state-and-regional

Kansas City-based firm to lead design of Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge expansion |

Kansas City-based firm to lead design of Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge expansion |

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OMAHA — A Kansas City-based infrastructure design firm will lead the design of a project meant to connect the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge with north downtown.

The North Downtown Riverfront Connector Bridge, also known as the “Baby Bob,” will expand downtown Omaha’s iconic 3,000-foot pedestrian bridge. The project is meant to increase access between north downtown and the riverfront.

With City Council approval Tuesday, the city will pay up to $235,411 to HNTB Corporation for design engineering services related to the project.

The North Downtown Riverfront Connector Bridge is planned to span Riverfront Drive and the Union Pacific Railroad tracks, connecting the 13-year-old Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge to a point near the intersection of 10th and Mike Fahey streets.

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The “Baby Bob” Pedestrian Connector Bridge would connect major destinations in north downtown, including TD Ameritrade Park, CHI Health Center Omaha and Creighton University, according to plans outlined by the City of Omaha.

With the completion of “Baby Bob,” pedestrians would be able to walk onto the connector bridge just north of the event center and east of the baseball stadium. It’s now about a 20-minute walk to reach the Missouri River bridge from that location if pedestrians go south around CHI Health Center.

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Double the luck: Two $100,000 lottery winners at Casey’s in Iowa | State and Regional News

Double the luck: Two $100,000 lottery winners at Casey’s in Iowa | State and Regional News

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Lottery lightning has struck twice at a convenience store in Glenwood, Iowa.

Two men, both from Glenwood, collected $100,000 Iowa Lottery jackpots in the span of a week after purchasing scratch-off tickets at the Casey’s on South Locust Street.

Jacob Harper, 33, claimed his prize from a “$100,000 Mega Crossword” lottery ticket March 28. He paid $10 for the ticket and was the 16th winner in the game.







Joshua Kisler bought his winning ticket Monday at a Casey’s store in Glenwood, a week after another $100,000 winner was sold there.




Joshua Kisler claimed his winnings Monday from a $20 “Super 20s” ticket he bought at the same store.

Mary Neubauer, an Iowa Lottery spokeswoman, said lottery tickets are distributed randomly around the state. It’s just a coincidence that two big winners popped up so close together in the same town of 5,500 people, 25 miles southeast of Omaha.

“We look for patterns when we’re talking about random events,” she said. “But it’s fun when something like that happens.”

And it’s a rush for those who win.

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Harper told lottery officials he scratched off his winning ticket at a late-night gathering with friends. Winning the top prize in the crossword game requires completing six words on the ticket.

He said he felt like time stood still when he realized he had won.

“I’m like, ‘No way! This doesn’t happen,’” Harper told lottery officials. “I counted again and again. I think I got up to like 10 times … before it finally sunk in that I just won $100,000.”

Although it was 2 a.m., he left a message on his parents’ answering machine. They called him back after they woke up.







Glenwood -- JacobHarper

Jacob Harper, 33, plans to use his winnings to quit his job and work full time at a business he and two friends recently started.




“My mom just started screaming,” he said. “My dad’s laughing in the background, I can hear him on the phone. They were ecstatic.”

Luck apparently runs in the family. They won a $10,000 scratch-off prize last year, Harper said.

He plans to quit his job and work full time at Omaha Computing Solutions, a business he and two friends recently started.

“It’s life changing,” he said.

Harper and Kisler aren’t the first Glenwood residents to win life-changing lottery prizes. In 2018, Karen Harger won a $1 million Powerball prize.

Neubauer said the Casey’s in Glenwood is a “busy location, for sure,” with more than $256,000 in lottery sales last year.

Now it’s a lucky store, too.

“You never know where the big one is going to come,” Neubauer said. “Glenwood is certainly on a run.”

Native Nebraskans see themselves in ‘Faces From the Interior’ exhibit at Omaha museum |

Native Nebraskans see themselves in ‘Faces From the Interior’ exhibit at Omaha museum |

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Vida Stabler was a 1970s teenager the first time she saw her own people, the Umoⁿhoⁿ, represented in artwork.

She walked with her Omaha Central High School art class across the lawn north of the school and entered the Joslyn Art Museum.

What she found, in a collection of watercolors including a portrait called “Omaha Boy,” would influence her career spent teaching the traditions of the people also known as the Omaha.

That expertise recently brought Stabler, now 64, back to the museum and again in front of the paintings of famed artist Karl Bodmer. Now, it was she who commanded the audience’s attention.

Museumgoers fanned out around her as she sat and pointed to the frame behind her on the wall: “Omaha Boy.”

What would his life have been like, she asked, this child of her tribe standing for a portrait in 1833? Who was this boy posing at a trading post a few miles from where, a century later, the Joslyn would be built on the lands of the Umoⁿhoⁿ?

Stabler’s answers to those questions are why the museum invited her and other Natives — including people whose tribal ancestors are depicted in the paintings — to take a leading role in the current exhibit, “Faces From the Interior.”

The exhibit, on display through May 1, features 90 watercolor portraits Bodmer painted after an epic 1830’s journey up and down the Missouri River. His portrait subjects: Native people of the Northern Great Plains.

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The collection, considered a defining body of Western art, is now on view oh-so-close to where Bodmer once set up his easel.

But the paintings arrived here only after a wild journey. They went by boat to Bodmer’s Paris studio, then languished in a German castle before a post-World War II discovery brought them back stateside. Omaha energy company Northern Natural Gas bought the collection and loaned it to Joslyn in 1962. The loan became a gift in 1986, after Northern became Enron — but before Enron became infamous.

“Faces” is the first Joslyn exhibit focused solely on Bodmer’s portraits. It’s also the beginning of the museum’s effort to study the works from an Indigenous perspective, said Joslyn chief executive Jack Becker.

“It’s a collection that should be seen from multiple points of view,” Becker said.

Native artists, activists and educators now have a voice in how these works — their own family portraits — are displayed and interpreted. Their insights tie the challenges their tribes wrestle with today to the pressures that U.S. policies put on the people Bodmer painted.

Visitors walking the gallery can experience these contributions: companion art pieces, video documentaries, written and audio messages.

Stabler, speaking at a gallery talk, looked at Bodmer’s painting of the Umoⁿhoⁿ boy wrapped in a bison robe. She saw his forehead streaked with vermillion, the bangles circling his wrist, a plume tied in his hair.

“If ever I saw an elegant young Umoⁿhoⁿ boy, that was him,” Stabler said.

She said he would have lived in a warm earth lodge. He would have collected wood and hauled water. He would have learned about his tribal clan in the ceremonies that brought people together in a circle representing the cosmos.

He’s not much different, she said, from the children she teaches today, at Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation Public School in Macy, the Omaha Reservation town, pop. 1,045.

“We’re resilient,” she said. “Even though we live in a whole different world, there is something beautiful and innate about our children.”

Stabler’s approach to preserving her language and teaching it to her students was influenced by Bodmer and his employer.

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In 1832, Bodmer was hired by a German prince, Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, on a mission to study the plants, animals and people of what he called “The natural face of North America and its aboriginal population.”

The prince sensed he was running out of time. Settler encroachment, disease and U.S. government policy had already decimated some Native tribes.

Arriving in Boston on Independence Day, 1832, Maximilian wrote, “I looked in vain for the original American race, the Indians; they have disappeared from this region.” Steaming up the Missouri past Bellevue in Spring 1833, he saw survivors scarred and blinded by smallpox.

The prince’s and artist’s trip to visit Northern Great Plains tribes fell squarely between Lewis and Clark’s expedition, begun in 1804, and the Homestead Act of 1862. From open prairie, to private ownership, in less than one lifetime.

What Maximilian and Bodmer brought back to Europe in journals and paintings is now considered one of the most accurate pre-photography records of the American West.

Recently, Omaha artist Steve Tamayo studied the Bodmer painting “Wahktä́geli, Yankton Sioux Chief” to recreate the man’s feathered headpiece in three dimensions for the exhibit.

Tamayo, a member of the Sicangu Lakota tribe, worked in his studio, teaching his grandson, Izzy Tamayo, at his side. He cut cloth, trimmed eagle and hawk feathers, stretched sinew and deer hide, and mixed mineral pigments to craft the piece. Each notch in a feather and each red stripe represent a battle achievement, he said.

Bodmer’s documentation is meaningful to Tamayo in light of government policy that aimed to strip Native people of culture and language. As an artist, he tries to revive cultural identity.

Working with the Joslyn is “an awesome opportunity to show that this way of life still exists, but we need to teach the next generation.”

The portraits have helped Lestina Saul-Merdassi of Omaha reconnect with her heritage. She recently greeted museum visitors in the Dakotah language, then translated: “‘It’s good that you are all here, and I greet you all with a heartfelt handshake.’”

Looking up, she explained, “I had to read that off my phone, because I’m in the process of relearning my language.”

Saul-Merdassi, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe, is an addiction counselor, a powwow dancer and an advocate in the “MMIW” movement to raise awareness of missing and murdered indigenous women.

She saw herself in one of the few portraits Bodmer made of a woman.

“When we talk about our history, not everything is all powwows and beauty,” she said. “Some of us are still healing from what our ancestors went through.” By turning to tradition: “We’re on the mend.”

The exhibit’s perspective is part of an “orientation shift” happening in the art world, said exhibit curator Annika Johnson, the Joslyn’s first-ever associate curator of Native art. The new role will continue into the future thanks to an endowment established by museum board chair Stacy Simon.

Johnson works to build relationships with Native people within and beyond museum walls. She launched a Native art advisory committee, opens the Joslyn’s archives to Native elders and tribes and mentors Native students.

This work to preserve and share Native art and history is crucial, said Stabler, who learned something from the Bodmer collection.

“If we don’t write things down, maybe we’re going to miss something,” she said. “Will we have the time to teach that lesson, or tell that story? Or will they be forgotten?”

The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.

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UNMC survey of perceived health effects related to AltEn continuing | National News

UNMC survey of perceived health effects related to AltEn continuing | National News

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Researchers from the University of Nebraska and Creighton University are continuing to assess individuals’ perceptions living in proximity to the AltEn ethanol plant near Mead.

A survey designed by the University of Nebraska Medical Center to measure the perceived health risks related to AltEn has been put online to help reach a greater number of people living in Saunders County.

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Dr. Eleanor Rogan, the interim chair of the Department of Health Promotion in UNMC’s College of Public Health, said the questionnaire is modeled on the Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response created by the Centers for Disease Control.

“This is a common way to get some insight into what kinds of health problems people are experiencing, to narrow down the search for adverse health effects that may actually be caused by the exposure, or an event,” Rogan said.

It’s also “much faster and less expensive than actually medically examining everyone for everything,” she added.

The 40-question survey, which takes about 15 minutes to complete, asks for basic household information, the level of awareness and feelings residents may have about AltEn, as well as physical and mental health conditions they have experienced since the plant started operating in 2015.

Residents who respond to the survey will also be asked to identify when any symptoms may have started, and if they believe their health conditions could be connected to the biofuel plant’s activities.

AltEn used seeds coated in pesticides to manufacture ethanol, leaving behind toxic solid and liquid waste products. The Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy ordered the plant to shut down in February 2021 for numerous violations of state environmental regulations.

More than 215 people of the 1,000 who received the survey by mail earlier this year have returned it, Rogan said, and more than 150 people have signed up to provide a blood or urine sample to be analyzed for any of the chemicals found in high concentrations at AltEn.

The samples will be taken at the Saunders County Medical Center in Wahoo and analyzed at the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory in Omaha.

The survey will remain active through the end of May, Rogan said. UNMC plans to analyze the data and make the aggregated, non-identifiable information public at a later date.

Individuals whose blood or urine samples show the presence of toxic compounds will be provided specific advice for contacting a physician, Rogan added.

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If an ongoing funding source can be secured, individuals will also be asked to participate in a medical registry which will track any health issues they develop for years to come.

The massive project to study AltEn’s affect on air quality, surface and groundwater, and the health of humans, wildlife and pollinators was first proposed a year ago.

At that time, UNMC pegged the cost of the study at $1 million per year for 10 years. Earlier this year, the cost of the study was reduced to $7.8 million.

Private donors helped get the project moving forward last year as the research team sought other funding to keep it going, and Sen. Carol Blood of Bellevue introduced a bill (LB1048) this year appropriating $10 million in federal funds to put toward the research.

The Legislature’s Appropriations Committee did not include Blood’s bill in any of the budget packages it forwarded to the floor for debate.

But last week, lawmakers advanced another bill (LB1068) with an amendment from Blood attached appropriating $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to continue the study over the next year.

LB1068, introduced by Sen. John Stinner of Gering, will need to pass two more rounds of consideration in the final seven days of the 60-day session before it can be sent to Gov. Pete Ricketts’ desk for his signature.

Meanwhile, Rogan said a town hall in Mead is being planned to communicate next steps in the research study, which includes ongoing sampling of soil, surface and groundwater, and air to study their movement in the environment.

The perceived health risk survey can be found at www.unmc.edu/env-pollution.

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