Nebraska
Slama pitches Colorado’s ‘Taxpayer Bill of Rights’ for Nebraska • Nebraska Examiner
LINCOLN — State Sen. Julie Slama of Dunbar, who has criticized Gov. Jim Pillen’s property tax relief plan for costing many Nebraskans more while he benefits, touted her own proposal Saturday.
Slama’s 16-piece package of proposed constitutional amendments largely mirrors Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), with hard limits on state, local and school taxing and spending.
She split up the proposal to avoid running afoul of the Nebraska Supreme Court and the state constitutional rule that restricts certain new laws to a single subject.
Her proposal to let Nebraskans adopt a TABOR-style initiative at the ballot box this fall was heard Saturday by the Revenue Committee.
Slama described her proposal as a long-term fix for rising taxes linked to increased spending by local, school and state governments. She said it would let voters apply the brakes.
“This approach is unique in that it empowers the people,” she said. “It empowers the people to decide what their tax rate should be, what government should be spending money on.”
What Slama’s amendments would do
Essentially, her amendments would cap spending and taxing authority by every level of government unless overridden by a vote of the people. It would also let constituents sue the government to enforce the caps.
It would require a public vote to issue major government debt or bonding and would require a baseline rainy day fund of 3%.
Slama said her proposal, as an example, would likely prevent any future project like the City of Omaha’s modern streetcar project without voter approval.
Nobody but Slama testified in support of the idea, but State Sens. Brad von Gillern and Kathleen Kauth, both of Omaha, who sit on the Revenue Committee asked questions that seemed to express interest in the idea.
Both nibbled around how Slama’s proposal might be more lasting than others because it would be part of the constitution and not a state law that lawmakers could more easily change.
Both seemed to buy into Slama’s idea that her proposal would pair well with any short-term fix for property taxes the Legislature might adopt during Pillen’s special session.
“By any measure this is wildly popular in Colorado,” von Gillern said at one point in the hearing. “It’s hard to say the people shouldn’t have a voice in their tax policy.”
Slama, asked whether additional lawsuits could cost taxpayers more, said they wouldn’t because most would stop wayward tax increases with court injunctions.
Critics question damage caps could do
State Sen. George Dungan of Lincoln and a pair of testifiers from Colorado, encouraged to testify by OpenSky Policy Institute, emphasized the potential damage to school and local funding.
Dungan questioned what role the passage of TABOR played in Colorado ranking near the bottom nationally in teacher pay and in school funding per pupil.
Representatives from the Nebraska Association of County Officials and the League of Nebraska Municipalities warned about the risks to hiring and retaining public employees.
Jon Cannon, executive director of NACO, and Lynn Rex, executive director of the League of Nebraska Municipalities, pointed to the declining condition of Colorado’s roads and said Nebraskans wouldn’t accept such poor road conditions.
Former Colorado state Rep. Brad Young and Denver-based economist Chris Stiffler said many local governments and school districts have opted out of TABOR, after public votes, because of the funding crunches it caused. (Nebraska’s version, as written, would limit the authority of local governments and schools to opt out.)
Young, who wrote a book about TABOR’s negative effects, said setting the cap for government spending growth at inflation plus population growth didn’t let local governments keep pace with their needs.
He said shrinking government relative to the economy means that the state and its local partners couldn’t pay competitive wages to teachers, health care workers or college and university employees.
“Population plus inflation does not keep up with the economy, and as a result, you end up with a constant shrinking of the government,” Young said.
Government costs don’t follow CPI, expert says
Stiffler said tying the government’s ability to purchase what it needs to the consumer price index leaves governments too little flexibility.
Governments “buy” roads, teachers and health care, he said, all of which have seen costs rise faster than the types of goods in the consumer price index. He said tying caps to a producer price index might work better.
He said some states tie spending caps to personal income growth. But he said starting teachers in Colorado now earn less than a Starbucks manager and the state is losing talent.
Some districts shortened the school week to four days during a recent round of state budget cuts that sliced $1 billion out of school funding, Stiffler said.
State Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Omaha said Colorado’s schools consistently rank well in test scores and academic offerings.
She said higher school spending doesn’t always equate with outcomes, and she said Colorado isn’t struggling to attract new residents or visitors.
Colorado has grown from about 3.5 million in 1992, when TABOR passed, to 5.8 million in 2024, based on Census estimates.
“I know this is a slightly unique approach, but it brings a unique flavor to the debate,” Slama said. “Nebraskans work hard for their money, and they deserve a direct say in how it is spent.”
Nebraska voters rejected a TABOR-style state spending lid in 2006.
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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