Farmworkers often struggle to access healthcare. While working, they live in remote areas, sometimes with no personal vehicle. In Colorado, nothing in the law enshrined farmworkers’ rights to quality healthcare.
Until 2021.
That year, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed the Agricultural Workers’ Rights bill into law in June. This law guarantees farmworkers have the right to contact “essential service providers” — health professionals, attorneys, consuls, and clergy members — during their breaks.
However, an industry group is challenging the law. The Colorado Livestock Association filed a lawsuit in June that focuses on the section of the law requiring employers to not impede farmworkers’ reasonable access to service providers during their off time. The group wants it ruled unconstitutional.
In the lawsuit, the Colorado Livestock Association requested the court declare the provision allowing key service providers access to its property violates employers’ rights to exclude people from their property.
“The State of Colorado has not paid just compensation for this (violation) nor initiated eminent domain proceedings to do so,” the organization said in court documents. This is the second time an organization tied to the state’s agricultural industry has challenged the law.
The Colorado Livestock Association did not immediately return a request for comment.
In response, a farmworker – identified as Jane Doe in court documents – and Colorado Legal Services, a nonprofit providing legal advice to low-income people in the state, filed a motion to intervene as defendants on Sept. 13.
Colorado Legal Services is receiving support and advice from a newly formed entity known as FarmSTAND, a nonprofit organization comprised of a national network of attorneys to represent communities affected by industrial agriculture. Towards Justice and Farmworker Justice are also involved in the lawsuit.
According to the organization’s press release, FarmSTAND seeks to concentrate resources — bringing lawyers and their expertise together — on certain cases that can set precedents, working in partnership with a broad base of local and national organizations.
“We try to support partners who are doing great work in this space to try to reform industrial animal agriculture and transform the food system,” said Kelsey Eberly, the FarmSTAND attorney counseling on the case.
An estimated 2.4 million people work on farms and ranches nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s census of agriculture. This population, mostly Latino, is roughly equal to the population of Chicago. About half are undocumented.
In Colorado alone, the agricultural industry employed 19,339 workers, experiencing a 5.7% growth in direct crop production jobs in 2022, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. The farmworker community in Colorado constitutes 4.1% of the rural workforce.
Eberly emphasized the unique challenges faced by farmworkers.
“These workers are some of the most isolated and vulnerable,” she said.
Their remote residences and long and demanding work hours create significant barriers when seeking access to essential services, such as health professionals, that many other workers often take for granted.
Eberly also highlighted the importance of the existing law for farmworkers’ rights in Colorado for seasonal laborers who arrive to work on farms during the summer months and often find themselves entirely reliant on their employers for various aspects of their livelihood.
“They live at the place where they work, and they don’t have transportation necessarily, so the only way for them to get any help is for people to come to them,” she said. “That’s why this law is so important.”
Access to assistance becomes especially critical when workers have health issues, particularly given the challenges posed by the effects of climate change.
According to the National Institutes of Health, farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die from heat exposure than workers in other sectors. One of the reasons is that this demographic group has a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease.
There is little legislation to protect agricultural workers in the U.S.
“This Colorado Law was so groundbreaking, and why it’s so important to protect it,” Eberly said, “so that it can be used as a model for other states.”
The post A new network of attorneys seeks to defend abuses of industrial agriculture. First up, Colorado. appeared first on Investigate Midwest.
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This story is part of our series Unhealthy Wisconsin, which examines areas where Wisconsin falls short in well-being.
When her daughter was born weighing just 1 ½ pounds, Dr. Jasmine Zapata experienced firsthand the danger she now spends her professional life battling: Wisconsin’s stubbornly high rate of preterm birth and mortality, especially among Black babies.
Zapata works at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health as a pediatrician and public health researcher. For the last two years, she also has served as the state epidemiologist for maternal and child health and chronic diseases at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS).
Her second child, born prematurely at just 25 weeks of gestation, faced several life-threatening illnesses in the neonatal intensive care unit. As Zapata knows better than most, complications caused by prematurity are the leading cause of Black infant mortality in Wisconsin.
“She was almost a statistic,” Zapata said. “I was a statistic with my birth outcome … the one about college-educated Black women having higher rates of preterm birth compared to white women who don’t finish college.”
Her daughter is now 13 years old and “thriving,” but the experience still fuels her passion for combating inequities in maternal and child health.
Wisconsin has one of the highest mortality rates for Black infants in the United States. The two main causes of death within the first year of life for Black infants are low birthweight and sudden unexpected infant death, according to a 2023 DHS report.
The report calls for more parental education around safe sleeping habits (babies alone on a surface on their backs, free from soft objects and loose bedding), prioritizing breastfeeding when possible and better access to prenatal and postpartum care.
Research, including at the University of Wisconsin, has highlighted societal factors — including stress caused by poverty and racism — as major causes of negative outcomes for Black babies. Wisconsin is home to outsized Black-white disparities across society, including in education, wealth, health, housing and the justice system.
In 1990, Black infants in Wisconsin were 2.7 times more likely to die within a year of birth than white infants in the first year of life, according to DHS. Three decades later, Black infants in the state are three times more likely to die than white infants.
“This isn’t new news,” said Theresa Duello, a reproductive cell and molecular biologist who researches misconceptions of race, a social construct, in genetic studies.
The overall rate at which infants die during the first year of life in Wisconsin in 1990 was 8.4 deaths per 1,000 live births. By 2021, that number dropped to 5.3 deaths per 1,000 live births, similar to the national rate.
Negative birthing outcomes for Black infants have not improved as quickly as those for white babies.
Among white infants, the rate dropped from 7.2 to 4.4 deaths per 1,000 births between 1990 and the 2019-2021 period — a 39% decrease. Among Black infants, the rate dropped from 19.7 to 13.2 deaths per 1,000 live births over the same period, a 33% drop and still triple the rate for white infants.
“I think we should reexamine how we take responsibility for this,” Duello said.
Preterm birth, those occurring before 37 weeks of pregnancy, is the leading cause of newborn mortality.
Wisconsin’s rate of neonatal deaths due to preterm birth was 21% above the national average in 2018. That year, 15.6% of Black births were premature, compared to 9% of white births.
Low birth weight — infants less than 5 pounds, 8 ounces — and prematurity are both associated with infant mortality, Duello noted.
Low birth weight is often associated with intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR), when the fetus is smaller than expected for the number of weeks of pregnancy. Researchers hypothesize that an increase in the hormone cortisol during pregnancy may harm blood flow to the placenta, compromising access to nutrients and impairing fetal growth.
When low birth weight babies are born in consecutive generations, some may incorrectly assume the issue is genetic, Duello said. But if pregnant women in the same family face great stress over the generations, such as poverty, lack of health care and racism, they will more likely have high cortisol levels — and likely deliver a small baby. Addressing such stressors could improve pregnancy outcomes, research shows.
Mothers of color disproportionately live in areas with fewer resources and thus may face greater stresses that increase the odds of negative birth outcomes, DHS says in a 2018 report.
“The Black-white difference in infant death is considered an inequity because its causes are systemic, avoidable and unfair,” the report says.
While poverty affects stress levels, a California-based study suggests racism can play an even bigger role in infant mortality disparities than wealth. In California, the wealthiest Black parents lost more babies on average — 437 per 100,000 births — than the poorest white parents: 350 per 100,000 births.
“We know what to do. We lack sufficient intent,” Duello said. “And that doesn’t mean there aren’t good people working really hard.”
The federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Title V Maternal and Child Block Grant program provide key resources for reducing maternal and infant mortality rates in Wisconsin, according to DHS.
Thirty community organizations — eight of which are based in Milwaukee County — have received grants to reduce infant and maternal mortality rates in Wisconsin.
But ARPA funds are not permanent.
In his 2023-2025 budget, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers proposed $5.7 million over two years in grants for community organizations working to lower maternal and infant mortality. The funding would have also supported fetal and infant mortality review teams and grief and bereavement efforts.
Evers’ proposal would have helped community-based grants stretch beyond the time frame of ARPA and built on the work started with the ARPA-funded community grants, according to Elizabeth Goodsitt, a DHS spokesperson.
But the Wisconsin Legislature’s Republican-controlled Joint Committee on Finance removed the provisions along with hundreds of others before Evers ultimately signed the budget in July. The final budget allocated $222,700 per year for “reducing fetal and infant mortality and morbidity” — the same level DHS has received for more than a decade.
A 2014 study found better birth outcomes for Black and white mothers who participated in Healthy Start, a community-based federal program involving home visits, health information and access to medical and community services.
Another approach is the use of doulas: support people during pregnancy, labor and birth. Hanan Jabril, a community doula and sexual and reproductive health and rights educator in Madison, said a doula’s role is to support and empower the patient to facilitate a safe pregnancy and birth.
“We don’t speak on behalf of the patient, but we can help facilitate conversations between the patient and the provider,” Jabril said.
One goal is to reduce “obstetric violence,” which refers to harm inflicted during or in relation to pregnancy, labor and the postpartum period, sometimes by providers who hold implicit biases against people of color.
One example Jabril observed: a patient who was denied pain medication in the hours after a cesarean section after a provider suspected “drug-seeking behavior” — contrary to what some of the patient’s nurses thought. Although the patient advocated for herself, the experience showed the potential harm of implicit bias and the need for doulas, Jabril said.
The presence of doulas can improve birth outcomes. Doulas have been shown to decrease cesarean sections — surgical procedures with higher risks than nonsurgical births — by anywhere from 28% to 56%, according to DONA International, the largest doula-certifying organization.
People partnered with doulas often forgo epidurals or other pain medication, and they are four times less likely to deliver a baby with a low weight, according to a 2013 study.
The price of doulas ranges widely depending on the type — for instance their availability before or after a birth. Although most insurance companies do not cover a doula’s full cost, Jabril considers them “always worth it.”
Patients in need of financial help have options. The city of Milwaukee, for instance, since 2019 has matched residents with free doulas through its Birth Outcomes Made Better program.
Some doulas-in-training or volunteer doulas are willing to work for free. Jabril provides free services.
Wisconsin DHS recently disbursed almost $1 million to four community organizations that train doulas or provide doula services. Two of those organizations — both based in Milwaukee — received more than $700,000 for doula workforce development. They include the WeRISE Community Doula Program, which provides free services.
Zapata admits her work to improve birth outcomes often is “daunting” and “discouraging,” but it’s also important.
“And it’s important for us to remember that behind all of the statistics and numbers these are real lives and real families that are forever impacted,” she said.
The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
Wisconsin’s Black infants have some of the country’s highest mortality rates. These solutions could help. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
More than 16,000 Mississippians were dropped from Medicaid in August during the latest round of the agency’s disenrollments.
The pandemic-era federal regulations that prevented state Medicaid agencies from disenrolling beneficiaries ended in May. Since then, Medicaid divisions all over the country are reviewing their rolls for the first time in three years.
In June, 29,460 Mississippians were dropped. Another 22,507 people were disenrolled in July.
August’s numbers bring the agency’s total number of disenrollments thus far to 68,626 people. Before unwinding began, the agency’s enrollment exceeded 900,000 people for the first time in the agency’s history.
Most concerningly, most of those who were disenrolled — 54,366 people or 79% — have not been kicked off because they’re ineligible. Instead, there were issues with their paperwork – it was either not turned in on time or was incomplete. That could mean some people have been kicked off Medicaid even though they’re still eligible.
It’s unknown how many of the procedural disenrollments have been children. Children are most at risk of losing benefits during the unwinding process, federal research predicts, and many of them may still be eligible. Kids in low-income families comprise more than half of Mississippi’s overall Medicaid beneficiaries.
“These are not good numbers,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “It’s very concerning to see … people, likely children and parents by and large, losing Medicaid for red tape or procedural reasons.”
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 13 states have higher procedural disenrollment rates than Mississippi.
From June to July, 18,710 kids were unenrolled from Medicaid, when the first wave of disenrollments took place.
Mississippi Today has requested to interview an agency official about the unwinding data, but the requests were not granted.
New enrollment numbers show that from July to August, another 12,882 children were dropped, bringing the agency’s total of children dropped since unwinding began to 31,592.
Mississippi Medicaid’s monthly unwinding reports do not say what number of terminations were children, but Mississippi Medicaid spokesperson Matt Westerfield confirmed that most of these disenrollments are due to unwinding.
The agency’s ex-parte rate, or automatic renewal rate, remains low. Westerfield previously told Mississippi Today that the agency wants to increase those rates, but August numbers show that of the 70,069 people up for renewal, only 10,817 were renewed on an ex-parte basis.
That’s on par with the previous data release, which shows that of the 75,110 people up for renewal in July, 12,188 were renewed ex-parte.
The agency in August requested permission from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for “four additional flexibilities that would reduce procedural disenrollments while increasing ex-parte renewals.” According to Westerfield, some were approved, while discussions continue about the others.
The agency’s backlog of beneficiaries to review also keeps growing. In June, about 5,000 renewals were not reviewed. About 15,000 additional reviews went uncompleted in July and another 10,000 in August.
As unwinding continues for the next several months, the burden on the state’s already crumbling health care infrastructure grows. One report puts nearly a half of the state’s rural hospitals at risk of closure.
State Republican leaders have adamantly opposed expanding Medicaid to the working poor, which research shows would bring in billions, though presumptive incoming House Speaker Jason White recently indicated he would consider expansion. His predecessor Philip Gunn largely led the effort to oppose the policy change.
The Kaiser Family Foundation says at least 6,438,000 people nationally have been disenrolled from Medicaid as of Sept. 13.
The post ‘These are not good numbers’: Thousands more Mississippians, kids dropped from Medicaid appeared first on Mississippi Today.
TORCH, Ohio — Four fracking waste injection wells in Athens County have temporarily suspended operations by order of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which says the wells present an “imminent danger” to health and the environment.
On May 1, ODNR Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management ordered the suspension of a Class II injection well in Rome Township on grounds that its operator, Reliable Enterprises LLC, violated an Ohio Administrative Code section that bars operators from contaminating or polluting surface land and surface or subsurface water. In late June, three wells in Torch operated by K&H Partners were suspended on the same grounds.
Applications for new Class II injection wells from both Reliable Enterprises and K&H were denied because of the suspensions. K&H’s application for a fourth well at its $43 million facility in Torch generated controversy when it was proposed in 2018.
Class II wells are used to contain toxic waste from oil and gas production thousands of feet underground. The wells are intended to isolate the waste water, known as brine, from groundwater.
However, the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management found that waste fluid injected into the three K&H wells had spread at least 1.5 miles underground and was rising to the surface through oil and gas production wells in Athens and Washington counties.
Waste injected into the Rome Township well spread to oil and gas production wells as far as two miles away, also in both Athens and Washington counties, the division said.
That suggests that all four wells “endanger and are likely to endanger public health, safety, or the environment,” the ODNR orders said. If the wells continue to operate, the ODNR orders say “additional impacts may occur in the future and are likely to contaminate the land, surface waters, or subsurface waters.”
The suspension orders for both K&H and Reliable Enterprises say the wells cannot resume operation until “the conditions that caused the suspension have been corrected.”
K&H fought its order in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, but the court found that it did not have jurisdiction in the case — the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission did. The commission was already considering the company’s appeal, which remains pending.
Reliable Enterprises did not appeal its suspension order, according to the commission’s docket, which the Independent obtained through a records request.
Two Class II wells in Noble County were also suspended earlier this year over threats to local water supplies. The order suspending those wells reported issues with brine flowing to the surface since 2010 and referenced multiple instances of uncontrolled brine release that required corrective action from the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management.
A 2021 incident cost the division $1.2 million to repair. In January of this year, another uncontrolled brine release occurred at one of the wells. The suspension order for the Noble County wells came days later.
Although the composition of fracking fluid is generally considered a “trade secret,” monitoring suggests the waste is highly hazardous.
Data released by the Pennsylvania-based watchdog group FracTracker shows that at least two of the three K&H wells in question have been injected with waste containing polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. PFAs are linked to birth defects and increased risk of cancer.
ODNR data published by FracTracker shows fracking waste in Ohio contains radioactive waste as well. The radioactive compounds that ODNR found in fracking waste can remain in the environment for thousands of years and cause bone, liver and breast cancer.
Mark Bruce, then an administrative officer with the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, told the Independent in August that “ODNR has received no evidence or reports that any groundwater, surface water, or water wells have been impacted” by fracking waste that migrated from the K&H wells in Torch. Bruce has since left his position.
The absence of evidence showing impacts on drinking water doesn’t necessarily mean that no impact has occurred, said Ted Auch, midwest program director for FracTracker. Auch is particularly concerned for Athens County residents who rely on well water, who may have limited ability to monitor possible contamination.
Likewise, Julie Weatherington-Rice, a hydrogeologist and Columbus-based senior scientist at Bennett and Williams Environmental Consultants, said the brine migration incident “certainly” threatens water supplies.
“Yes, we can lose public water supplies; yes, we can lose private water supplies,” Weatherington-Rice said. She added that it is difficult to know how far the impact could extend in any specific incident of brine migration.
Bruce said residents can report suspected impacts to the ODNR by calling (614) 265-6922, adding that the department will investigate reports.
In addition to disposal through injection, fracking waste in Ohio is also used to salt roadways despite its radioactivity. Advocates, including the Ohio Brine Task Force, say this poses a grave environmental threat.
“All injection wells have the potential to leak,” said Weatherington-Rice. “What was down there already has to move … so it’s gonna go in all the fissures and the joints and the cracks … and you’re overloading the system. Eventually the glass is gonna overflow.”
This is particularly problematic since geologists do not know the locations of many fault lines or of many abandoned wells and mines through which injected brine can reach surface and groundwater sources, she explained. Many faults are discovered only through seismic events induced by fracking and wastewater injection. One such event occurred recently in Washington County.
Production well operators near Torch have alleged their operations were affected by migrating fracking waste for years, according to the ODNR order.
In a 2016 investigation, the ODNR determined that it was unlikely the K&H wells were affecting the production wells. But in its June order, the department stated that more recent developments “undermine that 2016 investigation and demonstrate that its conclusion is wrong.”
In finding that fracking waste was migrating from the K&H wells, ODNR noted that K&H was injecting “large volumes of fluid” into the wells “at pressures that have increased.”
In 2019, the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management found evidence that brine water was migrating from injection wells in Washington County, affecting 28 nearby production wells.
ODNR believes fluid is migrating from the K&H wells in the same manner as in Washington County. Before its Washington County investigation, “the Division did not contemplate that injected fluid could migrate in the manner described in that report,” according to the June suspension order.
That claim doesn’t float with Weatherington-Rice.
“I just find that statement borderline ludicrous,” she said. “Anybody who has an undergraduate degree in geology, who went to a good school and did field work … would know better than that.”
Weatherington-Rice added, “Ohio does not have magic geology” that would accept injection of large amounts of waste fluid without posing any risk.
The Ohio shale formation into which the K&H wells and the Reliable Enterprises well inject is a particularly risky geology for underground injection, according to Weatherington-Rice.
In its order denying Reliable Enterprises’s application for a second well, the ODNR Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management pointed to issues with migrating fluid at its well in Rome Township. The order said, “an Ohio shale injection zone poses a substantial risk” for migration.
Likewise, in its order denying K&H’s application for a fourth well, the division cited “demonstrated problems with injecting into similar injection zones,” referring to waste injection into the Ohio shale near suspended wells.
The Buckeye Environmental Network and Ohio Brine Task Force, two Ohio environmental advocacy groups, have called for a suspension of all Class II wells injecting into the Ohio shale for over a decade, according to a Sept. 5 press release.
The release quoted Weatherington-Rice’s description of the Ohio shale as “holier than a Swiss cheese.”
K&H Partners won a temporary restraining order from the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in early June, after Judge Mark Serrott found that ODNR had deprived the company of its property rights. The company also appealed the decision to the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission; that case is pending.
In seeking the temporary restraining order, K&H argued that the company, owned by the huge investment fund Blackstone, would face “catastrophic and irreparable harm from an indefinite suspension of its injection well facility,” citing a threat to K&H’s $1.2 million annual payroll.
K&H paid a $500,000 bond for a 15-day extension of the initial restraining order that allowed it to continue operation.
The primary basis of K&H’s case — both in Franklin County and before the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission — is a June 2020 report from an independent consulting firm. K&H hired the firm the month before to investigate complaints that its injected wastewater was migrating to production wells owned by Energex Power.
According to an appeal document, the firm reported no evidence “suggesting the K&H Partners [wells] are responsible for impacts to the surrounding oil and gas production wells.” The report said the brine appearing in production wells could be naturally occurring.
In its motion to dismiss the temporary restraining order, ODNR said the consultants’ report “does not undermine” findings of the agency’s multiyear investigation of the K&H wells, which found that the brine found in nearby production wells “cannot be plausibly explained as naturally originating.”
Although the ODNR has not yet seen evidence of water supplies contaminated by the K&H wells, the ODNR said in its motion to dismiss that the wells should be suspended to prevent such contamination from occurring: “Once an underground aquifer has been contaminated by brine, there is no way to make it safe again,” the motion states. “The damage is done, and it cannot be undone.
“Accordingly, when an injection well is showing signs of migration, the Chief cannot and does not wait for evidence that the migration has actually impacted an aquifer before issuing an order suspending operation. If he did so, it would be too late.”
The Franklin County case was dismissed and the restraining order vacated on Aug. 2 after Serrott determined that his court lacked jurisdiction to oversee the case. That right falls to the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission, which is already considering K&H’s appeal.
The commission will hold a private, quasi-judicial appeal to discuss the merits of the K&H appeal on Sept. 11, said Cory Haydocy, the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission’s executive director. It is unclear how long it will take to resolve the appeal, Haydocy added.
K&H attorney Jonathan Olivito did not return a request for comment.
K&H operates facilities across 3,600 acres in Athens and Washington counties, according to the company’s court filings. The company received permits for its three Torch wells in 2012, 2014 and 2015 amid fierce public opposition.
For local activists who participated in the initial fight against the wells, the recent ODNR suspension and denial orders only confirm what activists have said about injection wells all along.
“We said it would happen, and it did!” activist and former Athens County Commissioner Roxanne Groff said in the press release from the Buckeye Environmental Network and Ohio Brine Task Force. “From the first Class II Injection Well permit application in Athens County in 2011, scores of us protested the idea and stated clearly that drilling in this area would eventually cause the migration of fluids. ODNR’s self-proclaimed strict policies failed.”
Bruce, with the ODNR Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, told the Independent that despite recent migration of fracking waste, underground injection is “an effective and safe way to dispose of oilfield waste fluids.” Ohio’s regulatory framework ensures the wells “do not negatively impact public health, safety, or the environment and reduce risk as much as possible,” Bruce said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that over 2 billion gallons of fracking fluid are disposed of in about 180,000 Class II injection wells every day.
The post Local injection wells suspended over ‘imminent danger’ to drinking water appeared first on Athens County Independent.
Covered swine barns dot the landscape near Platte Center, where tens of thousands of hogs are raised and fed.
Many of these barns are owned by a local boy who grew up a few miles west of the village, built his small family farm into a global pork empire and then became governor.
Gov. Jim Pillen’s hog operations bring jobs and prosperity to this area near his hometown. They also may bring risk to Platte Center’s drinking water.
The town had to dig a new municipal well three years ago, after another well recorded nitrate at nearly 12 parts per million. That’s higher than the level the federal government says is safe to drink.
Ingesting high levels of nitrate has been linked to a variety of health conditions: A syndrome that can kill babies, thyroid disease, birth defects and cancers, including cancer in children. Nationally, Nebraska has the highest pediatric cancer rate west of Pennsylvania.
Nebraska counties with elevated nitrate levels are often the places where children suffer higher rates of brain cancer, lymphoma and leukemia, a recent University of Nebraska Medical Center study shows.
Andrew Greisen, Platte Center’s water operator, says the area surrounding town has seen a handful of cancer cases this year.
“When I was young, there wasn’t that (many) people with cancer. Now it’s wild,” he said. “Prostate cancer, breast cancer and brain cancer, just everything. I just think it’s got to be the food we’re eating or the water we’re drinking.”
That’s why Greisen is now working with Natural Resources District experts as they map nitrate levels inside Platte Center-area aquifers – studying where the nitrate may be flowing from.
There are many potential culprits, including the nitrogen fertilizer applied for decades to corn fields surrounding this small town.
Another potential culprit: The Platte Center West hog farm. The farm, 6 miles northwest of town, recorded a 61.5-parts-per-million nitrate level – six times above the legal drinking water limit – in one of its monitoring wells last year.
Another nearby hog farm, Janssen Platte Center Nursery, which tested 21.2 parts per million nitrate in April, has shown “strong elevated nitrates and chloride levels,” according to a groundwater review by the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy last year.
Both of these hog farms are registered to an owner at 4438 Old Mill Court in Columbus, the headquarters of Pillen Family Farms.
Greisen suspects most of the nitrate comes from anhydrous ammonia fertilizer dumped on cornfields decades ago. He also said that there’s a “good possibility” that hog farms with high nitrate readings affect the area’s water quality.
“It throws a red flag, it really does,” he said.
Since 1993, Pillen and his family have owned or operated at least 108 livestock facilities – most of them hog barns – spread throughout the state, but clustered in eastern Nebraska, according to permitting records.
Only 27 of these facilities are required by the state to have monitoring wells installed on them.
Sixteen of those 27 have recorded nitrate levels higher than 50 parts per million at least once since monitoring began on site, according to a Flatwater Free Press review.
A few of them have violated the state’s livestock waste control rules. They have housed more hogs than permitted, the state alleged, failed to report wastewater discharge into a marsh and submitted groundwater test results and manure nutrient analyses late – all of which could conceivably increase the risk of nitrate contamination, research shows.
Pillen is far from the only big hog producer facing these issues. In many places, waste from concentrated livestock operations is a major contributor to ground and surface water nitrate pollution, the research noted.
These high readings on Pillen-affiliated livestock facilities result in little state action, the review shows. Like other hog farms and feedlots that have reported high nitrate in Nebraska, the elevated levels don’t automatically trigger any state intervention, as the Flatwater Free Press previously reported. The NDEE examines these results individually to determine potential causes and solutions, said Amanda Woita, a department spokesperson.
To be clear: No one is directly drinking from these monitoring wells on hog farms. But some of that nitrate will move along with groundwater, experts say, potentially posing a risk to residents living downstream and contributing to Nebraska’s nitrate problem.
Pillen did not respond to multiple interview requests from Flatwater Free Press and Investigate Midwest about his hog operations.
In a December 2022 interview with the Nebraska Examiner, Pillen portrayed nitrate pollution as a problem largely stemming from the past. He said much improvement has been made, and that remaining problems will take time to address. “And if there are a few silly things going on, it’s easy to be able to identify that and granularly fix that,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the governor directed all questions to Pillen Family Farms.
Pillen Family Farms CEO Sarah Pillen, the governor’s daughter, sent a general statement when reporters requested an interview. She said the company “(has) always placed a strong commitment on being positive environmental stewards of the land.”
She noted the company employs a 17-member team who work to protect Nebraska’s groundwater and ensure safe nutrient management.
She and other Pillen Family Farms executives did not respond to multiple email questions about high nitrate detected on specific hog farms, potential causes of these high readings and the company’s remediation efforts.
Many Pillen hog barns have few to no known nitrate issues, data show. Nitrate readings at modern hog confinements should be low unless waste storage pit leaks or manure is overapplied in nearby fields, said Chris Jones, former University of Iowa water quality researcher and author of book “The Swine Republic.”
Other Pillen hog barns look much like the hundreds of other pig farms spread across Nebraska, which tend to show at least slightly elevated nitrate levels at some points. Ray Ward, founder of a leading Nebraska water testing lab, said nitrate readings near livestock waste lagoons are “quite variable,” from near-zero levels to very high numbers.
Still other Pillen operations, like a Holt County hog farm, have recorded nitrate levels higher than Jones says he’s ever seen.
The Holt County farm, called CRB Finish, had multiple nitrate readings higher than 200 parts per million between 2015 and 2017.
In 2016, it recorded a reading of 445 parts per million – nearly 45 times the EPA standard for safe drinking water.
“If you’ve got a monitoring well that’s 400 parts per million and there’s drinking water wells in the area, that should be a 911,” Jones said.
Another expert, Rebecca Muenich of the University of Arkansas, said it’s a “huge, huge, huge human health concern” if nitrate anywhere near this level makes it into the drinking wells of nearby residents.
“That’s water that you can sell as fertilizer for sure,” said Muenich, who specializes in analyzing water quality data near livestock facilities.
The nitrate levels in that Holt County hog farm monitoring well have dropped markedly since 2020, dipping to near zero in November 2022.
Many other monitoring wells on livestock facilities tied to Pillen Family Farms continue to show flashing nitrate warning signs.
Nine different hog farms that the state lists as being Pillen-affiliated reported nitrate higher than 70 parts per million this year, according to an FFP review of groundwater reports.
Two are near Platte Center, population 355. The monitoring well at Pillen’s Production Farms, a hog farm south of the village, had water tested at 70 parts per million nitrate in April. Another farm, Oconee Finisher, reported 76 parts per million this year, the highest level since it started monitoring.
Both are downstream of the town and have less impact on the town’s drinking water. But residents of rural Platte County – many of whom get their drinking water from private wells that aren’t required to be tested – are still at risk, experts say.
At least seven domestic wells are situated within three miles downstream of Pillen’s Production Farms, a Flatwater Free Press analysis of the state well registry found.
Platte Center is surrounded by nearly 50 livestock facilities within a five-mile radius, including feedlots and hog barns. Many don’t have monitoring wells installed on site. The three that do, including one not owned by Pillen Family Farms, all show significantly elevated nitrate levels.
The town recently drilled a new, deeper well that’s currently delivering clean water.
The project’s price tag: roughly $500,000. The state footed nearly half the bill.
Greisen is worried about Platte Center’s future, because he knows what is happening nearby.
The village of Lindsay has spent $826,000 digging a new well and running pipes into the village. One of that 283-person village’s wells has regularly violated the 10-ppm drinking water standard since 2010.
Bellwood is also under the threat of high nitrate.
Greisen wonders, and worries: Is more polluted water coming Platte Center’s way?
Sometimes called “liquid gold,” hog manure contains a high concentration of nitrogen matter, which converts to nitrate when exposed to oxygen. Nitrate is great fertilizer for crops. But it can also easily find its way into groundwater, which supplies 85% of Nebraskans with drinking water.
The federal Clean Water Act gives states the authority to monitor water at certain livestock operations. Many states mandate the monitoring of nitrate because of potential water contamination.
Experts say these monitoring wells may pick up high nitrate originating from sources unrelated to livestock. The high nitrate detected could reflect plumes of nitrate, generated years ago, now entering the water table. It may also come from commercial fertilizer – many of Nebraska’s hog farms are near cornfields.
But sometimes feeding operations are the direct source of nitrate, depending on how they store feed, manage wastewater and apply manure to surrounding land, according to the NDEE and outside experts.
That’s why the NDEE typically requires multiple-well monitoring programs on certain sites — at least one upstream that indicates background contaminant levels, and two downstream.
High nitrate readings in a downstream well can indicate that the feedlot or hog barn has released large amounts of nitrogen into the aquifer, said Dan Snow, director of the University of Nebraska Water Sciences Laboratory.
Snow said the high nitrate and spikes of ammonia at CRB Finish, the Pillen hog farm in Holt County, seem to signify multiple leaking events in the wastewater distribution system. It appeared a spill “allowed the ammonia and other contaminants to flow directly into the aquifer,” he told the Flatwater Free Press, after reviewing the groundwater monitoring data.
Pillen Family Farms executives didn’t respond to multiple Flatwater Free Press emails asking about the potential cause of the high nitrate.
The soil is also very sandy in Holt County, Snow said, so nitrate from animal waste can get quickly washed into the water table. “Maybe having animal feeding operations in that part of the state is not a good idea, just because it’s much easier to contaminate the local groundwater,” he said.
Hog manure is often applied to nearby fields to avoid high transportation costs, thus exposing nearby bodies of water and groundwater to contamination risks, said Muenich, the University of Arkansas water expert.
“… It can be accidental application or deliberate; it doesn’t matter,” Snow said. “If it’s at the surface … and the plant doesn’t use it, it can eventually end up at the water table.”
State regulators point out that there are restrictions for livestock facilities like the Pillen Family Farms hog barns. They must sit at least 100 feet from an existing domestic well and 1,000 feet from an existing municipal well.
Some animal feeding operations are also asked to monitor nearby drinking wells, said Carla Felix, an NDEE spokesperson, in an email.
No hog barn is known to have contaminated a rural resident’s drinking water, Felix said.
“NDEE is not aware of any documented incidences where a private well was impacted by a (Livestock Waste Control Facility),” she wrote.
And she noted that any investigation isn’t guaranteed to identify the source of high nitrate for a simple reason: Groundwater moves.
Jones, the Iowa water expert, suspects that this mystery about where high nitrate comes from isn’t one that regulators are clamoring to solve.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, an international environmental nonprofit, gave Nebraska an overall rating of “low” for what it says is a lack of livestock operation data transparency.
To Jones, keeping the sources of high nitrate mysterious is the point.
“The uncertainty about individual operations … the industry uses that … to avoid responsibility and make the case that it can’t be regulated,” he said.
In 2006, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee reported that workers at a Hastings-area hog farm were pumping hog waste onto a nearby federal wetlands area. State regulators later alleged that the hog farm, co-owned by Pillen Family Farms had “allowed or caused a discharge of livestock waste” onto the wetlands, then failed to report the spill.
In a separate incident, farm employees constructed a PVC pipe without a permit. They used the pipe to drain a storage pit into a freshwater channel, regulators alleged.
The operation near Hastings, named Inland Foods, eventually entered a court-ordered agreement with state regulators and paid a civil penalty.
Inland Foods is one of a dozen Pillen Family Farms livestock operations that have violated state regulations in the past three decades, a review of NDEE documents shows.
Current executives at Pillen Family Farms didn’t respond when asked about specific violations of state rules.
In a statement, Sarah Pillen touted the company’s general environmental protection measures, describing them as “far beyond regulatory requirements.” The company works closely with state regulators, she said. In the company’s history, she said, it has never had a permit revoked. (Read Sarah Pillen’s full statement here.)
The Hastings-area farm didn’t have groundwater monitoring when it paid a penalty for violating state rules.
In 2011, state regulators recommended the installation of monitoring wells. The nitrate readings came back high.
An inspection later that year suggested the hog farm violated state rules by housing more hogs than its permit allowed.
High nitrate on site has continued. A downstream monitoring well detected a level of 77.8 parts per million in May. A 2021 NDEE report concluded that “this facility is impacting groundwater quality with a depth to water of 85-100 feet.”
The high nitrate readings didn’t surprise Marty Stange, Hastings’ environmental supervisor. He said local construction projects might have altered groundwater flow, and high nitrate levels might not necessarily reflect the hog farm’s manure management.
The NDEE works with livestock operations it has deemed to have impacted groundwater, Felix said. Sometimes it orders these facilities to do things such as increase monitoring, plant trees or relocate lagoons, which can cost millions of dollars.
There’s no public record of NDEE further investigating or otherwise acting on its 2021 report. Woita, the NDEE spokesperson, declined to say whether the department has worked with Inland Foods, the hog farm co-owned by Pillen Family Farms near Hastings, on any remediation.
Despite record-keeping rules, state regulations aren’t stopping high nitrate from showing up in water near livestock operations, advocates say. The leaching of nutrients from manure into groundwater and surface water can kill fish, cause algae bloom and threaten drinking water, research shows.
State rules require hog barns to document where manure is applied to prevent overapplication.
But Anthony Schutz, a UNL law professor and board member of the Lower Platte South Natural Resources District, said such paperwork doesn’t guarantee good stewardship. After all, it’s nearly impossible for NDEE inspectors to watch every acre.
“You keep a bunch of records. You do a bunch of monitoring. You follow all of the rules that are in the permit. But it turns out the rules in the permit don’t actually require you to not pollute. And so you wind up with … where we are today,” said Schutz.
Last September, a handful of Nebraskans testified at a state hearing on proposed permitting changes for concentrated animal feeding operations. Some testifiers were grassroots organizers. Others farmed small plots of land next to a livestock operation.
Most wanted the state to hold large, industrial farms more accountable.
“The water in this state belongs to the people, not to any industrial ag interest,” said Nancy Meyer, a Cedar Bluffs resident, arguing Nebraska is neglecting to protect its groundwater.
“When does the alarm sound loud enough that we stop overloading our soils and waterways with nutrients?” said Ashlen Busick, a testifier from the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, in an interview with the Flatwater Free Press.
But many inside Nebraska’s ag industry are dubious.
Livestock nutrient management consultant Andy Scholting thinks current state regulations already provide ample guardrails.
“We’re doing more in regards to nutrient management compared to other states in the Midwest,” he said, noting the state mandates more frequent soil tests before manure application.
Osceola farmer Kevin Peterson owns a 4,800-head hog farm and serves on the state Environmental Quality Council, a 17-person, governor-appointed board that adopts some NDEE regulations.
Peterson thinks the current regulations, and a heavy emphasis on educating farmers, are working as intended.
After all, overapplying manure is expensive, he said. And Nebraska farmers are increasingly heeding the nitrate problem and taking voluntary action to address it, Peterson said.
“It’s a lot easier to envision a robber baron sitting in the office … twisting his evil mustache and thinking about how they could destroy the environment in order to make an extra penny,” said Peterson. “I’ve yet to run into any of those folks … I do not think Governor Pillen is one of those.”
As governor, Pillen could strengthen rules and “stop the bleeding,” said Graham Christensen, an Oakland-area farmer who focuses on regenerative agriculture and runs a consulting firm.
“He has such an opportunity as this known polluter to help bring farmers into a situation where they’re not (polluting), and his operations would benefit from that,” said Christensen.
Pillen could tap into federal funding to promote farming practices that can reduce nitrate leaching, such as planting cover crops, Christensen said. He could step up state regulations on manure application such as requiring buffer strips when manure is applied.
“He’s ignoring the issue. He’s not wanting to meet with anybody on this thing. He’s not publicly addressing our concerns,” Christensen said.
This April, the NDEE published a letter to Nebraskans concerned about the feedlots, hog barns and chicken farms that surround small towns like Platte Center.
The document summarized public comments and the agency’s response to 11 different points of concern over water quality and waste control, after some commenters said the agency didn’t adequately address concerns raised in the rule-making process.
In the April letter, there’s a spot in the document where the NDEE listed any changes it has made in the permit rules in response to these concerns.
In all 11 areas where potential change could occur, the state agency responded with a single word.
“None.”
Sky Chadde, of Investigate Midwest, contributed to this story.
This is the second in a series. Read the first story here.
The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.
The post Pillen’s Water: High nitrate detected on hog farms owned by Nebraska’s governor appeared first on Investigate Midwest.
JACKSON COUNTY — When she first bought her house in Millwood nearly 20 years ago, Michelle Roach saw it as an investment for her family.
“I plan to give my property to my son,” she said. “That’s supposed to be his, and I’ve been telling him that since he was little.”
But now, for the first time, she’s reconsidering that plan in light of a plant to turn medical waste into energy proposed off state Route 2 — roughly a mile from her home.
“I don’t want to leave. I love it up there,” she said. “But that’s what everybody is talking about.”
Spurred by federal incentives meant for clean energy, these kinds of waste-to-energy facility proposals are becoming more common, especially in West Virginia. A plan for a plant in Follansbee was scuttled earlier this year, and there are two other projects in the works, including the proposed plant in Millwood.
There are some environmental benefits to these types of facilities. Waste incinerators are viewed as an alternative to landfills, and have been lauded as an eco-friendly substitute method for disposing of waste.
But residents like Roach are concerned about what they see as a lack of transparency in the process, and they’re worried about the potential environmental and health effects of a new waste incinerator. Because these sites are proposing to use relatively uncommon chemical processes, Heather Sprouse, an organizer with the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, said the consequences of the facility’s potential emissions are unknown.
“One of the challenges here is that many people don’t have understanding or no access to even understand what the long-term impacts can be because there’s very little information available about cumulative impacts,” Sprouse said.
The proposal by Thunder Mountain Environmental Services would build the medical waste facility in a warehouse space off Point Pleasant Road, right outside of Ravenswood.
The facility would dispose of solid medical waste by converting it into energy through gasification — a process that converts waste into synthetic gas, which can then be used to produce energy. The company plans to power the facility with that energy. It expects to employ between 15 and 20 people full time, according to Thunder Mountain President Bryan Fennell.
The waste the facility is incinerating will include used medical gloves, paper towels, bandages, needles, syringes, chemotherapy administration supplies, expired or tainted medicines and human or animal tissue or fluids generated during medical procedures. And while it will keep about 1,650 pounds of this waste from going into a landfill every hour, the incinerator will emit 12.29 tons of pollutants into the air annually, according to the permit engineering evaluation.
One of those pollutants is tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, otherwise known as TCDD, one of the most toxic kinds of dioxins.
While the engineering evaluation estimates that the Millwood site will emit less than two tenths of a milligram of TCDD per year, the chemical is a carcinogen — a substance or agent capable of causing cancer — and dioxins can be incredibly harmful even at low emission rates.
“They induce birth defects, they alter the immune responses, and so even exceedingly low concentrations are quite troubling for people,” said West Virginia Sierra Club chair Jim Kotcon, also an associate professor of plant pathology at West Virginia University.
The facility will operate “in strict compliance” with its permits, said Fennell. The site is permitted to emit nine nanograms of TCDD per cubic meter; 90 times greater than the emissions level permitted in the European Union.
The proposal by Thunder Mountain Environmental Services marks the second recent attempt by an out-of-state company to establish a medical waste-to-energy facility in West Virginia.
“It does seem like we’re seeing this as a trend, and it looks like Central Appalachia might be kind of the bullseye for how these facilities are developing throughout the nation,” Sprouse said.
Concerns over medical waste-to-energy facilities in the state began following the proposal of a facility in Follansbee last year by Empire Green Generation. The out-of-state company proposed using pyrolysis — a process that thermally decomposes material into combustible gas — to convert medical waste into gaseous fuel. The company dropped the project following opposition from residents and city officials.
A June announcement by Gov. Jim Justice of another waste-to-energy facility, this time in Eastern Kanawha County, has only further heightened concerns.
Sprouse credits the sudden boom to state and federal governments incentivizing such facilities.
Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act included a variety of incentives to promote clean energy and reduce carbon emissions. Some of those benefits were aimed at encouraging the commercialization of carbon capture and storage and hydrogen hubs.
The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021 also allocated funds to invest in projects utilizing hydrogen technology in an effort to help the country transition to a zero-carbon economy.
“These tax credits are available for a variety of circumstances, but we’re seeing that it does create an environment where for business owners it can be ever more profitable for them to engage in this waste incineration technology,” Sprouse said.
While it’s unclear whether the Millwood or Follansbee facilities would qualify for the incentives, the interest in the capture of carbon from waste-to-energy plants has grown over the past decade, according to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
Millwood resident Henry Ligier, sat in his den, flipping through a stack of papers in his lap. A few stray papers were scattered around him, while his wife Adelle perched on a seat nearby, her own documents in hand.
“I’ve been doing a lot of research in reference to how this whole process works,” Ligier said. While he’s not an engineer, he previously worked at a recycling plant as a safety director before retiring. Over the past few weeks, he’s read the DEP’s engineering evaluation for the facility, researched the proposed processes and watched videos on the technology.
“I understand the recycling business and I understand safety,” he said. “I’m trying to learn this, and what I’m learning I’m passing on to all the community.”
Most, if not all, of the information the community has on the proposed medical waste facility has come from research by either the Ligiers or Roach, and it’s what they plan to use as they now set their sights on mobilizing opposition in the neighboring town of Ravenswood.
But even as their effort grows, their underlying frustration has too. Despite their research, they still have a lot of unanswered questions and concerns over the overall impacts of a medical waste facility.
“Had we known that this was happening, we would definitely not have moved here,” said Ligier, looking at his wife. The couple moved to West Virginia just two years ago from New Jersey. “We would not have moved here at all.”
For now, whether Thunder Mountain’s plant will open down the road from the Ligier’s house is still unknown. The facility needs three state permits to operate: an alternative treatment technology permit and a commercial infectious medical waste facility permit from the Department of Health and Human Services and an air permit from the Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Air Quality.
In early August, DHHR’s Office of Environmental Health Services denied two of the permits, saying the facility is classified as a large Hospital Medical Infectious Waste Incinerator, which are prohibited under the state’s Medical Waste Act. The site’s failure to qualify for the exemption to the rule also contributed to the permit denial.
While Fennell says the company hasn’t yet made any decisions, they’re still hoping to continue with the Jackson County project.
Spurred by government funding, controversial waste-to-energy plants eye West Virginia appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.
Two forestry companies that were announced as recipients for hundreds of thousands of dollars in state grant money last December were issued environmental violations at their Maine facilities over the past several years.
One of the companies, ND Paper Inc., had a $101,400 state penalty finalized in late August for chemical spills at its Old Town mill in 2020 and 2022.
One spill led to a limited fish kill in the Penobscot River and continued issues with high-pH at the spill site near the riverbank, according to Maine Department of Environmental Protection officials.
A second company, T&D Wood Energy LLC, operates a wood pellet manufacturing facility in Sanford that was cited for nine violations of DEP regulations between 2019 and 2022, DEP records show.
Its violations stem from inadequate recordkeeping and exceeding the facility’s emissions limits. The company was most recently issued a violation notice in April 2023. If left unresolved, the violations could lead to monetary penalties.
David Madore, the DEP deputy commissioner, wrote in an email Monday that there is an enforcement action pending against T&D Wood Energy.
Last year, ND Paper was awarded $1 million through a state grant, called the Forestry Recovery Initiative, and T&D Wood Energy was awarded $600,000.
The initiative is administered by the Maine Technology Institute, a nonprofit created by the Maine legislature in 1999 to distribute state-funded grants and loans to spur economic growth and innovation.
T&D Wood Energy did not respond to a request for comment. An ND Paper spokesperson said the company works to monitor compliance at its facilities and reports to state regulatory agencies when issues arise.
When asked by The Maine Monitor if MTI had any concerns that some of the awarded companies, including ND Paper and T&D Wood Energy, had poor environmental compliance histories, the MTI president, Brian Whitney, wrote, “MTI does not necessarily agree with the assumption of the question that any of the companies have a poor compliance record.”
The Forestry Recovery Initiative grant uses funds from the federal pandemic rescue plan. The funds were allocated by Gov. Janet Mills to a state pandemic recovery plan, called the Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan, in 2021 with legislative approval.
The grant was to help Maine’s forestry companies recover financially from the COVID-19 pandemic, and support company projects that bolster long-term economic growth and job creation.
Phase One of the initiative in March 2022 awarded 224 small-scale forestry companies with $6 million in grants. The second phase awarded $14 million to a total of 19 larger forestry companies.
ND Paper and T&D Wood Energy were in the second phase. They plan to use the funds to expand productivity.
ND Paper intends to enhance the efficiency of a packaging paper machine at its Rumford mill, and T&D Wood Energy wants to acquire two shuttered facilities to expand operations, according to a webpage announcing the grant awards.
Since announcing the awards last December, Whitney wrote in an email that MTI has been finalizing the details.
Whitney said the application process for Phase Two included self-certification from the applicants that they were a business in good standing and confirmation from state agencies that the companies have not been banned from contracting with the state or federal government.
Overall consideration of grant applications, however, did not include separate investigations of the companies’ compliance with environmental laws, and an applicant’s history of environmental compliance was not used as a criterion to score applications, according to MTI.
“The application did not inquire about historical violations of environmental law,” Whitney wrote in an emailed response to the Monitor’s questions.
Whitney stated that such investigations into environmental compliance are not a requirement of the Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan.
Whitney wrote that before contracting with the awardees, MTI shared the list of grant recipients with the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, and Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.
After the awards were announced, MTI “learned that T&D Wood was not in compliance with DEP,” Whitney wrote. “(T)hat contract and conditional award has not moved forward pending resolution of the outstanding issues with the state.”
ND Paper’s violations
Whitney said officials were unaware of ND Paper’s environmental violations until they saw a news report in July that ND Paper “faced a Maine DEP issue resulting from a spill at one of their other Maine locations” in Old Town.
Whitney said the MTI then received confirmation from DEP and the state DECD that ND Paper “had satisfactorily settled the issue.”
The $101,400 penalty for ND Paper was finalized by the Maine Board of Environmental Protection in August.
It was prompted by separate spill incidents at the company’s Old Town mill. In the first, 30,720 gallons of a sodium hydroxide mix was poured through a drain in September and October 2020 because of an open valve, leading to the increased pH levels and corresponding small-scale fish kill.
DEP staff members reported the floor drain system associated with the fall 2020 spill has been repaired, though Pam Parker with DEP’s Water Quality Bureau said in a meeting this month of the Maine Board of Environmental Protection that extensive repairs were difficult due to the facility’s age.
“… (T)his is an old industrial building with a tremendous amount of legacy piping, but also actively used systems,” Parker said. “So it was hard to be able to wholesale repair the facility …”
A smaller spill occurred at the same building in June 2022, when 1,076 gallons of a sodium hydroxide solution were released over a 30-day period.
ND Paper has repaired the parts of the Old Town facility that the spills originated from, according to the DEP, and installed monitoring equipment to prevent another incident.
As part of the consent agreement, ND Paper also has to investigate the high-pH material still detected underneath the spill site and create a remediation plan.
The Old Town mill has been closed since March.
Although ND Paper’s Old Town mill has been the most recent target of DEP enforcement, its Rumford mill, which its Forestry Recovery Initiative award is designated for, also has had recent environmental deficiencies, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database.
Between April 2020 and September 2022, the Rumford mill violated its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit five times, the database shows. The permit is a federal license enforced by DEP that limits the wastewater a facility can legally discharge.
In an email, ND Paper spokesperson Jay Capron wrote that the company carefully monitors and maintains its systems to ensure environmental compliance with regulatory agencies.
“In addition, incidents are reported and elevated internally, and the process includes completing incident investigations, developing corrective actions, and presenting findings,” Capron wrote.
T&D Wood Energy’s track record
DEP has issued four warning letters to T&D Wood Energy’s Sanford facility since it came online in November 2018, as well as two violation notices, according to documents obtained by the Monitor through a Freedom of Access Act request.
In the first violation notice, issued in February 2020, DEP wrote that the agency received 13 air quality complaints between 2018 and 2020. Agency officials also made several visits to the plant.
The violation notice said because of the facility’s classification under the federal Clean Air Act and its guidance for state agencies to oversee facilities with the greatest potential for significant impact on human health and environment, DEP identified the violations as “High Priority,” and labeled T&D Wood as a “High Priority Violator.”
DEP acknowledged that as a new operation, T&D Wood and Player Design, Inc., which jointly hold an air emissions license for the facility, “have been working through startup of the new manufacturing process to come into compliance, resolve operational problems, and run an efficient, profitable business.”
However, DEP officials wrote, “The Department has given T&D Wood ample time to come into compliance.” That included delaying compliance testing and providing technical assistance from a department compliance inspector, according to the violation notice.
Four months later, in June 2020, T&D Wood received a DEP warning letter that stated, “Based on our findings there is more work to be done to come into full compliance,” citing excess smoke and dust, as well as incomplete reports.
In a follow-up inspection in August 2020, a DEP official wrote that an inspection at T&D Wood’s facility indicated compliance with the company’s air emissions license, but more test results were required.
A string of warning letters came two years later in July and December 2022, when the facility was again dinged for its emissions and incomplete recordkeeping. A full compliance evaluation in February 2022 identified several more violations.
The facility received its most recent violation notice in April, followed by the pending enforcement action.
T&D Wood Energy did not return emails or phone calls requesting comment.
Safeguards and concerns
According to Whitney with the Maine Technology Institute, there are several safeguards that keep grant awardees on track with the goals of the Forestry Recovery Initiative, including five years of quarterly reporting requirements beyond a project’s completion.
He added that if a grantee fails to comply with federal and state statutes, regulations or other grant requirements, MTI “would provide the grantee an opportunity to cure its issues, but MTI does retain the ability to terminate the agreement and seek reimbursement of the grant funds if necessary.”
Whitney said most of the funds have yet to be distributed.
In addition to ND Paper and T&D Wood’s outlined violations, five other companies awarded Forestry Recovery Initiative grants had instances of non-compliance with DEP regulations, according to the EPA database.
Sappi North America, Inc. was awarded $1 million for improvements in pulp and paper mill productivity at its facility in Skowhegan.
At that same facility, Sappi has five violations reported under its wastewater permit between April 2020 and September 2022, according to the EPA database.
Sappi received two violation notices from DEP and one warning letter for operations at its Skowhegan plant during that two-year span.
The EPA database shows two other violations from 2020 against Sappi on its water permit for its operations at a Westbrook mill. EPA also lists one more violation on Sappi’s air emissions license. Those notices came before the initiative awards were announced last December.
There were three warning letters issued under the air emissions license between January 2020 and July 2022, the EPA database shows.
Sappi North America did not respond to requests for comment on those violations and its plans for the grant award.
Hancock Lumber Company, Inc. was also awarded $1 million through the initiative for a project labeled “Bethel Value Added.”
At its Ryefield mill, Hancock Lumber has received several violation notices for a permit under the Safe Drinking Water Act, another federal license but for community water systems, though the company’s water system is listed as private and only serves 45 people.
Almost all of those violations are listed as “resolved” on the EPA database.
After initially responding to a reporter’s email, Hancock did not respond to email inquiries on the violations and the company’s designated project for grant funding.
Robbins Lumber East Baldwin, LLC was awarded $1 million to purchase a sawmill edger that will replace a 40-year-old piece of equipment at its East Baldwin mill, according to Robbins spokesperson Catherine Robbins-Halsted.
Robbins-Halstead wrote in an email that the project will improve equipment efficiency and reduce energy consumption while making a demanding job easier for operators.
In response to a question about water violations reported at the company’s Searsmont facility, Robbins-Halsted said one group of violations was due to existing background groundwater concentrations.
Another violation stemmed from an effluent discharge that DEP had authorized, according to Robbins-Halsted.
“In both instances Robbins was communicating with DEP and working with DEP to comply with standards in a mutually agreed upon path. The alleged violations represent a gap between State DEP and Federal EPA data recordkeeping,” Robbins-Halstead wrote.
DAAQUAM Lumber Maine, Inc., was awarded $500,000 by the Forestry Recovery Initiative for a project to replace a kiln at its Aroostook County facility.
It has one violation for its air permit in August 2021 and two warning letters from DEP.
DAAQUAM did not return phone call and email inquiries on the violation, nor its plans for the Forestry Recovery Initiative awards.
ReEnergy Biomass Maine, LLC is the fifth company with listed environmental infractions before it was awarded initiative funding.
The company received $523,900 for projects at its Livermore Falls and Stratton facilities to harness a charcoal-like substance called biochar for potential use as a soil supplement, according to its spokesperson, Sarah Boggess.
In October 2022, the company had an NPDES permit violation at its Livermore Falls biomass-to-energy facility, which burns wooden material and converts it to electricity, when the facility exceeded its monthly average chromium limit by 18%.
According to Boggess, the company determined that the excess was due to washing activities while the facility was offline for the fall.
“To prevent a recurrence, the Livermore Falls team will isolate the wash water and dispose of it before it reaches the cooling tower so it is not included in the facility’s discharged water,” Boggess wrote in an email. “There was no financial penalty assessed.”
In response to those violations, Whitney said because the ECHO database relies on self-reported and time-limited violations, some may be relatively minor and do not result in enforcement actions if resolved with the regulator.
He said MTI is not in a position to pre-empt the responsible agency in enforcement proceedings or decisions.
Asked if any companies aside from ND Paper and T&D Wood energy that were awarded forestry initiative funds had outstanding environmental violations, DEP’s Madore directed a reporter to the EPA ECHO database.
Sean Mahoney, vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation’s Maine Advocacy Center, an environmental advocacy group, wrote in an email that if the state is going to provide public funds to help the private sector, there should be certain assurances.
“(T)hose companies should have their houses in order and be in compliance with all state and federal laws,” Mahoney wrote. “The situation with T&D Wood Energy appears particularly noteworthy given (its) lengthy history of noncompliance.”
The story Forestry companies granted state funds despite environmental violations appeared first on The Maine Monitor.
Over a decade into retirement, Danny Johnson still considers himself a coal miner. It was such a part of his identity that when his only daughter got married, he walked her down the aisle wearing his hard hat and mining coveralls.
Whenever Johnson dug into a new part of a mountain, he remembers feeling that he and God were the only ones who had ever seen that part of the earth.
“You’re going where nobody’s ever been,” the 69-year-old said while sitting on his front porch in Mercer County.
But his decades of mining had drawbacks as well. He worked long shifts at various mines in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky — sometimes going over two weeks in a row without a day off. He missed countless birthdays and graduations of his two children, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
And the job took a severe toll on his health. When Johnson was 20, a 20-foot-long rock fell on his face, requiring him to get more than 100 stitches through his face and mouth. Later, he broke each of his feet and watched a nail fly straight into his pupil.
“I can see big stuff, but I can’t read nothing,” Johnson said, pointing to a blue artificial lens in his eye.
While those injuries have scarred over, he’s still battling the consequences of the dust that lives in his lungs. Eleven years ago, at the age of 57, Johnson was diagnosed with progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe stage of black lung disease.
The disease has been a known threat to coal miners for over a century — it’s taken the lives of tens of thousands of Americans since 1968. While black lung became less common through the 1990s, it’s on the rise again. Now, even middle-aged miners have been diagnosed with advanced stages of the disease.
Severe black lung continues to disproportionately affect central Appalachia; from 2019 to mid-2023, nearly 30% of Americans diagnosed with progressive massive fibrosis at federally-funded black lung clinics were West Virginians, according to the Black Lung Data and Resource Center at the University of Illinois Chicago.
That trend is widely attributed to more frequent exposures to silica dust. With the easily-accessible coal already mined, workers often grind through rock embedded with quartz to mine thinner and thinner seams. Grinding that quartz creates silica dust, which is 20 times more toxic than coal dust alone.
“It’s the silica dust that’s killing them,” Johnson’s wife Debbie said. As a black lung nurse at Bluestone Health Center in Kegley, she’s used to seeing patients like Johnson — miners who get winded from walking up their front porch stairs, on a daily basis.
“Now they’ve got black lung. He’s got black lung,” she said, gesturing to her husband. “A whole lot of them have black lung.”
By now, coal workers weren’t supposed to get black lung. Half a century ago, 40,000 West Virginia miners went on strike until Congress passed landmark legislation to “eliminate conditions in mines which cause the disease.” Since then, regulators have also enacted federal rules to further limit workers’ overall dust exposure.
But the lingering and now increasing trend of silica-induced lung disease wasn’t directly addressed until this summer. After decades of delay, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) proposed regulations to set and enforce a stricter limit on silica dust exposure.
Health advocates have expressed mixed feelings about the rule: while many are grateful that MSHA is acting, some are worried about whether the rule as written will actually protect miners.
But most of the people who have worked in coal mines or with coal miners agree: something needs to be done, and it has to be done right. Otherwise, Danny Johnson is confident his fate will be shared by the next generation of miners.
“You work hard for this and that, and everybody’s gonna end up like me — dead,” he said, pointing at his exposed chest. “This stuff is killing me more and more.”
At the New River Health Clinic in Oak Hill, 69-year-old retired miner Roy Keith sat across from respiratory therapist Lisa Emery. It was Keith’s first health care visit in years; he was there to see if he qualifies for West Virginia’s black lung benefits program.
Like Danny Johnson, Keith spent decades mining coal underground, and his lungs are a constant reminder of the job’s effect on his health.
“I like to play softball, but I can’t run,” Keith said.
“It’s horrible to hear him sleep,” his partner, Peggy Dickens, told Emery.
In her eighth year at New River Health, Emery said she’s been seeing more and more miners in their 30s and 40s with severe black lung. So many have no choice but to keep working the dusty jobs if they want to support their families, she said.
“It just makes me cry every day,” Emery said.
After Emery asked him questions about his breathing, Keith sat in a glass-paneled booth, a machine that tests miners’ lung capacity. In the transparent box, Keith nodded as Emery instructed him to inhale deeply and then exhale as quickly as possible.
In his first few attempts, Keith couldn’t stop coughing, so much so that Emery had to restart the tests. His face vibrated and turned purple as his lungs expelled as much air as they could.
Watching her partner from a seat across the room, Dickens cringed as Keith shook and coughed. Her father was a West Virginia coal miner as well, and he had a silica-caused breathing disease when he died at 49.
“It just reminds me of Daddy,” she said.
On an August morning in Beaver, over 100 people filed into the dimly-lit auditorium of MSHA’s National Mine Health and Safety Academy. The agency was holding a hearing on its proposed silica rule and gathering comments from miners, miner advocates and representatives of mining companies.
It was the best opportunity for coal miners from central Appalachia, people like Terry Lilly, to share their thoughts directly with MSHA officials. The retired miner sat and spoke softly into a microphone.
“I’d like these young [miners] to realize they need to wake up,” Lilly told the panel, pausing between sentences to catch his breath. “One of these days you’ll be like me, and you can’t walk across the parking lot.”
Lilly spent 30 years working underground and now has only 40% of his lung capacity remaining. He knows the way the mines were set up in the 1980s — and the way some are run now — do not make it easy for workers to avoid disease. Lilly remembers how some mine operators would pressure or force miners like him to manipulate dust samples and hide overexposure.
In fact, independent analyses of MSHA’s own coal mine dust samples show its previous silica dust exposure limits failed to adequately protect miners for decades. An investigation by NPR and PBS Frontline in 2018 analyzed MSHA’s data and found 21,000 instances of overexposure to silica dust since 1986.
While the proposed rule, in its current form, does require regular dust sampling, much of its effectiveness will depend on mining companies sampling their own mines and reporting it accurately and honestly. Although some companies may do that, Lilly worries there are still loopholes.
In the back rows of the auditorium, Roosevelt Neal and John Cline sat next to each other. Neal, a 71-year-old former miner from Raleigh County, received his black lung diagnosis when he was in his 50s. Ironically, he first took a job underground so his family would have access to health insurance.
“I know I got a little age on me, but…I’m out of oxygen just walking up steps,” he said.
When the Department of Labor rejected his request for black lung benefits, Neal turned to Cline, a lawyer and longtime West Virginia labor rights advocate who played a key role in reforming the federal black lung benefits system. With Cline’s help, Neal won the money the federal government ultimately said he deserved.
Since the mid-1980s, Cline has worked with hundreds of West Virginia miners disabled by silica dust. While he views this rule-making process as part of a continued effort to keep miners healthy, he doesn’t forget that in the past, it’s been difficult for MSHA to pass and enforce dust regulations that prevent miners from getting this preventable disease.
“I’ve watched so many people decline and pass from this,” Cline said. “Not only the shortness of breath, but the effect it has on mental health and making life such a terrible struggle.”
If Cecil Matney Jr. had made it to Beaver, the 49-year-old Logan County coal miner planned to speak, using the half of his lung function he has left, about some of the activities he can no longer do: hunting, going on walks with his family, kicking a soccer ball around with his 12 and 13-year-old sons.
He may have mentioned that he’s still working as a miner: he can’t afford to retire from the mines despite having a disease that’s slowly killing him. Or that multiple pulmonologists have told him he’ll likely need a lung transplant soon.
“It feels like a ton of bricks laying on your chest when you’re trying to catch your breath,” Matney said. “My wife’s woken me up thinking I was dying because I wasn’t breathing.”
He often sees white specks floating in the air underground. The dust continues to cripple many miners like him with progressive massive fibrosis.
Matney recognizes what an effective silica rule could do for the thousands of West Virginia miners like himself. That is, if regulations are strict enough — and if there’s rigorous oversight and enforcement — to keep coal operators in line.
“If you’re not holding the company responsible for something, they’re gonna break that rule,” Matney said. “They could care less. That’s just the facts about it.”
But for him, the damage has literally crystallized in his lungs. Embedded silica particles and fibrotic tissue sap his ability to breathe. His disease, and his struggle for breath and continued life, is the result of the government’s past failure to act on silica dust.
Matney wants to live long enough to see his sons become adults, to teach them how to act and to watch them have children of their own. But he knows his decades of dust have made these aspirations ambitious at best.
“At the rate I’m going, that’s just something you don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I could be here today and be gone tomorrow. It’s just the way it works.”
Howard Berkes of Public Health Watch and Justin Hicks of Louisville Public Media contributed to reporting this story.
‘This stuff is killing me’: After decades of delay, new black lung protections come too late for some West Virginia coal miners appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.
North Dakota this year adopted one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, with narrow exceptions for rape and incest victims in the first six weeks of pregnancy and to save the life of the mother.
Although abortions-rights advocates haven’t given up the fight, abortion opponents are moving ahead with the restrictions and placing a heavier emphasis on supporting new mothers through legislation and services, such as maternity homes for pregnant women and teens.
One of those teens is Molly Richards, who was just 13 years old when she learned she was pregnant.
She remembers feeling both “excited and oblivious” when she got the results at a clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where she grew up. The community is home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe, of which Richards, now 17, is a citizen.
“It was a very happy time for me,” she recalled.
Then the reality of carrying and raising a child began to sink in. But Richards didn’t view abortion as an option.
“Abortion was not on my mind. That was a big no-no for me.”
Seeking resources, Richards and her family connected with Mary Pat Jahner, director of Saint Gianna & Pietro Molla Maternity Home in the small, unincorporated community of Warsaw.
The picturesque brick home – four stories tall and trimmed with ornate gold crosses – is an institution within the North Dakota anti-abortion movement.
Originally a convent for nuns and a boarding school, the home now serves young pregnant women – most from nearby Native American reservations. In addition to food and shelter, the facility provides counseling services, help completing high school, clothing, job training and parenting classes to mothers.
The facility houses two to four residents at a time. Richards was four months into her pregnancy when she arrived at the home.
“Our main purpose is just to provide a choice for moms who …might need a place to stay or might need a family,” Jahner said. “Most of the moms don’t have a safe place to be, they might be living couch to couch. They’re not living on the street per se, but they might not have their own place to call home.”
With abortions essentially unavailable in the state, where religion is deeply ingrained and diverse, efforts to support mothers and their children have taken on new prominence.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and returned abortion decisions to the states, researchers predicted the number of births would increase, as would the need to support pregnant people, young mothers and their children.
An analysis by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimates that nearly 9,800 additional live births occurred in Texas from April 2022 through December 2022 after a six-week abortion ban took effect in that state in fall 2021.
The federal Congressional Budget Office has said it anticipates an increase in births because of the end of Roe but that contraceptive use and other abortion methods, such as medication abortion, will largely offset that increase.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, doesn’t think the United States is prepared for an influx of births – and that policies nationwide aren’t doing enough.
“We are right now not a family friendly country. We may be pro-life, but we’re not pro-family. And if you’re going to make decisions that put more babies into the market, we need to support those babies,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re pro-Roe or anti-Roe, support children. They’re your future.”
State Sen. Sean Cleary, R-Bismarck, has been at the forefront of pushing for additional help for mothers and babies amid North Dakota’s abortion ban.
“There was an understanding that women are navigating a very difficult time in their lives, that the state could be doing more to support them and empower them,” Cleary said. “We wanted to be a state that was known for supporting families and supporting mothers.”
Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, signed bills this year to eliminate taxes on diapers; expand Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits for pregnant individuals; and provide additional funding to the state’s “alternatives-to-abortion” program, which gives funds to child-placement agencies, anti-abortion counseling centers and maternity homes – including Gianna & Pietro.
Cleary co-sponsored the diaper tax and Medicaid bills, as well as failed efforts to create a paid family leave program, a tax credit for child care expenses and a program to increase pay for child care workers.
The 31-year-old said being a father helped him see the need for this type of legislation. He has a toddler and another child on the way.
“Families can’t afford to send their kids to child care, and the workers can’t afford to work there,” he said.
Abortion-rights activists doubt the effectiveness of the few measures that made it through the Legislature.
“None of them are actually adequate to address fully supporting a pregnant person bringing a child into the world and raising a child to adulthood,” said Cody Schuler, advocacy manager for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Dakota.
“If you’re going to have a near-total ban on abortion and you’re going to force people to carry pregnancy to term, you have to do more than give a tax break for diapers.”
Katie Christensen, North Dakota state director for Planned Parenthood, emphasized the problematic funding of the alternatives-to-abortion program.
Christensen has criticized the program for providing $1 million in state funds to mostly religious ministries with little to no government oversight. State funding for so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” which aim to dissuade people from getting abortions, is especially concerning to abortion-rights advocates.
There are at least seven such centers in the state, according to the Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, which provides nationwide tracking of these facilities and is maintained by University of Georgia professors.
“We’re putting thousands of public dollars into programming that aims to seek out people who want abortions and try to persuade them away from that,” Christensen said. “They’re still allowed to promote their religion while using these dollars.”
Despite this criticism, Sen. Tim Mathern, D-Fargo, one of only four Democrats in the 47-member state Senate, co-sponsored the alternatives-to-abortion funding bill, claiming that it “sort of became a litmus test between pro-choice and pro-life people.”
Although he supports abortion access, Mathern backed the bill in an attempt to change the tide of Democrats in North Dakota being seen as “the anti-religion and anti-God people and the people who kill babies.”
However, if concerns over these “crisis pregnancy centers” are legitimate, Mathern said, their practices should be evaluated and “the state’s attorney should be investigating.”
North Dakota’s Legislature meets for 80 days during odd-numbered years only. Legislators, who don’t have staff, work at their desks on the floor of the Senate or House. This model can mean less government funding for programs, something Republican state Sen. Janne Myrdal supports.
Myrdal represents far northeastern North Dakota, where the Gianna & Pietro home is located. She sponsored the state’s strict new abortion ban and co-sponsored the bill that beefed up funding to the state’s alternatives-to-abortion program. She warns that such funding comes with some strings attached.
“If you ask for that much support, then the government’s going to come on top of it and go, ‘We’re going to regulate you,’” Myrdal said. “You can’t pray for people, you can’t hug people, you can’t share Jesus with people who come in, because the government can’t do that.”
Gianna & Pietro, which is a nonprofit organization, receives the majority of its funding – about $500,000 to $600,000 each year – from individual donors, but it also has received funds from the state’s alternatives-to-abortion program.
In this year’s bill, about $100,000 was earmarked for the home; Jahner said the money will go toward updating vehicles and other needs.
In the nearly two decades of the home’s operation, more than 300 people have lived there, and over 100 children have been born as part of the program.
During a recent visit, three women who were either pregnant or young mothers, including Richards, lived at the home. Staff members stay on site, too, to provide support and help.
Jahner, her daughter, whom she adopted from a former resident, and several other children of former residents live on the property, as well, in a two-story home behind Gianna & Pietro.
Richards’ initial stay in 2019 only lasted a month. Feeling homesick, she returned to South Dakota to give birth. But after struggling to parent on her own and dropping out of school, Richards returned to Gianna & Pietro over a year and a half ago, with her son, Bernard, in tow.
Richards is now in the process of having her son adopted by a family in southern Minnesota, because, she said, “I wanted something more and better for my son.”
There is a clear religious aspect to Gianna & Pietro. Residents must attend Sunday Mass, take part in nightly prayer and participate in grace before meals. A stained glass chapel is located on the first floor of the home, and delicate religious paintings are scattered throughout. Across the street sits a steepled red brick church where residents may also attend Mass.
Although residents are not required to be Catholic or religious to live at the home, a question about religious preference is included on the admission application form and participation in religious activities is required.
“I didn’t become religious until I actually came here, so my family isn’t religious,” Richards said. “I was baptized (Catholic) a year and a half ago.”
Schuler, of the ACLU, and other abortion-rights advocates worry such religious requirements could lead to “coercing individuals into religion” with the help of government funding.
“When it comes to a maternity home, it’s being operated as a religious ministry. I don’t think state dollars should be paying for that,” Schuler said. “But at the same time, I know that there are individuals who are religious who might be looking for what that center might provide.”
With limited capacity in homes like Gianna & Pietro, abortion care across the Red River in neighboring Minnesota remains essential, abortion-rights advocates say.
“The amount of pregnant people who are having their abortions today across the river would fill up those homes fivefold today – unless they’re going to open up huge apartment complexes to house all of these pregnant people,” said Destini Spaeth, board chair of the North Dakota Women in Need Abortion Access Fund.
Abortion is legal in Minnesota up to fetal viability, which is 24 to 26 weeks, and exceptions are granted to save the life or protect the health of the mother. Surrounded by states that have completely banned abortion or are in court fighting to prevent access, Minnesota has become a key state for abortion access in the Upper Midwest.
For nearly 25 years, Red River Women’s Clinic operated in Fargo and was the only abortion clinic in the state for two decades. Every Wednesday, when the clinic was open, protesters gathered with graphic signs outside the front door.
Then last year, after word of the Supreme Court’s likely end to Roe was leaked, its operators began looking for a new location. Last August, they reopened less than 3 miles away – across the river in Moorhead, Minnesota.
Each Wednesday, the clinic provides 25 to 30 abortions up to the 16-week mark of pregnancy. After that time, patients are referred elsewhere for a multiday procedure that the independent clinic lacks capacity for.
Since the move, the clinic has seen its patient load increase 10% to 15%, said Tammi Kromenaker, the facility’s director. And with fewer overall restrictions on abortion care in Minnesota, Kromenaker said she believes access has actually increased for women in North Dakota.
But the fear her patients feel has also gone up, she said.
“Every week, mostly patients from North Dakota will say: ‘Is it even legal for me to come here? Will I get legally prosecuted for this health care?’
Kromenaker continues to fight for abortion rights back across the river in North Dakota. Her clinic is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit over the state’s near-total abortion ban.
“We didn’t want to give up on North Dakota. We didn’t want to leave,” she said. “But our hand was forced.”
News21 reporters Trilce Estrada Olvera and Cassidey Kavathas contributed to this story.
This report is part of “America After Roe,” an examination of the impact of the reversal of Roe v. Wade on health care, culture, policy and people, produced by Carnegie-Knight News21. For more stories, visit https://americaafterroe.news21.com/.
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