A nonprofit that has been working for years to bring an indoor pool and community center to the Stillwater area has entered into an agreement to purchase the current Lake Elmo Elementary School site for $4.25 million.

Stillwater Area Public School District officials announced on Tuesday morning that the district is selling the property at 11030 Stillwater Blvd. N. to Valley Community Center Partners Inc. The sale includes the building and approximately 12.86 acres of land.

The nonprofit is planning to build a new community center on the site. Among the planned amenities: an aquatics facility, fitness and recreation spaces, courts for multiple sports, youth activity areas, gathering spaces and programs serving people of all ages and abilities.

The group’s vision is to “create a central, accessible place that promotes social connection, physical and mental wellness and recreational opportunities for the entire St. Croix Valley region,” according to the group’s website. “At this time, no equivalent community resource exists.”

Potential demolition costs for the existing building are already accounted for within the district’s voter-approved bond proceeds, district officials said.

The organization will have a 210-day due-diligence period to review title, survey, environmental, soil and feasibility considerations.

The closing is scheduled for Dec. 1, 2026, or earlier by mutual agreement. That date allows the district to finish out the current school year before moving into the new Lake Elmo Elementary building over the summer. The new school, which is currently under construction at the corner of 10th Street and Lake Elmo Avenue, opens next fall.

“We are pleased that this agreement both supports our district’s long-term facilities plan and opens the door for a community-focused redevelopment of the site,” said Superintendent Mike Funk. “This project has the potential to bring meaningful benefits to families across the region.”

Valley Community Center Partners has been working for years to create a central, accessible community hub within the boundaries of the Stillwater Area School District.

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In 2023, the group hired Colorado-based Ballard*King & Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in, among other things, creating feasibility studies for recreational and sports facilities, to conduct a survey of more than 1,300 residents of the area.

Nearly 90 percent of the respondents supported an indoor pool. “Spoiler alert: everybody wants a pool,” Diane Polasik, vice president of the board, told the Pioneer Press at the time. “Since we don’t have a pool, we have to go to other community pools and drive a ways to get there.”

In addition to an indoor pool, top trends in the survey were multi-purpose gyms, group exercise, indoor play, community gathering, indoor run/jog and teens programs. More than 80 percent of the responders indicated those things were important.

More information about Valley Community Center is available at thevalleycenter.org.

By MATT BROWN, Associated Press

In a packed room at library in a downtown Boston, Rep. Ayanna Pressley posed a blunt question: Why are Black women, who have some of the highest labor force participation rates in the country, now seeing their unemployment rise faster than most other groups?

The replies Monday from policymakers, academics, business owners and community organizers laid out how economic headwinds facing Black women may indicate a troubling shift for the economy at large.

The unemployment rate for Black women increased from 6.7% to 7.5% between August and September this year, the most recent month for available data because of the federal government shutdown.

That compares with a 3.2% to 3.4% increase for white women over the same period. And it extended a year-long trend of the Black women’s unemployment rate increasing at a time of broad economic uncertainty.

Many roundtable attendees view those numbers as both an affront and a warning about the uneven pressures on Black women.

“Everyone is missing out when we’re pushed out of the workforce,” said Pressley, a progressive Democrat. “That is something that I worry about now, that you have all these women with specific expertise and specializations that we’re being deprived of.”

And when Black women do have work, she said they tend to be “woefully underemployed.”

Black women had the highest labor force participation rate of any female demographic in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yet their unemployment rate remains higher than other demographics of women.

Historically, their unemployment rate has trended slightly above the national average, widening during periods of slowed economic growth or recession. Black Americans are overrepresented in industries like retail, health and social services, and government administration, according to a 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics Survey.

“Black women are at the center of the Venn diagram that is our society,” said Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, a PhD candidate in public policy and economics at the Harvard Kennedy School.

She pointed to April as the month when Black women’s unemployment began to diverge more sharply from other groups. A policy agenda that ignores the causes, she said, could harm the broader economy.

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Roundtable participants cited many long-standing structural inequities but attributed most of the latest divergence to recent federal actions. They blamed the Trump administration’s downsizing of the Minority Business Development Agency and the cancellation of some federal contracts with non-profits and small businesses, saying those actions disproportionately impacted Black women. Others said tariff policies and mass federal layoffs also contributed to the strain.

The administration’s opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives was repeatedly mentioned by participants as a cause for a more hostile environment for Black women to find employment, customers or government contracting.

There is no concrete data on how many Black federal workers were laid off, fired or otherwise dismissed as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts through the federal government.

The attendees discussed a wide range of potential solutions to the unemployment rate for Black women, including using state budgets to bolster business development for Black women, expanding microloans to different communities, increasing government resources for contracting, requiring greater transparency on corporate hiring practices and encouraging state and federal officials to enforce anti-discrimination policies.

“I feel like I was just at church,” said Ruthzee Louijeune, the Boston City Council president, as the meeting wrapped up. She encouraged attendees to keep up their efforts, and she defended DEI policies as essential to a healthy workforce and political system. Without broad-based efforts, the Democrat said, the country’s business and political leadership would be “abnormal” and weakened.

“Any space that does not look like our country and like our cities is not normal,” she said, “and not the city or country we are trying to build.”

Around 30 people recently gathered at a Fort Worth co-working space to discuss ways to build a more inclusive community for all of Tarrant County’s residents. “Welcome to the one-year anniversary of the 817 Gather,” Nydia Cardenas, the event organizer, told the crowd. “Whether it’s your first time or your 12th time, you are welcome here.”

The monthly meetings, held every third Sunday and organized by the 817 Podcast, a weekly morning show focused on local politics, have become a hub for collective action to combat the influence of right-wing extremism and recent efforts by Tarrant County’s three GOP commissioners to consolidate power through precinct-level redistricting.

On June 3, 2025, county commissioners Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez joined fellow Republican Tim O’Hare, the county judge, in approving one of seven proposed redistricting maps, overriding strong public opposition and the dissenting votes of Democratic commissioners Roderick Miles, Jr. and Alisa Simmons.

That decision weakens minority representation into Precinct 2, which is currently held by Simmons, while packing minority groups into Miles’ Precinct 1 ahead of the March 2026 primary. Those elections will determine the party nominees for the county judge race and the commissioner seats in Precincts 2 and 4.

The effort to redraw Tarrant County along partisan lines has galvanized several progressive-minded groups to organize and collaborate like never before.  

Chris Tackett, a Tarrant County activist who founded See It, Name It, Fight It to combat local right-wing extremism, was at the recent grassroots gathering and told the Texas Observer that county Republicans fear losing the county judge seat. Flipping control of a more favorably drawn Precinct 2 could serve as a buffer that allows Republicans to retain a majority on the Commissioners Court even if Republicans lose the top county position in the November 2026 general election. “There are enough voters out there who can absolutely turn an election and blow up what they are trying to do,” he said. 

Cardenas, who has worked for over a decade as a consultant and mentor with minority-owned businesses and startups, used the recent 817 Gather meeting to announce her candidacy for Precinct 4 commissioner. It’s a decision, she told the Observer, that was spurred, in part by the recent months-long battle to prevent gerrymandering in Tarrant County, which is the top battleground county in Texas. Republican incumbent Manny Ramirez won that seat in 2022—part of a conservative wave election in Tarrant—by 18 points, giving Republicans a majority on the court. O’Hare was also elected that year by 6 percentage points. 

For years, she’s been a key community organizer for progressive causes that have sought to push back on the influence of right-wing churches and Christian Nationalists in local politics. Cardenas pointed to the Fort Worth City Council’s vote in late 2024 allowing Mercy Culture Church to move forward with its large trafficking-recovery shelter— despite vocal neighborhood opposition—as an example of the growing influence of radical Christian groups in local government. Mercy Culture’s leaders have openly supported Republicans like O’Hare and Krause while characterizing opponents as “warlocks.” 

Community meetings, including this one organized by the 817 Podcast, have galvanized Tarrant County residents in recent months.
(Photo by Marc Arjol Rodríguez)

Since O’Hare, Krause, and Ramirez took office, they’ve created an “Elections Integrity Unit” to prosecute local voter fraud cases, even though a 2020 state audit found no evidence of widespread election meddling in Tarrant County. The Republican commissioners recently approved funding for a new Law Enforcement Training Center at the request of Sheriff Bill Waybourn at a cost of $60 to $75 million, despite widespread condemnation of the sheriff’s handling of in-custody deaths at Tarrant County Jail.  

Those 817 Gather meetings have drawn together local activists like Tackett and his wife, Mendi, along with Tarrant4Change director Alexander Montalvo and other grassroots group leaders. In the spring of 2025, the group learned that the Commissioners Court was preparing to vote on hiring the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law group from Virginia, to advise on changes to district boundaries for the 2026 elections. “It sounded like it was just going to happen, and nobody was paying attention,” Montalvo recalled.

Leading up to the April vote, the grassroots activists prepared to speak at the commissioners court meeting and to attend one of four public input sessions organized by the county. Since O’Hare won his election in 2022, commenting publicly at Commissioners Court meetings has become difficult and even dangerous for residents trying to exercise their First Amendment right to petition their county leaders.

In July 2024, both a local pastor and a former lawmaker were banned from the Commissioners Court and issued trespass warnings for expressing concerns about the alarming number of deaths occurring at Tarrant County Jail. At one meeting, O’Hare warned the public that breaking decorum or speaking beyond the allotted limit “may result in arrest and prosecution.” This year alone, multiple speakers have been arrested for yelling or clapping during county meetings that have been reduced from weekly to biweekly, and, more recently, to monthly sessions where county budgets are approved and vendors are paid.  

Ann Zadeh, a former Fort Worth city councilmember and one of the 817 podcast hosts, told the Observer that she advises people to prepare one-minute speeches, even though they are allowed a full three minutes under the court’s own rules. “O’Hare often cuts off speakers well before their three minutes are up,” she said, calling his approach “authoritarian.” 

Tackett said the network of grassroots groups spotlighted the voices of public speakers who were opposed to the redistricting. Ahead of the June vote, Chris said their effort culminated in 600,000 views across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Discord. 

“When we talked to people who were showing up to the meetings, whether at Commissioners Court or the precinct meetings, we had people who were saying that they saw the video and wanted to show up and speak,” he said. “It became almost contagious for folks to realize their voice had power.”

On June 4, the day after the county Republicans passed their redrawn map, five local plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas challenging Tarrant County’s newly adopted Commissioners Court map. The complaint argues that the map violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and infringes on the 14th and 15th Amendments by diminishing the voting power of minority communities. 

The lawsuit describes a map drawn with a clear intent, stating that the redistricted map “gerrymanders the County to eliminate one of the two existing majority-minority precincts and instead packs the bulk of the County’s minority voters into a single precinct while cracking others across the remaining three precincts. [The map] surgically moves minority voters from District 2 to District 1 while just as carefully moving Anglo voters from District 1 to District 2.”

Tarrant County’s spokesperson did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. O’Hare has not hidden his agenda, saying in one televised interview in May that he’s redistricting Tarrant County “to put another Republican on the Commissioners Court. Period.”

Commissioner Simmons told the Observer that the redistricting was a racially motivated effort to “silence the voices of African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities.” She said it was important to have the help of grassroots activists fight back locally against a national MAGA agenda. “He is carrying out the edict of Project 2025 at the local level,” she said, referring to the top-down effort by conservatives to roll back civil rights and personal freedoms. “It is happening right here in your own backyard. This is where you have to pay attention.” 

Montalvo said any gerrymandered map bases its protections on recent voting patterns while he predicts that 2026 will see a “seismic shift” in turnout. “Tarrant County has the potential to be the election story of the 2026 midterm election cycle, not only in Texas, but in the country,” he said. He noted  that 48 percent of voters in state Senate District 9, which has been reliably Republican for decades, recently voted for Democrat Taylor Rehmet, who now heads into a runoff against Southlake right-winger Leigh Wambsganss. 

Local Republicans, Montalvo continued, may have analyzed the county’s demographics and voting partners, but they are misguided in two key areas. “Human hubris and human ingenuity are two things we can’t quantify,” he said. “I think the hubris of this racial gerrymandering is going to come back to bite the Republicans because of the human ingenuity of what you’re seeing amongst grassroots organizing.”

The post In Tarrant County, a Grassroots Coalition Pushes Back on Christian Nationalists appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By CALEIGH WELLS, Associated Press

The pollution from food is sneaky. Because the apple sitting on your kitchen counter isn’t really causing any harm.

But chances are good that you didn’t pick it from a tree in your backyard. It required land and water to grow, machines to harvest and process, packaging to ship, trucks to transport and often refrigerators to store. Much of that process releases planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

That’s why the global food system makes up roughly a third of worldwide, human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EDGAR FOOD pollution database.

Meanwhile, roughly a third of the U.S. food supply is lost or wasted without being eaten, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It might never get harvested, it might spoil in transit or the grocery store might reject it for being the wrong size or color. That’s a big reason why some consumers are looking for less-wasteful alternatives ranging from farmers markets to delivery services for produce that didn’t meet supermarket size or appearance standards.

“There’s a whole breadth of opportunities to purchase food,” said Julia Van Soelen Kim, food systems adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension.

And during the week of Thanksgiving, this decision is especially high stakes because lots of grocery shoppers are buying for extra guests, and more food can mean a bigger climate impact.

Here are tips for reducing impact by shopping beyond the grocery store.

The community supported agriculture box

Jane Kolodinsky, professor emerita at the University of Vermont and director of research at Arrowleaf Consulting, has bought her produce directly from a local farmer for 30 years.

It’s called Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA. At the beginning of every harvest season, Kolodinsky pays that farm a fee. Then, once per week, she picks up a box of produce at the farm. Some CSA programs pick the produce, while others let you customize. Some deliver. An online database shows which farms participate in CSA programs.

Since the food is grown nearby, there is less processing and packaging. “There’s a smaller carbon footprint for purchasing locally compared to global or national food distribution channels,” said Van Soelen Kim. “When they’re local, they’re traveling less distance, so less gas, less fuel.”

Local farmers are also likely to grow whatever works best for the area’s climate and season. “When things are in season, they need less storage time, so less electricity for cold storage,” said Van Soelen Kim, who added that can also mean a smaller food bill.

It’s not pollution-free, because the crops still require land and water, and the food does travel some distance. But CSAs avoid many steps in the modern food supply chain.

That model is challenging for consumers who want to maintain the same shopping list year-round. Shopping in-season requires more flexibility. “I would encourage consumers to think, ’OK, year-round we want some hand fruit that’s firm,’” she said. “So maybe it’s apples, and then it’s pears, and then its gonna move to kiwis, and then is gonna move to pluots.”

And in colder regions, she said there is still local produce. It’s just more likely to be dried, frozen or canned.

FILE – Customers browse farmer’s market displays in Union Square, Jan. 13, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Peter K. Afriyie, File)

The farmers market

Kolodinsky said the oldest alternative food system is the farmers market, where vendors gather and sell directly to consumers. Growers also sell at farm stands that aren’t tied to a centralized, scheduled event.

Farmers markets allow consumers more flexibility to pick the produce than a typical CSA. They also offer seasonal produce and less packaging and processing than a grocery store. Many also accept payment associated with government food assistance programs.

Plus, these models cut down on waste because customers are more tolerant of produce that’s not a uniform size and shape, said Timothy Woods, a University of Kentucky agribusiness professor.

“It doesn’t matter to me if one cucumber’s a couple inches longer than the other one,” he said. “Less waste means more efficient utilization of all the resources that farmers are putting out to produce that crop in the first place.”

FILE – Shiitake mushrooms are displayed at the stand of a farmer who sells “ugly” produce at a discount at a farmers’ market in San Francisco, June 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Haven Daley, File)

Other delivery services

Farmers who sell to grocery stores typically have to meet high standards, Woods said. For example, there could be onions that never got big enough or the carrot that grew two roots — vegetables that are just as safe and tasty to eat. There’s also surplus harvest.

“They will intentionally not pick certain melons that are undersized out in the field. And so you’ll have gleaning programs that will be people that are saying, ‘Those are perfectly good cantaloupe that are out there. We’ll send a team out there to pick those,’” said Woods.

He said services delivering food that doesn’t meet supermarket size or appearance requirements, such as Misfit Markets or Imperfect Produce, have become more popular in recent years.

Van Soelen Kim said there isn’t a lot of data yet on whether these services have a significantly lower climate impact. They reduce food waste, but the food might come from far away.

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Misfits Market refreshes its online selection weekly. Customers then fill a box of often discounted groceries that might have misprinted labels or are undersized or blemished. They are delivered via a company truck or third-party courier such as FedEx. The company’s founder and CEO, Abhi Ramesh, said it minimizes emissions by having set delivery days instead of offering on-demand delivery.

“By doing that, we batch all of our deliveries together. So it is one van to your ZIP code on that day. One truck that goes from our warehouse on that date,” he said.

Ramesh said sometimes a farmer’s market or CSA is even better at offering nearby seasonal food than his company. But for a lot of the country, those services go away when the harvest season ends. “And so your local grocery store, believe it or not, is still transporting that from California. But the difference is we’re able to go and transport the food waste piece, which reduces a ton of emissions.”

Woods’ advice for using services like Misfits Market is the same as other channels: Eat seasonally, eat locally and look for minimal packaging.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.