It's Friday, January 30, 2026 and in this morning's issue we're covering: NC A&T students take the wheel on early voting, Why It’s Hard to Sue ICE Officers for Abuse, Minnesota churches respond to ICE presence with prayer, solidarity, Tazewell County judge sped up redistricting ruling to beat General Assembly vote to move the case, New Family Childcare Models Are Bringing Business and Families Back to Main Street, Europe gets ‘green energy’. These Southern towns get dirty air, State election officials project confidence after FBI search of Georgia elections office.

Media outlets and others featured: Carolina Public Press, The Marshall Project, MinnPost, Cardinal News, The Daily Yonder, Verite News, Votebeat.

Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors and Sheriffs in 2026? - Bolts

There are roughly 2,400 elections for prosecutor and sheriff in 2026. Below is our Bolts database of those local elections. Also: read our preliminary overview of these elections, published in January 2026,... Read More

BoltsDaniel Nichanian

‘Protect Ours.’ NC A&T students take the wheel on early voting.

by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press
January 27, 2026

A NC A&T student came up to county elections board Democrat Carolyn Bunker in tears after the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ January meeting. The board had just voted 3-2 to exclude two Guilford County college campuses from early voting primary plans. 

Unlike many of her fellow students, the student had a car. She told Bunker she felt pressure to drive her friends, her friends’ friends and her classmates to the polls — all while trying to balance schoolwork and a job. 

Election boards shouldn’t put that burden on anyone, Bunker told Carolina Public Press. But at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, the largest HBCU in the nation, a group of students are shouldering it proudly. 

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Juniors Terrence Olu Rouse and Shia Rozier recently launched Protect Ours, a movement to get students from campus to the polls this March. 

Since 2004, the NC A&T site has been used for presidential general elections, according to data provided by Guilford County elections director Charlie Collicut. A University of North Carolina - Greensboro site was added in 2012. The county board added both campus sites to presidential primary early voting plans in 2020. 

However, neither NC A&T site has ever been used during midterm or municipal election cycles as early voting sites. 

Students want that to change. Ideally, they’d like to be on the list for every election, no matter how small, Rouse said. 

“This was no goof of the system or administrative error; this is a modern day poll tax on a student,” he said. “There are thousands of students who do not have accessible transportation from campus to polling sites off campus, or students that cannot financially afford it or do not have the time to figure out another means of transportation.” 

But it’s too late to change election board members’ minds for this election, so NC A&T students are taking the primary into their own hands. That means tackling the biggest barrier to student voter participation: transportation. 

Letting the ‘grown ups’ decide?

Rozier has gone to the county elections board three times in her three years to advocate for the inclusion of NC A&T campus voting sites. This time, she didn’t succeed. 

Republican State Board member Stacy “Four” Eggers, for one, doesn’t buy that an urgent need exists to add campus early voting sites in Guilford County. He cites the historical record; in 2022, a majority Democratic county board voted unanimously to approve early voting plans that did not include campus sites. 

If there was such a need, Democrats should have included the sites then, he said.

“Now we're being asked, suddenly, you must add seven sites and double the amount of sites, otherwise you're discriminating against someone?” Eggers asked. 

Guilford County Republican elections chair Eugene Lester is of the same mindset. Campus sites will be open on Election Day, and mail-in absentee voting is available, he said in a December interview with Carolina Public Press. Plenty of options exist, he said, because the board chose 10 sites he thinks serve the entire community. 

“We're certainly not going to look at one group and say that that group is more important than any other group,” Lester added. 

Democratic State Board member Siobhan Millen thinks excluding students sends the wrong message. 

“What you've done, is you've said in the primary, the grown ups are going to pick the candidates, and then in the fall, you all can vote or not vote as you want to,” she said. “What my point is, is that I think the primary sites should be as representative as possible and as similar, demographic-wise, to the general so that it's the same group that's doing the choosing.” 

After the Guilford County portion of the meeting, dozens of NC A&T students stood in front of board members with signs, asking why they weren’t included. In a video of the exchange, one student suggests that if their skin color were different, the outcome would have been too. Republican board chair Francis De Luca firmly rejected that idea. 

At the January meeting, the State Board also upheld the Jackson County election board’s majority plan, which cuts a historical Western Carolina University campus early voting site that has been proven to increase youth voter turnout. 

Building a movement at NC A&T

Transporting students to the polls won’t be cheap. 

Rozier and Rouse are raising funds for a shuttle to take students from campus to the Old County Courthouse, a 1.5-mile journey, for five days of early voting. Each day would cost about $1,500. 

As of Monday afternoon, they had raised $1,370.

In the meantime, they plan to stage a march on Feb. 12 from NC A&T’s Dudley Lawn to the Old County Courthouse. The students are in discussions to partner with several local and statewide organizations in their effort, but were not ready to share a finalized list Monday. Their effort is not connected in any way with the university. 

State Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, said NC A&T students have always been engaged in the voting process. 

“It's really commendable how energetic students are about voting, and I think this is a great commentary on that commitment to making sure that their votes are recorded,” she said. 

In the longer term, Rozier hopes this is a “turning point” for current and future NC A&T students. They want to work with county boards of election, not against them. They’d like to address and resolve any barriers in the way of placing early voting sites on their campuses so they don’t have to continuously relitigate the issue, she said. 

That will be difficult. Early voting decisions often hinge on turnout, which tends to be lower on college campuses. But while those numbers are important, they aren’t everything, Bunker said. 

“Students are our future,” she said. “... We have to be cultivating our students into being lifelong voters, and if we don't provide the sites for them to be able to vote, then we are doing a disservice to our future generation.” 

In addition, early voting on college campuses has always been a “partisan battle,” Harrison said. Republicans perceive campus sites as boosting Democratic turnout. It’s also sometimes hard to justify “student-specific” early voting sites that may have difficult parking situations for outsiders, she added. 

“But the population centers at these campuses are tremendous, and so from my perspective, it makes sense to locate them there,” Harrison said. 

Rozier and Rouse at NC A&T plan to coordinate with other student leaders across the state moving forward — both those who have lost early voting sites and those who want to maintain them. 

“We won't see these different attempts to get college voting to stop anytime soon,” Rozier said. “There is power in strategy, power in community. We hope to build a larger community where we can strategize together about what's coming next, what we're doing.” 

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Why It’s Hard to Sue ICE Officers for Abuse

The civil rights law that has allowed lawsuits against local and state police doesn’t apply to federal agents.

By Cary Aspinwall

Additional reporting contributed by Jesse Bogan

This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

In 1871, bands of masked men were riding through southern states, terrorizing Black people with murders, beatings and rapes. Local officials did little to stop the violence because many of them supported, or in some cases were members of, the Ku Klux Klan.

In response, Congress passed a law, often referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Act, meant to protect people from civil rights violations by state and local officials. The law has become a key piece of police accountability, granting Americans the ability to file civil rights lawsuits in federal court against state and local officers. But one important group remains exempt — federal agents.

Following the recent slayings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers in Minnesota, along with other violence against civilians, some experts are questioning why that same 155-year-old law doesn’t apply to employees of the federal government.

Scenes of brutal arrests and violent encounters with federal agents have become commonplace in U.S. cities where the Department of Homeland Security has launched immigration crackdowns in recent months, especially in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse for the Veterans Administration, was fatally shot in Minneapolis by Border Patrol agents on Saturday after he tried to protect a woman an officer had shoved to the ground.

When federal agents use excessive force, infringe on people’s civil rights or fail to offer medical aid, experts say it’s especially difficult to hold them accountable in federal court.

“There’s basically no right to sue federal officers for almost anything, including constitutional violations and including use of deadly force,” explained Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA who is an expert on police misconduct lawsuits.

When local or state police use excessive force, victims or their families often file federal civil rights lawsuits. Cleveland paid Tamir Rice’s family $6 million; Baltimore agreed to $6.4 million for the family of Freddie Gray; and Minneapolis awarded George Floyd’s family a $27 million settlement.

Schwartz said it is “a cruel irony” that Congress originally passed the civil rights law in response to masked men committing abuses allowed by state and local officials following the Civil War.

“And here we are, 150 years later, and we are seeing federal officers blatantly violate the Constitution and laws,” she said. “And states are beginning to recognize that they need to step in to protect the citizenry — their residents — from violence and overreach by federal officers.”

In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, two legal scholars argued that the loophole for federal officers should be closed and the new law should be named in Good’s honor. Jonathan Ross, the officer who killed Good, could possibly face state criminal charges, but legal experts say the prosecution would face a number of challenges.

Lawmakers’ refusal to close this loophole in the 1871 act for federal officers is a bipartisan policy failure that has persisted for decades, said Alex Reinert, a professor at New York City’s Cardozo School of Law who is an expert in civil rights and constitutional law.

“The Supreme Court has made it hard and Congress has done nothing about it,” he said. “The other piece of it is: Every presidential administration, every Department of Justice of every presidential administration for the last 45 years, has argued vigorously for a limitation of the right to sue federal officials. So, whether it’s a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, they are all responsible for the space in which we find ourselves today — even as the current administration must be held accountable for flouting constitutional bounds in unprecedented ways.”

Reinert said the killings of Pretti and Good have brought national attention to this issue, and that “has the potential to generate momentum for change,” but that effort may face significant resistance from the administration and Congress.

Illinois passed a law last year that would allow people to sue federal officers in state court for violations of their civil rights while conducting immigration enforcement. The Trump administration quickly sued to nullify it.

Ken Wallentine is the retired chief of the West Jordan, Utah, Police Department and the former chief of law enforcement for the state attorney general, and has served as a consultant on civil and criminal use-of-force investigations. He has concerns about what he’s seen unfolding lately in Minnesota.

“I have a lot of questions about the tactics and use of force,” Wallentine said.

If these deadly and violent encounters involved Minneapolis or St. Paul police instead of ICE and Border Patrol agents, he said, there would likely be some level of accountability happening, at least on the city, county or state level. There would be an investigation by internal affairs or the local prosecutor, or possibly an inquiry by another elected official or public body. For instance, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin received more than 22 years in prison for the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

To be sure, not all incidents involving excessive force claims against local police end in criminal convictions or lawsuit victories. But in Wallentine’s previous roles, he had to answer to a mayor or an attorney general who could fire him. And state and local police have to obtain and maintain licensure through a state board that can revoke it. That same system doesn’t exist for federal officers, he said.

“There are so many accountability tools that don’t apply to federal agents,” he said.

In fact, several Trump administration officials have told ICE officers that they have “absolute” immunity.

In the wake of Floyd’s death, dozens of states passed laws aimed at reducing use of deadly force by police and creating a duty for officers to intervene in cases of excessive or illegal force or misconduct. This month, Colorado officials launched a system for reporting complaints of misconduct by federal agents.

“Nobody is above the rule of law, including federal agents such as ICE or border patrol,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement.

Minnesota’s attorney general has a form for reporting violations of civil rights by federal officers. The state also has a specific law requiring someone who fires a gun and knows or suspects they have injured someone to immediately render aid. Some experts have argued that the agents present at Good’s death could be prosecuted under that law, because they reportedly never rendered aid and prevented a physician from doing so. After agents shot Pretti, they didn’t perform CPR and initially refused to allow a doctor to examine him before relenting, according to the doctor’s account in court records.

In the case of Good’s death, Wallentine noted, “you’ve got the head of the agency jumping up and down and thumping her chest and saying this was a bad person,” leading him to believe any internal investigation may not be fair or impartial.

Similarly, within hours of Pretti’s death on Saturday, Trump administration officials labeled him a “domestic terrorist” and someone trying to “massacre law enforcement.”

Wallentine said he was a vocal advocate for a Utah law passed in 2022 that set minimum standards for an officer’s duty to intervene and report misconduct. He’s authored articles for police publications examining lawsuits in which courts held officers liable for not intervening when witnessing excessive force.

“We require of our state and local officers a high standard of conduct, and we have a number of means to ensure that that standard of conduct gets met,” Walletine said. “And we ought to, as a society, expect the same out of anyone that we give a badge and a gun and the right to infringe on constitutional liberties. We ought to have the same standards of accountability [for federal law enforcement] — and we don’t.”

Federal officers have used violent tactics during a number of incidents in Minneapolis-St. Paul: A family with six young children had tear gas thrown at their vehicle when they were trapped in protest traffic. The mother had to perform CPR on her infant, and the other children were treated at a hospital for smoke exposure, the Minnesota Star-Tribune reported. Agents mistakenly arrested a U.S. citizen at gunpoint in his own home, hauling him out in his underwear. Protesters have been sprayed in the face at close range with chemical irritants.

On the morning of Jan. 11, Orbin Mauricio Henríquez-Serrano reportedly was on his way to work when he stopped to fuel up at a gas station in St. Paul.

As Henríquez-Serrano sat in his car at the gas pump, Border Patrol agents in military-style fatigues and tactical gear swarmed his vehicle and ordered him out. In bystander video of the incident, Henríquez-Serrano appears to be on his phone when federal officers surprise him. Within seconds, they smashed the window and forcibly removed the 27-year-old from a Jeep, flipping him face down on the ground, cuffing his hands while at least one agent knelt on his back. He was soon limp and unconscious before agents took him away in a minivan.

Some who watched the footage of Henríquez-Serrano’s arrest initially feared he might have died. He survived, and records show he was held at an ICE detention facility in El Paso the following week. HuffPost reported on Monday that he was deported.

Homeland Security officials didn’t respond to questions about the incident. The agency addressed criticism of the arrest in a public post on X: “The subject refused to obey lawfully given orders and during that time a crowd formed. After multiple warnings and several minutes, Border Patrol broke the vehicles [sic] window and arrested the illegal alien.”

His sister, Consuelo Henríquez-Serrano, told The Marshall Project in a phone interview that her brother did not have legal immigration status but planned to seek asylum, fearing gangs and corruption in his native Honduras. She spoke to her brother briefly on the phone from the detention camp, but was unsure about the extent of his injuries.

“He’s not a criminal, he didn’t harass anybody, he didn’t have guns — they just took him,” she said.

Minnesota churches respond to ICE presence with prayer, solidarity

by Brian Arola, MinnPost
January 27, 2026

ST. PETER, Minn. — Pastors read Bible verses and a choir sang hymns, giving it the feel of a standard church service. The timing, social-justice themed scriptures, and songs and excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings set it apart. 

While demonstrators marched in downtown Minneapolis and businesses closed across Minnesota in protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trinity Lutheran in St. Peter and other Minnesota churches opened their doors for prayer Friday.

These services, held by dozens of Christian congregations in Greater Minnesota and the Twin Cities, coincided with “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth & Freedom,” a day of pause from regular activity, organized by faith leaders, unions and community groups. 

Related: Minnesota protesters brave subzero temps to oppose federal immigration enforcement

During a time when community members are feeling real fear, said Trinity pastor Scott Kershner, churches showed a commitment to the common good. “It’s to provide an opportunity for people to gather, to gain hope from coming together, to lift up our neighbors and support one another in a challenging time,” he said.

Church leaders respond to ICE activity

Some leaders of mainstream churches have been actively responding to Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s largest immigration crackdown yet. After an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, ISAIAH, a coalition of faith organizations, organized vigils and demonstrations.

About 100 clergy members got arrested Friday after an ICE Out demonstration at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. They chose the airport because ICE’s deportation flights take off from there, and clergy wanted airlines to call for an end to the federal government’s operation in Minnesota.

As outspoken as many Minnesota church leaders are against ICE, protestors also recently targeted a church where an ICE official reportedly serves as a pastor. Three activists were charged by the Trump administration after a demonstration at Cities Church in St. Paul. 

Related: St. Paul's Women with Walkers protest ‘the best way we can.’

Friday’s service at Trinity Lutheran, part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, wasn’t a protest or rally, Kershner said, but rather a way to hold space for spiritual support. Nine clergy members from area churches came together for the event.

John Odegard, pastor at Grace Lutheran in Mankato, said in an email that a service at his church on Friday was in part a response to the increasing number of people who are upset about ICE’s tactics.

“People in our community are afraid to do normal things because they do not know if they will be racially profiled as they simply try to go about their day,” he stated. “In addition, there are many in our community who have expressed to me that they feel helpless to do something meaningful in the face of so much hurt.”

Mankato and St. Peter, like other Greater Minnesota cities, saw spikes in ICE activity after Operation Metro Surge launched in December. Some St. Peter residents are afraid to leave their homes right now, said Bill Nelsen, a retired pastor who attended Friday’s service.

“We have people who are watching out for each other, and particularly for our Hispanic and East African folks,” he said.

Nelsen co-founded St. Peter’s Good Neighbor Diversity Council with Mohamed Abdikadir, a local imam. The community group, under new officers, recently voted to create an emergency response fund to support the needs of residents from vulnerable communities.

‘Foundational’ work

Spaces for prayer are important amid all the hurt that Minnesotans are feeling, Odegaard said. A church can be a space for grieving, hope and resilience.

“My hope is that we will also be able to provide a little push for people to take even small actions of love toward their neighbors,” he said. “That active love is central to my faith, and it is what will help lead us forward. Faith should be a catalyst for a changed life, one that is focused on loving others in tangible ways.”

As in St. Peter, services in Mankato, including one at Hilltop United Methodist, came together through a group effort from congregants and faith leaders. Other congregations scheduled services in Minneapolis, St. Paul and surrounding suburbs, plus Rochester, Duluth, Moorhead and other Greater Minnesota cities.

In the 1960s, Nelsen served as a Civil Rights activist in Alabama under King’s leadership. Friday’s service included readings from King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” reminding Nelsen of the Civil Rights leader’s eternal hope for common good.

“You don’t give up,” he said. “You keep working on it in any way you can.” 

Among the scriptures at Friday’s service, a passage from Leviticus stated its readers “shall not oppress the alien.” The alien, it continued, “shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself.” 

A faith leader representing more conservative Christian churches also cited scripture in calling for compassion toward immigrants. Lucas Woodford, a Minnesota district president of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, pointed to verses from the Book of Matthew about loving a neighbor as yourself and welcoming strangers in a public letter following Good’s death. 

Church teachings can equip people for moments like now, said Elizabeth O’Sullivan, pastor at the Congregational United Church of Christ and Spirituality Center in Austin. She led a service at her church Friday.

“It seems very foundational to the church to respond when our community members are afraid and literally hungry,” she said. 

She geared her service toward children, aiming to be a night of fun and connection for people who desperately needed it. Prayers focused on calls for peace, for a time when people can live without fear and with dignity, and for a place where might doesn’t equal right, she said.

“These are really divided times,” O'Sullivan said. “There’s room to have different ideas about what would constitute a good immigration policy, and still say this is too much.”

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Tazewell County judge sped up redistricting ruling to beat General Assembly vote to move the case

The judge had given both sides until next week to provide written arguments but acted before then to head off a Democratic attempt to relocate the case to Richmond.

Tazewell County judge sped up redistricting ruling to beat General Assembly vote to move the case

The judge had given both sides until next week to provide written arguments but acted before then to head off a Democratic attempt to relocate the case to Richmond.

Cardinal NewsDavid M. Poole

by David M. Poole January 29, 2026

For Judge Jack S. Hurley, Jr., it was now or never.

Hurley is the Southwest Virginia judge whom Republicans selected to hear their lawsuit seeking to block Democrats’ plans to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.

The judge had given both sides until next week to provide written arguments about the applicability of a 100-year-old law dealing with public notice before the state constitution can be amended.

But legislative Democrats — who accused Republicans of “judge-shopping” — turned the tables on Hurley by fast-tracking legislation that would transfer the case to Richmond Circuit Court and retroactively repeal the law in question.

So on Tuesday afternoon, an hour after the state Senate voted along party-lines to approve legislation fashioned to take the case out of his hands, Hurley issued a six-page order finding in favor of Republicans. He ruled that legislative Democrats had sidestepped both state law and their own rules in a rush to redraw congressional districts before the midterm elections this November.

Changing Virginia’s rules for drawing legislative districts became no easy task after 2020, when voters overwhelmingly agreed to enshrine a bipartisan redistricting commission in the state constitution.

Amending the constitution requires voter approval, but only after the legislature approves the language twice, the second time occurring after a November general election  for the House of Delegates.

The process usually takes more than two years, but Democrats believe they have found a way to get it done in six months. The General Assembly first approved the redistricting amendment in a special session held Oct. 31, just a few days before in-person voting for state House elections. The second approval came this month during the opening days of the regular legislative session.

Democrats are planning to hold a statewide ballot initiative on April 21 that would give voters the final word whether or not to approve a limited carve out, allowing the Democratic-controlled legislature to draw new congressional districts that would be used this November.

Virginia Democrats point their finger at President Donald Trump, who has encouraged Republican states to gerrymander their congressional districts to flip as many Democratic seats as possible this fall. Texas was the first to comply, which prompted strongly Democratic California to respond in kind. 

Virginia Democrats — who control both chambers of the General Assembly — say they can’t sit idly by as Trump rigs elections in other Republican states. 

A Democratic group calling itself “Virginians for Fair Elections” sent out a fundraising appeal on Wednesday that blasted Hurley’s ruling as part of a GOP bid to silence voters from being heard in a referendum.

“Right now, Republicans are trying to run out the clock, muddy the process and keep Virginians from voting on fair elections and leveling the playing field all across the county.”

Those who oppose the plan note that the Democrats’ answer to more fair national elections seems to be sticking Virginians with manifestly unfair districts. Democrats say they may try to draw lines that create Democratic majorities in four of the five districts now represented by GOP members of Congress.

“There is nothing fair about the map that’s going to be released on Friday,” said Brian Cannon, who led a bipartisan effort to approve the redistricting commission. “Gerrymandering disenfranchises voters and is fundamentally unfair. It’s morally wrong.”

Few people were surprised that a judge from Southwest Virginia found in favor of Republicans. After all, Democrats will tell you that Judge Hurley ran for the state legislature in 1999 as a Republican.

What was unexpected was that Hurley felt compelled to act before the deadline he had given to both sides. In his order, Hurley indicated that legislation (SB769/HB1384) that Democrats introduced last week made the case “ripe” for immediate action. 

The identical bills — which are expected to pass by the end of the week — would amend the current 2025-26 state budget to include $5 million for an April 21 statewide vote. The measures also include language that would stipulate that all litigation related to redistricting should be heard by the Richmond Circuit Court. 

More significantly, the budget bill includes language that would eliminate a state law that a notice of proposed changes to the state constitution must be displayed on the door of every courthouse in Virginia for at least three months before the state House election sandwiched between the two legislative approvals. The bill includes unusual language that would eliminate the law retroactively, all the way back to 1971 when Virginia adopted a new state constitution.

In their Tazewell lawsuit, Republicans said the legislature’s first approval of the redistricting amendment last October was invalid because voters were not given the notice required by law. The legislative action took place only four days before the November 2025 state House elections. 

Democrats dismiss the law as an outdated remnant of the 1902 state constitution written in the days when people traveled by horse or foot once a month to the county seat for court day.

In a floor debate Tuesday, House Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County, noted that the three-month notice provision was removed from the 1971 constitution and only by oversight was the provision not excised from the state code.

Surovell said the retroactive nature was simply a safeguard so no one could question the validity of any constitutional amendment passed in the last half-century. “It was thought it would be safer to repeal the statute effective to 1971,” he said.

State Minority Leader Sen. Ryan McDougle, R-Hanover County, congratulated Surovell on his attempted verbal slight of hand. 

“If the law was in place, you can’t come back and say, ‘Whoops….I’m going to go back and undo that,’” McDougle said.

In his opinion, Judge Hurley ruled that a lack of required public notice was a fatal defect in the legislature’s approval of the constitutional amendment last October. 

Hurley’s order uses ALL CAPS for emphasis. One paragraph reads: “Likewise, even if said passage HAD been valid, that no ‘NEXT ENSURING GENERAL ELECTION OF THE MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF DELEGATES’ has occurred the court ORDERS that any 2026 Regular Session vote on a proposed constitutional Amendment SHALL BE and IS construed as a FIRST vote under Article XII, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution.”

Hurley declined to be interviewed for this article. There’s no way to know if he watched the live Senate floor debate on Tuesday, but his order makes it clear he has been keeping close tabs on the legislation in Richmond aimed at his case in Tazewell. At the end of his order, Hurley took a swipe at the constitutionality of the bills.

He questioned the notion that the legislature could pass a bill that would retroactively apply to the past. He noted the state constitution mentions only the application of laws in the future.

Hurley also questioned the constitutionality of language that would transfer the Tazewell case and any other redistricting litigation to Richmond Circuit Court. He said the measure would be a “direct violation” of a constitutional prohibition on special legislation that includes “a change of venue in civil or criminal cases.”

Plexes, Pods, and Micro-Centers: New Family Childcare Models Are Bringing Business and Families Back to Main Street

by Anne Vilen, The Daily Yonder
January 26, 2026

When LeyAnn Gehlen-Wampler of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, gave birth to her son last year, she faced a common dilemma in rural communities:  She needed to work to pay her living expenses, but the cost of childcare—if she could find it—would be more than she could earn in most jobs.  The ideal solution, she thought, would be to take care of baby Kaysyn herself and get paid to take care of other children, too, but the childcare center where she once worked had closed.  She thought about applying for a state license as a family childcare home, but “My house is too small, and there’s no way we could afford the start-up costs on our own,” she said.

Then, opportunity knocked.  

Recruited by Julie Warner, an early childhood consultant for the city who had once been a family childcare provider herself, Gehlen-Wampler opened her Shining Stars family childcare home in Medicine Lodge Daycare, a model that could reshape childcare in rural communities.

The Medicine Lodge Daycare flex-plex is a cluster of small, fully equipped childcare businesses in a mainstreet building. Crucially, although Medicine Lodge Daycare occupies a commercial space in the heart of downtown, the building was renovated into five separate rooms with separate entrances and outside playgrounds ideal for five independent family childcare providers, each caring for a small group of mixed-age infants and toddlers. 

“That’s where the innovation is,” said City Administrator Brian Withrow. The space, owned by a non-profit, complies with state regulations for childcare centers, but is occupied by licensed family childcare providers who don’t need to meet the more rigorous standards for childcare center administrators.

Through a mix of local, state, and federal grants, the town also paid for furniture, curriculum materials, licensing support, and even the first year of liability insurance. “It’s the only way I could have opened,” Gehlen-Wampler said. “Here I also have a supportive community of other providers to turn to. This opportunity has truly been life-changing for my family.”

It’s also been life-changing for the town’s businesses and families, said city councilman Matt Forsyth. “What it means for downtown is huge. It keeps Main Street alive in a small town where most main streets are dying. I'm a business owner myself. I've had trouble finding spots for my own kids, and this is going to allow everybody to have a spot for their children and know that they're well taken care of in this great facility.”

A Housing Model That Works for Child Care—and for Rural Economies

The “plex” concept seems simple: Build or convert small homes—typically one- or two-bedroom units—and lease them at below-market rates to licensed family childcare providers. In reality, implementing the concept is more complicated. States have different regulations for and even definitions of family childcare; many explicitly or implicitly require that family childcare providers live in the residence where they care for children. 

Kansas is one of just seven states (the others are Alaska, Missouri, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, and Wisconsin) that allow family childcare providers to operate in non-residential settings such as schools, businesses, or hospitals, according to Opportunities Exchange, a non-profit working to transform early education programs so that they can be sustainable and also high quality. This allowance paved the way for the state to allow the Medicine Lodge businesses to operate under family childcare licenses with fewer restrictions than those regulating larger childcare centers.

A center has to have a director who doesn’t care for kids, multiple teachers, commercial insurance, and expensive building upgrades like sprinkler systems, according to Julie Lyon, a consultant who helped shepherd the development of a childcare triplex in nearby Greensburg, Kansas. “It’s cost-prohibitive for a small town,” Lyon said.

By contrast, Greensburg’s three single-family units cost $417,028 in total to build. The city of Greensburg and its partners used American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars, grants from regional foundations and the childcare coalition, and local development funds to cover construction, sidewalks, playgrounds, furnishings, and materials.

An added bonus: If the community someday needs more housing instead of childcare, each unit could be converted to a rental home, increasing the town’s affordable housing stock.

A New Business with Work-Life Balance

For Kasha Unruh, a mother of three and longtime caregiver, the flex plex model was the only viable path to opening a licensed family childcare home.

Her mortgage agreement prevents running a business in her own home. But in October 2025, with support from Lyon and the city, she opened her family childcare program in the Greensburg triplex. She now cares for seven children—including two of her own—and because the program isn’t in her actual home, enjoys a work-life balance that is rare for home-based childcare providers.

After a city rent subsidy, Unruh pays just $300 a month for the space. She covers her own insurance, utilities, and licensing fees, while the nonprofit owner handles building maintenance and ensures the facility meets licensing requirements. The lower overhead lets her keep childcare affordable: less than $150 per week per child—far below the U.S. average.

Shared Community, Shared Costs, Shared Solutions

One of the biggest advantages of placing multiple providers together is the built-in community.

In both Medicine Lodge and Greensburg, providers can collaborate on vacation schedules, hire a shared substitute teacher for the day, and use the same research-based multi-age curriculum designed by a retired local educator.

The towns also offer backend administrative support—something typically available only in larger commercial centers. Consultants help providers write business plans, file taxes, and develop sustainable operating strategies.

Lyon manages a provider substitute pool that serves the whole county and has become a recruitment tool to bolster the childcare supply. Two of the three substitutes she hired later opened their own home-based childcare businesses.

To encourage long-term stability, the local economic development commission also created a $5,000 retention bonus for providers who keep their businesses open beyond the first year. Ninety percent of recipients spent the money on critical business needs like insurance, transportation, and building repairs, according to Lyon.

Micro-Centers are the “Right Size” for Many Communities

While the flex plex model is working well in Kansas, another small-scale childcare model allows greater flexibility and possibility, said Louise Stoney, the co-founder of Opportunities Exchange. “If you want childcare supply in rural areas, we have to think differently, and we have to think small, and we have to make small possible,” she said.

Micro-centers, like flex plexes, are operated by family childcare providers caring for small groups of up to 30 children in mixed-age classrooms. But, they operate in commercial spaces, often spaces that are provided free-of-charge by an employer, city, or housing development. The model is based on Chambliss Center for Children in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which operates 24-hour care serving infants through 12-year olds in microcenters located in local schools.

“The most essential thing for sustainability for a childcare program is full enrollment every day, every seat,” according to Stoney.  To achieve that in small towns, it needs to be regulated the way family childcare programs are – allowing for mixed ages of children and not requiring a supervising teacher with an advanced degree. Stoney has worked with policy makers in places like North Dakota and Indiana to “rightsize” their licensing, zoning regulations, even building and fire codes to allow family childcare providers to expand into microcenters that operate outside their own homes and closer to where people work. 

In Indiana, the Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning (OECOSL), streamlined its licensing categories to support a Micro-Facility Pilot program that launched in early 2025. Six existing childcare centers applied to open smaller satellites in rural or small town libraries, schools, and shopping centers. The new regulations are tailored to smaller settings; they allow children to bring their own lunches and snacks, support mixed-age groups, and draw on the resources of the larger micro-facility hub for staffing and administrative support.

Child Care That Fits Families, Providers, and Employers

Several small towns in rural Minnesota, which allows family childcare providers to operate a business outside of their own homes (though not in commercial spaces), are building flex plexes, or “childcare pods” as they call them. 

One consulting firm, The Business of Childcare, even offers communities a pre-fabricated childcare home designed specifically for family providers. For about $288,000, said President Jeff Andrews, towns get a home built to licensing standards and a turnkey support package: project management, operator recruitment, communications, and onboarding until the provider is fully licensed. 

Andrews’ vision aligns closely with Stoney’s micro-center model. Whether a community needs a single childcare house or a micro-center serving 30 kids with three or four staff depends on the scale of childcare needs and accommodation outside of the provider’s own residence, but both can provide mixed-age, family-like settings.  

Furthermore, Andrews pointed out, a manufacturing site that operates two or three shifts would really benefit from a nearby childcare facility that is open 24-7.  Three family childcare providers could all operate out of the same childcare house, serving parents who work non-traditional hours as well as the 9-to-5ers. That could help alleviate the chronic shortage of workers that manufacturing plants in rural areas often face.

The smaller mixed-age setting of family childcare is also preferred by many families, especially those with infants or multiple children in daycare. It is often “the most familiar, flexible, convenient, personal, and affordable option for families,” according to Home Grown, a funding collaborative that advocates for home-based care.

It’s also an option that works for aspiring childcare providers like Brooke Garvey, in Mapleton, Minnesota. The support she received from The Business of Childcare and the town finally made her long-held goal attainable, she said. Her business, Tiny Roots Childcare, located right on Main Street, will serve up to ten children, including her infant and toddler. 

“Quality childcare should feel like a second home,” Garvey said. “I want parents to feel their kids are safe, growing, and connected to the community. I want to be part of the parades, the town days, everything.”

For her—and for employers and families in Mapleton—that’s a dream come true.

Support for this reporting came from the Better Life Lab at New America.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Europe gets ‘green energy’. These Southern towns get dirty air.

by Tristan Baurick, Verite News New Orleans
January 23, 2026

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Verite News and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change. This story is the first of a three-part series.

It almost felt like old times for the friends and family gathered at Robert Weatherspoon’s house. The living room couches and chairs were filled, a football game was on the TV, and the aroma of bacon and butter beans drifted in from the kitchen. 

What was missing was Weatherspoon’s voice. While his friends usually bring the food or cook during get-togethers, Weatherspoon is counted on to supply the laughs. The 67-year-old with an expressive, cherubic face has a reputation for devastating one-liners, off-color game commentary, and stories — skewed somewhat for comedic effect — about people everybody knows in Gloster, a mill town in southern Mississippi too small to have strangers.

But shuffling from his bed to the living room had left him breathless. Weatherspoon took a puff from his inhaler, but his throat was locked and his chest was tight. He tried a joke on an old high school buddy across the room, and it fell flat, stalled between labored breaths.

His next utterance was darker, whispered to the person with the closest ear. “I thought I was dying last night,” Weatherspoon said. “For 20 minutes, I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t move.” An odd thought crossed his mind as he lay there, struggling for air. “I said, ‘Let me write something before I go. I want to tell about my life. I want to put it all down.’”

The story of Weatherspoon’s late middle age might have chronicled an energetic man who still liked to jog, grow okra and peppers in his garden, chase after women, and make his friends laugh. But in 2014, a massive mill that turns trees into peanut-size pellets opened in Gloster, and “everything changed for everybody,” he said. 

Operated by the British energy giant Drax, the mill and two newer ones in Louisiana — near Urania in the center of the state and Bastrop near the Arkansas line — churn out billions of pellets each year to meet surging overseas demand for electricity produced by burning wood, what the company markets as “sustainable biomass.” Alongside the mills, in communities of mostly poor, Black residents, the air is tainted with cancer-causing gases and tiny particles that can burrow deep into people’s lungs and trigger a long list of health troubles.

It’s not clear whether Drax’s activity has caused any particular individual’s health problems, but the mills release chemicals at levels federal regulators and scientists say can be toxic to humans.

In living rooms around Gloster, on front porches, and between the crumbling facades and boarded windows along the town’s main street, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t believe their life was better before the mill, called Amite Bioenergy.  

“When I go out, I can’t hardly catch my breath,” said Helen Reed, a Gloster native. “Everything is worse since Drax came here.”

Tucked into a remote corner of southwest Mississippi, Gloster is exposed to more particulate matter and releases of toxic air than most parts of the country, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Rates of cancer, asthma, and heart disease are substantially higher than the national average. Gloster has other industrial facilities, but the EPA lists the Drax mill as the region’s only major emitter of toxic air pollutants. 

Wood pellets have been touted by European countries as a greener, climate-friendly alternative to coal and gas. Made from sawdust and comparatively cheap trees grown in the American South, pellets now power a large share of the United Kingdom’s electrical grid. Drax has turned the U.K.’s largest coal power station, a mile-wide complex in rural Yorkshire, into what is essentially an immense wood stove fueled with Mississippi and Louisiana pine. 

Raking in billions of dollars in both profits and government subsidies, Drax foresees substantial growth in the coming years — especially in the U.S., where it’s planning new mills and an ambitious push into the booming carbon capture and storage business. 

In Gloster, the industry promised prosperity for the town’s 850 residents when Drax’s mill opened 11 years ago. Gloster, Urania, and Bastrop had once been booming mill towns, producing pulp, paper, and lumber for a global market. When those mills closed in the 2000s, the local economies collapsed. Drax was seen as a godsend — a rejuvenator of the jobs, money, and pride that come with a mill that roars with life. But many people say they’ve received little more than noise, dust, and toxic air: The three nearly identical Drax mills in Mississippi and Louisiana have been forced to pay millions of dollars for hundreds of pollution violations over the past five years.

In Urania, a central Louisiana town about two hours northwest of Gloster, the penalties are having little effect, said Glen Henderson, a longtime Urania resident who lives a mile from Drax’s LaSalle BioEnergy mill. “I was born and raised in the area, and I love it here,” he said. “But if I get a chance, I’m definitely going to move.”

Hassled by the mill’s lights and noise at night and sawdust coating his car in the morning, the peace and quiet Henderson hoped to enjoy in retirement disappeared when Drax opened the mill in late 2017. 

“We’ve always been a mill town,” he said. “I worked in the old mill after high school. But the mills we had around here weren’t like this. This is something else.”

Michelli Martin, a Drax spokesperson, said the company is making strides to reduce pollution. “The safety of our people and the communities in which we operate is our priority, and we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously,” Martin said. “As a company dedicated to sustainable energy production, high standards of safety and environmental compliance are always our top priority.” 

Drax’s mill has only hastened Gloster’s decline, said Carmella Wren-Causey at her home on the town’s edge, where subsidized apartments abut a dense monocrop of loblolly pines. “We’re being poisoned slowly, right before our eyes,” she said. Tears ran down her cheeks and slid under the plastic tubes funneling oxygen to her nose. Diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Wren-Causey’s breathing has become so difficult that she can barely keep up with her grandson, a toddler who was scooting his bike near her oxygen tank. 

“God gave me breath when he gave me life,” said Wren-Causey, who blames the mill for her declining health. “Nobody should tamper with that. But Drax took it away.” 

Breaking rules again and again

When Patrick Anderson, an environmental attorney, first tried to convince Mississippi’s environmental regulators that Drax was violating the state’s pollution laws, he boiled things down to a simple equation: 1 = 1. 

Because testing showed one large pellet mill in Florida had been emitting about 1,000 tons of volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs, every year, it stood to reason that the virtually identical mill in Gloster was emitting roughly the same amount, he told the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2017. 

But Drax was claiming its Gloster mill was keeping its emissions lower than 250 tons per year, the threshold that distinguishes “minor” from “major” sources of VOCs, a classification of pollutants that are harmful to breathe, especially for children, elderly people, and those who suffer from asthma and other lung conditions. 

The minor-source designation allowed Drax to avoid more stringent regulations and higher costs associated with installing and maintaining pollution-control technologies. “One of the most troubling trends in the wood pellet industry is that facilities that should face the most rigorous air permitting standards are actually the least controlled and the dirtiest,” Anderson wrote in a 2018 report for the Environmental Integrity Project. 

A year after the report, Anderson was proved right. In 2019, Drax disclosed to Mississippi regulators that the Gloster facility had been emitting an average of 796 tons of VOCs per year — more than three times the limit allowed under its permit, according to documents obtained through public records requests. 

The revelation resulted in a $2.5 million fine from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2020 and elicited surprise and anger from Gloster’s residents, many of whom said they were unaware the mill posed risks to their health. 

“When I first started having trouble breathing, I thought God was punishing me — but it wasn’t God doing that,” said Weatherspoon, who believes the mill’s emissions and his declining health are linked. 

In a letter to Mississippi’s regulators a few years later, Drax attributed its underestimated emissions for the Gloster mill to a lack of experience with pellet production. “The pellet production industry is a relatively young industry,” the letter said. “Several wood pellet facilities, not only Amite BioEnergy LLC, initially underestimated emissions in connection with the permitting of these facilities.”

In neighboring Louisiana, state regulators also found that Drax had been breaking air quality rules. Drax’s mill near Bastrop, for instance, was supposed to cap its VOC emissions at 250 tons but had actually been releasing about 1,100 tons per year, according to a company filing with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. In 2022, the state agency reached a legal settlement in which Drax paid $3.2 million but admitted no wrongdoing. 

That settlement was the largest in more than a decade for Louisiana’s environmental regulators. But to Anderson, who now works for the Southern Environmental Law Center, it was also the extent of any serious efforts to rein in Drax’s pollution in Louisiana. 

When Mississippi determined in early 2023 that the Gloster mill had also far exceeded the allowable limits of what regulators call “hazardous air pollutants,” Anderson asked Louisiana’s regulators if the mills in Urania and Bastrop were doing the same.  

It was a question they couldn’t answer. A Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson said the agency doesn't require Drax to conduct routine testing for hazardous air pollutants, which include nearly 190 chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer, birth defects, and other serious problems, or a similar group of chemicals the agency refers to as “toxic air pollutants.” The state’s regulators also don’t conduct their own testing at Drax’s mills. 

In Mississippi, the hazardous pollutants Drax released into the air above Gloster included methanol, acrolein, and tons of formaldehyde, a chemical that’s far worse than being merely carcinogenic. “It’s also mutagenic and neurodegenerative, which is as awful as that sounds,” said Aisha Dickerson, an environmental health researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Formaldehyde has the potential to both mutate human cells and trigger brain disorders, affecting memory, learning ability, and behavior. 

Anderson said it’s mind-boggling that Louisiana won’t test for chemicals it knows can cause cancer and a host of other illnesses. In his yearslong campaign to get the state to change its ways, he attempted the 1 = 1 tactic, demonstrating that the Gloster mill is comparable to the Bastrop mill in Louisiana and likely has similar pollution levels. 

Drax itself has called the Gloster and Bastrop mills “nearly identical.” In letters to Mississippi’s regulators, the company attempted to avoid additional emissions testing by arguing that the Bastrop mill in Louisiana was so similar to the one in Mississippi that testing from one should apply to the other. “The (Bastrop) facility was built at the same time and is very similar to Amite, such that it has the exact same process design, equipment, production, rates, and the fiber is procured from a similar wood basket,” the company wrote. 

Drax’s Louisiana and Mississippi mills turn ground-up trees and logging debris into tiny pellets that are shipped overseas and burned in a power station in rural England. (Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today)

In 2024, Drax admitted to what Anderson had been saying for years. Buried several pages into the company’s permit updates, Drax noted that both of its Louisiana mills had exceeded their “minor source” limits for hazardous air pollutants. Drax didn’t say specifically how much it had been violating the 25-ton limit for these contaminants, but the company noted a “proposed emission rate” of nearly 40 tons, according to permitting documents. 

Despite Drax’s admission, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has yet to issue fines, and a spokesman declined to say what steps, if any, the agency has taken to get Drax to comply with its emissions rules. The spokesman also did not answer several questions about its enforcement actions and air quality monitoring practices. 

Allegations about Drax have also come from within. In 2020, Louisiana regulators received an anonymous complaint from someone with intimate knowledge of Drax’s two mills in the state. It contained a host of allegations about chemical releases, manipulated data, ignored safety testing, and poor wastewater management. The most serious accusation was that “each facility has literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting” of harmful chemicals annually, including episodes that “would easily” exceed limits on acrolein, a chemical that can irritate eyes and lungs and, according to scientists, is “probably carcinogenic.” 

“Any mention of these items will cause senior management to threaten termination,” the complaint said. It also alleged that the two mills “manipulate” data “to avoid defined permit deviations.” 

When the state’s inspectors followed up, they found no evidence of emissions violations in data and equipment records provided by Drax. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s inspection report did not address the alleged threats of firings or manipulated data. Inspectors partially substantiated the allegations about improper waste disposal: During an inspection of the Urania mill, they found that Drax was burning waste sludge without a permit. 

Drax denied the allegations, noting that the waste-disposal issue was “not a normal condition” and that the company continually works with regulators to address environmental concerns.    

The ultrafine dust expelled by Drax’s mills is another major health concern, Dickerson said. The particles released during a mill’s operations are so tiny that they can slip past the lung’s defenses and penetrate the bloodstream. 

“Eventually, these particles can be transported to the brain and other organs,” Dickerson said, listing cognitive impairment and stroke among the problems that can develop. “You may not see symptoms immediately, but constant exposure could mean issues down the line.”

Drax has made several upgrades and changes to reduce emissions, particularly VOCs. In 2021, the company installed a thermal oxidizer at the Gloster mill that breaks down these compounds.

“We care deeply about the safety of our people and the residents of the communities in which we operate, and we take our environmental responsibilities and compliance extremely seriously,” said Matt White, vice president of Drax’s North American operations. “Compliance is at the foundation of everything we do, and we have invested a lot of hours and resources with the goal of continuously improving our operations.” 

Despite the upgrades, Drax continues to incur fines for pollution violations. In late 2024, Drax agreed to pay $225,000 for exceeding the Gloster mill’s limits for hazardous air pollutants, particularly methanol. The state also cited Drax for failing to conduct required emissions tests and maintain pollution controls and proper records.

The company’s financial penalties, which add up to about $6 million, are dwarfed by its profits, which have topped $1 billion in recent years. “Drax is so profitable and so subsidized that it powers through all of this,” Anderson said. “The fines don’t hurt their bottom line.”

In April 2025, amid complaints from residents, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, or MDEQ, denied Drax permission to increase its emissions. Six months later, it reversed that decision, allowing the Gloster mill to become a “major source” of hazardous air pollutants. The October 15 permit ruling essentially gives Drax permission to release pollutants at the levels that got it in trouble when it was classified as a minor emitter.

A group of Gloster residents immediately filed a federal lawsuit against Drax, alleging that the company unlawfully exposed people to “massive amounts of toxic pollutants.”

Drax has “consistently failed to meet their legal obligations not to dump pollutants … and have continued to denude U.S. forests, all for the benefit of a British company,” the lawsuit alleges. 

In a motion to dismiss the case, Drax’s lawyers argued that the lawsuit fails to show “particularized injury that is traceable to (the Gloster mill’s) conduct.”

A representative from the MDEQ declined to comment on the permit decision and lawsuit but said that “MDEQ takes seriously its obligations to protect human health and the environment.”

A Drax spokesperson said the company was “pleased that (MDEQ) has listened to the clear recommendations of its own technical staff and the voices of Gloster community leaders, local businesses, and a large number of our neighbors in Gloster,” adding that the “permit will allow our plant to continue to operate, enabling us to continue providing much needed well-paying jobs in this rural corner of Mississippi, and support hundreds more across the state’s forestry and lumber industries.” 

The spokesperson said that "MDEQ's conditions, inspection regime, and our commitment to continue to invest in compliance and improving operational standards will ensure that Drax at Amite operates as safely and efficiently as possible.”

The pellet town ‘algorithm’?

Pellet manufacturers seem to have a particular set of criteria that guides them to places like Gloster, Urania, and Bastrop, said Erika Walker, an epidemiologist at Brown University who has been researching the effects of noise and pollution in communities that host pellet mills. 

“It’s like there’s an algorithm that tells you where vulnerable communities are, and where people are not going to ask questions,” she said. “If you need to piss on the side of the road, where do you go? A dark area where nobody’s looking.”

Pellet mills in the South are 50 percent more likely to be located in communities with a high proportion of poor and nonwhite residents, according to a 2018 study by researchers from Tufts University and the Dogwood Alliance, a forest conservation group based in North Carolina. Of the 32 mills assessed in nine Southern states, including Mississippi and Louisiana, 18 were in counties or parishes with poverty rates above the state median. Louisiana and Mississippi are tied for the highest levels of poverty in the United States at 14 percent, according to federal data. The national rate is just under 9 percent.

Across the Deep South, state and local leaders are so desperate for economic activity that they don’t ask critical questions about what the facilities may mean for the environment or people’s health, said Dickerson of Johns Hopkins. “These communities all seem to have low-income, historically marginalized residents who might not have the time or resources to fight a permit allowing a pellet mill to come in,” she said. 

In Gloster and Bastrop, Black residents make up nearly 80 percent of the population, and more than 30 percet live under the poverty line, making less than $15,650 a year. Urania’s 700 residents are mostly white but look worse off economically. According to census data, the town had a poverty rate of 40 percent and a median household income of $12,400 — about a fifth of the national average. 

Martin, the Drax spokesperson, denied that Drax is drawn to areas with few white people and high poverty. “The inference that Drax uses an 'algorithm’ to take advantage of communities is untrue,” she said. “Drax uses a number of criteria to identify and select pellet mill locations, including proximity to low-grade roundwood and sawmill residuals, transport links, and access to local supply chain.”

Walker said that Drax could alleviate many concerns about pollution if the company built its mills far from where people live. The best place to put a mill is “in the middle of the woods,” she said. The Drax mill near Bastrop may approach this ideal. Located 10 miles north of the town, the mill is surrounded by forested tracts interspersed with logging roads. 

“Honest to pea, I didn’t even know it was there,” said Linda Coker, who lives nearly 2 miles from the mill and is one of its nearest neighbors. 

In Urania, Drax’s LaSalle BioEnergy sits just outside the town’s limits, but a school, medical center, two churches, and several homes sit within a mile of it. 

The facility's location in Gloster is particularly troubling, Walker said. It abuts a mobile home park and other houses and is about a mile from a children’s day care center. “Literally, my first question when I visited Gloster was, ‘Who zoned this?’” she said. “It’s right out in the open. No acoustical barriers, no buffer of trees. It was shocking to see it operating right in the middle of the community.”

Noise, dust and questions

When the town of Urania was carved out of pine forests more than a century ago, its founder, a timber baron with a visionary streak, promised two often-incompatible things: industry and tranquility. 

In the late 1890s, Henry Hardtner knew “the living was really rough” around his expanding lumber mill, so he platted Urania far enough away from his business that his workers could enjoy “a welcome relief” from the noise, dust, and smoke, a local newspaper recounted in 1968. The town, nestled among towering, sweet-scented longleaf pines, was named after the Greek goddess of the stars because, in Hardtner’s view, the site was downright “heavenly.”

Henderson, the Urania resident who lives a mile from the Drax mill, wishes Hardtner could see Urania now. He’d have Hardtner sit with him on his porch at 2 a.m. to listen to the near-constant clanging and banging from the LaSalle BioEnergy mill and see its lights glowing over the tops of an ever-thinning band of trees nearly a mile away. At daybreak, Henderson would show off the powdery substance coating his truck. 

“This noise and dust — what are the long-term effects of all that?” he asked. “Nobody seems to know, or they don’t want to know.”

There has been little scientific research into the environmental and health impacts of the relatively new wood pellet industry, but that’s starting to change. In 2024, Walker received a $5.8 million federal grant to conduct the first study of emissions from wood pellet mills on human health in the U.S. Awarded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the grant is funding a research team that’s in the early phases of a five-year study focusing on the noise, particulate matter, VOCs, and other emissions from Drax’s Gloster mill. 

The first study by Walker’s team, which includes researchers from the University of Mississippi and Drexel University, found that the noise levels in the small towns with pellet mills approach those of big cities. “The noise pollution in Gloster rivals my neighborhood, which is by an interstate in a big, industrial city,” said Walker, who lives just outside Providence, Rhode Island. 

Noise from the Gloster mill’s operations and a steady stream of truck traffic to and from the facility sometimes topped 70 decibels and rarely fell below 41 decibels. The rural Mississippi town of Mendenhall, which is similar in size to Gloster but lacks a pellet mill, was typically 10 decibels quieter. “That’s an enormous difference,” Walker said. “It’s like turning a faucet into Niagara Falls."

In Urania, Henderson said the mill seems loudest at night and in the early morning, producing a discordant clattering when he’s trying to sleep. It’s especially bad on windy nights. 

“Get a north wind, and it’s rockin’ and rollin’,” he said. “It sounds like logs tumbling in a dryer.”

The impacts of noise pollution on human health are often overlooked or ignored, but a growing body of research has linked chronic exposure to high blood pressure, heart attacks, anxiety, and depression. 

“Noise disrupts your sleep, disrupts your mood, and sets off a stress response that’s like your ‘fight or flight’ response, which makes your body ready to fight a threat or run from it,” Walker said. “The constant stimulation of that response can cause all kinds of health problems.”

Drax says it follows all federal guidelines on noise abatement and conducts annual surveys of its mills’ sound levels, which it characterizes as no worse than other industrial facilities.  

“We also go above and beyond to insulate our buildings to mitigate any noise that would come from the hammermill and help prevent it from being audible beyond the fence line,” Martin said. “The noise from facility operation is consistent with the surrounding industrial plants and does not contribute to significant impacts above existing background noise.”

Walker’s research is ongoing, but a few preliminary findings have emerged. One is that air pollution is magnitudes higher in Gloster, especially with VOCs, she said. Data from dozens of air pollution monitors installed around the town show clouds of pollutants concentrated around the mill and in neighboring residential areas. It also showed unexpected spikes during the night. That matches the experiences of some in Gloster who said they notice foul odors and find it more difficult to breathe after dark. “At night, it’s always worse,” Weatherspoon said. “It smells disgusting.”

This could indicate pollution “dumping” during certain hours when people are less aware of the pollution, Walker said. 

Drax denied that the mill releases more pollution at night. “Any suggestion that we manipulate our operations to avoid complaints or detection is completely false,” Martin said. 

Another surprising trend was found in Gloster’s children. The closer a child lived to the mill, the heavier their body weight, the researchers found. “That was shocking,” said Walker, who has visited Gloster and communicates regularly with residents. “It fits with some of the things we heard at community meetings. People are steeped in the idea that you don’t want your kids playing outside because the air’s polluted. If they’re staying inside, how are they getting physical activity?”

The widening base of research is leading some residents to think that the pervasive health problems in Gloster may be tied to the air they breathe, said Wren-Causey, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Drax. “It’s not just people’s lifestyles or the work they do,” she said. “It’s about what Drax is putting into the air. Now people are making a ruckus. People are starting to open their eyes.”

Sitting in his living room while his friends watched football, Weatherspoon said witnessing the dual decline of his body and his town has sparked an anger that his doctor warned could further harm his health. 

“The doctor tells me, ‘Don’t get pissed off or you’re gonna die,’” he said. A friend nodded in agreement, telling Weatherspoon he really should take it easy. Weatherpoon shook his head. “When I think about what’s happened to me and what’s happening here, I get pissed off in a heartbeat,” he said. 

Late in the football game, an out-of-town guest got up to leave. Weatherspoon tossed him a little gallows humor on the way out. 

“Don’t come back here if you want to keep living,” he said. “It’s no joke.”

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

State election officials project confidence after FBI search of Georgia elections office

Jessica Huseman, Votebeat

Jan 29, 2026 at 2:02pm EST

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The FBI’s search of a Fulton County, Georgia, election office, sent shock waves through election offices nationwide that have spent years responding to lawsuits, audits, and investigations driven by President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.

But state election officials — many of them gathered this week for a national conference — projected confidence afterward, saying their work has already withstood years of scrutiny following the 2020 election, and they have followed federal and state law.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, said election officials are “concerned” and “upset,” and believe “a certain individual is trying to intimidate us” ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections. At the same time, he said, officials want voters to know they are running “safe, secure, and accessible elections,” with safeguards that are continually reviewed and improved.

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican and the state’s chief elections officer, said the only response to heightened scrutiny is strict adherence to the law. “We’re committed to orderly and fair elections, no matter what political party the voter belongs to,” she said. “But we live in a reality where politicians politicize stuff.”

Those comments came as the National Association of Secretaries of State met this week for its annual winter conference, with the FBI’s search in Georgia hanging over the gathering. The conference schedule shifted amid the uncertainty, with NASS officials offering late confirmation that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard would address the group on Friday.

Tensions surfaced Thursday as speakers addressed the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive push for greater federal control over elections. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat and former secretary of state, referenced the Fulton County search and called it a “wake-up call” for election officials.

Later, West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner, a Republican, introduced Jared Borg, a special assistant to the president and deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, noting that Borg had been asked to speak about the administration’s future plans — including the possibility of a second executive order on elections. Borg did not address that issue during his remarks and declined to comment when asked about it afterward.

The FBI on Wednesday executed a broad search warrant at a Fulton County elections office as part of a federal investigation into the handling and preservation of 2020 election records. A federal judge authorized agents to search for ballots, tabulator records, ballot images, and voter rolls, citing potential violations of federal election law.

The search came a week after Trump repeated his claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and said “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

Trump-appointed officials at the Justice Department and other agencies in 2020 said they had found no evidence of fraud swaying the outcome of the election, and allegations of it from Trump and his allies were rejected by courts, election officials, and experts after multiple audits and reviews found Trump lost the election to Joe Biden.

The raid in Fulton County, which Gabbard was present for, is the latest escalation of Trump’s efforts to use the federal government’s authority and resources to continue pursuing those allegations over elections. And it’s the most visible federal law enforcement step to date connected to Trump’s long-running claims of widespread election misconduct, raising concern among election administrators about continued scrutiny years after the election.

Last week, Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pressing the Justice Department’s demands for voter roll data amid tense discussions over immigration enforcement efforts there, prompting Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon to call it “an outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota into giving the federal government private data on millions of U.S. Citizens in violation of state and federal law.”

Election officials have openly said they are preparing for a range of scenarios including potential federal intervention in the administration of the 2026 midterm elections.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, framed the FBI action as politically motivated.

“This administration is weaponizing law enforcement across the board and in this case for the purpose of satisfying the president’s obsession with his 2020 election loss,” Fontes told Votebeat in a statement. “If Arizona is next, so be it. We’ve got nothing to hide and they’ve got nothing to prove.”

Warrant leaves key questions unanswered

The search warrant stands out for its breadth and timing: Issued more than five years after the 2020 election, it authorizes federal agents to seize nearly all of Fulton County’s election records from that contest, including ballots, tabulator tapes, ballot images, and voter rolls, rather than just materials tied to specific allegations.

The warrant cites federal records-retention and election-crime statutes, though required retention periods have long since passed, and allows government attorneys to take custody of and independently review the seized materials. Both statutes are typically subject to a five-year statute of limitations, which would have expired in 2025 for conduct related to the 2020 election.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he is not aware of any evidence that Fulton County destroyed election records before retention requirements expired and said the county appears to have preserved its ballots.

Becker said the five-year limitation has run out and leaves “no possible claim” tied to how the election was conducted.

Becker added that seizing ballots years after an election raises separate concerns, including new chain-of-custody problems that could undermine the integrity of any evidence gathered. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to those ballots once they’re seized,” he said, warning that such uncertainty could itself create evidentiary issues.

A rare federal search, in a county long targeted by Trump

Fulton County is Georgia’s most populous county, and encompasses most of Atlanta. Its unique position helps explain why federal investigators are still seeking access to physical ballots and detailed election records years after the election. The county has faced sustained litigation, audits, and public-records disputes tied to the 2020 vote, creating pressure to retain ballots and related materials long after many states stopped keeping them.

That prolonged scrutiny overlaps with Fulton County’s central role in Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in Georgia, a Republican stronghold that flipped for Biden and also elected two Democratic senators in the same election cycle. Trump and his allies repeatedly singled out the county as evidence of a stolen election, even after recounts, audits, and court rulings upheld the results, keeping local election officials under pressure long after most jurisdictions moved on.

The FBI search followed earlier attempts by the Justice Department to obtain 2020 election records through the courts. In December, the department sued Fulton County after officials declined to turn over ballots and related materials without a court order, arguing the records were sealed. The lawsuit sought access to the same categories of records later named in the search warrant, marking a shift from civil litigation to criminal process.

Fulton County did not respond to an interview request, and the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment.

States say their systems have already been tested

For election officials elsewhere, the Georgia search underscores just how atypical Fulton County’s situation has become. Many states say their 2020 election systems were examined exhaustively and are governed by clear legal timelines for record retention, making similar searches for 2020 records less likely.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said the FBI’s search in Fulton County was rooted in “unproven conspiracy theories” about the 2020 election. While election officials welcome good-faith questions, Benson said, they reject efforts “driven by conspiracy theories” and “verifiably untrue claims” to use the federal government to intimidate election workers or interfere with elections for political purposes.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, said the agency is notifying county election officials about the situation in Georgia but is not issuing formal guidance. She said the office is preparing in case a similar situation were to arise in Arizona and is available, along with its legal staff, to assist counties with questions about record retention.

She added that Arizona no longer has 2020 ballots, because state law requires counties to destroy ballots within 24 months of an election.

Pennsylvania election officials were “not aware of similar activity taking place in Pennsylvania,” a spokesperson for the Department of State said in a statement, emphasizing that the state’s 2020 election “was free, fair, safe, and secure,” with results upheld repeatedly by state and federal courts.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.