ROANOKE COUNTY, Va. (WDBJ) – A Bent Mountain teenager will compete at the National High School Rodeo Finals in Lincoln, Neb., later this month after qualifying with the Virginia High School Rodeo Association.

Kellen Hamm, a dual-enrolled homeschooled Roanoke County senior, graduated this May with a 4.2 GPA. She will compete at the national finals July 18–25 in four events: breakaway roping, team roping, barrel racing and pole bending.

Seventh state title in pole bending

Hamm recently claimed her seventh consecutive Virginia state championship in pole bending, riding her horse Tucker. Winning seven straight state titles in the same event on the same horse is considered a rare accomplishment in high school rodeo competition.

College plans

Hamm has been accepted to Murray State University in Kentucky, where she plans to enroll this fall. She will pursue a degree in elementary education and compete on Murray State’s collegiate rodeo team.

To follow Hamm’s progress at the National High School Rodeo Finals, visit the event’s official website online.

Often seen as a black box of information, data centers in Nebraska will be forced to reveal more about their operations, like their annual water use and power demand, to the state, following the recent passing of a new law by the Nebraska Legislature. Jesse Bradley, director of the Department of Water, Energy, and Environment said the state agency will then see what information gaps remain, but that the legislation is a “great start” and will help with future planning. 

In addition to electricity production, water has emerged as a point of contention as companies look to build more data centers in Nebraska. Local residents, researchers, and regulators worry that new data centers could bring about water shortages in a state where water availability can vary widely and where wide swaths of this agricultural state are suffering through extreme drought. For now, the best available information about how much water data centers use comes directly from the data center companies themselves — if they choose to be transparent.

For instance, in Nebraska, there isn’t even an official count of how many data centers there are in the state. Of the ones that have reported their water usage, the amounts vary. Google’s Nebraska data centers consumed about 732 million gallons of water in 2025, according to the company. Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, expects its water consumption from data centers to grow. From 2020 to 2024, Meta’s four million square-foot Sarpy County data center withdrew anywhere from 26.7 million gallons to 37.5 million gallons from the local water supply, depending on the year.

Data centers use water to cool the buildings and the computer servers inside. Keeping everything at optimal temperatures ensures the equipment doesn’t malfunction. Some cooling methods, like evaporative cooling systems, typically use large amounts of water. Air-cooled chiller systems, however, deploy a “closed loop” containing water, a chemical coolant, or sometimes both and can operate without needing to be replenished for years. While closed loop systems use less water, they tend to use more electricity — the production of which can also require water.

“What’s best?” said Eric Masanet, a University of California, Santa Barbara engineering professor. “It depends on the data center, its design, the local climate, if you have enough water, if you have enough power, what people want, what they’re willing to devote their resources to.”

Google decides which cooling system to use depending on how much water is available in a given location, according to Ben Townsend, the company’s head of infrastructure and sustainability. The company assesses local watersheds before and after building a data center. Meta’s Sarpy County data center uses a combination of evaporative and closed loop cooling.

While data centers have typically been built in urban areas, developments have started to move further out to suburbs and rural areas as fiber optic cables and infrastructure has improved, said Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition. This expansion raises concerns for areas of Nebraska that either don’t have enough water already or whose water supply is already fully allocated. Most of the state’s water is used for irrigation to support the agriculture-based economy. 

With water use expected to rise due to droughts and higher temperatures from climate change, water policy and allocation are top of mind, said Crystal Powers, water extension educator at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

“From a logical, common sense perspective, we really need to stop putting industry in areas where they can’t be supported,” by natural resources like water, said John Winkler, general manager of the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resource District. “It doesn’t make sense to put a data center in an area that’s very water insecure to begin with.”

Masanet and fellow researcher Jonathan Koomey said the pressure is being put on the data center industry to be more efficient and transparent.

“I work with a lot of people in the tech industry. They’re pouring trillions into this industry,” Masanet said. “We should hold them to account and make them install the very best technologies that minimize energy and water.”

The organizers behind the effort to eliminate property, inheritance and income taxes are launching their newest petition attempt. The EPIC Option group announced Tuesday that it aims to raise $2 million to get paid circulators to collect signatures, instead of relying on a volunteer-based, grassroots collection effort.

The Tuesday announcement said organizers hope to complete this in time to get the petition in front of voters during the 2028 general election. This is the third attempt by EPIC leaders to circulate petitions. Previous attempts in 2024 and again this year didn’t come close to collecting enough signatures to turn into the Secretary of State’s Office. EPIC organizers didn’t return requests for comment.

The two previous petitions attempted to amend the Nebraska Constitution, which means they require a greater number of signatures – about 10% of Nebraska voters, instead of 7% that’s needed to create a new state law. Organizers would also need to collect valid signatures from 5% of registered voters in at least 38 of Nebraska’s 93 counties.

EPIC President Steve Jessen has previously said that his group can no longer rely on a volunteer grassroots effort, “because no ballot initiative has successfully gathered enough signatures using only volunteers since 1966.”

This time, EPIC leaders are asking around 8,000 people to donate $250 each to raise the $2 million needed to pay petition circulators. They would pay circulators $10 per signature. Leaders are advertising that donors could then essentially earn back their $250 contributions by collecting 25 signatures. If all 8,000 donors collected 25 signatures, the organizers said, “We will reach 200,000 signatures, enough to put EPIC on the 2028 ballot.”

Rising property taxes have been a growing sore spot for Nebraskans and have provided a platform for politicians to run on. Governor Jim Pillen, who’s seeking another term in office this fall, has made property taxes the crux of his platform, going as far as to call a special session of the Nebraska Legislature in 2024 to demand that state senators do more to fix the “crisis.” Pillen recently opened up a property tax hotline to solicit complaints from Nebraskans.

Pillen has pointed the finger at local county officials for property valuations, and a representative for county officials has said the governor’s criticism is misdirected. Economic research groups in Nebraska have also differed on how to solve Nebraska’s rising property taxes.

The state has taken steps to gradually lower the state’s income tax rates, but as those continue to decrease, the state has struggled to make up funding for state agencies. State senators have had to shore up budget shortfalls in the past several legislative sessions, and now Pillen is further reducing monthly allocations to state agencies.

Advocates for the EPIC system want to replace property, income and inheritance taxes with a consumption tax – a sales tax on services and all new purchases. Several former state senators, the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and other statewide groups formed an opposing group called “No New Taxes” to tamp down on the 2024 EPIC team’s campaign. And shortly thereafter, the Tax Foundation published a report finding the EPIC consumption tax would need to be around 21.6% or higher to cover the abolished property, income and inheritance taxes. The foundation’s estimate is quite higher than the 7.5% rate the EPIC team initially estimated, which the Tax Foundation said was based on “flawed calculations.”