Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
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Mele Mason recalls the days when the newsroom at Omaha TV station KMTV had journalists covering city hall, the county courthouse, the statehouse and the “cop shop.” Reporters attended multiple other governmental meetings and community gatherings, said Mason, who worked as a news videographer at the station in the 1980s. But those days are gone, she said, with her old newsroom now about one-third the size. So when Mason saw that an effort was underway to address shrinking newsrooms by enl...
The legal bills have been piling up in Richardson County. Since 2022, this southeast Nebraska county of fewer than 8,000 people has poured at least $143,000 into fighting a lengthy and contentious legal battle – not with an out-of-state business, or problem property owners. Richardson County is at odds with its own employees. For nearly two years, the 16-person county road department has been locked in a union battle with the county over a new contract and wage increases. The union, r...
For more than 15 years, the brick building in south Lincoln has served as a local hub for the U.S. Department of Agriculture - a place where farmers meet face-to-face with federal workers overseeing complex conservation projects on their land. But last month the Department of Government Efficiency, a cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk, moved to cancel the building's lease months early and claimed it saved taxpayers more than $62,000. DOGE reports on its "Wall of Receipts" to...
When the new Trump administration directed a temporary freeze on federal grants and loans last month, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen's office offered a calm public-facing reaction. But emails and text messages show that many Nebraska state agencies - like organizations across the U.S. - were simmering with questions and concern. The federal directive had thrown into question if and when governments and organizations would get billions they use for everything from housing programs to highway constructi...
The University of Nebraska would do less cutting-edge medical research, lay off employees and lose top scientists if deep federal cuts backed by President Donald Trump’s administration take effect, say university leaders. In interviews, NU President Dr. Jeffrey Gold and leaders at the University of Nebraska Medical Center portrayed the proposed cuts as a dark cloud hanging over local researchers and noted they would prove even more painful if coupled with potential state budget cuts. “As sad as it is to say, if this is sustained over a long per...
Ekram Saleh sat in a classroom, surrounded by immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and Sudan. They listened as the county's election commissioner talked about voting. Here's how you can register, the commissioner said. Here's who represents your city council district. And also – Hall County needs poll workers to run every election. Saleh was then a brand-new U.S. citizen, a Sudanese native who didn't know she could serve her new country by being a poll worker. The next day, she went straight to t...
Summerland's girls' basketball team played two commanding games in the Summerland Holiday Tournament, bringing home the championship trophy on Saturday. The Lady Bobcats opened the tournament in dominant fashion on Dec. 27, defeating Winside 48-23 in the first round. A combination of aggressive defense and consistent scoring allowed the Bobcats to control the game from start to finish. The Lady Bobcats set the tone early, outscoring Winside 10-6 in both the first and second quarters, giving...
Gail Rock credits an unusual collaborator that inspired a 1970s holiday season staple and launched her career as an author: a mouse. The mouse, which scurried atop the stove in a friend's home, triggered a series of events that birthed "The House Without a Christmas Tree," a television movie that aired each Christmas season on CBS from 1972 to 1977. It eventually became a novel, written by Rock, and led to several TV movie spinoffs. The story centers on a young girl who longs for a Christmas...
SCHUYLER – His eyes are tired from scanning the conveyor belt. His feet and back are sore after hours of standing in his steel-toed boots. His brain is fried from searching for faulty welding and chipped paint on the more than 1,000 metal pieces that whiz past him on the belt during the graveyard shift. Marco Gutiérrez has spent the past eight hours inspecting tiny parts that will become car seats in Ford F-150s and Chevy Malibus. Before that, he put in a shift at Panda Express, cooking ba...
Justin Harris could use the money. The McCook farmer and businessman is already behind on last year’s property taxes, and still owes $3,200 that’s growing with interest. And Harris is also missing out on a tax rebate thanks to a much-misunderstood change that Nebraska lawmakers made earlier this year. It’s costing him $1,300 – money he could have nabbed had he paid his property taxes by Dec. 31, 2023. “There was no chance for us to be able to take advantage of that discount because we're living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. The vast majori...
The envelope didn't surprise Dru McMillan. But when she opened the letter and read the number, she felt sick. "If you agree with the determination, please submit a draft in the amount of $21,042.73 within 30 days," it read. McMillan is a Lincoln therapist. She has long served a majority of patients who use Medicaid, the government-funded cheap or free insurance, to pay for mental health care. The letter came from an auditor working for one of three massive insurance companies the State of...
While Pete Ricketts was governor, he and his parents spent serious money supporting state senators – and opposing fellow Republicans who had displeased the governor. Longtime observers say that money helped morph the Legislature, making it less independent and more partisan. In January 2017, Patrick O'Donnell entered the Nebraska State Capitol's cavernous legislative chamber, air heavy with the echo of history's fierce debates and whispered negotiations. The longtime Clerk of the Legislature s...
Three taxidermied penguins preside over Room 426 in Allwine Hall, standing atop a row of metal cabinets in the back corner. The Antarctic birds are locked in an everlasting staring contest with a stuffed hornbill whose craned neck protrudes from a bookcase holding a row of primate skulls. To the students who file into professor James Wilson's mammalogy class, these are ordinary sights. What grabs their attention on this Monday afternoon are the short stacks of paper spread neatly across the...
In 2020, as the country voted in and then sweated out a razor-thin presidential election, the voters of Clay County in rural south-central Nebraska participated in numbers never seen in this century. The number of potential voters living in the county had barely budged since 2016. And yet, during the 2020 election, some 507 more voters cast ballots than had in 2016 – a 16% spike. In total, some 84% of Clay County's 4,271 registered voters cast ballots, far higher than Nebraska's statewide t...
Alonzo Denney sets his phone on the conference table, pulls up a family photo and starts counting. There are 11 living relatives, including him, now sharing ownership of 80 acres along the Bazile Creek in Knox County, land originally allotted to their ancestor by the federal government. Then Denney does some quick math. He might, he says, be paid around $25,000 if this land, now mostly flooded and unusable, was placed into a flowage easement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Denney,...
One word best defines how Megan Landes-Murphy and her husband Tom Murphy met, made career choices and launched a unique-to-Nebraska business. Sheep. Neither spent much time around the animals while growing up in northwest Wisconsin and the Omaha area, respectively. Now, they have sheep, a few chickens and two Great Pyrenees dogs named Milo and Birdie on their 12-acre ranch east of the small south-central Nebraska town of Lawrence. Two years ago, Landes-Murphy launched Kestrel Ridge Pellet Co.,...
The Kansas City Royals game played through the car radio as Jeff Hovden drove south on a Friday night. Jeff and his son Jack had tickets for the next day. During the drive, the broadcast team noted the strong Omaha contingent in attendance, many sporting jerseys with the name "Bohm" across the back. The next day the Hovdens experienced it in person. "It was pretty impressive," said Hovden, a Phillies fan and car wash soap salesman from Vermillion, South Dakota. The "Bohm" on the many jerseys...
Pricking his finger with a small needle, Anthony Warrior squeezed a drop of blood onto the test strip. As he saw the number illuminate, the then-40-year-old Absentee Shawnee citizen and Muskogee descendant knew his days of bad eating had caught up with him. With his weight nearing 500 pounds and his blood sugar dangerously high, Warrior was facing a future of possible blindness, kidney failure and limb amputation – all complications of unchecked diabetes. If he didn't address his eating h...
There's a map tacked up on the wall in Kameron Runnels' office – squared lines and small text showing who owns what pieces of the Santee Sioux reservation. Six of the squares, big chunks of land, are labeled the same: "school land." Runnels, the tribe's vice chairman, said he always wondered what exactly that meant. Two of the squares are colored in green – land the tribe pays the state almost $65,500 per year to rent and farm, even though it's within reservation boundaries. When Nebraska was...
A few years back, a lucky tip came my way about an impending immigration raid in O'Neill. I don't recall a lot of details about what was expected to happen, but the tip was "you'd better be there tomorrow morning." As I drove up Highway 281 toward the north-central Nebraska town, I settled in behind what seemed like an endless line of SUVs with blackened windows also driving northward. It turned out they were mostly agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who were headed to...
At peace. That's how Jordan Larson felt back in Lincoln after her fourth, and likely final, Olympic Games this summer. Her journey to tranquility started well before Paris, before capping an unprecedented career with the U.S. national team by winning silver, even before returning to her alma mater to help coach a championship contender. "This last two years really has been a journey of pure reflection ... of healing," Larson said at an August press conference. "I'm soaking in the essence of...
The group of teachers had a straightforward but daunting assignment before them: How could Cody-Kilgore, a small district nestled in the Nebraska Sandhills, buck the trend of rural decline and revitalize the school? Teachers Stacey Adamson and Tracee Ford latched onto an unusual idea that started as a joke – one that grew more unusual as it progressed. What about a grocery store run by students? Now nearly two decades after the idea first surfaced, the Circle C Market – a student-run gro...
Bob Decker thought he'd get an early start on golf one morning this summer when he headed to Omaha's Steve Hogan Golf Course. Instead, he ended up providing swarms of mosquitoes their breakfast, lunch and dinner during his round at the nine-hole course. "I was slapping mosquitoes off my legs the whole time," he said. "Thus the reason for my poor score ..." Decker wasn't imagining things. Compared to last year, mosquito numbers have jumped significantly across Nebraska, nearly doubling in...
The year was 1974. It was early fall. Or was it late spring? Never mind all that, Gary Hergenrader says. It isn't the season he remembers today, but the site: the old campground across the water, a dozen red cabins clinging like ticks to the canyon walls, the lodge overlooking Keystone Lake, the geology exposed in the rocky shelves above. Before retiring in 2005, Hergenrader served nearly 25 years as the Nebraska state forester. But back in 1974, he was a 34-year-old professor at the University...
Phil Whitmarsh starts a lot of conversations with an offbeat question: Have you ever played a 500-year-old guitar? Eventually, he'll hand you Mary Kate. The instrument resembles a Fender Telecaster, the six-string synonymous with Americana twang and favored by artists like Bruce Springsteen. Mary Kate looks and plays like a Telecaster, but the sound is different. It's the wood, says Whitmarsh. That wood once helped hold up the old Woolworth warehouse in Omaha's historic Old Market. In a few...
