Nebraska
Rent aid program for needy Nebraskans “on track,” with much of the $48M still available • Nebraska Examiner
LINCOLN — A once-controversial emergency rent aid program has distributed about $11 million to eligible Nebraskans, leaving more than three-quarters of $48 million available following its September launch.
Except for a funding bottleneck at the beginning, administrators are pleased with the rollout of the latest round of pandemic-related Nebraska Emergency Rental Assistance, said Shannon Harner, executive director of the Nebraska Investment Finance Authority.
“We’re pretty happy,” said Harner, whose NIFA team is leading the ERA II effort. “The flow of getting funds out continues to speed up. That is also positive.”
Given that the federally-provided funding had been shut off for a year, pent-up demand led to some challenges early on, Harner said. Extra staffing helped get the process to a better pace and smoother disbursement of funds, she said.
Since late September, about 1,800 applicants who represent almost all of Nebraska’s 91 smaller, more rural counties have received funding, according to an update provided by NIFA.
Renters in the state’s largest two counties of Douglas and Lancaster are not eligible for this pool of funds, but each of those counties was able to apply for and distribute its own ERA aid.
Overall, the average amount of assistance delivered to households in the eligible counties has been about $6,262. Sarpy County has had the most participants.
The bulk of financial help has been directed at rent — about $7 million for past-due bills and $3.8 million for future payments. However, a slice also has gone toward utilities and to help renters catch up on overdue internet bills.
Harner said that NIFA and its “community collaborative partners” have been working diligently to distribute the emergency aid to households who prove they had financial hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We understand the relief and stability this program has provided to so many families across the state, and we continue to encourage anyone who believes they may qualify to apply,” she said.
Under program guidelines, funds are to be distributed until they run out or until September 2025, and they do not have to be paid back.
NIFA’s hope, Harner said, is to get at least 75% of the $48 million spent by the year’s end. “We believe we are on track,” she said.
Once that 75% point is reached, she said, the program guidelines allow remaining funds to be directed toward building affordable housing.
“We look at that as having a better long-term impact,” said Harner.
She said it was too early to know how many dwellings might be created or in what form they would be built.
But she said it was likely such remaining dollars would be directed toward the low-income housing tax credit program administered by NIFA.
A sample of representatives who work with low-income families across the state said this ERA II process has gone smoother, especially in comparison with the previous one.
Many advocates, renters and landlords had voiced complaints to lawmakers and state officials about the management of the first round of emergency rental aid to the 91 counties.
They said the previous contractor, Deloitte, an audit and financial services firm, had created a cumbersome online application process that kept many needy Nebraskans from accessing the aid.
Low participation rate was among reasons cited by then-Gov. Pete Ricketts when he refused to tap the second round of rent aid dollars that the federal government had set aside for the 91 Nebraska counties. Ricketts said that the pandemic was over and that Nebraska should guard against becoming a “welfare state.”
State lawmakers stepped in but the Legislature fell one vote short of overriding a gubernatorial veto on a bill that would have forced Ricketts’ hand in accepting the aid.
Gov. Jim Pillen, after he was elected, bucked Ricketts’ stance and accepted what was left of the original $120 million that was to go to the state’s 91 smaller counties. By then, certain deadlines had been missed, and much of the original allocation went back to the federal government and was redirected to other states.
NIFA was tapped to lead the second ERA phase — which Harner said will be the last tranche for those American Rescue Plan Act emergency rental and utility funds.
Tanya Gifford of Lift Up Sarpy County said she has seen improvement in the program after early sluggishness in getting the rental aid distributed.
“It started out bumpy. They were obviously not staffed adequately,” she said of the call center.
Now, Gifford said, clients are seeing a three- to four-week processing time, which she said is fair.
NIFA officials, she said, have been “super responsive.”
Araceli Santos-Ayala of the McCook area Community Action Partnership of Mid-Nebraska said most landlords she has dealt with have been patient. The landlords must participate, and are the receivers of the rent aid.
“We might have a hiccup here or there — but knowing there is someone to email, ask questions of or get clarification is great,” she said. “I haven’t had anybody get denied at this point. I tell them it can take time and try to ease them by explaining the process.”
Harner said fraudulent applications also have slowed the process at times. Most have been discovered prior to money being disbursed, so not many applicants have been turned over to the state authorities, she said.
Sandy Nation is a housing advocate who assists ERA applicants in northeast Nebraska.
“The ERA program has helped so many families get past a really difficult time, especially in rural communities where housing is in short supply,” Nation said.
“I’ve spoken to people who think they may not qualify, but I always say, you don’t know unless you apply, Nation said. “The ability to get caught up on past-due payments and build a cushion for future needs relieves a lot of stress and provides a sense of stability.”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (KSNB) — Children across Nebraska can get free meals during the summer months through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program.
The Olinger family is one of many families getting free meals while school is out. Mikayla Olinger said the program helps save money on groceries.
“It helps a lot,” Olinger said. “Oh yes, especially with the three boys and now my daughter is starting to eat big food.”
Oscar Garcia, director of food service at West Lawn Elementary, said the community struggles with food insecurity.
“Some kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from, that’s why it’s important we meet the need in our community,” Garcia said.
The program also provides a place for children to learn new skills. One parent said it teaches children how to use a cafeteria so they are prepared when they go for the first time.
“The bonus to that is that sometimes they may run into their classmates they haven’t seen in a couple of months,” Garcia said.
Another parent said the program keeps children active.
Garcia said he has a goal for 16,000 meals to be served this year. Meals are available for any child whether they are in the school district or not.
Meal locations and dates
Free summer breakfast and lunch will be available at the following locations:
- Dodge Elementary — June 2-July 17
- Howard Elementary — June 2-June 26
- Shoemaker Elementary — June 1-June 26
- Starr Elementary — June 1-July 17
- West Lawn Elementary — June 1-July 17
- Grand Island Senior High — June 2-June 27 (breakfast only)
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Copyright 2026 KSNB. All rights reserved.
Nebraska
Nebraska Public Service Commission approves controversial transmission line through the Sandhills
The Nebraska Public Service Commission on Tuesday approved a heavily disputed 220-mile Nebraska Public Power District transmission line through the Sandhills.
Commissioners were briefed that the limited scope of the vote wouldn’t stop the so-called R Project, but only delay it. It passed by a count of 3-1, with one commissioner present not voting.
Christian Mirch, representing eastern Douglas County, didn’t vote. Kevin Stocker, who represents Grand Island and everything to the west, voted against the project.
“I recognize that the Nebraska Public Service Commission has limited authority over transmission line projects and is not responsible for establishing Nebraska’s overall energy policy,” Stocker said, “but since this permit requires a vote from commissioners, I will state the reasons for my opposition. First and foremost, the entire project is in my district, and currently the project does not have total support from the landowners who will be directly impacted.”
Stocker said changing national energy policy and NPPD considering a nuclear power station raises questions about the $800 million R Project. He called on the utility to perform an updated assessment of the plans.
Amy Ballheh lives and ranches near Burwell. Fire sparking is a concern, and the record-breaking wildfires this spring are evidence of the risk, Ballheh said during the public comment period.
“When these lines are put up out in the middle of nowhere, the fire gets started before you can hardly see it, and then you can’t get to them because the hills are too sandy,” Ballheh said. “There’s too many low, wet grounds. It’s just very, very difficult, so that is a big concern to have it out in that grassland.”
Many landowners have not signed agreements with NPPD. Landowners cite the fragile nature of the Sandhills and how the project could endanger the whooping crane and American burying beetle.
Trent Lewis of Sherman County said the Sandhills are a key part of one of the largest grasslands in the world. He’s a co-op owner of NPPD but said the power company’s plan doesn’t add up.
“In the name of net carbon zero, [NPPD] wants to bring concrete, steel, and heavy machinery into the second-largest carbon sequestration area of the world and somehow believe that we’re making progress,” Lewis said. “Making progress for who and what?”
The Sandhills are “the Great Plains’ largest and most unspoiled grassland ecosystem,” a University of Nebraska-Lincoln article said in 2024.
The commission’s legal team said NPPD provided all the necessary infrastructure waivers with phone, internet and railroad companies nearby to move forward. Its attorney said the Public Service Commission is statutorily required to approve projects that meet requirements, like the R Project has.
This is the latest news in a 13-year case that’s heading to court for the second time, after permits were vacated following the first case in 2020.
A nonprofit called Preserve The Sandhills and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota seek a preliminary injunction in the U.S. Civil Court of Denver, where U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel named in the case are based. The Fish and Wildlife Service approved a permit application filed by NPPD, which outlined a plan to minimize harm for the endangered American burying beetle, allowing the plans to move forward.
In a statement emailed to Nebraska Public Media News in April, a spokesperson for NPPD said the project “is desperately needed to improve reliability and reduce congestion on the Nebraska grid.” The utility said it followed all legal requirements in the Fish and Wildlife permitting process.
Nebraska
Keith Jacobshagen, famed prairie painter, finds essential and eternal in endless Nebraska sky – Flatwater Free Press
Several days each week for more than 50 years, Keith Jacobshagen got behind the wheel and drove into the countryside around his home in Lincoln, to look, to experience, to think and, most importantly, to draw and paint.
“I could not stay away from going out there and being absorbed into the space and the light and the landscape,” he said. “So it was a real lure to me that was strong.”
Unlike other landscape artists who capture obvious scenic glories of crashing ocean waves or snow-crested mountains, Jacobshagen has devoted his life to depicting what much of the rest of America calls flyover country and ignores: cornfields, treelines, grain elevators and vast, unimpeded skies.
For decades, he has been one of Nebraska’s best-known artists with works featured in scores of exhibitions across the state and the U.S. He has gained renown nationally as a chronicler of the Great Plains, with work featured in two influential museum shows that traveled the country.
“I really regard Keith as the most significant Plains or prairie painter today or then,” said the
exhibition’s curator, Joni Kinsey, “and he seemed to be doing more monumental works, and I don’t mean in terms of size but in terms of significance, that were truly in the category of sublime. His work just stood out.”
Now 84 years old and in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Jacobshagen is facing the reality that his painting days are largely behind him.
He is content to look back at what he calls a very satisfying career in which he produced more than 2,000 paintings, not to mention hundreds more drawings and original prints.
From May 15 through Aug. 16, he will be spotlighted in a solo show, “The Shape of the Prairie,” at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Mo. And the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney is tentatively planning a Jacobshagen retrospective in 2027 that curator Karissa Johnson hopes will tour at least regionally and include an accompanying scholarly catalog.
Jacobshagen’s works have a singular look – a low horizon line with sometimes only loosely delineated features across the landscape and big, sweeping skies – delicate white clouds against a panorama of blue or the orange and slate gray of a sunset turning into night.
“Once you see a Jacobshagen, you wouldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s work,” said David Cateforis, a professor of art history at the University of Kansas. “He has a very distinctive style.”
The elevated point of view came from being a pilot. When he was in his teens, the Wichita, Kansas, native learned to fly from his father, who was a test pilot for Boeing during World War II.
As an adult, Jacobshagen would sometimes rent and fly planes and gliders around Lincoln for fun.
“Every time I’d get back in one piece,” he said, “I just felt grateful for getting to do that, to mix both my affection for the landscape in terms of drawing and painting in it and in terms of flying over it.”
Although Jacobshagen’s landscapes are rooted in specific times and places, his skies often verge into abstract-expressionism, with his gestural, free-spirited deployment of color and patterns.
In previous eras, landscape artists often felt compelled to fill up their compositions, but in keeping with her notion of “plain pictures” with its clever dual reference to the Plains and uncluttered scenes, Kinsey, a professor emerita in art history at the University of Iowa, argues that Jacobshagen avoids that approach.
“He’s got maybe grain elevators or other structures,” she said, “but they are so tiny that they don’t dominate, and what he allows to dominate is the vista – the flat horizon and sweeping sky, and definitely there is almost a kind of (Mark) Rothko effect.”
While he certainly knows well the centuries-long history of landscape painting, Jacobshagen has always made a point of keeping up with the ever-changing pulse of the art world. For years, he’d spend a week or two each summer in New York City viewing dozens of gallery and museum exhibitions.
It is this balance of past and present, of abstraction and realism, that gives his pieces a contemporary quality.
But Cateforis believes that like the great 18th- and 19th-century English landscape painter John Constable, the Nebraska artist is of his time but also manages to transcend it. “There is a sense of something that is kind of essential and eternal that Keith is finding in these humble Midwestern landscapes,” the art historian said.
Jacobshagen was born in Kansas in 1941 and has spent his entire life within a three-state area, nearly all of it in the Great Plains, the vast region of grasslands that stretches from Canada all the way south to Texas.
He first fell in love with the Plains landscape as a child, when he peered out the car window as he rode with his mother to airfields outside of Wichita to pick up his father from work. “There was something magical about what was around me that I somehow knew as special to me,” he said.
He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree from the Kansas City Art Institute and his master’s degree at the University of Kansas, where he studied with Robert Sudlow, a noted landscape painter who Jacobshagen called a “huge influence.”
The two would venture into rural areas around Lawrence and set up their easels 10 to 25 feet apart. He vividly recalls Sudlow yelling out in excitement as a change in light or some other natural phenomenon was occurring: “Geez, look at that blue!”
Jacobshagen would continue this practice throughout his career. He traveled into the landscape as often as five days a week, depending on his schedule at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he taught from 1968 through his retirement in 2008.
Before heading out in the morning, he would sit with a cup of coffee and look over aeronautical charts he used for flying or regular road maps.Sometimes, an intriguing town name like Rokeby or Saltillo or an unusual arrangement of a group of lakes would catch his eye. “Those kinds of things lured me out there like the sirens,” he said with a laugh.
He sometimes brought an easel with him, painting for two or three hours at whatever site he’d chosen and roughing out perhaps half of a composition. Then he’d finish it in his studio, relying on Polaroid photos he had taken at the same time and his memory.
Other times, he used orange, 5-by-7½-inch engineering notebooks to make sketches or jot down notes about the weather conditions or time of day, factoids that can sometimes even be found written in small letters along some of his drawings and small paintings.
“So, there is a specificity to his work at the same time there is a universality to it, and that again adds interesting layers of complexity,” Cateforis said.
For Jacobshagen, just taking in the landscape was as important as the final art work. “Being out there and absorbing the light and the temperature and the lovely sounds that go on out there and the terrific smells of a freshly turned field,” he said. “There is nothing better.”
Many of Jacobshagen’s drawings and paintings are small, but he has created larger-scale works as well, including “Crow Call (Near the River),” a twilight scene that measures about 4 feet tall and 6½ feet wide.
That panoramic piece was acquired in 1991 by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., and it was featured for a time on a postcard available in the institution’s shop.
It is not on view now but has hung in a place of honor in the museum director’s office since 2018.
“I got very charged up when I made that painting,” the artist said. “I made a lot of personal discoveries about how I was thinking of the process of painting.”
The big question surrounding Jacobshagen is legacy. In addition to his many exhibitions, he was represented by several New York galleries, including the prestigious, now-defunct Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, and he has works in more than 50 museum and corporate collections across the country.
But is that enough for him to be remembered in 50 or 100 years?
“I hope so,” Kinsey said. “I definitely hope so, because I think he has been all along one of the more astute artists of this distinctive landscape, and there are not a lot of them.”
It doesn’t help that Jacobshagen was not included in a 2019 book titled “Landscape Painting Now,” which featured more than 80 artists, or that his works are not in the collections of major museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York or Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Also working against him are the art world’s continuing coastal biases and lack of understanding and appreciation of the Plains landscape. That’s something that the influential 1996 show “Plain Pictures” strived to counter. Jacobshagen’s work was included in the exhibition, which opened at the University of Iowa Museum of Art and traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and Omaha’s own Joslyn Art Museum. One of Jacobshagen’s paintings was featured on the cover of the show’s catalog.
But the reality remains: Landscape painting has never been at the forefront of 20th or 21st century art.
What’s not in question is the mastery of Jacobshagen’s work itself, which Cateforis believes has the transcendent quality that can match the great Dutch masters. “There is a sense of calm and serenity but also a sense of supreme accomplishment in the way he renders the sky, the land and the elements of the landscape,” he said. “There is a quiet assurance in the work.”
While the upcoming show in St. Joseph and the other planned by the Museum of Nebraska Art are important, what would significantly help Jacobshagen’s chances for a more lasting place in art history is a touring retrospective organized by a larger, more prominent institution.
That may happen, or it may not, but the artist himself professes to give little thought to his legacy.
He is sure of one thing: He has no regrets.
“Oh, no, none,” he said without hesitation. “I am content.”
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