Another year, another blow to Pennsylvania transit riders.

Keystone State Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the annual budget into law last Sunday, and for the fifth year in a row, public transportation has been left to financially starve. The approved budget contains no funding for transit operations, continuing a streak that forces every agency to scrounge for its own money, to varying degrees of success.

“We’ve been left out for far too long,” remarked Connor Descheemaker, Statewide Campaign Manager for Transit for All, PA! The organization rallied transit riders to send more than 50,000 letters to state representatives and the White House-eying governor calling for transit funding, reaching every legislative district in Pennsylvania.

Those calls went largely unanswered. Riders in Lehigh Valley are now bracing for route eliminations and trip cancellations, despite already paying increased fares. Lancaster County paratransit riders will pay more as well, beginning next month.

Low-income, disabled, and rural Pennsylvanians will lose access to jobs, healthcare, and loved ones. That reality hasn’t stopped their governor from declaring victory.

In a speech at last week’s budget signing ceremony, Shapiro uttered a total of three words about the state-sponsored mobility crisis: “There’s more I want to do – like raising the minimum wage, funding mass transit, and expanding access to affordable housing,” he said.

Shapiro seems to understand the need for well-funded transit. Last year, he sent $220 million to Philadelphia to boost SEPTA’s barren maintenance fund following a series of onboard fires.

One-time relief won’t keep buses running, though.

Shapiro has failed, and failed, and failed again to pass his landmark transit policy. His initial proposal would increase the share of sales tax revenue going to public transit by 2 percent. The blame isn’t all his: Even after he watered down his proposal to a 1.75-percent increase, statehouse Republicans failed to support it.

Even if it had succeeded, it’s too little, too late: The sales tax change would still be $92 million short of the $384 million that Transit for All, PA! estimates is needed to prevent further service cuts in public transportation across the state.

Transit for All, PA! has previously lobbied for its legislative package, which would have increased taxes on car rentals and leases, and raised a new tax on ride shares.

Like Shapiro’s plan, that failed, too.

“The General Assembly has deferred action to invest fully in public transit,” state Sen. Nikil Saval (D-Philadelphia), who had authored the ride share component of the legislative package. “Despite the continued activation and involvement of tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians … we will once again face this issue in 2027.”

Pennsylvania’s last semblance of adequate transit funding ended in 2021 with the expiration of Act 89. The 10-year allocation covered statewide transportation expenses, including roadway maintenance and transit operations. 

As soon as Act 89 money dried up, agencies turned to Covid relief grants to stay afloat. Those grants, provided through the American Rescue Plan, ended in 2024. Several agencies have gone so far as to pillage their own fixed-route budgets to continue federally mandated paratransit services.

Call it luck, a Band-Aid, or a bad omen; riders on Philadelphia’s SEPTA and Pittsburgh’s PRT are momentarily safe from service cuts and fare hikes. Following last year’s budget disaster, Shapiro permitted the two agencies to raid their own maintenance funds to temporarily pay for operations.

Now, both are pausing upgrades, deferring basic maintenance, and reckoning with the realities of operating – but not fixing – a large-scale transit system.

State highways, on the other hand, received $775 million in new funding from Shapiro’s budget deal.

Transit advocates in Pennsylvania are shifting strategies to preserve essential transit services. A June decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, allowed slot machines to be taxed at a higher rate.

Both Democrat and Republican lawmakers have shown interest in using revenue from the so-called “skill games tax” to fund transit. The legislature must agree on a tax rate and structure, but declined to do so before finalizing the budget.

“Anytime that there is a discussion of new revenue in Pennsylvania, it needs to include public transportation,” Descheemaker said. “We are losing public transportation actively, right now in Pennsylvania. Public transportation needs to be at the center of those conversations.”

JAMESTOWN, R.I. (WJAR) — It was just a normal day at a home on Sloop Street in Jamestown until Stephen Santoro happened to glance up.

“I looked up at the peak and saw a very large nest of bees,” Santoro said.

Thousands of them.

“Well, I don’t mind honeybees, but just not that many,” he said.

That’s when he knew he had to call the Jamestown Swarm Chaser, Jim Turenne.

NBC 10’s Patrice Wood reports on the unique talents of the Jamestown Swarm Chaser.

Turenne is a beekeeper and member of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association.

You can often find Turenne collecting honey at the Godena Farm, Conanicut Island Land Trust.

“They’ve actually been considered to be the most important species on the planet. They pollinate about one-third of the food we eat,” Turenne said.

But when someone needs help, the Swarm Chaser jumps into action, climbing up the side of the house on Sloop Street.

“The swarm basically had moved into the person’s house here,” Turenne said.

Turenne removed those on the outside and another beekeeper cut into the house to get the rest.

“That was one of the biggest clusters I’ve ever seen. That had probably 20,000 to 30,000 bees,” he said.

The homeowner was relieved.

“Oh, I’m extremely grateful,” Santoro said.

Swarm-catching is a unique talent.

Turenne has had 14 swarm rescues so far this year, all volunteer.

Nominate someone in your community volunteering to make our community better by filling out the short nomination form for “Community Treasures”

The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation says it will shut down at the end of the year after its corporate parent cut off funding and evicted its three staffers Wednesday. The move leaves $600,000 a year in grants to Vermont organizations, and 40 years of the ice cream brand’s progressive mission, hanging on a judge’s future ruling.

“This is the other foot dropping in terms of the way Magnum is trying to destroy the social values of Ben & Jerry’s,” said Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, in an interview Wednesday.

The Vermont-based iconic ice cream brand has been in a legal fight with its parent company, The Magnum Ice Cream Co. — an ice-cream spinoff of the larger corporation Unilever — since November 2024. Ben & Jerry’s alleges that the corporation overreached its control, pushing out the CEO and interfering with the brand’s political views. The question before a judge is whether the corporate parent had the authority to reshape governance and withhold funding from the foundation. 

Amid the push-and-pull over governance, Unilever audited the foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of Ben & Jerry’s, in April 2025, finding conflicts of interest and a lack of governance and financial control. 

Liz Bankowski, president of the foundation’s board of trustees, said in an interview that Unilever withheld the philanthropy’s funding late last year and ordered foundation staff to vacate its corporate office in South Burlington by July 15 because of governance issues the audit raised. This led the foundation’s leaders to join the ongoing lawsuit, fought by the ice cream brand’s independent board, in an effort to retain funding. The lawsuit is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. 

While the foundation’s leadership is framing the decision to cease operations as the only option after Unilever withheld funding, an unnamed spokesperson for Magnum wrote in a statement to VTDigger that the shuttering is “entirely down to the Trustees and their decision to ignore the findings of an independent audit and failure to put in place basic good governance; much to our dismay.” 

Since the audit, the foundation has adopted a conflict of interest policy, but “the bottom line was that unless we changed our board, they were going to continue to withhold funding,” Bankowski said.  

Cohen described the audit as “a bunch of trumped-up charges.” 

“The foundation has been independently audited every year,” he said. “I think that Magnum was searching in vain for some illegal or unethical activities. I think they found none.” 

Since Ben & Jerry’s sold the ice cream business to Unilever in 2000, the corporation has given $60 million to the foundation. The philanthropic arm has operated for 40 years, supporting the ice cream brand’s progressive mission by offering financial backing to social justice organizations across the country. The foundation does not have an endowment and is reliant on the funding its parent company gives annually, outlined in its merger contract.

A chunk of that funding, $600,000 a year, goes to Vermont organizations such as the immigrant farmworker rights organization Migrant Justice and the LGBTQ+ nonprofit Outright Vermont, according to foundation leaders. 

“We fill a particular niche that not a lot of other funders fill,” said Rebecca Golden, the foundation’s director of programs, who has worked at the organization for 34 years. 

Golden is one of three foundation staffers whose last day in the physical office is Wednesday, following orders from Magnum to vacate. Although Magnum did not directly address its vacate order in its statement to VTDigger, the spokesperson wrote that the foundation’s leaders recently “took the position that its staff are not Ben & Jerry’s employees, despite utilising Ben & Jerry’s offices and systems.”

Golden described the possible shutdown as an “enormous loss” that will not only affect the organizations that the foundation supports but also Ben & Jerry’s employees who “feel very proud of being a part of the foundation.” 

“It’s been a really long year, so there’s been a lot of emotions — the whole gamut, as we like to say of the seven stages of grief. But I think at this point we’re sort of in the acceptance phase,” she said. 

The Magnum spokesperson indicated that the work of the foundation will continue even if its leaders decide to cease operations at the end of the year, writing that the company is “firmly committed to funding a grant-giving foundation, supported by appropriate governance controls to ensure it is living by its values.”

But Cohen is not confident that Magnum will uphold the values of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation in the corporation’s continued philanthropic efforts. 

“What are they going to fund? I have no idea. My guess is that they would not be looking to fund entities that are opposed to the status quo,” Cohen said.

The foundation’s leaders have pointed to its support of Migrant Justice during a period when the farmworker organization was considering a boycott of Ben & Jerry’s as an example of their commitment to social justice. After immigrant farmworkers raised concerns about working conditions at farms supplying Ben & Jerry’s, the company joined a program that collaborates with farmworkers to strive for fair working conditions. 

Political activism has been central to the Ben & Jerry’s brand since its founding. As a part of the ongoing lawsuit, Ben & Jerry’s alleged in a May filing that Magnum has been undercutting its social justice mission in order to “censor, intimidate and purge” the company’s independent board, which Cohen said was created to defend its progressive values. 

Three of the board’s members, including one who has been an outspoken critic of Israel, were removed late last year after the parent corporation introduced a new set of governance practices. In its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Magnum argues that it retains ultimate authority and the brand’s social mission must be nonpartisan.  

As the lawsuit awaits a decision, Cohen, who is not a part of the suit, has created a campaign to “free Ben & Jerry’s,” amassing around 160,000 signers for its petition demanding that Magnum sell Ben & Jerry’s to a “group of values-aligned investors.”   

“The very values-led business model that built Ben & Jerry’s into this amazing, phenomenal brand is the very thing that Magnum is currently destroying,” Cohen said.