Looking back at 2008 in the news
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By the Lincoln Journal Star
Most of us will be glad to see the books close on 2008. It was a year of controversy, contentiousness and concern, from the courtroom to politics to our national and personal well-being.
Here, the Journal Star staff looks back at a dozen major news developments and ahead at how they may shape the coming year.
A man named Bo
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Use this interactive feature to see what made headlines this year across the state. (Katie Nieland/JournalStar.com)...
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They decided they liked this gray-sweatshirt-wearing, wad-of-gum-chewing football coach when they first met him.
Five years haven’t changed matters.
If 2007 was a year of discontent over a proud football program face-planting into the ground, 2008 was decidedly the year of Bo in the state of Nebraska.
There were Bo shirts, Bo jingles, Bo sandwiches, Bo lexicon.
What the heck does Bofense mean? It doesn’t matter.
Chuck Norris hides from Bo Pelini, don’t you know? That’s what the e-mail said. Hard to tell if the sender thought it a joke or undeniable fact.
The hype was plenty to live up to, but so far complaints are few. Eight wins in a regular season won’t usually bring satisfaction around here, but after the chaos of fall 2007, optimism rules the day.
The Huskers are bowling again on New Year’s Day. For now, good enough.
That will change. Expectations will rise. But for now, the mood is well and the woman in the Nebraska Bookstore holds up a T-shirt to show her husband.
My BOfriend’s back.
“Is that for you or me?” the husband cracks.
— Brian Christopherson
Pain in the pocketbook
Here in the Plains, gas is more of a staple than in some other places, and its price a constant topic of conversation, if not always a reliable indicator of the economy.
It became both in 2008.
Nebraskans saw the price of gas take off in 2008 to unprecedented heights, an average of more than $4 a gallon. At the same time, crop prices — propped up by demand for corn made into ethanol — drove what appeared to be a new generation of prosperity on the farm.
Neither lasted.
Regional extremes elsewhere burst the housing and mortgage industry bubble and drove the nation into recession. Gas prices and crop prices dropped at midyear to levels considered more normal.
Over the course of the year, the stock market lost almost half its value, mostly in the autumn as the government sought vast amounts of money to prop up the financial industry. Families tried to hold on to what wealth they hadn’t lost.
Real estate was even more complicated.
The existing home market and prices were holding their own locally, but new home sales were down more than 30 percent year to date late in November.
Zillow.com reported 84 percent of homes in the Lincoln Metropolitan Statistical Area lost value in the past year and 19 percent of those sold actually sold for a loss.
Late in the year, a wave of layoffs spread over the state as employers cut hundreds of jobs and recession clearly set in. Ernie Goss of Creighton University predicted job losses well into 2009.
Some economists predicted the worst national recession since World War II.
— Richard Piersol
Safe havens
Nebraska caught the attention of national media, filmmakers and bloggers with a safe haven law that passed in February and went into effect in July.
By the time Gov. Dave Heineman called a special session to change the law, 36 children ages 1 to 17 — a few from other states and both coasts — had been handed over to the state, most of them adolescents with behavioral or mental health disorders. Most also needed services their parents could not pay for or could not access.
Now the law allows for only infants up to 30 days old to be dropped off at safe haven hospitals.
But the problem of access to services for older children remains.
“We have great things being done in the state, but things are tying our hands to keep us from doing better,” said Scott Dugan, a mental health service provider in Grand Island. “We’re managing costs, but not delivering the right care, at the right time, in the right location,”
Seven senators formed a task force to propose legislation and help raise awareness of services for these kids and others like them. A number of bills will be proposed when the Legislature meets, beginning Jan. 7.
— JoAnne Young
DNA exonerates 6
This summer, DNA testing on evidence from a 1985 murder in Beatrice cleared six people sent to prison for the crime.
Debra Shelden, James Dean and Kathy Gonzalez already had served their time in the death of 67-year-old Beatrice widow Helen L. Wilson and had been released.
Joseph White and Thomas Winslow were freed after DNA test results showed they had not sexually assaulted Wilson. JoAnn Taylor was released after tests identified now-deceased Bruce Allen Smith of Oklahoma City as the man who assaulted Wilson in her downtown Beatrice apartment all those years ago.
Five of the six had pleaded to charges in Wilson’s death and are anticipating pardons. White’s conviction for first-degree murder was set aside.
The six likely will not be compensated by the state for being wrongly convicted. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have compensation laws; Nebraska does not.
No word yet on whether they’ll seek passage of a state law that could grant them direct compensation or whether they’ll file civil rights lawsuits seeking damages.
— Catharine Huddle
Invite causes firestorm
On Oct. 16, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln announced William Ayers — a founder of a group that bombed buildings in protest of the Vietnam War — had been invited to speak at a November student research conference.
Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, was to speak only on education research, UNL said.
But that didn’t stop a public firestorm.
Outraged callers and e-mailers flooded university offices, and elected officials publicly criticized the Ayers invitation.
In poring over more than 1,000 phone messages, e-mails and blogs — which contained threats of violence at the conference and on Ayers’ life — UNL experts concluded that to host Ayers would pose a significant security risk.
Chancellor Harvey Perlman canceled the speech Oct. 17.
The public uproar has waned, but questions linger. UNL faculty leaders, angry they weren’t consulted before the event was canceled, are pressing for an investigation to determine whether academic freedom was breached.
They are awaiting a response from the American Association of University Professors.
— Melissa Lee
Memorial flights
It bothered Bill Williams of Omaha that the National World War II Memorial was built too late for most veterans of the war to see it.
So Williams, his wife, Evonne, and the Nebraska Veterans of Foreign Wars organized the Heartland Honor Flight. They hired a private charter to take World War II veterans on a one-day trip to Washington, D.C.
The first flight departed May 21 from Omaha with 102 veterans from Nebraska and western Iowa. Among the passengers was George “Babe” Kreifel Jr., of Table Rock, a former infantryman who served in four major battles in the Pacific.
“I never dreamed in my life I would ever experience anything like this,” he said after seeing the memorial built in his honor.
Funded by private donations, the Heartland Honor Flight has taken five other charters — 745 World War II vets total — to see the memorial. The youngest were in their 80s, and many were in wheelchairs.
But some 800 veterans still want to go, and organizers want to take them all by Memorial Day. They’ll need more donations to complete the mission. To help: www.heartlandhonorflight.com.
— Joe Duggan
New legislative faces
Term limits are changing the face of the state’s single house Legislature.
Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, the lone black senator who has served for 38 years, will leave office Jan. 6.
In recent years, Chambers was able to single-handedly stop many bills he didn’t like — ranging from a constitutional amendment to protect hunting and fishing to making seat belt violations a primary offense, so you don’t have to be stopped for another violation first.
Those issues are likely to reappear next year.
Fourteen other senators could not run for re-election because of the constitutional amendment that limits senators to two consecutive four-year terms. One incumbent was defeated in November.
That means 37 of the 49 state senators will have four years or less experience.
Gov. Dave Heineman will be one of the most experienced state elected officials around. He has worked in state government for 14 years, as state treasurer, lieutenant governor and for the past four years (almost) as governor.
— Nancy Hicks
State Fair moving on
The 139th Nebraska State Fair was known mostly for what happened before and what happened after. The 140th will be the final showcase for the long Lincoln tradition.
After more than a century of fairs at State Fair Park, the Nebraska Legislature voted earlier this year to clear the 250-acre space for occupancy by a research campus anchored by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The fair is moving to Grand Island’s Fonner Park. A $42 million pile of money built with contributions from the university, the city of Grand Island, the state fair board and the state budget will be used to upgrade the infrastructure there.
The university must have $14.5 million of its $21.5 million in place by Feb. 1. The same goes for $6 million of Grand Island’s $8.5 million share.
— Art Hovey
Dark clouds
Tornadoes and torrential rains pounded Nebraska in the spring, destroying houses and businesses, keeping farmers out of the fields and taking lives at a Boy Scout camp just across the border in Iowa.
An April 25 tornado in the community of Johnson signaled the beginning of a violent season in 2008. Before it was over, tornadoes hit Ceresco, Ulysses, Aurora, Kearney and Omaha as well as farmsteads in Jefferson and Gage counties. Fortunately, no one was killed or seriously injured.
Heavy rains flooded basements, washed out bridges and prevented spring planting across central and eastern Nebraska. An 8-inch rain May 29 forced the evacuation of Platte Center because of flooding.
A line of storms that fired up in Kansas and Nebraska the late afternoon of June 11 produced a killer tornado at a scout camp near Little Sioux, Iowa. The twister left four teen-age boys dead — three from Omaha, one from Iowa —and about four dozen injured.
— Joe Duggan
Projects in the works
Big projects — one under way and two others on the drawing board — got a lot of attention from city and county officials this year.
Residents were shocked to learn that costs for the first phase of the Antelope Valley Project have ballooned from $175 million to $264 million. Contractors are digging a new channel under the new P, Q and O street bridges. Citing other community priorities, Mayor Chris Beutler says the second phase will have to wait.
Despite a tough economy, city officials are moving forward with an arena project west of the Haymarket. Two designs are in the works while city officials ponder when’s a good time to ask voters to approve the controversial project.
The county board is waiting for more favorable market conditions to issue bonds for the new $65 million jail. Those bonds could be issued in January.
— By Algis J. Laukaitis
Splitting the vote
Nebraska got a piece of the action in a presidential election this year for the first time since 1964.
Republicans have thoroughly dominated presidential politics in Nebraska for 44 years, but in 2008 Democrats managed to snare one electoral vote, and Barack Obama won both Lincoln and Omaha.
With Nebraska awarding a presidential electoral vote to the winner of each of the state’s three congressional districts, Obama snatched metropolitan Omaha’s 2nd District vote.
John McCain won statewide and in the remaining two congressional districts to claim four of the state’s five electoral votes.
Meanwhile, Republican Mike Johanns won the Senate seat being vacated by Chuck Hagel and all three incumbent GOP congressmen were re-elected.
City elections in 2009 will be headlined by Omaha’s race for mayor. Former Mayor Hal Daub, defeated for re-election in 2001, is mounting a comeback bid and is matched thus far against two Omaha city councilmen.
— Don Walton
Ethanol and ag prices
Ethanol, so recently the toast of Nebraska’s agricultural establishment, had its share of problems in 2008.
First it was high corn prices. Then it was plummeting petroleum prices that took some of the shine off a situation of rapid expansion and rows of ethanol boosters wielding ceremonial ground-breaking shovels.
Corn rose as high as $7 a bushel in Nebraska as ethanol investors rushed to take advantage of the federal government’s renewable fuels mandate. That price dropped rapidly in the last few months of 2008, but an equally precipitous drop in oil prices since has raised even more havoc with ethanol’s bottom line.
As 2009 arrives, construction has been halted on several projects, including those at Carleton and Wahoo. Others already operating — including bankrupt VeraSun, owner of plants at Albion, Central City and Ord — are trying to find their way out of financial turmoil.
— Art Hovey
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