model the Lower Basin states’ alternative in its entirety.”

Similarly, Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s water commissioner and negotiator for Colorado, said in a statement that her state “cannot speak directly to the contents of Reclamation’s matrix of potential alternatives at this time,” but remains firmly committed to the Upper Basin states’ alternative.

The Biden administration will analyze the proposals and craft a draft environmental impact statement, which it plans to release later this year.

Uncertainty remains about how the Trump administration will impact Colorado River talks.

Negotiators have expressed optimism that the process will continue as planned under the incoming administration. Historically, the federal government has relied on the states to come to an agreement, and new administrations have had little impact on negotiations. Shrinking water supplies are not a partisan issue, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director for the National Audubon Society, adding, “The fact of the matter is there’s less water in the Colorado River.”

But the Trump administration could still have an impact on the Colorado River’s future. It could refuse to advance Biden’s proposals, for example. Donald Trump has not only threatened to gut federal agencies, he’s also talked about revoking Inflation Reduction Act funding, which has paid for conservation initiatives and water-saving incentives in the Lower Basin. “That funding helped ward off the acute crisis that the Colorado River faced in 2022,” Pitt said. What will happen if it ends is anyone’s guess.

Multiple recent studies have found that climate change is bringing the Colorado River to a tipping point.

A study released last month, which modeled the drought vulnerability of Colorado’s Western Slope river basins, concluded that the Colorado River may soon reach a grim milestone: There will not be enough precipitation, full stop, to keep Lake Powell full. Other recent studies have found that future drought in the Colorado River Basin may be worse than previously anticipated and much harder to recover from.

Meanwhile, conservation organizations feel they cannot implement strategies to conserve water and restore habitats effectively until the seven states come to an agreement. Ultimately, to avoid jumping from climate change-fueled crisis to crisis, the states need come to an agreement for how to divvy up the water — and they need to do it sooner rather than later, Pitt said. “We’re stuck at the cusp of a crisis and a big fight.”

The post The Biden administration weighs in on Colorado River management appeared first on High Country News.

The fertilizer was promoted as an environmental win-win for years. An untold number of farmers and ranchers across Texas have spread it on their land.

Russell Marinari, 23, graduated from the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine in May and is now   working as third mate on Deepwater Titan, an offshore drillship in the Gulf of Mexico. Marinari works three weeks on and then has three weeks off. 

“I summered in Boothbay and knew I wanted to work on the water,” he said. “I have a full-time salary and I only work 50 percent of the year. I think that’s pretty cool.”

The excitement of working at sea for months and exploring new places has long attracted people to nautical careers.

But a number of factors, including the pandemic, have left the United States with a marked shortage of merchant mariners, who largely work on commercial ships that at times transport weaponry and supplies to the U.S. military, provide disaster relief and support international trade.

Thomas Lord, a 1987 Maine Maritime Academy graduate and now executive vice president of Seiden Krieger Associates, said the shortage of mariners has been a major topic of discussion recently, and that many mariners have postponed retirement so the true magnitude of the situation has yet to be felt.

“The crisis is with the mariners, the shipboard folks,” said Lord. “They are raising the alarm that we need more mariners.”

A 2021 report from the Baltic and International Maritime Council and the International Chamber of Shipping described a shortage of around 26,000 officers certified to work on ships in international waters and predicted it would triple by 2026.  

The report forecast that there would be a need for an additional 89,510 officers by 2026 to operate the world’s merchant fleet. BIMCO said there were at the time 1.89 million seafarers operating over 74,000 vessels around the globe.

Ann Phillips, a retired Navy rear admiral who heads the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration, told a Congressional committee last year that the mariner shortage was exacerbated by COVID-19 but has been a problem for several years.

During the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of mariners were stranded at sea during the peak of the crisis, with many ports refusing to allow crew ashore. Some were at sea for 20 months, according to reporting by The Washington Post, even as demand for their services skyrocketed.

Ninety percent of the world’s goods move by sea, a figure that became glaringly evident during the pandemic, as containers stacked up in ports, waiting to meet insatiable consumer demand.

Phillips cited a 2017 study that found the U.S. did not have enough mariners with unlimited tonnage credentials to sustain a full activation of the Ready Reserve Force, which has around 50 vessels and supports the deployment of U.S military forces worldwide. The study found a deficit of 1,839 mariners. 

“This optimistic scenario assumed that all qualified mariners would be both available and willing to sail as needed,” she said.

Recruitment efforts 

Roland Rexha is secretary treasurer of the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association, a union that dates back to 1875 and represents U.S. Coast Guard licensed officers in foreign and domestic trade.

He said the shortage has become acute since the pandemic. To appeal to new recruits, he said, the industry needs to offer higher wages, internet access onboard, better food and a schedule that makes it possible to raise a family.

“If we don’t have enough people, it then becomes an issue with our supply for our sailors and our soldiers,” Rexha said. “It would be catastrophic. We deliver tanks, helicopters, ‘bullets and beans,’ as they say.”

George Tricker, vice president for contracts and contract enforcement for Seafarers International Union, said his group has an active recruiting effort and is streamlining its application process.

“As an industry, we have to make ourselves more visible,” he said. ”Back in the day you were on ships that stayed in port for several days so that you could sightsee. Now you are in and out of the port so quickly. It’s less of an adventure and more of a job.”

Zach York, 23, graduated from Maine Maritime Academy last spring and spent the summer working for a ferry company part-time and joined a union in August. He shipped out in late September as third mate on Major Richard Winters, a cargo ship.

York, who is from Sewell, N.J., said going out to sea ran in his family, noting that his dad attended the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point and he has been racing sailboats since he was six. 

“It’s a big learning curve,” he said of his new job. “It’s not a training ship. It’s not the same culture. You’re learning a lot every day and trying to put the pieces together, as they say.”

Each job comes with its own contract. York had the option of a 60-day posting or a 120-day posting and opted for the longer one because it will allow him to be home for 115 days.

Industry shifts

Craig Johnson, interim president of the Maine Maritime Academy, graduated from the academy 30 years ago and sailed with the Merchant Marine for seven years before coming ashore.

Johnson said the academy does its best to give students a taste of life at sea. During their four years at the school, they go on three 75-day training cruises — two on an academy vessel and one on a commercial ship.

He said the industry knows it has to make life better for mariners, starting with connectivity, noting that most ships now have Starlink satellite internet. Not long ago he was on a training vessel and received an alert that his son’s blood sugar was low. His son was miles away, yet Johnson was able to address the issue immediately. This is a big change from before. 

“When you went out to sea, you were very disconnected from the world,” Johnson said. “Thirty years ago you lined up at a payphone with 20 other sailors to make calls. In the Nineties came the cell phone that you could use when in port. But now you can do your business at any time.”

He is a member of a working group looking at the mariner shortage and said it’s clear the issue is no longer simply about wages, but amenities.

“This shortage of qualified mariners is something I have never seen before,” Johnson said. “It’s a defense crisis for us too. This is a huge problem worldwide.”

Johnson said at the end of the day, one has to have stamina to work at sea.

“You’re working seven days a week, 12 hours a day. You’re really on call all the time. That’s why people on shore love the mariners,” he said. “They are problem solvers. You can’t call AAA when you’re out at sea. You have to solve problems in real time.”