In early August, Vice President Kamala Harris and her newly selected running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, swept through the Southwest, holding massive rallies in Phoenix and Las Vegas and energizing Democratic voters just before the party’s national convention, which concluded yesterday. Now, as the official Democratic presidential ticket, they need the staunch support of a few key voting blocs in Arizona and Nevada, crucial swing states that will help determine the outcome of the November election.

Christian Solomon, Nevada state director for the nonprofit Rise Free, which works with college-age voters, described the diverse, ecstatic crowds at Harris and Walz’s rallies. “Everybody’s life is just kind of exploding with this,” he told High Country News.

Arizona and Nevada are now reliably purple states, in part due to the influx of Democratic voters to metropolitan regions over the last decade. President Joe Biden, who stepped down as the Democratic candidate late last month, narrowly won both states in 2020, but recent polls suggested that he was losing support in his attempt at re-election, especially following a poor debate performance against former President Donald Trump. Ever since Harris stepped up, she has reinvigorated major demographics in the party’s base — including women and minorities — and she’s making noticeable inroads among independents.  

“Everybody’s life is just kind of exploding with this.”

Recent polls from the research firm Focaldata and the New York Times/Siena College are showing Harris with a slight edge over Trump. Her gains in western swing states are at least partially attributable to her choice of her running mate. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who had also been under consideration, would have been more recognizable to Arizona voters, but Walz has shown a surprising ability to generate support among young people and independents.

Last year, voters who do not identity with a political party outnumbered Democrats and Republicans in both Arizona and Nevada. In Nevada, their numbers have risen consistently for more than a decade, aided in part by the state’s new automatic registration system. In Arizona, nearly half of voters under 30 are now registered as independent.

Thom Reilly, professor and co-director of the Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy at Arizona State University, said that independent voters are notoriously difficult to predict, but that they do tend to favor new candidates over incumbents. Nationally, they seem to switch every so often: In 2016, Trump’s success among independents helped vault him to the White House, but Biden recovered enough of their votes to win in 2020. This year, independents were trending toward Trump again until Harris reset the map. As of this month, she is polling nine points ahead of Trump among non-party-affiliated voters.

In general, voters crave economic policies that directly affect their quality of life, an area where Walz’s record is particularly strong. As governor, he has locked in policies for free school meals, child tax credits and increased labor protections for gig workers.

He also appeals directly to independents who are disillusioned by the polarized party system, according to Sondra Cosgrove, a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada and executive director of the civic engagement nonprofit Vote Nevada. Walz authorized the expansion of ranked-choice voting across Minnesota, a type of electoral reform that increased voter turnout in the Twin Cities. By allowing for some expansion without enforcing it statewide, Cosgrove said, Walz signaled a spirit of pragmatism and compromise. “I’m hoping that this is going to be a Tim Walz moment, where he can say, ‘I hear you. Let’s work on this. Let’s figure out,’” she added.

As for Harris, she has secured support from critical groups, such as the endorsement of Nevada’s powerful Culinary Local 226, a union that represents service industry workers in Las Vegas. She is polling well among women in both Arizona and Nevada, driven in part by her strong support of reproductive rights. As vice president, she has made multiple trips to Nevada, touting the importance of gun control in the wake of the University of Nevada Las Vegas shooting last year. She has also regained some of Biden’s 2020 support among Latino voters, who comprise a quarter of Arizonans and one-fifth of Nevadans.

Trump still has significant support in the Copper and Silver states. Many Arizona residents want to see tougher action on immigration, and the former president has made securing the border one of his top issues, while repeatedly criticizing Harris on this front. As vice president, she supported President Biden’s mission to address the root causes of immigration by working with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. While instances of illegal crossings from the three countries has decreased, they increased overall under Biden, until the administration’s recent cap on asylum. Harris has defended her record with the more recent policy, which border officials say reduced crossings over the summer.

Most polls have Trump and Harris essentially tied, and neither can be certain of the support of independent voters. Reilly, from Arizona State, noted that two-thirds of registered independents in Arizona failed to vote in 2020. This year, the voters he surveyed in June said they were more likely to turn out for down-ballot issues like abortion or water conservation than on behalf of either party. Still, it’s impossible to discount the dramatic shift in favor of Harris.

Nancy Gomez, 64, a retired administrator at Arizona State, came away from the Vice President’s Phoenix rally impressed at the energy generated by Harris and Walz. She supports the Biden administration’s policies generally, but this election, for her, is about leaving behind the last nine years of Trump. “People are tired of being angry at each other,” Gomez said, “There’s a level of excitement that I haven’t seen in a long, long time.”

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On any given day between April and September, dozens of wildfires are burning throughout the West. More than 4,700 fires have already scorched California this year, burning nearly 30 times the acreage that was charred over the same period last year. The Park Fire — now the fifth-largest fire in the state’s history — has destroyed more than 821 structures and forced residents of four counties to evacuate. 

After more than a decade of increasing risk, many residents of fire-prone areas are well aware of the need to make evacuation plans and clear defensible space around their homes. Some residents are stepping up to fill gaps in regional fire protection. Still, many fire prevention and mitigation strategies can only be addressed by local government. 

Just as individuals vary widely in their approach to wildfire preparedness, so too do community leaders. How do you know that your county or municipality is taking effective measures? 

While the answer depends on the area’s level of fire risk, among other factors, there are certain steps that can help strengthen wildfire defense. We asked three experts working in or alongside local governments about essential, advanced and ideal wildfire-preparedness strategies for Western communities. 

Essential preparedness

Publish a wildfire action plan. In May, Oregon’s Wasco County received a $5.9 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service, the largest in the state so far this year, to conduct multiple mitigation projects, including targeted tree removal and community education. It’s a feat that community development director Kelly Howsley-Glover said would not have been possible without the county’s community wildfire action plan, which aggregates information on local risk reduction efforts, updating a previous version from 2005.

“Plans translate into grants,” she said, because they demonstrate that local agencies are already working together to identify their most urgent needs. This year, Wasco County’s priorities include finalizing a study on vegetation near roads, which can contribute to fires, and adopting new standards for building with nonflammable materials. 

Establish an active dialogue with community members. Both Wasco’s community wildfire action plan and its natural hazards mitigation plan sought public feedback through surveys, which informed how the county prioritized its goals. Over time, the county bridged the communication gap between firefighters and the local farming community, encouraging the latter to play an active role in containing this year’s fire in Larch Creek. 

Build relationships among agencies. Tuolumne County, which sits north of Yosemite National Park, is 75% public land. To effectively reduce the buildup of fallen trees and shrubs, which fuel fires, county leaders must work with the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. When county officials realized that they were competing for the same state and federal grants as the Forest Service and other agencies, they decided to host annual meetings among county, state, tribal and federal agencies to streamline their efforts and set shared priorities.

“We have very high fire-severity zones,” said Dore Bietz, assistant director of Tuolumne’s Office of Emergency Services in. “In a rural community that is truly dependent upon finding grant-funded programs, (identifying areas of need) really allows us to work together as a team.”

Update fire safety standards. Detailed building and zoning codes can also ensure that every homeowner is prepared for fires. In Wasco County, these codes remind residents to make sure their driveways are wide enough for emergency vehicles, and, on longer private roads, to have enough turnouts for cars to pass one another safely. They also emphasize that homes need fuel breaks, including barriers of fire-resistant plants. Whether self-certified or externally enforced, standard codes can encourage property owners to act ahead of time and keep their fire agencies in mind. 

Advanced preparedness

Identify areas of greatest risk. The Forest Service and the Bozeman-based research group Headwaters Economics run a program called Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire, which provides fire expertise to local governments. Their study of Wasco County found that unused agricultural lands, previously believed to pose a low risk, had contributed significantly to recent fires when farmers applied no-till practices, leaving enough vegetation to allow wildfires to spread. 

Share data across jurisdictions. When the Tuolumne County team of federal and local officials began to apply for funding, they compiled all their land-use data into a single map that showed where fuels reduction was proposed or already occurring. The map eventually became a publicly accessible tool that is updated annually. It cost the county only a small amount beyond paid staff time, because each office had already collected its own data. 

Develop auxiliary measures for vulnerable communities. The storyboard also helped Tuolumne County secure a $10 million grant from the USDA to create defensible space around over 1,000 homes. These homes were identified as a priority because many of their owners were elderly or low-income and either could not carry out the manual labor or couldn’t afford to hire contractors. In Lost Valley near Eugene, a nonprofit connects young adults with older residents in need of mitigation efforts. 

Ideal preparedness 

Conduct an annual evacuation drill. In Benton County, Oregon, Carrie Berger, fire program manager at Oregon State University and a local Firewise coordinator, was one of the first to receive a text that her community-wide evacuation drill had begun. Despite working with local emergency services for months, she still felt her stomach flip. Then she and her family grabbed their bags, piled into the car and joined hundreds of neighbors participating in the voluntary drill. Five years and four drills later, Berger said she and her neighbors were able to overcome the anxiety by working through the first few steps of an evacuation. “Now,” she said, “I don’t feel uneasy about it. I just go.” 

Widen existing roads or build new evacuation routes. At the time of 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest wildfires in recent history, Paradise, California, had only six emergency exit routes. Some were blocked when cars broke down or fires swept through town. According to an investigation by USA Today and The Arizona Republic, hundreds of Western communities face similar vulnerabilities. 

New roads are costly, and they can harm habitat and wildlife. When designed to minimize impact and maximize access, however, they allow more emergency vehicles to get in and more people to get out when a fire approaches. 

Hire local workers for annual mitigation efforts. Bietz of Tuolumne County reflected that even with millions of dollars of state and federal grant money, opportunities for long-term mitigation are limited. Grants typically run out after five years, and the funding is often spent on contractors, who can charge steep prices for their work. With a longer funding horizon, the county could hire more full-time staff and develop training programs for seasonal fuels reduction or prescribed fire management, involving more residents in active mitigation. 

Creativity is the key to building resilience, Bietz said. “Everyone, if they do their part, from their little household to their community to their neighborhood to their county to their state, helps reduce all of that risk, which means we will survive what’s to come.” 

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Last fall, on a tour of his grain farm on Idaho’s rippling Camas Prairie, Bill Flory stood in a buzz-cut field of recently harvested wheat. A sturdy man with a whitening mustache, the 70-year-old farmer grows wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils and other rotating crops on land his great-grandfather first tilled in 1904 with a horse-drawn plow. Today, farm trucks haul the wheat about 40 miles to the Port of Lewiston, where it’s funneled onto barges. At peak harvest season, four wheat-filled barges a day leave the port and travel through the locks of eight dams — four on the Lower Snake River, four on the Columbia — on their 465-mile journey to the Port of Portland. There, the grain is loaded on ocean-going ships bound for international markets.

Soon, though, all that could change.

Scientists, tribes and environmentalists see removing the four Lower Snake River dams — a last resort, after decades of other options have failed — may be the best and only chance to prevent the extinction of salmon in the Pacific Northwest. But many local farmers and businesses rely on the dams, locks and reservoirs for transportation, irrigation, recreation and electricity, and they say they cannot afford to lose them.

“It would be like taking out the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. Sure, you could do it. But there’d be consequences.”

Flory isn’t necessarily opposed to dam removal, but he argues that it’s a lot more complicated than proponents suggest. As one of the stakeholders, he has been having tough conversations about transportation logistics and how they would have to change if the dams come down.

“It would be like taking out the 405 freeway in Los Angeles,” Flory said. “Sure, you could do it. But there’d be consequences.”

Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe, says dam removal is necessary to restore salmon, a species integral to the tribe’s diet, culture and economy for tens of thousands of years.

As part of the Treaty of 1855, the Nez Perce were promised the right to hunt and fish in all “usual and accustomed places.” “We signed up to have fish in perpetuity, not fish on life support,” Wheeler said. “The question we need to pose is how we change the way we do business to ensure the impacts of transportation aren’t contributing to the declining population of a keystone species.”

Flory and Wheeler both participated in a panel discussion about salmon and dams hosted by the Society of Environmental Journalists last spring. They have a cordial business relationship: Flory, who previously served as the chairman of the Idaho Wheat Commission, leases farmland from the tribe and also owns land within reservation boundaries that his grandfather purchased from a homesteader. They represent two of many stakeholder groups that have spent years debating the future of the lower Snake River dams.

“We signed up to have fish in perpetuity, not fish on life support.”

The dam debate — which was basically gridlocked for two decades — is finally evolving from a binary battle into a more collaborative conversation about how to solve an extremely complex puzzle. The driving question has largely shifted from whether or not to remove the dams to how best to mitigate the economic impacts of removal.

The pivot toward collaboration began in April 2019, when Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson, R, announced his intention to restore salmon populations by coming up with a plan that keeps all stakeholders whole. Simpson and his staff then embarked on a three-year fact-finding mission that included 300 meetings with tribes, farmers, officials and other stakeholders. Those meetings informed the proposal Simpson announced in February 2021: a $33.5 billion framework for recovering salmon by breaching the lower Snake River dams and finding other ways to satisfy the needs they serve, including transportation and hydropower.

Simpson proposed allocating $3.6 billion for Snake River transportation, including improvements to the grain transportation network and subsidies to farmers to offset the increased transportation costs. For farmers like Flory on Idaho’s Camas, Simpson envisioned new spur rail lines connecting existing tracks with the Port of Lewiston, where wheat could continue to the Tri-Cities on the BNSF railway, which runs alongside the Snake River.

When Flory imagines a future without the dams — and the shipping they provide — he worries about volume and timing.  Each year, around 2.4 million tons of freight travels down the river. About 90% of it is wheat, and most of it is barged downriver to international ports. In the absence of barging, that load — about 10% of the nation’s wheat exports — would transition to trains and trucks. But Flory is uncertain whether the existing railways and roads can handle the extra freight.

Washington’s Department of Transportation is currently engaged in a transportation impact analysis regarding that very issue. Jim Mahugh, lead engineer on the study, said that economic factors complicate what might otherwise be a straightforward engineering question. Infrastructure needs will depend on what percentage of the 2.4 million tons of freight is shipped by train versus truck. It’s hard to predict how that will parse out, because it will be driven by economic factors — international markets, fluctuations in supply and demand, and the price of grain.

Farmers in Washington’s Palouse have an advantage: The state owns a short-line rail system that moves 25% of the wheat grown in Washington. But farmers like Flory, on Idaho’s Camas, would likely have to rely on the stretch of the BNSF railway that connects the Port of Lewiston to Washington’s Tri-Cities, where wheat and other products could be loaded onto barges traveling down the Columbia River or continue by train to Portland.

Flory said he’s open to that idea, though he wonders if the BNSF railroad — a single unidirectional track — has the capacity to handle the four barges’ worth of grain a day that leave Lewiston during peak season.

Plus, there’s the extra time it will require: Railroad hopper cars take longer to load than barges. “In three and a half days, my grain can be on an ocean vessel and heading toward export customers,” he says. That speed and efficiency enables him to respond quickly to volatile export markets. If frozen railroads in Canada derail a shipment of wheat from a competing farm, could Flory Farms fill that void as quickly by rail? Would shipping delays cost him business with foreign customers?

The effect of increased volume on railroad infrastructure is also a concern. During a 1992 test drawdown of the reservoirs, the loss of water pressure against the shore caused the ground to shift and slump, threatening the structural integrity of the railroad tracks built on top of it. Any necessary repairs could cause even more shipping delays.

“If we are working toward equitable business in this country, we must consider all impacted parties and the true cost associated with doing business.”

But Flory’s biggest worries are economic: If barging is removed as an option, he expects his costs to go up and his margins to shrink. According to the 2022 Lower Snake River Dams Benefit Replacement Report, shipping by rail is considerably more expensive: 50 to 75 cents per bushel, compared 30 to 45 cents per bushel by barge.

Flory said he would find it challenging to keep his prices low and market share high in Asia, where his club wheat — a soft, low-gluten variety grown almost exclusively in the Pacific Northwest — is used to make Japanese sponge cakes, and his hard red winter wheat becomes high-end ramen noodles. If his prices were no longer competitive overseas, he would have to find markets closer to home, or else grow other crops.

Some point out that barging prices are artificially low because the federal government and regional ratepayers fund the annual $83 million cost of maintaining and operating the Lower Snake River dams. Environmental activist Lin Laughy, who has looked closely at the economics, calculated a subsidy of $40,000 per barge.“It’s an implicit subsidy,” said Eric Crawford, strategic partners coordinator for Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit conservation group involved in many of the conversations about salmon and dams. “What about reimagining how we spend that money?”

“If we are working toward equitable business in this country, we must consider all impacted parties and the true cost associated with doing business,” Wheeler said. “That includes considering the needs of the salmon, because they can’t change their ways. We can.”

“Let’s continue the conversation,” Flory said. “Let’s force some people to come to the table, not sit in the corner and yell, ‘No!’”

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On July 21, President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to run in his place, launching her to the forefront of potential Democratic nominees. Harris’ term as VP hasn’t produced many significant policy outcomes of her own, but her experience as a California senator and attorney general, as well as her 2020 presidential campaign, point to a consistent record of pro-climate, pro-environmental policies and an evolved understanding of tribal land issues. Should she eventually assume the Oval Office, her career to date signals a likely continuation of the West’s Biden-era gains in the protection of public lands, water and wildlife as well as support for tribal sovereignty.  

“We couldn’t be more excited,” said Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s lands-protection program. Harris worked with the organization on bills to expand California’s public lands, increase access to nature and develop community incentives for wildfire prevention. “She understood the totality of these issues, and that gives us great confidence.”

Over the past four years, the Biden administration reinstated protections for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and conserved more than 41 million acres of public land. It passed the climate-forward Inflation Reduction Act, which was hailed as a windfall for domestic clean energy jobs and a once-in-a-generation wealth transfer to historically marginalized communities. The record bears a striking resemblance to Harris’ own platform for president, which also pursued environmental justice and sought an end to fossil fuels on public lands.

“This was the most impactful one-term presidency on public lands, climate change and environmental justice,” Manuel said. Harris, who was born in Oakland and spent much of her career in California, was also able to provide the Biden administration with insight into regional issues. “A Westerner leading on all these issues is very significant.” 

Prior to joining Biden’s ticket, Harris was best known as a Golden State prosecutor. As California’s attorney general, Harris won multiple settlements against corporate polluters, including a $44 million settlement from the owners of a container ship that spilled 53,000 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay. She secured multimillion-dollar deals with oil companies BP, ARCO and ConocoPhillips for negligent monitoring of hazardous materials in gas station storage tanks, and she was part of the team that held Volkswagen accountable for bypassing air pollution regulations, eventually earning more than $86 billion in penalties for the state. However, her claim that she pursued polluters while working in the San Francisco DA office has come under scrutiny.

In the Senate, she co-sponsored bills to develop national wildlife corridors, divert revenue from energy development to national parks and further climate equity by calculating policy impacts on frontline communities. She voted to protect the Antiquities Act and the Great American Outdoors Act, as well as to halt drilling in the Arctic and pass a public-lands package that conserved 2 million acres of land and water. Over the course of four years, she earned multiple perfect scores from the League of Conservation Voters.

Harris’ track record with Indigenous affairs over her decades working in politics is more varied. As state attorney general, she created the first Indian Child Welfare Act Compliance Task Force to protect Native children. But she also opposed multiple tribal applications to put land into “trust” and thereby grow a tribe’s land base. During her time as attorney general, Harris’ office also pursued a legal argument that could have had negative, precedent-setting impacts for tribes that have acquired land in trust. She argued that the Big Lagoon Rancheria, a tribe that was seeking to build a casino on 11 acres of trust land, improperly received that land from the federal government. The case had the potential to open past land-to-trust transfers across Indian Country to litigation, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled against California.

Trump’s impact on Indian Country over four years

Since then, Harris has distanced herself from that position. When then-Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier asked her about this publicly in 2019, Harris said that as California’s attorney general it was her duty to represent the state’s interests, which did not necessarily reflect her own. “As California’s attorney general she was perceived as being more focused on states than tribes,” wrote Mark Trahant (Shoshone-Bannock) in an analysis for ICT. “But that has largely shifted.”

During her 2020 campaign for president, for example, Harris promised to assist tribes in restoring their lands and to make it easier for them to do so in the future. Her campaign also detailed specific policies and initiatives to advance Native voting rights, increase funding for the federal agencies serving tribal communities, and protect Native women and children, building on some of the legislation that she co-sponsored during her time in the Senate. Those bills largely focused on supporting Native health care and addressing the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples, along with the Native Voting Rights Act of 2019 and other legislation concerning tribal wildlife corridors and food sovereignty. 

As vice president, she’s been a part of an administration that has made considerable strides in integrating Indigenous knowledge and tribal priorities into public-lands management, as well as in providing funding for Native-led climate resilience projects and appointing multiple Indigenous people to leadership positions. She was the first sitting vice president to visit the Gila Indian River Community and do an interview with the Native news organization ICT. Asked by reporter Aliyah Chavez (Kewa Pueblo) about the administration’s goals and the decision to appoint Native leaders like Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), Harris said, “I do believe that we are setting a new model for what the interaction and what the partnership should be [with tribes], always grounded in full appreciation and respect for tribal sovereignty.” 

The Democratic Party has less than a month to introduce any alternative candidates before the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19. Other potential frontrunners, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, appear to be rallying behind Harris as the primary candidate who could win the race against former President Donald Trump. 

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On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities and municipalities can punish people for sleeping outside, even when they have nowhere else to go. In the case of The City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the conservative majority sided in a 6-3 decision with Grants Pass, a small city in southern Oregon, finding that its broad public camping ban did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment

“This is the single most important case on homelessness in the past few decades,” said Nisha Kashyap, an attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. The organization, which joined several others in writing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting the rights of unhoused people in Johnson, called the decision “devastating”.

“The decision risks opening the door to a whole slew of punitive measures that cities could enact in an effort to just push unhoused people out of their communities,” Kashyap said.

“This is the single most important case on homelessness in the past few decades.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that fines imposed by Grants Pass on people sleeping outdoors did not “qualify as cruel and unusual,” and thus did not violate the Eighth Amendment.

Gorsuch referred to briefs written by California Governor Gavin Newson, mayors of several Western cities, and conservative-led states, wherein city officials wrote that they need to be able to enforce public camping bans as part of the “full panoply of tools in the policy toolbox” to “tackle the complicated issues of housing and homelessness.”

The ruling removes a narrow but critical provision that had barred some Western states from fining, ticketing and jailing homeless residents for public camping when adequate shelter was unavailable. The decision comes as large cities across the West, facing an escalating crisis in homelessness, have passed a slew of anti-camping ordinances. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, such cities could pass stricter anti-camping ordinances.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown dissented. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that Grants Pass’s camping ban effectively criminalizes people for sleeping, a “biological necessity.” She wrote that the majority focuses “exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”

The Court did not rule out the possibility that the Grants Pass ordinances violate other protections afforded to unhoused people under the Eighth Amendment, such as the Due Process Clause or Excessive Fines Clause, affirming that the decision is narrow and does not give cities unchecked power to criminalize homelessness, Kashyap said.

The Supreme Court also overturned Martin v. Boise, a previous 9^th Circuit decision that found that imposing civil penalties for camping when homeless residents lack access to any shelter amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. In the opinion, Gorsuch wrote that homelessness is not an involuntary condition and is not subject to Eighth Amendment protections.

“Anything that weakens Eighth Amendment protections is really, really concerning,” said Kashyap, echoing the response from housing advocates.

In a press briefing on the day of the decision, Ed Johnson, director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center and lead counsel for the respondents in Grants Pass v. Johnson, said the “troubling decision that is legally and morally wrong,” and could potentially worsen the homelessness crisis. Johnson has no relation to Gloria Johnson, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

GRANTS PASS IS a city of 40,000 people with a vacancy rate of 1%; roughly 600 of its residents experience homelessness at any given time. There is one shelter, the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission, which has 138 beds. It is a high-barrier shelter, meaning that people who want to stay there are required to work full-time at the Mission, remain sober and attend church services daily. People who cannot or choose not to meet these strict requirements cannot stay there.

In a 2013 meeting, Grants Pass City Council members said they deliberately sought to adopt laws that would keep homeless people from staying in the city.

“The point is to make it uncomfortable enough … in our city so (homeless people) will want to move on down the road,” said Lily Morgan, the then-city council president. The same year, Grants Pass started enforcing a 24-hour camping ban. Law enforcement officers began aggressively ticketing unsheltered people city-wide, often fining them hundreds — even thousands — of dollars.

Helen Cruz, for example, was fined $2,000 for sleeping in a public park. Cruz had lived in Grants Pass for four decades before she lost her housing in 2016. Even though she was working two jobs, as a house cleaner and at a motel, she couldn’t afford the city’s steep rent.

“The community around here is scared,” Cruz said, who is currently living in a church. She added that she feels like her elected officials “have no kindness and compassion for the homeless.”

In 2017, the Oregon Law center filed a class action lawsuit on the behalf of Debra Blake, an unhoused resident of Grants Pass, who passed away in 2021. Gloria Johnson and John Logan stepped up as class representatives. In 2020, the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit sided with the plaintiffs.

In the past few years, many cities in the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction — which includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana and Washington, as well as Oregon — refrained from fining, ticketing and arresting individuals for sleeping in public, legislating with the lower court’s decision in mind. Now that the ruling has been overturned, Western cities like Bozeman, Montana, will be able to pass stricter ordinances.

“(This decision) removes the most basic protections that recognize the humanity of homeless folks,” Rankin said.

This has raised concerns among lawyers and housing advocates about an uptick in local anti-camping measures following the ruling.

In cities outside of the 9th Circuit that already have camping bans, such as Denver, legal protections for unhoused people will be unchanged, although Denver’s current policy is to offer shelter before sweeping residents.

But “it sends a very strong message that cities can choose to be less compassionate,” said Cathy Alderman, the chief communications and public policy at the Colorado Coalition for the homeless in Denver. “The ruling is basically saying, ‘Unhoused people, we owe you nothing.’”

Several ongoing, high-profile lawsuits involving homelessness also won’t be affected, including one in San Francisco, where a U.S. District Court judge in Oakland barred the city from destroying belongings and taking away tents from people living in encampments.

In Grants Pass and elsewhere, the material reality for homeless individuals will change very little, according to housing advocates. Sara Rankin, a professor of law at Seattle University and head of Seattle’s Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, stressed that the scope of Grants Pass v. Johnson is very narrow. Even before the ruling, cities could still legally sweep encampments and fine and arrest unhoused people. That hasn’t changed anywhere in the country. Under the previous decision, for example, unhoused residents in Grants Pass were still required to move every three days.

Now, “folks might have to disperse and leave the city. It might make it harder for us to find folks,” said Leah Swanson, the operations coordinator at MINT, a public health outreach organization in the Grants Pass area.

What rural homelessness looks like

Jodi Peterson, the director of Interfaith Sanctuary Community Housing, a low-barrier shelter in Boise, said that the 9th Circuit’s decision on Martin v. Boise has had an impact, albeit a small one. It has not prevented the city from conducting daily sweeps, but it has created some stopgaps; now, for example, law enforcement is required to call the shelter to see if it has any beds before they ticket an unhoused person.

In the long term, experts expressed concern that additional local resources and public funding will be funneled into criminalizing homelessness, rather than in housing people in the first place. “There’s a lot of data saying that criminalizing unhoused people doesn’t work,” said Ann Oliva, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, adding that criminalizing unhoused people only retraumatizes them and makes it harder for them to eventually find stable housing. “Criminalization is actually more expensive than just housing people.”

Legal experts and advocates stressed that the court’s decision will not address the homelessness crisis in the United States. In the long term, affordable housing is the solution, but “we need interim strategies, things like housing-focused shelter, making sure that outreach is robust, and keeping people as safe and healthy as possible,” Oliva said.

“We may not have a home, but we’re still people. We deserve to be respected, just like anybody else does,” Cruz said.

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When Yakama Nation leaders learned in 2017 of a plan to tunnel through some of their ancestral land for a green energy development, they were caught off guard. 

While the tribal nation had come out in favor of climate-friendly projects, this one appeared poised to damage Pushpum, a privately owned ridgeline overlooking the Columbia River in Washington. The nation holds treaty rights to gather traditional foods there, and tribal officials knew they had to stop the project.

Problems arose when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency in charge of permitting hydro energy projects, offered the Yakama Nation what tribal leaders considered an impossible choice: disclose confidential ceremonial, archaeological and cultural knowledge, or waive the right to consult on whether and how the site is developed.

This put the Yakama Nation in a bind. Disclosing exactly what made the land sacred risked revealing to outsiders what they treasured most about it. In the past, disclosure of information about everything from food to archaeological sites enabled non-Natives to loot or otherwise desecrate the land.

Even now, tribal leaders struggle to safely express what the Pushpum project threatens. “I don’t know how in-depth I can go,” said Elaine Harvey, a tribal member and former environmental coordinator for the tribal fisheries department, when asked about the foods and medicines that grow on the land.

“It provides for us,” echoed Yakama Nation Councilmember Jeremy Takala. “Sometimes we do get really protective.”

Although government agencies have sometimes taken significant steps to protect tribal confidentiality, that didn’t happen with the Pushpum proposal, known as the Goldendale Energy Storage Project. Tribal leaders repeatedly objected, telling the agency that if a tribal nation deems a place sacred, they shouldn’t have to break confidentiality to prove it — a position supported by state agency leaders and, new reporting shows, at least one other federal agency. 

Nonetheless, after seven years, in February FERC moved the project forward without consulting with the Yakama Nation. 

The process known as consultation is often fraught. Federal laws and agency rules require that tribes be able to weigh in on decisions that affect their treaty lands. But in practice, consultation procedures sometimes force tribes to reveal information that makes them more vulnerable, without offering any guaranteed benefit. 

If a tribal nation deems a place sacred, they shouldn’t have to break confidentiality to prove it.

The risks of disclosure are not hypothetical: Looting and vandalism are common when information about Indigenous resources becomes public. One important mid-Columbia petroglyph, called Tsagaglalal, or She Who Watches, had to be removed from its original site because of vandalism. And recreational and commercial pickers have flooded one of Washington’s best huckleberry picking areas, called Indian Heaven Wilderness, pushing out Native families trying to stock up for the winter. 

The Yakama Nation feared similar outcomes if it fully participated in FERC’s consultation process over the Goldendale development. But there are alternatives. The United Nations recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to affirmatively consent to development on their sacred lands. A similar model was included in state legislation in Washington three years ago, but Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed it.

The requirements of the consultation process are poorly defined, and state and federal agencies interpret them in a broad range of ways. In the case of Pushpum, critics say that has allowed FERC to overlook tribal concerns.

“They’re just being totally disregarded,” said Simone Anter (Pascua Yaqui and Jicarilla Apache descendant), an attorney at the environmental nonprofit Columbia Riverkeeper. “What FERC is doing is so blatantly, blatantly wrong.”

THE YAKAMA NATION has been outspoken in its support for renewable energy development, including solar and small-scale hydro projects. But not at Pushpum; it’s sacred to the Kah-milt-pah people, one of the bands within the Yakama Nation, who still regularly use the site.

The proposal would transform this area into a facility intended to store renewable energy in a low-carbon way. Rye Development, a Florida-based company, submitted an application for permits for a “pumped hydro” system, where a pair of reservoirs connected by a tunnel store energy for future use.

FERC has offered few accommodations for the Yakama Nation on the Goldendale project. 

FERC spokesperson Celeste Miller told High Country News and ProPublica in an email that “we will work to address the effects of proposed projects on Tribal rights and resources to the greatest extent we can, consistent with federal law and regulations. This is a pending matter before the Commission, so we cannot discuss the merits of this proceeding.”

“FERC legally doesn’t have to do very much here,” said Kevin Washburn (Chickasaw), dean of the University of Iowa College of Law and former assistant secretary of Indian affairs at the Department of the Interior. “Consultation is designed to open the door so tribes can get in the door to talk to decision-makers.” According to experts, the process can range from collaborative planning that addresses tribal concerns to a perfunctory discussion with minimal impacts, depending on the agency.

“This is the problem with consultation and its lack of teeth,” said Anter. “If the federal government is saying, ‘Hey, we consulted, check that box,’ who’s to say they didn’t?”

There’s another problem with consultation, too: Any discussions with a federal entity are subject to public disclosure. That’s good for government transparency, Washburn said, but it can make tribal nations even more vulnerable. “And it’s why tribes are right to be cautious in what they share with feds,” he said.

That’s an obstacle at Pushpum. Things became even harder there in August 2021, when FERC notified the Yakama Nation that federal consultation would be carried out not by the agency itself, but by the developer. The Yakama Nation pushed back, asserting its treaty rights to negotiate as a sovereign nation only with another nation, not with a private entity. FERC, however, insisted that designating a third party was “standard practice.” The National Historic Preservation Act, signed into law in 1966, says an agency “may authorize an applicant or group of applicants to initiate consultation,” but maintains that the federal agency is still “responsible for their government to government relationships with Indian tribes.”

The Yakama Nation also worried about commission rules that require anything the tribal nation says to FERC be shared with the developer. “It gets very sensitive when we share those kinds of stories,” said Takala, the tribal councilmember. “We just don’t share to anyone, especially a developer.”

Some say FERC could change that internal rule, since it isn’t required by law. “For them to cite their own regulations and be like, ‘Our hands are tied,’ is ridiculous,” Anter said. For months, FERC and the Yakama Nation went back and forth over the conditions under which the tribal government would share sensitive information, with the Yakama Nation repeatedly asking to share information only with FERC.

Ultimately, FERC proposed four ways the Yakama Nation could participate in consultation. In the eyes of tribal leaders, all these options either posed significant risks to the privacy of their information or rendered consultation meaningless.

The first three were laid out in a letter from Vince Yearick, director of FERC’s division of hydropower licensing, sent on Dec. 9, 2021. For option one, it suggested the tribal nation request nondisclosure agreements from anyone accessing sensitive information. Yearick did not specify whether FERC would be responsible for issuing or enforcing these NDAs.

“It gets very sensitive when we share those kinds of stories. We just don’t share to anyone, especially a developer.”

Delano Saluskin, then-chair of the Yakama Nation, called this option “far from the requirements of NHPA or in line with the trust responsibility that the Federal Agency has to Yakama Nation,” citing FERC policies and National Historic Preservation Act law in a February 2022 letter to state and federal government officials requesting support. He added that it “describes a process that does not protect information that is sacred and sensitive from disclosure.”

Alternatively, FERC said, the Yakama Nation could simply redact any sensitive information from documents it filed. This option, however, would leave FERC in the dark about the details of what cultural resources the project would imperil. That would make it harder for FERC to require project adjustments or weigh the specific impacts in its decision about whether to permit construction.

Third, the Yakama Nation could withhold sensitive information altogether, which would present similar problems.

 Lastly, in a June 2022 follow-up letter, the commission suggested that the Yakama Nation submit a document “with more details regarding the resources of concern” and a request that some of the information be treated as privileged or withheld from public disclosure.

Overall, Saluskin described FERC’s options as a “failure” to conduct legal consultation in good faith.

A federal agency similarly raised concerns: In May 2023, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which advises the president and the Congress on protecting historic properties across the country, wrote to FERC suggesting that it “provide the Tribes with opportunities to share information that will be kept confidential.” FERC’s rule regarding disclosure, the council said, could insulate the agency from meaningful consultation, “and as a result from any real understanding of the nature and significance of properties of religious and cultural significance for Tribes.” 

THE CONCERNS OVER FERC’s engagement with the Yakama Nation are part of a wider discussion of U.S. government protections for tribal privacy and cultural resources. Speaking at a tribal energy summit in Tacoma in June 2023, Allyson Brooks, Washington’s state historic preservation officer, said that even though the consent language was vetoed by the governor, state law for protecting confidentiality around tribal cultural properties is still stronger than federal law, which only protects confidentiality if a site is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

In Washington, if a tribal historic preservation officer says, “‘X marks the spot; this is sacred,’ we say, ‘OK,’” Brooks declared. She said asking tribal nations to prove a site’s sacredness is like asking to see a photo of baby Jesus before accepting the sanctity of Christmas. “You don’t. You say ‘nice tree’ and take it at face value. When tribes say ‘X is sacred,’ you should take that at face value too.”

That approach is vital to the Yakama Nation, which recently saw a developer involved with a project proposed in nearby Benton County leak information that the nation believed was private. 

The Horse Heaven Hills wind farm would be the biggest energy development of any kind in Washington state history. But the sprawling 72,000-acre project overlaps with nesting habitat for migratory ferruginous hawks, a raptor state-listed as endangered.

Court documents related to the permitting proceedings show that the Yakama Nation believed it had identified the locations of the ferruginous hawks’ nests as confidential, in part because the hawks are ceremonially important. In May 2023, the Yakama Nation requested a protective order from the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, a state-level analog of FERC. The order, which the council issued, instructed all parties to sign a confidentiality agreement before accessing confidential information, similar to the nondisclosure agreements FERC proposed. If any party disclosed that information, they could be liable for damages. 

But the order didn’t stop that information from getting out. In February 2024, the Seattle Times published a story on the Horse Heaven Hills wind farm, which included a map of ferruginous hawk nests — a map that was credited to Scout Clean Energy, the developer.

The Yakama Nation quickly filed a motion to enforce the protective order, alleging that Scout Clean Energy had transgressed by passing protected cultural information to the press.

“If a tribal historic preservation officer says, “‘X marks the spot; this is sacred,’ we say, ‘OK.’”

The developer counter-filed, claiming that even if nest locations were a part of confidentiality discussion, the map itself was not, and that it was so imprecise that the critical details remained confidential. The council ultimately agreed. 

Despite the risks, Washburn said that tribes should take any opportunity to share their stories with federal officials, even if the conditions aren’t perfect. “I wouldn’t necessarily encourage tribes to give their deepest, darkest secrets to a federal agency,” he said. “But I would encourage them to meet with FERC and try to give FERC a first-person account of why they think this is important.”

Not all experts agree. Brett Lee Shelton (Oglala Sioux), an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said FERC is out of step with other federal and state agencies. “It’s hard to believe that it’s anything but disingenuous, using that tactic,” he said. “It’s pretty well known by any agency officials who deal with Indian tribes that sometimes certain specifics about sacred places need to remain confidential.”

And for Bronsco Jim Jr., a spiritual leader of the Kah-milt-pah people, sharing too many details is out of the question. Cultural specifics stay within the oral teachings of the longhouse, the site of the Kah-milt-pah spiritual community. Jim said he doesn’t even know how to translate all of the information into English. “We don’t write it; you won’t see it posted. You won’t see it in books. It’s our oral history. It’s sacred.”   

This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

Photo illustration sources: USGS, Rye Development, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Columbia Riverkeeper. Leah Nash, Jurgen Hess/Columbia Insight, Steven Patenaude.

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When I started reporting this story, I intended to ask several rural election officials about their work: how they got into it, the highs and lows, what they wish people knew about it. But all four officials I contacted refused to be interviewed or else ghosted me when it was time.

That doesn’t surprise Paul Manson, the research director at the Elections & Voting Information Center, a nonpartisan academic research organization. Manson has seen how contentious rural election administration has become in the face of increasingly deep partisan divides and persistent misinformation. “There is some super-intense pressure on folks right now,” he said. “I would suspect, at this time, many local election officials are shying away from more spotlights.” 

Rather than add to their stress, I decided to ask Manson my questions instead. Though he isn’t an election official himself, he has surveyed and interviewed hundreds of them. Below, Manson explains what makes American — and particularly rural — elections unique, why most election officials are women, and what he’s most concerned about come November.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

High Country News: How do American elections differ from the rest of the world’s? 

Manson: If you were a voter in Mexico or France, you’d have a national voter ID card, and things would be managed at that level. Instead, we do a classically American thing: We push that responsibility down to the lowest level.

Instead of having one federal office of elections, we have 8,000-10,000 of them. That number varies a bit, because we divide the duties of election administration — from voter registration to Election Day administration to auditing and certification (of votes) — differently in each state. So we even have a hard time defining what an election office is. It’s a beautiful bit of American democracy at work.

HCN: Are there any advantages of this system, especially when it comes to rural areas? 

Manson: Rural election officers often have legitimacy. They have shared with me just how much work they do to know their constituencies: They go to Elks meetings, veterans meetings, and share what this work of running an election looks like. 

That’s a huge asset. As maddening as it is to decentralize it, that local face, I think, just means a lot to voters. If someone starts asking questions about how things work, a lot of these administrators are happy to invite them to observe the process during election season, and that can make a big difference.

HCN: How does election administration in rural areas — like Garfield County, Montana, which has 888 registered voters — differ from election administration in, say, Los Angeles County, which has 4.3 million registered voters? 

Manson: In a larger office, the staff are entirely focused on election administration. In a more rural setting, it’s often in another type of office. So, here in Oregon, the county clerk will be serving in that role — and also managing property recordings, marriage licenses, maybe passport applications. Elections are part of the basket but not the entire basket. 

HCN: Seven of the eight states that allow 100% vote-by-mail elections are in the West: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington. How does that affect our elections? 

Manson: Thankfully, we’ve been on the cutting edge when it comes to voting options. Usually, the benefit of vote-by-mail is it’s cheaper: When you do polling places, you need to ramp up a lot of poll workers. That’s also a recruitment challenge. It used to be easier to find temporary workers, but this political binary has scared away some folks. Think about the average poll worker: an older American who’s maybe not interested in being in the fray. Vote-by-mail helps alleviate some of those pieces. 

HCN: What else has changed for local election officials over the past decade? 

Manson: Prior to, say, 2016, this was work that didn’t get a lot of attention. (Now) there are new stresses hitting these local election officials. When we were doing our interviews, in one of five, we would have to pause because it became too emotional, and the person needed to reset. 

It’s not uncommon for me to hear stories about personal threats, being challenged at the grocery store or (being) uncomfortable leading with what their job is because they’re fearful of how these national narratives have colored perceptions of elections work. Unlike their peers in more urban settings, (rural) election officials are lower-paid officials who wear many hats, but are also members of the communities they serve — and these attacks hurt uniquely for them. 

HCN: Your research has found that 84% of local election officials are women, and nearly three-quarters are over the age of 50. Many people you interviewed had mothers who held the role before them. Why does that matter?

Manson: In our society, we ask women to raise children, take care of the older generation and take care of their own household. (Election) work traditionally has done very well to support a woman trying to balance those three careers. You add on top an onslaught of public records requests that take up time, being challenged in the shopping line, and we’re seeing more and more departures from the field. We are losing institutional knowledge, folks who’ve been doing this for a long time. It seems like this toxic environment is really a challenge.

HCN: What happens if a rural district can’t replace its election official? 

Manson: We haven’t crossed that bridge yet. The closest we’ve seen is some activist perspectives — some examples in Colorado, New Mexico and California, where the secretary of State had to right the ship because someone came in and felt like they could manipulate how elections are run.

HCN: What can be done to improve the situation? 

Manson: We need to have candidates express their support for the legitimacy and quality of elections administration. This is going to be a very polarizing presidential election. I know these officials will do their best, but it’s a lot of pressure. 

HCN: Why should people care about rural elections? 

Manson: Some of these rural counties may represent a deciding factor in a congressional race, so the quality of election administration will matter in terms of how much faith we have in the outcomes. 

At the local level, I always ask students how many governments there are in the United States. And 90,000 is the official number, if you go with the U.S. Census. Most of those are special districts: school districts, soil and water conservation districts, rural fire protection districts. Those are elections that these county officials are also administering, so keeping that system operating is critical for a lot of the public services in rural counties.

Susan Shain reports for High Country News through The New York Times’ Headway Initiative, which is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. All editorial decisions are made independently. She was a member of the 2022-’23 New York Times Fellowship class and reports from Montana. @susan_shain

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Patty Coen was able to finish her bachelor’s degree because she had an abortion. Ever since, the Southwest Colorado resident has been an advocate for abortion access and reproductive justice. 

She worked as a nurse at a reproductive-care agency in Durango for about seven years. When a campaign started to protect abortion rights by getting a state constitutional amendment on the ballot, she headed the petition drive in rural Montezuma County, where she lives.

She said her personal story and her experience working at Planned Parenthood 

compelled her to get involved. 

“I worked at Planned Parenthood when Texas shut down abortion as unnecessary healthcare during Covid,” Coen said. “So I saw the people with uteruses drive 12 hours, have their abortion, get right back in the car and drive back to Texas.” 

Coen said she wanted to make sure that voters in Montezuma County had a chance to help get the amendment on the November ballot. 

“I really wanted our county to be represented,” Coen said. 

Although rural voters as a group are more likely than voters in large cities to support conservative candidates, that doesn’t necessarily translate into anti-abortion preferences. A poll of rural voters in swing states to be released this month by the Rural Democracy Initiative found that three-quarters of respondents said women should be in charge of decisions about abortion. 

“I know we [people who support abortion rights] are here,” Coen said. “You see the loud people of hate, and it’s like, yeah, they’re loud and they make you think they’re a lot of ’em. But I mean, wow, we got a lot of signatures.”

Abortion is currently legal in Colorado at all stages of pregnancy. The proposed Initiative 89 seeks to amend the Colorado constitution so that the legality of abortion in the state can not change in the future. It also would allow for public health insurance funds to cover abortion, overturning a current constitutional amendment prohibiting state insurance and Medicaid from paying for abortion care. 

To get on the ballot in Colorado, initiative petitions that seek to make changes to the constitution need at least 124,238 signatures with signatures from at least two percent of the registered voters in each of the 35 Colorado state senate districts. 

Cobalt, a Colorado abortion advocacy nonprofit, helped organize the signature gathering for Initiative 89, along with a coalition of organizations under the name Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom.

According to Laura Chapin, communications consultant for Cobalt, the petition was turned in to the Colorado Secretary of State with 230,000 signatures on April 18th, a week earlier than the deadline of April 26th. On May 17th, 2024, the Proposed Initiative 89 qualified for the November ballot.

“​​Rural Colorado was pretty awesome because people are really motivated. If you come to them and say, ‘we want to put abortion rights in the Colorado constitution,’ you get a really strong response. We’ve been really pleased with the rural outreach and the rural response,” said Chapin.

Coen, who lives in Montezuma County, said that even within Colorado there is not enough access to abortion care in the more rural regions, like Southwest Colorado. When Coen worked there, the Durango Planned Parenthood offered surgical abortions, but now only offers medical abortions. 

The Cortez Planned Parenthood, in Montezuma County, also offers medical abortions, but for a large chunk of the region including Montrose and the San Juan Mountain towns, accessing abortion care means driving over the San Juan mountains to one of two Southwestern Planned Parenthoods, west to Salida, or north to Glenwood Springs, a trip of at least 2 hours and including several mountain passes depending on the direction. 

At the same time that the petition drive to get Initiative 89 on the ballot was underway, a petition for an opposing initiative was also underway in Colorado to ban abortion after conception. The initiative did not receive enough signatures to appear on the ballot.

Abortion-rights petitions to add abortion access to state constitutions as a 2024 ballot initiative are in progress or have already been successful in many states including Arizona, Nebraska, Missouri, Maryland, Florida, and others. However, most of these measures only protect abortion until viability, which is not the case in Colorado. Colorado allows for abortion throughout the pregnancy. 

Montezuma County and Southwest Colorado’s location in the Four Corners makes it the ideal destination for out-of-state abortion seekers from neighboring states with harsher abortion laws like Arizona and Utah, or further away in Texas and Oklahoma.

“We’ve got to be a refuge state for this. We’re surrounded by states that are 100% against abortion,” said Coen.

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This school year, Montana, a state with fewer than 8,000 teachers, had 1,000 unfilled teaching positions. Meanwhile, Dutton-Brady Public Schools, a rural district about an hour from the Canadian border, easily filled its three vacancies.

Administrators credit a blue-hued room strewn with toys and highchairs: Little Diamondbacks Daycare, which is located inside the district’s K-12 school, steps from the cafeteria and the library. On a chilly Monday morning, children were trying on costumes, riding rocking horses and enjoying a rowdy game of musical chairs.

Eight-month-old Rowan watched the action from the arms of a staffer. Rowan’s mother, Jessica Toner, is a rookie teacher who heads the third-fourth grade classroom down the hall. Though Toner was offered four higher-paying positions in Great Falls, where she lives, she could neither find nor afford decent child care. “I called probably 15 different day cares,” she said, but they either didn’t have openings or were too expensive. “It was a nightmare.”

Toner hadn’t considered Dutton-Brady, which is a 32-minute drive from her house. But when she heard it had an opening — one that came with subsidized day care — she applied. “That’s what drew me,” she said. “And then I came to find that I love it out here.”

In-school day care can be found across the U.S., from Maine to Oklahoma and Colorado. It’s one way to tackle two crises: a shortage of qualified teachers and a shortage of quality child care. Recent data suggests that 79% of U.S. schools with teacher vacancies had difficulty filling them, while half of Americans live in “child care deserts” — communities that have at least three times as many children as licensed child-care slots. In many places, including Montana, both issues are more acute in rural areas. And of the 10 states with the highest rates of residents living in child-care deserts, seven are in the West.

Ask anyone involved with school-run day care, whether staff, clients or administrators, and they’ll probably say they’re delighted to have it. Experts, however, warn that it’s not a panacea. “All of this is well-intended,” said Chris Herbst, a professor who studies child care at Arizona State University. “But none of this is a sustainable, broad-based, fully funded solution to a long-standing problem.”

IN THE SPRING OF 2022, Dutton-Brady faced several teacher retirements. Superintendent Jeremy Locke knew it would be hard to replace them; it always was.

The Dutton-Brady School District is deeply rural, serving 131 students in a 625-square-mile region, an area larger than Grand Teton National Park. Its main school is in Dutton, and two others are located on colonies of Hutterites, an isolated Anabaptist religious sect. Dutton, which is the only town for miles, is home to two taverns, a water tower, a bank and a gas station that also sells fertilizer and livestock feed. There’s not a single stoplight.

Recruiting teachers has long been difficult; at times, the district has had to lure teachers from as far away as the Philippines. And veteran teachers rarely apply. Most recruits are like Toner: recent graduates who are just starting out, and perhaps starting families.

So, at a meeting that spring, Locke and the Board of Trustees seized upon the idea of opening a day care center to boost recruitment and retention. They scrambled to get the paperwork, financing and staffing in order before the 2022-’23 school year began. “We had to make it work,” Locke said. “Or else we knew that we were going to be dead in the water as far as staffing goes.”

Little Diamondbacks now serves 21 children, ranging from a few months to 5 years old. Dutton-Brady teachers pay up to $270 per child, per month for full-time, year-round care, a rate that is subsidized by state grants and by non-staffers who pay full tuition, up to $540 a month.

Staffing the facility has been a constant headache — it’s tough to find child-care workers anywhere, let alone in such a rural county — but Locke said it’s been worth it. “If we didn’t start this day care last year, we would not have filled our three openings,” he said. “We have no teacher shortages right now.”

In-school day cares exist elsewhere in rural Montana, too. Ekalaka, a town of 399 people on the eastern edge of the state, opened its center in August 2022. Browning, located on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwest Montana, started its facility in 1985; it was initially meant to serve teen mothers but now serves mostly staff members.

Browning’s superintendent, Corrina L. Guardipee-Hall (Blackfeet-Cree), used the day care when her children were small. “It really helped me be able to be a teacher and eventually administrator and now a superintendent,” she said. “It did help retain not only me as an employee, but also other people around the district.” It’s also a recruitment incentive: Guardipee-Hall noted that two new teacher assistants submitted day care applications for their children immediately after being hired.

“If we didn’t start this day care last year, we would not have filled our three openings.”

Montana’s school-based day care centers would seem an ideal way to attract and keep teachers. But Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, said they don’t address the root causes of shortages: low wages and decreased public perceptions about the profession’s prestige. Plus, day care centers support teachers for only a short time during their career, if at all.

“There are a lot of initiatives to compensate teachers in ways other than actual wages,” Kraft said, referring to efforts to subsidize student loans, housing or child care. “All of those have potential, although I would argue that it may be more effective to simply take the cost of those programs and fold them into higher teacher pay.”

In that regard, Montana has a long way to go: Its starting teacher salaries rank 51st in the nation. When the Learning Policy Institute, a national nonprofit, adjusted for cost-of-living differences, it found that the average starting salary for a Montana teacher was only $36,480 — far behind neighboring Idaho ($44,150) and Wyoming ($51,530).

As for why school districts might provide housing or child care before increasing wages, Kraft explained they might be “hesitant to commit to permanent and substantial pay raises with some uncertainty about the fiscal climate.” Besides, he noted, compensation must be negotiated with teachers’ unions — “often a time-intensive and slow process” — whereas a district can unilaterally decide to open a day care.

Ultimately, Kraft said, solving the teacher shortage will require major policy changes, as well as “generational shifts in how we perceive the profession.”

IN RURAL AREAS, in-school day care centers aren’t merely useful to the school; they also serve the community. About half of Little Diamondbacks’ regular attendees are the children of non-staffers, some of whom drive from nearly 40 miles away. Ekalaka’s facility, which is also open to community members, is the only licensed one in the county.

In rural Colorado, the West Grand School District, between Steamboat Springs and Breckenridge, has had an early childhood center since 2018. West Grand opened its facility after several teachers quit because they couldn’t find child care, but administrators soon realized it would address a greater need: The town has just one other licensed day care, and it’s often full.

The school’s day care center now serves roughly 22 children, only seven of whom are the offspring of teachers. “We knew we needed to (open it),” said Superintendent Elizabeth Bauer. “Not just for our teachers, but for our community.”

Hannah Wynd, who works for the local health department, said she might have had to move if she hadn’t gotten a spot at West Grand. “I, quite frankly, would not have a job if it wasn’t open and it didn’t have room for my children,” she said. “It’s super important, what it’s provided for my family.”

Experts don’t dispute the critical role these facilities play in families’ lives. In-school day care centers have been “introduced or enacted by well-meaning people who are probably frustrated that nothing is happening federally and are taking it upon themselves to try to better their community,” said Herbst, the Arizona State University professor.

“I, quite frankly, would not have a job if it wasn’t open and it didn’t have room for my children.”

Yet ultimately, Herbst believes such changes are “piecemeal,” and that true change must happen on a national scale. He wants Congress to support child-care subsidies, like those that were initially included in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan.

In the meantime, rural administrators, teachers and parents plan to keep doing what they can to keep their jobs local, their schools open and their kids cared for. (That includes obtaining additional sources of funding for their day cares: Dutton-Brady’s largest grant recently ran out, and West Grand is seeking new community funding partners.)

They don’t have the luxury of waiting for policymakers to decide their fates.

Because here’s the picture Locke painted: If Dutton-Brady loses a single teacher, it may not be able to replace them. If the school loses a second teacher, and a third, it could end up being assimilated into a bigger district. And then the community hub, the heart of the tiny town of Dutton, would be gone.

“We don’t have an option to not figure it out, because when we don’t, everything dries up,” Locke said. “It’s really an existential threat.”

Susan Shain reports for High Country News through The New York Times’ Headway Initiative, which is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. All editorial decisions are made independently. She was a member of the 2022-’23 New York Times Fellowship class and reports from Montana. @susan_shain

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