MENDOCINO CO., CA., 2/21/25 — Even with a microphone, Redwood Coast Seniors Executive Director Jill Rexrode would have had trouble getting her message heard over the cacophony of the daily lunch. Every table in Fort Bragg’s senior center dining room was filled. Lunchers enjoyed meatloaf, green salad, potatoes, and veggies. Volunteers and staff bussed carts burgeoning with cold and hot drinks and desserts. Everywhere the delicious aromas, storytelling, laughter, and clinking of crockery created a din that partly drowned out the piano player in the front. Rexrode needed to talk to the crowd and ask them to write letters and make phone calls about looming cuts to federal funding of these lunches, so she got the piano player to take a break and stood next to the American flag with a microphone and called for attention. Some went silent.

“I really need to talk to you to get your help in getting the Older Americans Act renewed,” Rexrode said. She asked those enjoying the meatloaf, the most popular lunch every week, to take a brochure provided at the door and write and call “all of those” on a long list of politicians and nonprofit groups. She asked the roomful to each send the message to get Congress to return funding used nationwide for senior nutrition.

“Please do this so we can continue to provide our lunches and Meals on Wheels here,” Rexrode said.

A looming federal funding crisis for the Area Agency on Aging of Lake & Mendocino Counties (AAA) could upend the budgets of all the senior centers in Lake County and three in Mendocino County, but only Fort Bragg’s Redwood Coast Seniors has chosen to make a fuss after the AAA alerted all its client senior centers that trouble was brewing.

Redwood Coast Seniors got $268,000 in federal money last year through AAA, Rexrode said. This provides much of the cost of one of the county’s largest Meals on Wheels and senior center dining programs.

Willits and Ukiah senior centers don’t get the federal feeding funds but are dealing with a separate issue, cuts to their outreach programs by Mendocino County. All the senior centers said the current uncertainty and talk of federal cuts is taxing an already thin line in two counties with poverty rates about 20 percent above the statewide average.

The noisy brouhaha coming from the Mendocino Coast has involved dozens of people calling a long list of state, local, federal and elderly activist groups. The call content shows up on local radio, news sites, billboards and social media, but pretty much only in Fort Bragg. The AAA says it’s a problem that does need action and has gotten local political help in fixing it. But many of those being called say they can’t fix the problem in the way callers from Fort Bragg are asking.

Understanding the problem that created the activism involves untangling a Gordian knot of partisan politics. Rexrode, like Alexander the Great, cut to the point instead.

“All of that is moot right now. We don’t want ‘he said, she said.’ Who gives a flip about that at this point? The point is we have to work together to renew the Older Americans Act, or thousands of seniors will go hungry.”

Zo Abell, on the Redwood Coast Seniors board at the senior center put it like this: “Support has always been and remains bi-partisan.”

While no payments have stopped yet, a little fix right now could prevent a crash by March, Rexrode said.

Omission of Older Americans Act funds

A December federal budget showdown led to a continuing resolution in place of approving a new budget. The Senate’s version of the continuing resolution included a funded Older Americans Act (OAA). But the version that passed the U.S. House of Representatives failed to include the OAA. There is widespread partisan debate about who is to blame for the omission or exclusion but for now, funding continues to flow based on the old budget.

There has also been some misinformation that President Donald Trump caused the problem when in fact it happened in December, while Joe Biden was still president.

Yet whoever is to blame, the intentional or unintentional omission has created a situation where an appropriation that could have been put to bed for five years now is vulnerable to a new federal budget where Trump and both houses of Congress will have to sign off.

The approach being pushed in Fort Bragg might not be the solution, other advocates for seniors say.

When advocacy groups and representatives on the list provided to seniors and the community in Fort Bragg were contacted they said the funding was continuing to flow at last year’s levels. While they praised Rexrode for bringing the matter to light, they did not feel there was any action that could be taken outside the continuing budget process.

Redwood Coast Seniors prepared 55,000 meals last year, served to seniors in the lunchroom or the grab-and-go program or Meals on Wheels. The Anderson Valley Senior Center serves lunch two days a week. Coastal Seniors in Point Arena  also gets federal funds through the Area Agency on Aging for Mendocino and Lake Counties.

Senior centers in Willits and Ukiah do not get the federal funds and are thus not impacted.

Ukiah Senior Center Executive Director Liz Dorsey said the Meals on Wheels program there is conducted by Plowshares, a Ukiah nonprofit that serves the homeless. Dorsey said Ukiah serves about 6,000 lunches per year.

“A large part of the problem is the fear of what might or might not happen. Senior centers are not funded as well as maybe they should be,” Dorsey said.

“We have always operated with uncertainty. But with these fears that people are experiencing right now, with everything in our society in flux, those who have been so generous in the past are potentially less likely to donate. Today I talked to about six or eight businesses, and across the board, I’m hearing ‘I am being slammed right now with donation requests.’”

Richard Baker, executive director of the Willits Senior Center said they serve about 21,000 meals per year, half in hall and drive up and half Meals on Wheels.

“Every senior center is run differently. We have a thrift store that generates probably about $330,000 a year. So right now, we have not had to reach out and seek federal funding,” Baker said.

“I could have applied for AAA funds and probably got money there. But why do that when other agencies depend on that money? It’s a pool of money, and if we get into it the pool has less to offer the others,” Baker said.

While Trump may not have created the current crisis, he has advocated for across-the-board cuts to social services, including recommending a cut of 25 percent to food stamp programs. The directors say all of this has added much anxiety to those overseeing thin budgets.

The Mendocino County senior centers all also face county cuts in the $25,000-$50,000 range to outreach programs. Those cuts came during the county’s budget process and will take effect July 1. The directors said they were working to raise that money but faced headwinds of uncertainty.

Lake County Social Services Director Rachael Dillman Parsons described what happened that led to this in a presentation to the board last week. The AAA is integrated into Lake County’s social services department, and all five Lake County senior centers depend on the imperiled federal funding for their meal programs.

California’s population made it one of the youngest states in the 1970 census, but the average age has been getting older since.

And the population is aging quickly in Mendocino and Lake Counties.

Census figures show that in 2022, 23.9 percent of Lake County’s population was 65 and older, up from 17.8 percent in 2010 In 2022; 24.6 percent of Mendocino County’s population was 65 and older in 2022, up from 15.5 percent in 2010, census figures show.

The post Federal budget turmoil prompts calls to action at Fort Bragg’s senior center appeared first on The Mendocino Voice | Mendocino County, CA.

SARATOGA—”Chaos.”

That was the single word a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee landed on to describe what life and work have been like at the Saratoga National Fish Hatchery since an offer for “deferred resignation” landed in his and thousands of other Wyoming residents’ inboxes in early February.

One of the facilities that has enabled the federally endangered Wyoming toad to stave off extinction, the 110-year-old hatchery was already in a period of transition before the chaos set in. Its supervisory biologist, Lee Bender, had recently retired, so a newcomer took the lead rearing hordes of rainbow, brown and other types of trout bound for lakes in the Wind River River Indian Reservation and fishing ponds outside of Cheyenne’s F.E. Warren Air Force Base to entertain angling airmen.

The transition meant the new supervisor was in a “probationary” employment status with the federal government. Like an untold number of other Wyoming residents, the Saratoga hatchery’s supervisor became another casualty of the Trump administration’s embrace of billionaire Elon Musk’s aggressive downsizing initiative spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known by its acronym DOGE. It’s an effort to rapidly streamline the federal government through layoffs of tens of thousands of employees everywhere from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the National Park Service.

Within some Republican Party circles the purge has been celebrated, complete with chainsaw-wielding viral moments. Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis lauded Musk’s work in a speech at the statehouse on the same day that a wave of federal employees in Equality State lost their jobs.

But on the ground in Wyoming, the indiscriminate firings look like a Bridger-Teton National Forest staffer losing his post-retirement health insurance plan and, in Saratoga, a fish hatchery supervisor packing up and bidding new colleagues goodbye just two weeks into a new job and life in Carbon County.

“I feel sorry for him,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee in Saratoga said.

The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity, which WyoFile granted because of the potential for retribution.

Keeping the hatchery afloat

WyoFile visited the facility on Thursday, investigating a tip that the hatchery was losing its entire staff because of the federal government workforce turmoil. Multiple requests for information to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional office in the Denver metro area yielded no responses. After the reporting trip, a public affairs officer from that office reached out and asked for written questions, but no responses were received by the time this story was published.

Right now, two staffers and an intern are still trying to maintain the 120-acre Saratoga National Fish Hatchery site, which includes 10 buildings that house thousands of trout of various age classes in addition to a breeding facility for the imperiled Wyoming toad.

“We’re keeping things going, you know,” the Fish and Wildlife Service employee said. “Just trying to do the bare minimum to keep things going.”

Being fully staffed at times in the past has meant up to four full-time workers plus another part-timer. It’s unclear how long the Saratoga hatchery’s two remaining employees will last. One of them accepted Musk’s “Fork in the Road”-branded “deferred resignation” offer, which promised pay and benefits through the end of September in exchange for walking away from the job. As of last week, the employee still hadn’t received word on whether the government had accepted their resignation — and when they’d be totally done.

As many as 8,100 Wyoming residents — the state’s entire federal workforce — received the offer. It’s unclear if the Saratoga National Fish Hatchery’s other remaining employee took the deal, or is leaving for another reason.

“I think he did, but I really don’t know,” the Fish and Wildlife Service employee said.

Another federal worker who was on site Thursday at the Saratoga National Fish Hatchery declined an interview for this story.

Even if the other person stays on, running the hatchery with a single staffer assisted by an intern would be a great challenge, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service employee who did consent to an interview.

“They’re going to have to start taking shortcuts, and they’re going to have to start making decisions,” the worker said. “I don’t think it’s going to impact things right away, like fish stocking. But it’s hard to say.”

Steep losses

The turmoil and unintended consequences that Musk’s hastily launched DOGE is inflicting upon Wyoming cuts across agencies charged with stewarding land, water and wildlife spread across a state that’s nearly half owned and administered by the federal government.

“Clearly this direction is coming from somebody who doesn’t understand how government works,” said a different federal employee in Wyoming who’s employed by the U.S. Forest Service. “People [employees] are frustrated, dismayed, about the continual attacks.”

WyoFile agreed to grant the source anonymity.

Over the weekend, Musk threatened federal workers in Wyoming and nationwide would lose their jobs if they didn’t respond to an email demanding they list in bullet-point format five things they accomplished last week. Employees were given until the end of Monday to comply.

Wyoming’s federal government employees, the Forest Service staffer said, are “very concerned about losing public land and what that means for everybody: our permittees, people who recreate on the forest [and] everyone who gets products from the forest.”

Muzzled by the Trump administration’s leadership, federal agencies have not disclosed job-loss figures and are responding to media inquiries and questions with copy-and-pasted statements. But job losses within some agencies are setting up to be steep.

The 3.4-million-acre Bridger-Teton National Forest, which manages a land area roughly the size of Connecticut, has been forced to shed over 40 of its full-time staff, according to a Forest Service employee familiar with the losses. That’s just the latest blow to a federal land manager that’s watched its budget, staffing and infrastructure erode for more than a decade.

“People [employees] are frustrated, dismayed, about the continual attacks.”

U.S. Forest Service staffer

Some ranger districts within Wyoming’s seven national forests have been hit harder than others, and many have sustained losses that will inhibit their ability to function effectively and accomplish tasks like OK’ing permits.

In Saratoga, the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest’s Brush Creek/Hayden Ranger District oversees the Sierra Madre Range and west side of the Snowy Range. The district, which is staffed by a dozen or so non-fire staff, lost three or four full-time employees, including a wildlife biologist and a recreation specialist, according to a different U.S. Forest Service employee familiar with the cuts.

Economic consequences

The losses of federal jobs in the Carbon County town could reverberate economically. A Saratoga timber mill that’s dependent on Medicine-Bow commercial logging could have less cut timber to process because Musk’s effort has pushed out Forest Service staffers needed to OK sales under federal law.

“People from wildlife need to sign off on [a sale], for example,” the federal government employee familiar with the Medicine-Bow cuts said. “We can’t sell a timber sale or put it out to bid until we get those surveys done.”

Across the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — which manages the Saratoga hatchery — approximately 370 employees were terminated during the initial thrust of layoffs, according to the National Wildlife Refuge Association.

“Losing this many dedicated employees all at once is an especially devastating blow to conservation efforts nationwide and an intentional dismantling of science,” Association President and CEO Desirée Sorenson-Groves said in a statement. “The National Wildlife Refuge System was already underfunded and understaffed. The people being fired today are the backbone of wildlife protection in this country.”

The Trump administration’s pick to helm the Fish and Wildlife Service, who will have to make do with the thinner workforce, is a Wyomingite: Brian Nesvik, the recently retired Wyoming Game and Fish Department director. To date, his former colleagues at Game and Fish have not been called in to assist with keeping the lights on and the fish alive at the Saratoga hatchery — but they’ll be at the ready, if it comes to it.

“I think that our folks, we’d help out any way we could if it becomes necessary,” Wyoming Game and Fish Department Fisheries Chief Alan Osterland told WyoFile. “The hatchery has been a part of that community for a long time, and hopefully it’ll stay that way.”

Angus M. Thuermer, Jr. contributed to this story.

The post Trump cuts may cost a trout-brooding, Wyoming toad-rearing federal hatchery its entire staff appeared first on WyoFile .

Jourdan Bennett-Begaye
ICT

WASHINGTON — It’s official: Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan is running for the U.S. Senate.

Flanagan announced her decision and officially launched her campaign on social media on Thursday, Feb. 20, one week after indicating her interest to run when current Sen. Tina Smith said she would not seek reelection.

The lieutenant governor wrote in her formal announcement Thursday that a Native woman has never won a U.S. Senate seat.

“I believe we can change that,” she said.

Flanagan, White Earth Nation, is currently the highest-ranking Native woman in an executive office across the country.

“Growing up, my family relied on government assistance programs like Section 8 and free and reduced lunch — even though my mom worked full-time in healthcare,” Flanagan said in the statement.

“My lived experience has informed my belief that we should wrap our arms around our neighbors in need,” she said. “That’s why on the school board, in the state house, and as lieutenant governor, I’ve championed kitchen-table issues like raising the minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, and free school meals.”

Democrat Paulette Jordan, Coeur d’Alene, gave a try at becoming the first Native American woman as a U.S. Senator in 2020 when she ran against incumbent Jim Risch, Republican, in Idaho. She was unsuccessful.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee, is the second Native American man to serve in the U.S. Senate. Former Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Northern Cheyenne, served two terms after becoming the first Native American to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

Related: Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan teases Senate run

Flanagan has served as the state’s 50th lieutenant governor alongside Gov. Tim Walz since 2019. She helped create the Minnesota Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office, a first for the country.

Many others are considering running for the seat, including Democrats Walz, U.S. Rep Ilhan Omar, and U.S. Rep. Angie Craig. According to Axios, Royce White and Adam Schwarze, both Republicans, are also expected to run.

If Flanagan won the seat, she would join a group of four Native American congressional members: Mullin; Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole, Chickasaw Nation; Kansas Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids, Ho‑Chunk; and Oklahoma Republican Rep. Josh Brecheen, Choctaw.

Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, kicked off her run for New Mexico’s Governor on Feb. 11, noting that she would be the first Native American woman governor in the nation as well if elected.

Both the Minnesota and New Mexico gubernatorial elections are Nov. 3, 2026.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ICT special interview with Peggy Flanagan

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Washed out bridges, soggy sofas, and ruined ductwork: these are just a sampling of the kinds of damage that flood survivors need to thoroughly document to support a government application for financial aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Local county and city governments around the state are urging residents on social media to report any damages from extreme weather and flooding.

Whitney Bailey is the disaster response project director with AppalReD — a legal aid group in eastern Kentucky. She said survivors should take photos and, if possible, create an inventory of damaged items. For appliances and electronics, it may even be helpful to log models and serial numbers.

The documentation should extend to any infrastructure on private property too.

“Start taking pictures, if you haven’t yet, of any bridges, culverts, landslides, mudslides, anything around your home. Gravel roads also,” Bailey said. “You can start making repairs but, just make sure you take photos of everything so you have proof of the before and after. And absolutely hold on to every single receipt.”

In the meantime, Kentuckians will need to wait for FEMA to approve the state’s application for individual assistance programs to repair houses and items destroyed by flood waters. Governor Andy Beshear said it submitted the application on Tuesday for 10 eastern Kentucky counties to receive that aid.

If that aid is approved, it could green light immediate grants of more than $700 for survivors and nearly $44,000 for household repairs and replacement of damaged property. Households have 18 months to apply and appeal these financial awards, but can appeal as many times as needed.

Meanwhile, news outlets are reporting that many FEMA staff were fired the same weekend that disaster struck and more firings could come. President Donald Trump has posted on social media recently that FEMA should be “terminated” and offhandedly proposed the same while touring disaster-stricken areas. He has indicated he wants local governments and states to pay for more of the recovery costs.

Trump has approved an emergency declaration to assist Kentucky’s response, but that aid is limited to immediate emergency response and is capped at $5 million. It’s unclear how he might respond to Kentucky’s request for individual assistance programs, which have individual award limits, but typically have no overall limit to local governments.

” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”A packed Capitol rotunda in Helena, Montana, for the February 19 Rally for Public Lands” title=”A packed Capitol rotunda in Helena, Montana, for the February 19 Rally for Public Lands” />The U.S. Constitution gives citizens the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” As a blizzard of public lands change sweeps out of Washington, D.C., activists around Greater Yellowstone ponder tactics to help them keep what they hold dear.

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A group of migrant agricultural workers who were sprayed with pesticides while working in a central Illinois cornfield in 2019 reached a confidential settlement late last month with Corteva and its subsidiary, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, ending a three-year lawsuit with the seed giants. The case against the companies that owned and operated the aircrafts that sprayed the workers is ongoing.

Lawyers for the workers said the companies violated the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act by:

• failing to provide them with facilities to wash off the chemicals after being sprayed,
• ordering the workers to go back into the fields still enveloped by the toxic compounds,
• lying to them about what had been sprayed,
• and by denying to pay for the workers hospital bills, despite carrying the legally required workers’ compensation coverage.

Attorneys for the migrants and their children sought compensation for damages and attorney fees, and claimed that the companies committed battery and assault.

Federal and state investigations, investigative reporting and public outrage around the case helped spur a change in the law that passed in June 2023 and increased penalties for applicators who expose humans to the harmful chemicals.

Sen. Karina Villa, a West Chicago Democrat who fought to pass the legislation for years in the state senate, said that it’s difficult for her not to get emotional about what happened to the workers. Villa said that both of her grandfathers were farmers and migrant workers, and she wanted to make sure such workers are protected in the state. She has been a member of the Senate Committee for Agriculture since 2021.

“I really wish I would have been a fly on the wall to know what that settlement was, but in my personal opinion, there’s nothing that can compensate for the blatant disregard for humanity that occurred,” she said.

On Aug. 5, 2019, approximately 95 workers were detasseling corn in a field in Santa Anna Township, operated by the agricultural seed and chemical company Corteva Agrisciences, when a plane flew overhead, dousing the workers in chemicals, according to court documents. It made a second pass, spraying the workers again only minutes later. Two weeks earlier, a similar incident had occurred when a helicopter dusted those same workers.

According to the lawsuit, the company “provided no emergency medical assistance, decontamination measures, or instructions to the workers about rinsing or washing themselves, and offered no transportation to a medical facility.” Several of the workers sought medical care at a nearby hospital, including a pregnant woman who was afraid she was miscarrying.

Some of the workers were not able to decontaminate and exposed their families and children to the pesticide, according to the complaint.

In a motion to U.S. District Judge Sue Myerscough, attorneys for the migrant workers wrote that each of the workers represented live and work outside of Illinois in multiple states. Many of the workers “do not have consistent or reliable access to the internet, making even remote participation for all Plaintiffs unfeasible,” according to the motion filed in April.

The judge took the request into consideration, including the cost of continuing the litigation, and on July 26, granted the confidential settlement agreement. A portion of the total amount of the settlement will be allocated to each of the plaintiffs based on many factors, including the severity of their injuries.

The plaintiffs’ claims against the owners and operators of the aircrafts, RAS Aviation LLC, Curless Flying Service Inc. and Farm Air Inc. remain active, according to the motion. Lawyers for the workers and their children declined to comment because of the ongoing litigation.

The aviation companies are also still embroiled in a separate lawsuit for the incident, brought by Illinois Attorney General Kawame Raoul through the Illinois Pollution Board, for violating the Illinois Environmental Protection Act. The attorney general’s office seeks to fine the companies $50,000 for each violation of the act.

Attorneys for RAS, Farm Air and Curless Flying Service, Inc. did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2020, the pesticide applicators were each fined $750 by the Department of Agriculture, the highest penalty at the time. Lawyers for the migrant workers and their children claimed in the lawsuit that the harms and damages from the incidents totaled more than $75,000 for each of the plaintiffs.

In a written statement to Investigate Midwest, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Agriculture said, “Corteva was the manager of the agricultural worker crews. The Department did not take any enforcement action against Corteva in the 2019 incidents, as they were not applying pesticides. In one of the instances, Corteva filed the initial complaint.”

A spokesperson for Corteva wrote in an emailed statement to Investigate Midwest, “We consistently denied in the lawsuit that the plaintiffs were sprayed with pesticides. That remains an issue in the case” and that “neither of (the aviation companies RAS Aviation or Curless) was working on our behalf when the plaintiffs claim to have been sprayed.”

Pioneer is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corteva, Inc., a publicly traded agricultural chemical and seed company. Corteva raked in $17 billion in sales in 2023 and operates fields throughout Illinois. Every summer, the companies employ migrant agricultural workers to detassel corn – a labor intensive process that can only be done by hand and typically lasts for two weeks to a month.

“The health and safety of our colleagues is our top priority,” the Corteva spokesperson wrote, “and we provide extensive training and resources to ensure they have the knowledge and equipment they need to be and stay safe.”

The post Corteva, Pioneer Hi-Bred settle lawsuit with farmworkers sprayed with pesticides appeared first on Investigate Midwest.