MONTANA

National park maintenance sidelined 

BILLINGS — The 250th anniversary of U.S. independence was just months away when National Park Service employees received a surprising directive from Washington: Maintenance projects approved for this year at sites across the nation were being relegated to a new “low priority” list.

Work wanted by the White House was taking precedence, including repairs to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press and three officials from the park service and Interior Department who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

The reflecting pool repairs and other projects tied to President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 initiative landed on a separate list for White House priorities, the documents show. Many of the administration-backed projects have advanced, though the reflecting pool repairs were botched.

Meanwhile, almost all of about 1,500 maintenance and other projects on the low priority list as of July are expected to go undone, the officials said. That will worsen a repair backlog at national parks that doubled over the last decade to more than $24 billion even as visitor numbers surged.

Because of their low priority designation and with the fiscal year ending on Sept. 30, it’s unknown when they will move forward unless park staff can find a workaround, two of the officials said.

The Interior Department said many entries on the low priority list had been “mis-prioritized and were corrected.” It declined to say how many or which ones, or how much parks are spending on projects outside Washington. Agency officials declined to answer questions about the reflecting pool.

IDAHO

Judge blocks abortion prosecutions

BOISE — A federal judge says Idaho can’t prosecute doctors who perform abortions to protect a pregnant person’s health or prevent self-harm.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill made the ruling on Aug. 13, writing that Idaho’s “Defense of Life Act” and “Fetal Heartbeat Act” — which together create a near-total ban on abortion — violate the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. Physicians who violate the laws can lose their license and face up to five years in prison.

Both laws include narrow exceptions, including abortions done to prevent the death of a pregnant woman or in some cases of rape or incest where the pregnant person has filed a police report.

The case isn’t about bodily autonomy or reproductive choice, Winmill wrote in the 81-page decision, but rather the “limit of the state’s power to make a woman suffer for the sake of an unborn child.”

The state can’t pick and choose which life-threatening conditions justify abortion, he wrote.

Dr. Stacy Seyb, a Boise maternal-fetal medicine specialist who sued over the law in 2024, said the ruling will allow him to practice medicine without fear of prosecution, and to offer patients with serious medical conditions the option of ending a pregnancy without having to leave the state.

Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador said he would appeal.

Attorneys for county prosecutors and the Idaho attorney general argued that Seyb misunderstood the state’s abortion ban, and that the ban already allows most health-preserving abortions. But Winmill said there is a gap between life-saving abortions and abortions performed to prevent non-lethal harm, and noted that Seyb said he has to refer patients in that gap to other states for care — including several with grave pregnancy complications who had to be flown to Utah for treatment.

Physicians could still face civil penalties for performing abortions under another state law, which allows extended family members of an aborted fetus to sue the provider for at least $20,000.

KANSAS

Town settles reporter’s lawsuit

TOPEKA — A small Kansas town has agreed to pay $850,000 to a former reporter at its weekly newspaper to end her federal lawsuit over a police raid of the paper’s offices in 2023 that ignited a national furor over press freedom.

Now-retired Marion County Record reporter Phyllis Zorn said in her lawsuit that the raid violated press freedoms and protections from unreasonable law enforcement searches guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. She also said it almost immediately led to health problems, causing the return of potentially life-threatening seizures that had been controlled for years with medication.

Zorn’s attorney, Randy Rathbun, and an attorney for the city Marion, a town of about 1,900 residents about 150 miles southwest of Kansas City, filed a joint statement on Aug. 11 — the third anniversary of the raid on the newspaper’s offices — that Zorn’s lawsuit was being dismissed. It was among the lawsuits filed in federal court against local officials over the raids of the newspaper’s offices, the home of Publisher Eric Meyer and the home of a former City Council member.

Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody said he was investigating whether the paper had committed identity theft or other crimes in accessing a local restaurant owner’s state driving record, but authorities who examined the raids said they were not legally justified. Meyer, Zorn and others saw the raids as retaliation for hard-hitting local coverage and efforts to gather information about Cody’s past in law enforcement.

Marion County agreed in November to pay a little more than $3 million to parties in the five lawsuits, including $600,000 to Zorn, to settle claims against its officials.

WYOMING

Turbine blades now a tribute

A 120-foot sculpture made from 12 discarded wind turbine blade sections and painted with 40 running mustangs will open to the public Sept. 3 at Art 321 in Casper.

Windborne Wyoming Mustangs is the centerpiece of the Windborne Wyoming Mustangs mural project. The sculpture was funded by Navarro Gallery and is now installed at the entrance to the Wyoming Rescue Mission’s Recovery Ranch.

Artist Chris Navarro, who led the project, said the sculpture has been six years in the making.

“I’ve been trying to make a sculpture from discarded wind turbine blades for six years, and I finally got one finished,” Navarro said in a news release.

Navarro led a two-day painting workshop at Art 321, where community members and Wyoming Rescue Mission residents created study paintings that served as references for the full-size mural.

The project also will be featured in a documentary by two-time Emmy Award winner Anthony Stengel, produced for Wyoming PBS.