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State extends deadline to reach deal to relocate coal piles in Green Bay

State extends deadline to reach deal to relocate coal piles in Green Bay

Yahoo31-05-2025

Brown County and C. Reiss Co. will have a few more days to reach a deal on relocating the coal piles south of Mason Street in Green Bay.
Jeff Flynt, Brown County Deputy Executive, announced Friday night that the state of Wisconsin has granted an extension of its previous May 30 deadline to use a $15 million state grant "due to the progress we are making in negotiations." The deadline is now 5 p.m. June 3.
The sides are trying to reach an agreement on leasing a portion of the former Pulliam Plant site to house the coal piles.
On May 23, state Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Oconto, asked the state Department of Administration to extend its deadline for the grant to give Green Bay, Brown County and C. Reiss Co. more time to finalize a deal for "such a massive development," he said in the letter.
"Revoking the grant will seriously jeopardize a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bolster northeast Wisconsin's role in our state's supply chain and the global economy following the Covid pandemic," Wimberger said.
The state Department of Administration notified city, county and company officials in late April that the Neighborhood Investment Grant would disappear if the officials couldn't agree to a deal by the end of May.
The grant is a key source of funding to turn the former Pulliam power plant site at the mouth of the Fox River into a port site for the coal storage.
Kevin Dittman contributed to this report.
Contact Benita Mathew at bmathew@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Brown County, Green Bay and C. Reiss discuss coal piles relocation

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Some Wyoming residents voice support for voter registration changes
Some Wyoming residents voice support for voter registration changes

Yahoo

time13 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Some Wyoming residents voice support for voter registration changes

CHEYENNE — Beginning July 1, Wyoming voters will be required to provide proof of state residency and U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, something Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray has been advocating for years. The move comes after the Wyoming Legislature passed House Bill 156 in February, a piece of legislation Gov. Mark Gordon let go into law without his signature. The public comment period for rules related to the change began May 5 and lasts until June 20. Wednesday afternoon, Gray's office held an in-person and virtual meeting to allow people to voice their opinions about the proposed rules. All attendees who spoke during the meeting expressed support for the new law, and made some minor recommendations for the Secretary of State to consider before a final version of the law is published. Wyoming voters will be required to be a state resident for at least 30 days before casting their ballots, and must present proof of residency and citizenship when registering to vote. Last year, a similar piece of legislation was approved by the Wyoming Legislature, but vetoed by Gordon on the grounds that the regulations exceeded Gray's legal authority. The 2025 legislation grants the Secretary of State that authority. 'Providing proof of United States citizenship and proof of residency has been a key priority of our administration,' Gray said Wednesday, 'and this rulemaking marks over a year-and-a-half-long standoff with Gov. Mark Gordon and myself concerning the need for documentary proof of citizenship and residency to ensure a reasonable means to follow our constitutional obligations of ensuring only U.S. citizens and only Wyomingites are voting in Wyoming elections.' Gray said the veto last year was very troubling, and there were a lot of inaccurate statements made by the governor. 'We didn't give up. We went to the Legislature, and the people won, weighing the governor back down, and the bill became law without his signature,' he said. Rep. John Bear, R-Gillette, and the former chairman of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, a hardline group of Republican lawmakers, was the primary sponsor of the bill. He spoke during Wednesday's public hearing, saying this bill will build confidence in Wyoming elections. 'Prior to introducing this bill, we conducted a poll of likely voters in the state of Wyoming. It was a very scientific poll, and this particular issue had over 74% support, and we saw that as we traveled the state,' he said. Voter Meeting From left, Elena Campbell speaks on Zoom, while C.J. Young, Election Division director; Jesse Naiman, deputy secretary of state; and Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray listen during a public comment meeting about voter identification rules in the Capitol Extension on Wednesday. Platte County Clerk Malcolm Ervin, who also serves as chairman of the Wyoming County Clerks Association, weighed in Wednesday, as well, with a few minor suggested changes. One recommendation concerned the use of Wyoming student identification cards as a document to prove residency for voter registration. He suggested the ID cards be required to display the voter's legal name, not a chosen name. He said most of his concerns regarding the 2025 legislation were quelled by the fact that there is a 'last-ditch' effort that allows people to show proof of residency or citizenship if they don't have the required documentation to vote outlined in the new law. If someone doesn't have valid identification forms or lacks a Wyoming driver's license and a Social Security number to prove residency, they can provide other documentation, such as a utility bill, bank statement or a pay stub under the proposed rules. To prove U.S. citizenship, one must produce a document already outlined in law, including a Wyoming driver's license, Wyoming ID card, a valid U.S. passport, a certificate of U.S. citizenship, a certificate of naturalization, a U.S. military draft record or a Selective Service registration acknowledgement card, a consular report of birth abroad issued by the U.S. Department of State, or an original or certified copy of a birth certificate in the U.S. bearing an official seal. 'I want to be clear that we see that adaptation as a last-ditch effort, if we've exhausted all other options. It's our last option on the table, specifically to ensure nobody is disenfranchised from voting,' Ervin said. The other concern he had that was addressed in the new legislation is that post office boxes in Wyoming will only count as proof of residency if the person lists their residential address on their voter registration application form. Another virtual attendee spoke in favor of the new law. Mark Koep, chairman of the Crook County Republican Party, echoed Rep. Bear's statements of statewide support. 'Overwhelmingly, the voters of Wyoming — and I talk to a lot of people — support these rules that you have in place,' he said. 'And so, I just want to make that heard on this chat to the media in the room: the people of Wyoming want these rules.' Since 2000, there have been four convictions of voter fraud in Wyoming, according to The Heritage Foundation, all involving U.S. citizens. When the public comment period closes on June 20, it will once again be up to Gordon to accept or reject the proposed rules. Under Gray's proposed rules, a valid Wyoming driver's license will be adequate proof of identity, residency and U.S. citizenship, so long as it lists a Wyoming address. Tribal identification cards issued by either the Eastern Shoshone or Northern Arapaho tribes, or other federally recognized tribes, will also count as proof of residency if a Wyoming address is listed. If the applicant doesn't have the forms of identification present at the time of registration, they must provide on the voter registration application form their Wyoming driver's license number and one of any of the following documents: U.S. passport; a driver's license or ID card issued by the federal government, any state or outlying possession of the United States; a photo ID card issued by the University of Wyoming, a Wyoming community college, or a Wyoming public school; an ID card issued to a dependent of a member of the United States Armed Forces; or a tribal identification card issued by the governing body of the Eastern Shoshone tribe of Wyoming, the Northern Arapaho tribe of Wyoming or other federally recognized Indian tribe. These documents would also need to list a Wyoming address to prove state residency. If a person seeking to register to vote doesn't have a valid driver's license, they must provide the last four digits of their Social Security number, along with one of the previously mentioned documents in the proposed rules. None of the documents will suffice if the applicant is not a U.S. citizen. Online comments on the proposed rules can continue to be submitted by email to the Secretary of State's chief policy officer and general counsel, Joe Rubino, at until June 20.

It's a really bad time to be an expert in Washington
It's a really bad time to be an expert in Washington

Boston Globe

timean hour ago

  • Boston Globe

It's a really bad time to be an expert in Washington

At the Pentagon, 14 advisory boards have been dismantled, with curt, thank-you-for-your-service notes sent to Democrats and Republicans alike. Some of the boards dealt with obscure matters. But others focused on vital issues, like rethinking the U.S. nuclear arsenal as China's nuclear buildup, Russian President Vladimir Putin's episodic nuclear threats and Trump's ambitious demand for a 'Golden Dome' missile defense system have changed the nature of nuclear strategy. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Also gone: the board of experts who were trying to learn lessons from China's astoundingly successful hack into the country's telecommunications networks -- where, by all accounts, the hackers remain to this day. Then came historians at the State Department and the climate specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which employed experts in weather, oceans, climate and biodiversity. Advertisement The National Weather Service lost so many people that the agency had to hire some back. No such luck for researchers relying on the National Science Foundation, where projects are disappearing every month. Advertisement No one killed off the expert advisory board at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as it deliberated whether healthy children should receive the COVID vaccine. They did not have to. While it weighed the pros and cons, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his colleagues announced that they had already made their decision. When the history of these tumultuous past four months is written, it will doubtless focus on the moments when teams from the Department of Government Efficiency shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, when the president issued tariff threats to much of the world and when he went to war with Harvard. Less noticed, perhaps, may be the devastation of the expert class, which once dominated the city, moving between think tanks and government offices, generating alternative views in its best moments, engaging in groupthink at its worst. Today, the experts are swelling the ranks of Washington's suddenly unemployed. To the MAGA faithful, each one of these disbanded groups is a victory for a trimmer government that follows the president's wishes. To them, the National Security Council was the heart of the so-called deep state, whose members testified against Trump during his first impeachment inquiry. The raft of advisory committees mostly slowed down decision-making, they argued, when they were not undercutting policies they did not like. Worse yet, they were the source of leaks. So if an advisory committee of experts was not needed to help James K. Polk, the 11th president, figure out how to spread the United States to the West Coast, why do we need them to figure out the strategy for adding Greenland and Canada? (The expansionist Polk has been restored to a place of pride in the Oval Office -- his portrait now hangs just below and to the right of Thomas Jefferson's.) Advertisement Part of Trump's problem with experts is their portrayal as neutral arbiters, more interested in the data than presidential spin. That is what has led to the White House this week trying to discredit the Congressional Budget Office, which concluded that, yes, the new tax bill could really add $2.4 trillion to the national debt, no matter the spin. Lacking the authority to fire the budget experts there, the White House turned to casting them as politically biased. And while every new president replaces board members and demands some fealty to the new leader's ideology, what has happened in the past four months seems to some in the federal government more like China's cultural revolution, where the only good ideas are the ones that flow from the leader, and both research reports and intelligence findings should support the president's desires. And when they are not, trouble follows. Just ask the National Intelligence Council, a small subset of intelligence experts -- many drawn from academia -- what happened when it came to the conclusion that the Venezuelan government was not controlling a criminal gang, an argument that Trump had used to justify deportations. The experts were told to 'do some rewriting' so the material could not be used against the president and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. After the intelligence findings were left unchanged, the board's leadership resisted and was removed. The whole institution is being moved into Gabbard's organization, where its independent judgments can be better controlled. Advertisement At the Environmental Protection Agency, self-protective action has replaced scientific inquiry. 'We've taken the words 'climate' and 'green energy' off every project document,' one scientist still in the government's employ said recently, refusing to speak on the record for obvious reasons. Veterans of Trump's first term say these changes are a manifestation of the president's bitter memories. 'I think somebody convinced President Trump, based on his experience in his first administration, that his own staff would be the biggest obstructionists,' H.R. McMaster, Trump's second national security adviser, said at a conference on artificial intelligence and national security Wednesday. (Trump's current national security adviser, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is one of around a half dozen across both terms.) While McMaster, now at Stanford, said he did not object to shrinking the National Security Council staff, he worried that also lost would be the capacity to run 'a deliberative process, which I think would be kind of nice on some of these issues, like tariffs, to clarify what you are trying to achieve.' 'Deliberative process' appears to be exactly what Trump is trying to avoid. And if that means eviscerating the expert class, so be it. It helps explain why the Department of Government Efficiency was given license to wipe out USAID. McMaster is hardly alone in concluding that some of the aid agency's programs had 'drifted.' Many Democrats say they agree, though almost never on the record. But McMaster gave voice to the question raised all over Washington when he asked, 'Should you just crush the entire organization or recognize there is a mission for that organization to advance American interests?' It was crushed, with foreign service officers, child health experts and others locked out of the offices. And that has led to both professional and personal angst. Advertisement 'If you work in the field of maternal and child health, you are in trouble,' said Jessica Harrison Fullerton, a managing director at the Global Development Incubator, a nonprofit that is trying to fill some of the gaps USAID's dismantlement left. 'Not only are you devastated by the impacts on the people you have been serving, but your expertise is now being questioned and your ability to use that expertise is limited because the jobs are gone.' In fact, what many of Washington's experts discovered was that crushing the organizations -- and putting their experts out on the street -- was the point of the exercise. It helped create a frisson of fear, and reinforced the message of who was in control. It has also led to warnings from more traditional Republicans that Trump's demand for loyalty over analysis is creating a trap for himself. 'Groupthink and a blinkered mindset are dangers for any administration,' said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security, which, in the days of bipartisanship, described itself as a bipartisan think tank. 'Pulling from multiple sources in and outside of government to develop solid options for foreign policy decision makers is the way to go.' Well, maybe in the Washington of a previous era. Within a 200-yard radius of USAID, DOGE teams moved into the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank that had significant private funding and money from Congress. They shuttered it, from its Cold War archives to the Kennan Institute, one of the country's leading collections of scholars about Russia. At a moment when superpower conflict is back, it was the kind of place that presented alternative views. Advertisement DOGE was unimpressed. Like their USAID colleagues in another part of the Ronald Reagan Building, they were soon stuffing their notes into cartons and discovering their computer access had been shut down. (The Wilson Center also sponsored book writers, including some from The New York Times.) The war on expertise has raised some fundamental questions that may not be answerable until after the Trump administration is over. Will the experts stick around -- after hiding out in the private sector or changing professions -- only to reoccupy the 'swamp'? And more immediately, what damage is being done in what may be the country's defining challenge: the competition with China over artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, electric vehicles, quantum computing? That is what many in the intelligence agencies worry about, not least because Europe is already openly recruiting disillusioned American scientists, and China's intelligence services are looking for the angry and abandoned. Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who writes often on the U.S.-China technological and military competitions, told an audience at the AI Summit on Wednesday that America is not acting like it understands that 'China has emerged as a full-spectrum competitor.' 'Our secret sauce,' he said, has been the American ability to 'recruit the most talented people in the world. Einstein didn't come from America.' 'The idea that we would be taking action that would undermine that makes no sense to any strategic thinker,' he said. Of course, those strategic thinkers rank among the suspect class of Washington experts. This article originally appeared in

An Inside Look At Disney's Affordable Housing Development In Florida
An Inside Look At Disney's Affordable Housing Development In Florida

Yahoo

time2 hours ago

  • Yahoo

An Inside Look At Disney's Affordable Housing Development In Florida

Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. If someone asked you to play a word association game using the term "Walt Disney World," your first response might be "Magic Kingdom" or maybe Mickey Mouse. It's a safe bet that "affordable housing" would be way down your list, but the economics of Florida's housing market have forced a paradigm shift. Florida living has become so expensive that Walt Disney World is building an affordable housing community for its employees in Florida. Florida used to be synonymous with affordable housing, but several factors have changed the Sunshine State's housing market. First, a post-COVID influx of new arrivals from Los Angeles and New York with deep pockets caused property prices to spike statewide. If that weren't enough, a home insurance rate crisis and high interest rates have made buying a home in Florida harder than ever before. Don't Miss: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — Invest Where It Hurts — And Help Millions Heal: The affordability issue is felt most acutely by workers at the middle to lower end of the wage spectrum. That's historically the economic demographic that staffs Walt Disney World and the company's other Florida attractions. Business Insider reports that despite paying its employees $15 per hour, they still have trouble keeping pace with rising rents and property values. Disney responded by teaming up with a real estate development company, the Michaels Organization, to build a new affordable community on 80 acres of land near the city of Horizon West. According to Business Insider, the community will include 1,400 housing units, and 1,000 of them will be designated as affordable units. Walt Disney World already owns the land, which is about 20 minutes west of the theme park. 'We selected this land because it is part of a thriving community, close to employers, shopping, services, public schools, and areas of rest and recreation. We feel there is no better-positioned community in Central Florida to provide residents the opportunity to start a new chapter of their story,' Disney said in a statement. Trending: If there was a new fund backed by Jeff Bezos offering a ? It sounds like a great deal for Walt Disney World employees, but the plan is not without its detractors. The Horizon West area has experienced rapid population growth and development in the past several years. Area residents are becoming more vocal in expressing their belief that their community can't handle any more development. Orange County District One Commissioner Nicole Wilson has heard those complaints, and Business Insider says she voted against the project last year. Business Insider cites U.S. Census data showing Horizon West's population has grown from 14,000 people in 2010 to 58,000 in 2020. The post-pandemic era brought about another boom, and now 75,000 people live in Horizon West. Area real estate agent Nicole Mickle told Business Insider that the Horizon West real estate market was so hot during the post-pandemic boom that she was selling homes via is constant in real estate, and those changes can be incredibly jarring to local residents when markets get overheated. Naturally, that causes residents to fret that their community is losing the small-town feel that originally attracted them to the area. 'What some want to do is keep the integrity of the community,' Mickle told Business Insider. It looks like they will have to adjust to the new reality. Wilson's "no" vote wasn't enough to stop the project from going forward. Construction is set to begin, and 1,400 new housing units are coming to Horizon West. This may also be a look at the future of real estate development. Attracting employees for regular jobs is becoming increasingly difficult due to the lack of affordable housing. Larger companies may take note of Horizon West and follow suit in other areas. . With over $1 million in dividends paid out last quarter and a growing selection of properties across various markets, Arrived offers an attractive alternative for investors seeking to build a diversified real estate portfolio. In October 2024, Arrived sold The Centennial, achieving a total return of 34.7% (11.2% average annual returns) for investors. Arrived aims to continue delivering similar value across our portfolio through careful market selection, attentive property management, and thoughtful timing in sales. Looking for fractional real estate investment opportunities? The features the latest offerings. Image: Shutterstock This article An Inside Look At Disney's Affordable Housing Development In Florida originally appeared on

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