United States
I write with authority about complicated, but deeply consequential issues. I dig for stories no one else is covering. I shine a light in places the powerful want shrouded. And above all, I inform citizens about their government — how it works, and how it can work better.
The spruce tree out front partially obscures the rusted gutters and boarded windows at 2628 E. Michigan St., but the debris scattered across the porch tells the story just as well. It's been years since anyone has called it home. In 2011, one owner walked away from a $3,300 tax bill and let the government take the house.
It's been 11 years since Minnie Crawford died - and at least five years since anyone kept up with the taxes on her Near-Northside Indianapolis home. In Crawford's absence, Mother Nature moved in. On a sunny morning in late May, the weeds behind 1909 Cornell Ave. could reach the chest of a grown man.
In a January 2010 letter, three members of the state pension fund's board of directors sent a stark warning to state lawmakers: Any attempts to water down a proposed reform package could leave the retirement system, which 1 in 10 Coloradans depend on as a replacement for Social Security, in grave financial peril.
A for-profit hospital in south Jackson repeatedly transferred emergency patients it was paid by the state to treat, possibly violating state hospital regulations and federal law, a Clarion-Ledger investigation found. The Clarion-Ledger obtained hospital transfer logs, patient charts and other documents leaked by whistle-blowers that depict a pattern of decisions at Central Mississippi Medical Center that may have put lives at risk.
Heading into his eighth and final year as Colorado's state treasurer, Walker Stapleton could finally say, "I told you so." The term-limited Republican had spent his entire tenure on a lonely crusade for public pension reform, warning that a "long-term fix" passed in 2010 hadn't really fixed anything at all.
In a mobile home park where the Eastern Plains meet the Denver suburbs, the Sable Altura fire station sticks out like a sore thumb from its modest surroundings. Its fire engines are state-of-the-art - shiny trucks you'd find at one of the big metro fire departments 20 miles west.
Since 2007, the city of Indianapolis has raised income taxes twice in order to hire new police officers. The first time, city leaders promised to add 100. The next, as many as 150. But on Sept. 1, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department had 59 fewer officers than it did before the first tax hike took effect.
A Colorado Sun analysis of $223 million in tax credits awarded from July 2013 to June 2018 found that the state is often doling out taxpayer dollars without much evidence that each tax credit is truly creating jobs. In some cases, the state is also pursuing conflicting goals, explicitly incentivizing renewable energy in order to fight climate change on the one hand, while giving nearly twice as much to the fossil fuel industry that cleaner energies are meant to replace.
Colorado's flagship public university is within reach of a controversial milestone: the majority of its student body could soon come from out of state. The University of Colorado's Boulder campus has trended that direction for years - the result of radically changing its business model to make up for two decades of state budget cuts.
About once a week for much of 2015, Kamia Edwards' son was too sick to go to school. Some days he was so hot, he'd take off his shirt and lie on the bare floor of their apartment.