Omaha World Herald. January 18, 2019
Many reasons for Nebraska to encourage higher-wage jobs
The Nebraska Advantage Act is heading toward a sunset either this year or next, and members of the Legislature have major work ahead in deciding how to revamp the state’s business incentives. One needed goal: do a better job in encouraging creation of higher-paying jobs - not millionaires, but middle-class salaried incomes adequate to provide financial security.
Ninety percent of Nebraska’s jobs require no experience, and 70 percent require a high school education or less, University of Nebraska economist Hank Robinson has found. Many Nebraskans struggle to meet their steadily increasing household expenses.
The challenges for Nebraska homeownership illustrate the concern. Over the past decade, only four other states have had a higher increase in home prices than Nebraska, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reports. Nebraska’s median home-sales price in November 2018 was $162,000, up 39 percent from the November 2011 figure of $116,000.
In Omaha, the median home-sales price is $152,100; in Papillion, $231,400; in Gretna, $281,000. Such home purchases require significant middle-class incomes.
“With a limited housing supply in Nebraska, and prices rising faster than rents, homeownership has trended lower,” the Fed reported last year. Between 2009 and the first quarter of 2018, the rate of homeownership in Nebraska fell nearly 5 percentage points.
Nebraska’s weak performance in creating higher-paying jobs also leads to another problem: The state is hobbled in retaining higher-educated young people and being economically competitive with other states.
Each year the state loses a net of about college-educated 2,000 men and women age 25 and older. Nebraska ranks 10th worst in the country in that regard. A report from the Nebraska Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education last year pointed to this as one of Nebraska’s central challenges in competing effectively against other states.
This brain drain hinders Nebraska’s tech industries, for example, from reaching their full potential. Nebraska ranked 40th in “advanced industries” in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, a 2016 Brookings Institution study said.
University of Nebraska President Hank Bounds pointed to these concerns last year, saying, “We need to be all in as a state in growing high-wage jobs.”
Nebraska elected officials, across party lines, make the same point. Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts is calling creation of new STEM-focused scholarship programs and says an incentive revamp should shift from incentivizing lower-paid jobs to higher-paid ones.
State Sen. Kate Bolz, a Democrat from Lincoln, supports an incentive revamp with that same general aim. Average annual pay in Nebraska, she notes, is 21 percent below the national average. She cites a consultant’s report that said “Nebraska’s economic development future cannot be based on growth that generates jobs of any kind, but, rather, growth that emphasizes high-quality jobs.”
Incentives policy is only one tool for encouraging this improvement in Nebraska’s economy, but it’s a central one. State leaders should be sure to focus on it as they decide the restructuring of the Nebraska Advantage Act.
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Lincoln Journal Star. January 18, 2019
State must be transparent on executions in the future
Just as the road leading up to Carey Dean Moore’s death by lethal injection was obscured by a lack of transparency, so too were the moments before a coroner pronounced him dead.
Nebraska’s first execution in more than two decades appears to have gone off without a hitch. The problem is how much Nebraskans have had to rely on the state’s version of events because openness was in too short of supply.
To guarantee transparency in the future, Lincoln Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks has introduced a bill that would require two members of the Legislature to witness executions from the moment a condemned prisoner enters the execution chamber until the inmate is pronounced dead - and that nothing would block the view of the senators, media representatives and other witnesses.
Anything to increase transparency and accountability in how the state administers its most severe punishment would be greatly welcomed, given the cloud that still hangs over its most recent use.
Before Moore’s execution, the state fought a lawsuit filed by the Journal Star and other entities seeking to learn how, where and when Nebraska purchased the execution drugs. While a judge ruled that much of the information sought must be turned over, the state appealed to the Nebraska Supreme Court - a case that has yet to be heard - and carried on with the execution.
As Moore was on the execution table last August, the curtains were unexpectedly closed for 14 minutes. In that time, the convicted murderer was declared dead, the first person in the country to be executed using the state’s four-drug cocktail, before the curtains were briefly reopened.
State law dictates the identities of execution team members must be kept secret. Corrections officials justified the closed curtain on those grounds, meaning some accommodation - preferably, better than masks currently proposed - would be needed if this bill were to pass.
If the state had been open before carrying out Moore’s death sentence, there would be less need for such legislation to govern how the lethal injection is administered. However, given the state’s reluctance to shed light on capital punishment, Pansing Brooks’ bill, LB238, will help nudge it along.
“We are not going to sit and let the government tell us, ’Trust us; we did it properly,’” she said. “If that’s so, then let us watch and make sure that that is happening properly.”
Amen to that.
The senator’s words ring true far beyond the execution chamber at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Hartley Burr Alexander’s words that adorn the Capitol’s main entrance are as applicable now as they were at the building’s completion: “The salvation of the state is watchfulness in the citizen.”
While it’s the government’s responsibility to carry out capital punishment in accordance with the law, the public needs the opportunity to ensure that indeed happens - and hold officials who don’t accountable.
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Kearney Hub. January 17, 2019
UNMC’s trucks take EMT classes anywhere
Local donors and state legislative and educational leaders knew they had a winning idea on their hands in 2012 when the Nebraska Legislature approved $15 million in seed money to build the $19 million Health Science Education Complex at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Operated by the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the HSEC trains 126 medical professionals per year in a rural setting at UNK with the belief that HSEC graduates will practice in rural Nebraska. Small towns and sparsely populated regions have fought for years to recruit and retain nurses, technicians and other professionals for local clinics, hospitals and care centers, but too frequently big-city lights lure away young professionals.
It’s a sound idea to train medical professionals in a place like Kearney, where students from small-town Nebraska can study in a setting that’s comfortable to them and assists them in answering their call to be caregivers and healers.
UNMC’s HSEC at UNK addresses rural Nebraska’s need for medical professionals.
We apologize for the alphabet soup in the previous sentence, but the next bit of good news calls for a second helping.
This week we learned that UNMC’s rolling EMT classrooms - called SIM-NE trucks - conducted their 250th free training session on Tuesday for Sutherland and Hershey fire and rescue teams.
SIM stands for Simulation In Motion and NE stands for Nebraska, because in their brief 18-month history, the SIM-NE trucks have served 4,700 emergency medical professionals in 87 of our state’s 93 counties. That’s big news because volunteer emergency responders don’t need to travel all the way to Lincoln or Omaha to receive top-rail training - the SIM trucks come to them.
Strategically stationed at Kearney, Norfolk, Scottsbluff and Lincoln, the four 44-foot-long, customized trucks carry state-of-the-art, hands-on training to emergency medical service providers in the state’s farthest corners. Taking classrooms to the emergency responders allows training to be team-based as EMTs train side-by-side with the people they normally work with during emergencies.
With its HSEC at UNK, along with its SIM-NE fleet, UNMC is shortening the distance that separates the rural lifestyle Nebraskans relish from the quality medical and emergency care we can’t do without.
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