Nebraska’s Big Prison Mess; Feds Frown on New Jersey Sports Betting
The Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln. Katherine Welles / Shutterstock.com
Also in our State & Local news roundup: Stories from Texas, Nevada and Ohio.
Here is today’s State & Local news roundup for Tuesday, September 30, 2014 ...
SAN ANTONIO, Texas: Officials from San Antonio’s water system approved a $3.4 billion contract to construct a water pipeline to bring 16 billion gallons annually from Burleson County in Central Texas to San Antonio. As Neena Satija of The Texas Tribune reports, “critics say the plan is financially risky and premature, because the city will have to pay for the full amount of water the pipeline can deliver every year — even though it may be decades before San Antonio actually needs all of it.”
OMAHA, Nebraska: State lawmakers are considering creating a full-time oversight committee for the Corrections Department after new revelations about Nebraska’s troubled prisons, reports Matt Wynn of the Omaha World-Herald. The newspaper’s investigation into the situation discovered that the state had been miscalculating prisoner-release dates and “state officials did not fully address the prison sentences for about 51 prisoners who racked up hundreds of criminal charges while they should have been in prison. As a result, the state essentially vacated about 113 years of prison sentences.”
ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey: The U.S. Justice Department has thrown cold water on New Jersey’s hopes to introduce sports betting to the state’s casinos and racetracks. As Reuben Kramer reports for The Press of Atlantic City:
Arguing in court papers that the state's legal strategy is based on a "meritless theory," the federal government urged U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp to keep in place a prior court order that stopped the state's sports betting plan in its tracks.
Sports betting is allowed in Nevada, Delaware, Montana and Oregon because those states allowed the practice before a federal ban on sports betting was enacted in 1992.
COLUMBUS, Ohio: State Attorney General Mike DeWine has said that the Buckeye State will not resume executions until state legislators make two changes to state law “in order to meet stipulations set down by U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost,” Alan Johnson of The Columbus Dispatch reports. In August, Frost ordered that executions in the state be halted because of concerns over drugs used for lethal injections.
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nevada: Did a local councilman know that there were 100 dogs “packed into squalid living conditions” at a home he rents out? Councilmember Isaac Baron says he didn’t know about the dogs, according to Bethany Barnes and Kimberly Delacruz of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Forty-one of those dogs died in a fire at the house over the weekend. “This house burned down because it wasn’t taken care of because of that damn owner,” the brother of the two renters told the newspaper. “This is the simple case of a slumlord.”
(Image via Katherine Welles/Shutterstock.com)