S.C.-owned hospital system to build 2 new hospitals
It's Friday, June 6, 2025, and in this morning's edition we're covering: A South Carolina-owned hospital system set to double debt to build two new hospitals, CUNY graduate goes from shelter to success, Mississippi Gulf Coast community completes its own air study after waiting for state agency, Current presidential administration investigates University of Wyoming over transgender sorority sister, Public reported problems at Atalco refinery long before inspectors found levee breaches, As Virginia police reforms take hold, decertifications jump
Media outlets and others featured in this edition: South Carolina Daily Gazette, The City, Mississippi Today, WyoFile, Louisiana Illuminator, MuckRock.
Editor’s Note: There are additional links at the bottom.
SC-owned hospital system set to double debt with 2 new hospitals
MUSC Health received final permission to borrow $860M as massive growth spurt continues
By: Jessica Holdman - April 21, 2025
South Carolina’s state-affiliated hospital system can now proceed with long-delayed expansion plans into some of the Palmetto State’s fastest-growing communities, but it will more than double its debt in the process.
After more than five years of court battles and four years of pandemic-induced financial hardships, the Medical University of South Carolina’s hospital system has final approvals in hand to finance two new hospitals in the suburbs of Charleston and Charlotte.
The State Fiscal Accountability Authority gave permission earlier this month for MUSC to borrow $860 million: $400 million to build a hospital and cancer center in Summerville’s mega Nexton community, $330 million to build a hospital in Indian Land (the unincorporated panhandle of Lancaster County), and $130 million to finance the equipment for both.
Unanimous approval from the state’s five-member fiscal oversight board came without discussion.
“These projects are good projects in and of themselves,” MUSC Health CEO Dr. Pat Cawley told the SC Daily Gazette. “We know both are in growing areas and we know those areas can easily support these facilities.”
The new borrowing adds to the public hospital system’s $836 million in existing long-term debt and leases, according to an April financial report.
By comparison, the similarly sized Prisma Health hospital system, headquartered in Greenville, carries a debt load of about $1.5 billion, according to the latest report from Wall Street ratings agencies.
Unlike the private Prisma Health, MUSC Health is a state-owned nonprofit.
But Cawley is not concerned by the financial lift, saying MUSC Health has more than enough borrowing capacity.
Expansive growth
MUSC Health first announced plans for the Summerville hospital in December 2017, citing the community’s booming population with mega developments such as the Nexton community filling up with thousands of new homes.
Hospital executives said patients were already making the drive from once-rural Berkeley County into downtown Charleston for health care. It was around this time the hospital system started talking about a new strategy to bring services closer to where patients live.
For nearly 200 years, MUSC Health had stayed largely contained to its Charleston base.
But in 2019, MUSC purchased four rural community hospitals in Florence, Marion, Chester and Lancaster counties and, with the latter two, saw firsthand the growth potential in communities near the North Carolina state line.
Indian Land had the second-fastest-growing ZIP code in the state in early 2020, when that project was announced.
“That whole area where the population is booming is a bedroom community of Charlotte,” Cawley said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “We already have patients and employees who commute to our existing hospital in Lancaster to receive care or to work.”
“It’s been shown that to serve patients most effectively, you need to be where they are,” Cawley added. “Patients want to receive their health care closest to home and family. These days, we can build a small hospital and do it in a cost-efficient way so patients don’t have to travel.”
In 2021, MUSC Health again expanded with the purchase of three hospitals and a standalone emergency room in the Midlands.
The public system took on debt for all of those purchases. Plus, it still owes upwards of $430 million for its 5-year-old children’s hospital and its Ashley River Tower hospital, which opened in 2008.
With all that, MUSC Health is still at less than half of its debt capacity, Cawley said.
While its tab is set to more than double, revenues generated by the two new hospitals when they open also will grow the system’s borrowing power. Because MUSC Health will be making more money, its debt capacity usage will stay “about the same,” Cawley said.
Moody’s ratings agency praised MUSC for its “prudent fiscal management” when it held the combined university and hospital system steady at its highest-level credit rating. Analysts with the firm did note some concerns however, with the hospital’s significant debt leveraging and narrow margins.
Still, a lot has changed since MUSC Health’s December 2017 announcement about the Summerville location.
For starters, the hospital system suffered four years of operating losses that started with the onset of the global coronavirus pandemic.
“COVID created a major workforce disruption. That was a big issue for hospitals all across the country,” said Thornton Kirby, president of the South Carolina Hospital Association. “It also caused a significant financial crisis, because the labor costs went up so much when the reimbursement rates (paid to hospitals by insurance, Medicare and Medicaid) were not going up at the same rate.”
MUSC Health’s operations were back in the black as of last June, with the system’s 16 hospitals earning nearly $62 million in income after expenses for fiscal year 2023-24.
“We held back simply due to COVID-induced uncertainty,” Cawley said of the new hospital plans. “Since then, the need has grown, and we are ready to move forward again.”
Regulatory changes
In addition to the pandemic, the projects were also held up by legal challenges filed under the state’s soon-to-be phased out regulatory process that required providers to get a Certificate of Need.
The bureaucratic permission process was supposed to control costs and prevent duplication by providers in the same area. But critics argued the protections ended up reducing access to care and increasing costs as hospital systems fought in court to prevent competition and tied up proposals for years — as occurred with MUSC’s plans for Nexton and Indian Land.
Under a 2023 law phasing out the application approval process, new hospitals will no longer need a Certificate of Need starting in 2027.
While that will end lawsuits and hefty legal fees for hospital operators, it also opens them up to more competition for patients, particularly from hospital systems in border states.
“The truth of it is, hospitals make a lot of money in some areas and lose a lot of money in some areas,” Kirby said. “They make money on surgery and on imaging, and they lose money in the emergency room. They lose money taking care of pneumonia patients and they lose money delivering babies.”
That means hospitals rely on money-making procedures to subsidize the other care provided.
“If you say anybody can build anything they want, they’re not going to build behavioral health units that lose money. They’re not going to build trauma services,” Kirby said. “They’re going to build surgery centers for insured people.”
Despite this, Kirby said hospital systems have not expressed a lot of angst about Certificate of Need going away.
“I hear people saying, ‘OK, this is the new environment. Let me decide what I’m going to do as a result,'” he said.
Unlike the SC Hospital Association, MUSC Health actually backed the law’s repeal, Cawley said.
Read More: South Carolina Daily Gazette
Macaulay Honors Graduate Goes From Shelter To Success
Simira Smith survived living in a homeless shelter and a near-fatal fire to become one of 50,000 CUNY graduates this year.
by Jonathan Custodio June 4, 2025
THE CITY partners with Open Campus on coverage of the City University of New York.
Simíra Smith came to New York City during the height of the pandemic, lived in a shelter for more than a year, survived a fire and struggled with impostor syndrome.
Now, she’s a budding scientist as one of 465 Macaulay Honors College students to earn a diploma this year from the CUNY honors program.
“Even though I know what I’m capable of, I always underestimate myself,” she told THE CITY.
As institutions across the country face federal programming cuts, Smith, 21, is one graduate who has already overcome her own set of challenges.
Originally from Jamaica, Smith graduates today from CUNY’s highly selective Macaulay, where promising city students receive financial and academic support in hopes of graduating free of debt. The honors program exists at eight CUNY colleges, including Lehman College in The Bronx, which held its own commencement ceremony last week.
During the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Smith and her mother moved to The Bronx in pursuit of better economic opportunities. That was after she had bounced around several high schools in Atlanta.
They initially lived in a room in a shared Airbnb apartment among Baychester’s sizable Jamaican population for about two weeks. They then lived in a homeless shelter in Throggs Neck, while Smith finished up at Truman High School in Baychester before starting at Lehman.
“It was a family shelter, but it was still kind of scary,” she said, recalling how she lost weight from eating frozen meals. “I think I felt like I was never going to leave the shelter.”
Her winding daily commute to Lehman from the shelter in Throggs Neck took nearly 90 minutes and required a long walk, a bus ride, a switch to the subway at 125th Street in East Harlem, then a ride back to The Bronx after another transfer.
Approximately 39% of CUNY students struggle with housing instability and 3% experienced homelessness, according to a 2022 survey by Healthy CUNY. Others said they were unable to pay for housing and moved in with others over financial or safety concerns.
Amid that uncertainty, Ferry Point Park offered a safe haven for Smith, one of more than 2,300 Lehman students who earned a bachelor’s degree this year.
“I would just go to the park, especially when it was getting close to sunset, and just sit and watch the sunset in the park, and it was so beautiful,” Smith said of the open space adjoining the East River. “I would just go all the way down where the sand is, and sometimes take my shoes off and just feel the sand in between my toes.
“And it kind of reminded me of being in Jamaica and going to the beach.”
Smith, who says she leaned on her Christian faith and her mother to get through the year in the shelter, was entering the college application process as a Truman senior.
Though she was initially intimidated by Macaulay, a guidance counselor there encouraged her to apply. After submitting an application minutes before the deadline and interviewing with Lehman staffers, she received an acceptance letter in March 2021.
“I remember I cried, but it was like happy tears, and it was really one of the best days of my life,” Smith recalled, dubbing Macaulay “the Ivy League of New York” and noting how she preferred Lehman for its science-research classes and the opportunity to stay in The Bronx.
Read More: The City
Waiting for government action on air pollution, Pascagoula community grabs the wheel
Coast community hopes new air studies can bolster case for buy-outs
by Alex Rozier June 4, 2025
After 14 years of pushing for safer air quality for her Pascagoula neighborhood, 78-year-old Barbara Weckesser is tired of waiting for government officials tasked with such responsibilities to take action.
In the last seven years alone, she said, over 30 people in her Cherokee Forest neighborhood of just 120 homes have died from heart disease, lung disease or cancer. In 2013, Weckesser started her activist group, Cherokee Concerned Citizens, which has long blamed releases from surrounding industrial operations – including a Chevron oil refinery, a Bollinger shipyard and a Rolls-Royce Naval center – for poor health outcomes in their community.
“Industry has grown, and chosen to put out more and more and more pollution,” Weckesser said. “And guess what? Our bodies can’t absorb it.”
Then in 2021, a ProPublica analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data identified the area as one of the nation’s top hot spots of toxic air pollution. Weckesser said that investigation helped boost her cause’s credibility.
Cherokee Concerned Citizens have remained active against potential environmental harms from local industry. Last year, the group sued the EPA for approving a plastic-based fuel experiment at Chevron’s Pascagoula facility that, ProPublica revealed, could have caused cancer to one in four exposed to production emissions. The EPA then in September said it planned to withdraw its approval.
Weckesser spoke on the phone days before heading to Atlanta to graduate from an environmental justice academy program, through Tuskegee University, that empowered community leaders across the South with knowledge and resources to lead their respective causes. Hearing from former EPA officials, she said the academy taught her a lot, including potential legal avenues for protecting the Cherokee Forest neighborhood.
In 2022, a year after the ProPublica story, the EPA awarded the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality $500,000 to monitor air quality in Pascagoula, later increasing the amount to $625,000.
But both agencies have yet to give a timeline for the yearlong study. So instead of waiting, Weckesser partnered with University of Colorado Boulder researcher Caroline Frischmon to do their own investigation, the results of which they published in March.
“This is the best data that we’ve had,” Weckesser said.
Their study used air sensors to compare “episodes” of pollution – or when the sensors detected rising levels of chemicals such as ammonia or VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) – in the neighborhood with those at another location near downtown Pascagoula, about two miles away. VOCs, the EPA says, can cause liver and kidney damage as well as cancer.
Read More: Mississippi Today
Trump administration investigates University of Wyoming over transgender sorority sister
The state’s lone public university maintains it had no role in the decision to allow the student to join a campus sorority.
by Maggie Mullen and Tennessee Watson June 2, 2025
The Trump administration announced Monday it’s investigating the University of Wyoming for alleged Title IX violations stemming from members of a campus sorority voting to admit a transgender woman in 2022, despite the school’s insistence that it doesn’t have a say in the membership of the private organization.
Critics of the admission of Artemis Langford have, until now, focused their efforts on the sorority itself: Kappa Kappa Gamma. Six of the sorority’s members sued the organization over the decision to admit Langford in 2023, but the case was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Alan B. Johnson, who ruled the government cannot interfere with how a private, voluntary organization chooses its members.
The lawsuit did not name the University of Wyoming as a defendant. That didn’t stop the Trump administration, which has already challenged California and Maine over transgender policies, from pursuing an investigation into the Equality State’s lone, four-year public university.
“[The Office for Civil Rights] launched an investigation into the University of Wyoming after the university allowed a man to join a campus sorority,” the Department of Education announced in a statement Monday, indicating that, at least in the administration’s view, the onus was on the university to police KKG’s membership practices, a stance that at least one attorney who focuses on Title IX issues told WyoFile was legally questionable.
The Department of Education revealed the investigation in an announcement recognizing June as “Title IX Month.” (June is more prominently known as Pride Month, a time of recognition of the LGBTQ+ community.) The department said it would “highlight actions taken to reverse the Biden Administration’s legacy of undermining Title IX and announce additional actions to protect women in line with the true purpose of Title IX.”
The school, for its part, continues to maintain that Langford’s admission is a sorority matter. The University of Wyoming’s “position has been that it doesn’t control decisions about sorority and fraternity membership,” the university said in a prepared statement. “Appropriately, the university has not been a participant in litigation in federal court regarding the legality of the sorority’s decision to admit the transgender student.”
Title IX — a federal law prohibiting discrimination based on sex in educational programs and activities — provides an exemption for the membership practices of social sororities and fraternities, according to attorney Melissa Carleton, who works with colleges and universities across the country on Title IX issues.
The Department of Education claims that KKG lost its exemption as a sorority by deviating from single-sex membership practices by deciding to admit a transgender woman.
Because the statute says social sororities “are outside the bounds of Title IX, it’s not clear the [Department of Education] has enforcement authority,” to define who can and cannot be a member, Carleton said.
If UW is found to be in violation of Title IX, its federal funding could be on the line, Carleton said.
“The Office for Civil Rights’ initiation of an investigation is not itself evidence of a violation of federal civil rights laws and regulations,” UW stated. “The university believes it has been and is in compliance with Title IX but intends to fully cooperate with the investigation and will work with the Office for Civil Rights to come into compliance if needed.”
How we got here
The announcement comes just days before a deadline in an ongoing civil lawsuit against UW’s Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter that began over two years ago.
In March 2023, six members sued the sorority for allegedly breaking its bylaws, breaching housing contracts and misleading sisters when it admitted Langford, a transgender woman, by a majority vote of its members.
The plaintiffs include Jaylyn Westenbroek, Hannah Holtmeier, Allison Coghan, Grace Choate, Madeline Ramar and Megan Kosar.
Reasoning that the government cannot interfere with how a private, voluntary organization determines its members, a U.S. District Court dismissed the case in August 2023.
The suing sorority sisters appealed the decision, but the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their arguments and gave the plaintiffs two options: amend their complaint or ask the lower court for a final judgment.
“More than nine months after the Tenth Circuit issued its decision, they have neither amended their complaint nor notified us of their decision to ‘stand on the original complaint,’ which would allow them to receive a final judgment that could be appealed,” U.S. District Court Judge Alan Johnson wrote, ordering the plaintiffs to fish or cut bait by June 9.
The plaintiffs had not taken court action as of press time.
The plaintiffs have, however, developed a direct connection with the Trump administration since their initial complaint.
Read More: WyoFile
Red Alert: Public reported problems at Atalco refinery long before inspectors found levee breaches
Some residents link health problems to Cancer Alley facilities like Atalco
By: Wesley Muller - June 3, 2025
GRAMERCY — There’s a small area along the Mississippi River’s east bank where the land, buildings and roadways are rust-colored and where the air is frequently filled with the same mineral that covers the surface of Mars.
That spot, about 45 miles west-northwest of New Orleans, is near the entrance of the Atlantic Alumina plant, also known as Atalco, the only bauxite refinery in the United States. Bauxite is a rock composed of aluminum oxides and other heavy metals such as iron oxide — the same compound that gives Mars its famous rusty hue.
Periodically, the rust-colored bauxite dust travels across the river and blankets the small, historically-Black community of Wallace or travels west to Gramercy or east to Garyville. In other instances, Atalco has discharged large plumes of white-colored dust from the refined alumina as far as 4 miles from the facility. The plant occupies roughly 3 square miles of land that straddles the border of St. James Parish and St. John the Baptist Parish.
Wallace resident Jo Banner is well known for her work as a watchdog of industrial pollution and expansion in the River Parishes. She and her twin sister, Joy, run the Descendants Project, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting the land and lives of Black residents whose ancestors were enslaved on the many antebellum plantations that lined the Mississippi River during the Confederacy.
“Our families have suffered from pollution and the dangerous conditions of this plant for generations,” Jo Banner said of the Atalco facility. “Our homes, our cars, and even our pets are covered in red dust, and that’s just what we can see. What we can’t see is even more dangerous, especially to our health.”
For Shamell Lavigne, the red remnants from Atalco are one of the many industry-caused hazards of living in St. James Parish. She is an organizer with Rise St. James, another local activist group that focuses on environmental justice.
“Any given day you can pass by over there and, if the wind is blowing a certain way, it’s blowing that red dust,” Lavigne said.
For years, Lavigne said, rumors have circled in the community that the dust particles from Atalco might contain mercury or arsenic. Both toxic metals have been found in the chemical slurry that spilled from recent levee breaks around Atalco’s manmade “red mud” lakes.
The series of levee breaches dating back to last year are detailed in thousands of documents from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.
The toxic waste has repeatedly escaped from containment areas and contaminated a public drainage system that flows to the Blind River Swamp. Lab testing of the soil and water from the impacted public areas found poisonous heavy metal elements — some at concentrations far beyond the legal and safe limits, according to government records.
When asked for comment, an LDEQ spokesman only confirmed that an investigation into Atalco was ongoing. For Atalco’s part, a company official acknowledged but refused to respond to multiple interview requests from the Illuminator.
Gramercy resident Gail LeBoeuf, 72, has lived roughly half a mile from the Atalco facility since 1999 and believes it could be a source of some of her health problems.
She was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2022, adding to the prevalence of cases along the Mississippi River corridor that go back decades. It has given rise to the label “Cancer Alley” to describe the area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the population has one of the highest concentrations of cancer diagnoses in the nation, according to data from the EPA’s air toxin mapping tool.
Studies have linked the cancer to the area’s high levels of pollution, especially in predominantly Black fenceline communities next to industrial facilities. Nearly 70% of Gramercy residents are Black, according to U.S. Census figures. This includes LeBoeuf, who also has bronchitis that she believes could be the result of Atalco’s particulate matter discharges.
Residents, some as far as 5 miles from the plant, periodically find their property and vehicles covered in a layer of red bauxite dust or white powder from the making of alumina.
Elevated levels of arsenic are present in the waste product of alumina refining. Recent medical studies have found that even low levels of arsenic exposure through drinking water can cause bronchitis and certain other respiratory diseases, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“It’s hard to think it’s not environmentally related,” LeBoeuf said of her illnesses, though she added that her doctors can’t say for certain how much the industrial pollution is to blame.
Read More: Louisiana Illuminator
June 3, 2025
As Virginia police reforms take hold, decertifications jump
Written by Emma Rose and Dillon Bergin
This story is a collaboration between MuckRock and the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.
Decertifications of Virginia law enforcement officers have jumped fourfold annually since 2020, when lawmakers passed reforms during a push for police accountability, according to a data analysis by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO and MuckRock.
The dramatic jump in decertifications – once an exceptionally rare punishment – has both advocates for police reform and law enforcement officers saying the new regulations have made a difference. Five years after the murder of George Floyd energized national change for police accountability, Virginia lawmakers and advocates agree that further reforms are ahead.
“We are really strict in Virginia about holding our officers accountable and making sure that the bad eggs are gone,” said Dana Schrad, director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police.
The disciplinary reforms were overdue, said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Virginia. The large increase in decertifications, she said, “means that things are working.”
Police and jail officers must be certified by the state to work in law enforcement. Decertifications, the revocation of a person’s authority to serve as an officer, have averaged about 80 cases annually since the reforms were enacted in 2021. Reinstatements of decertified officers have also risen each year since the reforms.
In the prior two decades, the highest number of officers decertified statewide in a single year was only 17, according to the analysis of data provided by the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). Between 1999 and 2011, just four officers in Virginia lost their certifications.
Five agencies across the Commonwealth have decertified more than ten officers: Virginia State Police, Chesapeake Police Department, Henrico County Sheriff’s Office, Fairfax County Police Department and Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office.
The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO and MuckRock obtained the database used to track officer decertifications from the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services through a public records request. The data, which also includes decertifications of jail officers, captures disciplinary actions from 1999 to early 2025. Each record includes the officer’s name, law enforcement agency, position at the agency, and the date and reason for decertification. The newsrooms also requested and obtained data on the number of certified officers as of March 2025 from the Department, as well as a list of all law enforcement agencies in the state.
Experts say this increased number of decertifications results from reforms enacted four years ago that broadened the scope of violations that could lead to decertification. For example, an officer may now lose their badge for lying or resigning during an investigation into their alleged misconduct.
New standards of conduct have also been created since the law was passed, which add additional grounds for potential decertification.
Prior to the reforms, Virginia officers could only be decertified for specific drug or criminal offenses or for failing to complete required training.
Gastañaga said the reforms aimed to address officers who had been fired for cause or had resigned during an investigation into misconduct but who remained able to seek employment at other law enforcement agencies in the Commonwealth. Officers can still be fired but keep their certification.
“We really needed to change the law to say that somebody who was terminated for cause could be decertified—and should be frankly decertified—in Virginia,” she said.
The Virginia reforms had been in the works for several years and gained momentum in the General Assembly following the murder of Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis.
According to a 2021 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, 30 states and the District of Columbia enacted legislative policing reforms in the year after Floyd’s death.
There are almost 25,000 certified law enforcement officers in Virginia’s police departments, sheriff’s offices and jails, according to the analysis of data provided by the Department of Criminal Justice Services.
The process to decertify an officer in Virginia requires a sheriff, chief or agency administrator to notify DCJS in writing within 48 hours of becoming aware of potentially decertifiable misconduct. A five-person team then reviews the notification to determine whether to decertify the officer.
Once the criteria for decertification are verified and decertification is initiated, DCJS serves notice on the officer. A former officer has 30 days to appeal his or her decertification before it is finalized.
Read More: MuckRock
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