B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

• Intercity buses are back: Since Flix acquired Greyhound five years ago, the company has upgraded its fleet, improved on-time performance and added 37 new lines. Cities are also investing in bus terminals after many shut down. That’s more important than ever in an age of high gas prices and the demise of discount airlines. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Stephanie Nakleh gives you all the ammunition you need to argue about induced demand on the internet. (We Can Have Nice Things)
• Even People picked up on the ridiculous “DEI bike lanes” story.
• Public transportation is one of the few places where people from different backgrounds still mix. (Northeastern Global News)
• Chill out, Bellevue residents, Sound Transit’s Crosslake light rail connection didn’t bring in criminals. (Seattle Times)
• Homeless individuals in Seattle make up 27% of the people killed by drivers, even though they’re just 1.2% of the population. What is the city doing to address that discrepancy? (KIRO)
• Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s bus redesign is threatened by a looming budget deficit in 2028, unless the Pennsylvania government comes up with a long-term funding solution (Public Source). In Philadelphia, SEPTA is facing similar uncertainty despite better-than-expected revenue (Inquirer).
• Los Angeles, which promised a car-free 2028 Summer Olympics, is reserving 369 miles of roadway specifically for athletes, coaches and officials. (CBS)
• Two L.A. cemeteries spent $500,000 to lobby California lawmakers in Sacramento to halt an L.A. bike lane project. (L.A. Times)
• Charlotte sales tax growth is flat, endangering future transit projects. (WFAE)
• The Houston Metro is proposing as-yet-unspecified service hour cuts to deal with a budget shortfall. (Chronicle)
• Denver’s Regional Transportation District launched a new strategic initiative called Building a Better RTD. (Mass Transit)
• Lexington, Kentucky started fining drivers who park in bike lanes. (Herald-Leader)
• New Delhi built a world-class subway system larger than New York City’s for less than the cost of one NYC subway line. (NY Times)
• The Chinese city of Chongqing opened a farmers market next to a subway station. (China Daily)

Nearly 50 years ago, two young organizations were both getting their start. 

In 1978, Sammy Hammons and his mentor, Tommy Brown, founded B&H Toolworks in Richmond with a vision of building a world-class manufacturing company in Kentucky. At nearly the same time, Mountain Association, founded in 1976, was beginning its work to expand economic opportunity across Appalachia by investing in local businesses and local leaders.  

B&H Tool Works has grown from a small startup into a sophisticated manufacturer serving industries ranging from automotive and aerospace to defense and transportation. 

Tommy was a respected metal worker and machinist educator at Eastern Kentucky University, and had first met Sammy as a student. With Sammy’s interest in tooling and machining, the two men began to partner, taking on repair work and small jobs that came their way.  

“It was a hobby shop. Something we loved to do,” Sammy said of the early days. 

The business grew quickly. In its first year, B&H generated about $30,000 in revenue. By year two, sales had climbed to $100,000, and the company had opportunities that suggested it could reach $750,000 the following year. The challenge was financing that growth. 

At the time, Mountain Association, then known as MACED, was also just getting started in community economic development. We were founded with a primary purpose to work alongside entrepreneurs to help strengthen businesses from the inside out. However, after a few years, staff realized entrepreneurs like Sammy and Tommy weren’t able to access financing from traditional lenders.  

Launching our loan fund in 1981, B&H became one of the organization’s earliest loan clients and one of our longest lasting success stories, but the growth was not without challenges. 

More than a Loan 

As MACED and B&H began to work together on the business’s projections, MACED staff found that while demand was strong, management systems needed improvement. B&H’s accounting indicated a small profit, but a deeper analysis revealed it was actually operating at a loss. Instead of shying away from the risk, MACED worked with B&H’s leadership to develop a plan for growth, improve management practices, and invest in needed equipment. 

Based on that plan, MACED provided $100,000 in financing, as well as hands-on business support. Within just three months, B&H grew from 12 employees to 21 and became profitable. 

Sammy and Tommy were then able to purchase land and build a 1,200-square-foot facility. Demand continued to grow, helped in part by opportunities connected to Toyota’s arrival in Kentucky. Then came a major setback. A lawsuit involving the original property owner dragged on for three years, making traditional lenders hesitant to provide financing just as the company needed working capital most. 

“We were growing with no cash flow,” Sammy recalled. 

Looking for help, he again contacted MACED.  

“They sent Ed McCormick out here. He audited us, and we hit it off great.” 

Over the years, McCormick became a trusted advisor. MACED helped B&H modernize its accounting and management systems, purchase equipment, and eventually expand into Rockcastle County. 

“We got all the creditors all lined up, but we didn’t have enough to put down,” Sammy said of the expansion. 

They worked with our Lending Team on a creative arrangement of a preferred stock investment that provided the capital needed to open that second facility. Later, B&H was able to buy out that investment, creating what Sammy describes as “a win for everybody.” 

The People Behind the Numbers 

For Sammy, yes, the equipment, square footage, and sales figures over the last five decades matter, but his greatest success is 110+ employees. 

“What I’m most proud of is providing good quality jobs. We probably spend over $5 million a year in payroll. And we have workers who’ve been here three to four decades, and many who have happily retired.”  

During a recent tour of B&H, Sammy walked us through the now 120,000-square foot Richmond facility, stopping every few minutes to introduce his staff. At nearly every workstation, there was a story worth telling—some employees had spent more than 30 or 40 years with the company and were approaching retirement. A newer hire was only on his third day of work. Then there was a young employee whose father and grandfather had both had careers at B&H. Now he is building a career there himself after graduating from technical college. 

As Sammy introduced each person, he knew their histories and their families. He spoke to the role each has played in building the company that generates millions in sales each year, feeding automotive and other industrial clients like Toyota in Georgetown and Link-Belt with essential metal parts. 

For those of us who work in community economic development, getting to see Sammy with his employees and, to think of how we helped get this started all those years ago, was a great reminder of why this work matters. 

“The field of economic development often equates success with how many jobs are created and saved. Those numbers are important, but they aren’t the whole picture of how meaningful investments can be,” said Leslie Ferguson-Oles, Mountain Association’s Chief Advancement Officer. “Every person Sammy introduced us to as we walked represented a story, a family, and a career.”  

As Mountain Association celebrates its 50th anniversary, B&H Tool Works’ growth from a small startup into a sophisticated manufacturer, now serving industries ranging from automotive and aerospace to defense and transportation, stands as a powerful example of what can happen when we invest in Kentuckians.  

To learn more about our 50 years of history, please visit here.

The post Forging a Future: How B&H Tool Works and Mountain Association Grew Together over 50 Years  appeared first on Mountain Association.

This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by Joshua Schank to talk about his book, “New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector.” In a broad-ranging discussion about urban dysfunction, Schank talks about the inner workings of LA Metro, the benefits of openness and transparency, and, of course, the importance of strategic planning.

Of course, no one gets away easy; we also share frustrations about meetings, transit board structures, and agency fiefdoms.

You know the drill. On Talking Headways you can:

• Read an excerpt of our exhilarating conversation below.
• You can read the entire text (with some transcription typos) here.
• Our you could do the right thing and put on some headphones and click “play” in the player below:

Here’s the edited portion:

Jeff Wood: What was it like when you got to LA Metro? I read the section about the “Board staff,” and I wanted to throw the book at the wall! But I also then thought, “You’re in LA, why don’t we make a ‘Parks and Rec’-type TV show about this group of folks who control, but don’t control, but do control, but don’t control the whole process of creating policy and moving things through the line at LA Metro?”

Joshua Schank: Yeah, it was quite the shock — “Board staff” definitely being one of the examples of a thing that was a big shock to me.

I’d obviously had worked around public agencies my whole life. I started my career at MTA in New York. I knew something about how agencies functioned, but I didn’t quite understand how bad it could be. I imagined in my naive mind that most people working in the agency shared the goals that I had. Like, basic things, like improving public transportation or reducing the number of trips by car — you know, the types of things that you would assume if you’re working at Metro, you care about.

But there’s a whole swath of people working in and around Metro, or any public agency, who just don’t care about those things because that’s not why they got into it.

The person running HR is unlikely to be passionate about transportation. The person running procurement is unlikely to be passionate about transportation. And then the Board staff are the most egregious example, because the Board staff is essentially political people who are now put in a position of dealing with transportation experts at this big agency.

So for those who don’t know, the “Board staff” is essentially support staff for the elected officials who run Metro, who sit on LA Metro’s board. They’re the equivalent of congressional staff (and I was a congressional staffer one time). I understand how that works. The difference is that as a congressional staffer, you get to make really important decisions behind the scenes that lead to legislative change, right, and you help inform your boss about how to vote on those decisions, what amendments to put in, et cetera.

In this case, the people are in the job themselves because the electeds have another job. The elected’s job isn’t to be on the board of Metro. The elected’s job is to be the county supervisor, be the mayor of Los Angeles, be whatever that role is, which also includes sitting on the Metro board. So that you wind up with these staff who have an outsized role and outsized influence, and that’s one thing that makes it unusual.

The second thing is that because of the Brown Act, the Board staff can serve as a proxy sometimes for responding to Metro board items, because the Brown Act says that if you’re going to have all the board together in a discussion, that you have to have it be a public meeting.

You can’t do that behind closed doors, except under a special set of circumstances. So Board staff briefings at Metro were created so that the Board staff could hear Metro items before they go to the board, and give the likely reaction of Metro board members behind closed doors. And those Board staff briefings are where a lot of policy gets made and people hear and discuss what’s going to happen. You essentially have staffers who are 25 or 30 years old, or maybe they’ve been there 40 years, but they’re political people who are reacting to transportation experts who have come up with answers to solutions.

So it becomes a very challenging situation that when I got there, I almost couldn’t believe it was happening.

Jeff Wood: I imagine that’s how it’s like at a number of agencies, and it’s all structure upon structure upon structure upon structure. I mean, you have the Brown Act, you have the requirements of the legislators, you have all this stuff that has to happen, but then it creates this convoluted way of communicating with each other, which then itself doesn’t make sense.

The structures make sense from trying to protect the public, right? But then when you put them all together and mash up, it’s a recipe that doesn’t taste good.

Joshua Schank: That’s right, and I think the fundamental issue is that elected officials serving directly on the board of a regional agency can be very problematic, and it’s problematic because they are primarily serving their constituents, and the agency is a second job.

In California, almost all the agencies are structured that way. You almost always have elected officials on the board, or sometimes in a couple of cases, they’re elected directly to the board, which I’ve heard is even worse. But if you’re an elected official serving on a board of a transit agency, everything that the transit agency does is going to be put through that hyper-political lens, and it’s gonna be much harder to have the regional perspective.

I would argue, based on my experience at Metro, that strong governance reforms are necessary in California if we’re going to have public transit agencies that are successful.

Researchers in Finland have developed a way to make leather-like fabrics from fungi at large scale using industrial equipment. This is a key advance towards vegan plastic-free leather alternatives for the mass market.

“Our process uses renewable feedstocks and mild conditions and does not involve livestock or chemically intensive processes,” says Géza Szilvay, and industrial biotechnologist and food scientist at VTT Finland, who published the research in the journal ACS Applied Bio Materials. “In this respect the process differentiates clearly from production of animal or synthetic leathers.”

Humans have for eons used animal hides to make clothing, utensils, and tools. Scientific advances have led to ethical synthetic leather. But those materials are made from fossil fuel-based plastics, so they create carbon emissions and linger in the environment for decades.

In the hunt for sustainable vegan leather alternatives, researchers and a few startups have recently looked at fungus. More specifically mycelium: the soft white mass of fibers that form the root-like underground structure of fungus.

Besides being free of animal cruelty, mycelium-based leather is sustainable. Mycelium grows in as little as two weeks requiring minimal water and energy, and it fully biodegrades at the end of its life. This has also prompted researchers to explore its use for sustainable building materials and electronics. Once harvested and processed into mats, mycelium looks and behaves much like leather. It is soft and supple, and has a surface that manufacturers can texturize and dye.

 

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But it it challenging to work with. It can be inconsistent in thickness and more fragile than hide. That’s because “most approaches grow mycelium directly as sheets, leveraging on a natural bottom-up biofabrication process,” Szilvay says.

He and colleagues took a different approach. They first grow the mycelium in a nutrient-rich liquid in a bioreactor to create a wet pulp. Then they wash the pulp and mix it with sorbitol and cellulose. Sorbitol makes the mass soft and less brittle, while the cellulose adds strength. Then they spread the flexible and durable fungal mass into thin sheets and dry them.

The team was able to make 1 meter of the material per minute using a roll-to-roll process. This approach offers greater flexibility in formulations so the properties of the fabric can be tuned, Szilvay says. “With certain formulations we achieved mechanical properties that are in the range reported for animal leather.” But the researchers still need more work to make materials with the same tear strength and abrasion resistance as animal leather.

“We believe the concept has the potential to become a viable alternative to non-renewable synthetic leathers,” he says. “More broadly, the paper shows how the range of biotechnology derived materials expands beyond chemical building blocks, bioplastics and proteins towards new kinds of materials.”

Source: Pauliina Ahokas et al. Production of Mycelium-Based Nonwoven Fabrics via Submerged Fermentation. ACS Applied Bio Materials, 2026.

In many ways, Central and Eastern Europe is not a newcomer to degrowth. It helped shape some of its foundational ideas.

Drawing on the insights of more than 1,000 groups worldwide, here is a compilation of stories, guides, webinars and an ongoing discussion course to help communities drive long-term change.

We embarked on a journey of transformation, traveling to many sacred sites across the interior of the North American continent.

• Cities first started installing bollards after 9/11. Since then, they’ve been used to stop drivers from using their vehicles to ram into pedestrians on the sidewalk. The New York Times calls them a sign of the militarization of cities that have become just another part of urban life.
• Architecture and urban planning have a role to play in keeping people moving and healthy, rather than just telling everyone to get more exercise (Arch Daily). This has a lot to do with cars, because they take up much more space in limited public right-of-ways than people do (Princeton University Press). Plus, climate change won’t be solved by individual choices, but only by public policy and collective action, according to author Leah C. Stokes (MIT Press Reader).
• Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron has some practical tips for going car-free.
• More U.S. cities, including Seattle and St. Louis, are putting up gates at light rail stations to increase their farebox revenue. (Mass Transit)
• Richmond leaders want the state of Virginia to drop the legal limit for DUI from a 0.08 blood alcohol level to 0.05. Drinking was a factor in 37 percent of the city’s crashes. (Axios)
• The Minneapolis Blue Line is still short $224 million. (Minnesota Public Radio)
• U.S. DOT officials spent two days in Atlanta looking into transit agency MARTA’s safety and security. (AJC)
• Nashville is developing a tool to measure how new development affects traffic. (Fox 17)
• After a recent court ruling in its favor, Doug Ford’s Ontario government is already starting to rip out Toronto bike lanes. (CBC)
• A new report frames high-speed rail between Toronto and Quebec City as essential for Canada’s economic development. (The Whig)
• A German company invented a tire that’s made out of 43 percent recycled materials and allows electric vehicles to get more out of their batteries. (Auto Next)

The power of birdsong to lift the human spirit has long been appreciated.

In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, a suffering person is revived when “Haply I think on thee, and then my state,/Like to the lark at break of day arising/From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate ….”

Today, the effect is evident in apps designed to soothe people with birdsong, and in a growing body of research showing that when people hear recordings of birds singing they cope better with stress and feel more restored.

But what happens when we hear those birds amid the clamor of urban life? After all, most of us can’t easily get away to a peaceful forest far from the nearest road.

Even relatively quiet traffic sounds well below thresholds recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) take a toll, leaching away the bird-born calm, according to a new paper in the journal People and Nature.

Although we are creatures of the Anthropocene, apparently a part of our ancient brains that reacts to sounds didn’t get the memo.

“Traffic noise undoubtedly affects the psychological benefits of natural soundscapes. With urban planning now including more green spaces, it is important that steps are taken so that people enjoy such areas to their fullest,” said Eleanor Ratcliffe, a University of Surrey researcher who studies interactions between psychology and the environment.

Ratcliffe and colleagues at several United Kingdom universities conducted experiments to understand how urban noise affected the benefits of hearing birds singing. First, they conducted on online experiment in which more than 1,500 people listened to a series of 9 audio recordings. Each contained songs from three different species totaling five birds, many of them mixed with sounds of a city, such as traffic noise. The recordings varied by the loudness of the human sounds and the complexity and loudness of the bird recordings.

Afterwards, people answered questions about their responses, such as, “The variety of sounds in this recording make me feel ….”

 

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For a deeper dive in more controlled conditions, the researchers conducted similar experiments with 62 university students in a lab. There they also hooked the subjects up to a device that measured the variability in their heart rate from beat to beat. A more variable rate is associated with lower stress.

The results showed that traffic noises consistently eroded the benefits of the birds. Louder traffic, not surprisingly, had a bigger effect. But even traffic perceived at 43 decibels – roughly equivalent to a refrigerator’s hum or a quiet office – diminished the benefits. The rankings by the study participants were mirrored in their heart rate variability. When traffic mixed with the birds, the variability was lower.

There’s evidence that at least part of what’s going on is that the overall intensity of sounds can overload people. The negative effects of loud traffic were amplified when the nature sounds were also dialed up to greater intensity.

In some ways, it appears that humans prefer a sort of acoustic middle ground. When the natural sounds were at a mid-level of loudness and complexity, people generally reported feeling better than when natural sounds were high end or low end and mixed with city noise. Likewise, people perceived more bird diversity in that mid-range, even though the number and species of birds were the same in each recording.

The findings suggest that when organizations are designing urban refuges such as parks, they shouldn’t forget to shut their eyes and listen. Measures such as lower speed limits on nearby roads or thicker perimeter vegetation could help preserve the acoustic benefits of the sweet sounds of Shakespeare’s lark.

“It is important that people get to spend time in nature and are able to appreciate its benefits without being distracted by noise,” said Ratcliffe.

Uebel, et. al. “The influence of acoustic characteristics and anthropogenic noise on restorative perceptions of natural soundscapes.” People and Nature. Aug. 25, 2026.

Photo by Mateusz Walendzik/Pexels

How did humans go from living in small-scale communities where everyone knew each other to building a massive civilization filled with billions of strangers? Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, author of "The Score," joins the odyssey to explore the strange relationship between games and large-scale society.

Marinette County could well become a model of sustainability. However, sprawling development may impede its progress as the next iteration of an economic threat to ecosystems.

In a world of AI and data centers and phones in our pockets that demand continual attention, Berry’s voice remains as important as ever.

• About three in 10 U.S. drivers think there’s nothing wrong with speeding, according to a AAA poll. The reality is, there’s plenty wrong with it, like the fact that it kills people. Nearly a third of traffic deaths involve excessive speeds. (Jalopnik)
• Miriam Pinski argues that one reason transit projects take so long and cost so much is because we ask them to do too much — beautify the neighborhood, save the environment, create jobs, etc. — when the most important thing is to create a reliable system people will choose to ride (Works in Progress). Meanwhile, Reece Martin went into even greater depth about the same topic (The Transit Brief).
• The Federal Railway Administration is loosening a lot of train safety regulations. (Trains)
• The California legislature sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a bill cutting red tape for high-speed rail. (EIN Presswire)
• Maryland’s $22 billion, six-year transportation budget includes just $100 million for Red Line planning (Daily Record). Meanwhile, an audit found that the state failed to collect more than $800 million in tolls (Maryland Matters).
• West Virginia groups asked a federal court for an injunction to stop the last phase of the Corridor H freeway project. (WDTV)
• The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy opposes Florida’s plan to use federal funds for EV chargers for flying taxis instead.
• Pittsburgh is replacing its 30-year-old light rail cars. (WTAE)
• Portland is considering offering city government employees free transit passes while Interstate 5 is closed for construction. (Willamette Week)
• Colorado has become a national leader on clean transportation, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
• Governing magazine honored Randy Clarke as one of its public officials of the year for revitalizing the D.C. Metro.
• Riders on Charlotte’s Gold Line now have to request a stop when they want to get off the light rail train. (Queen City News)
• The European Union wants member states to make the default urban speed limit 30 kilometers per hour, or about 20 miles per hour (Euro Cities). Birmingham, England has already beat them to the punch (BBC).
• Piggybacking on the discourse Streetsblog NYC stirred up over bike helmets, Belgium has made them mandatory for scooters that go over 20 kph. (Zag Daily)

Politicians overestimate opposition to climate action, as well as how polarized the public is on the issue, according to a new study. The findings suggest that a “spiral of silence” may dampen politicians’ willingness to go to bat for climate policies that are actually quite popular.

Previous research has shown that members of the public tend to underestimate support for climate action among their fellow citizens. But less evidence is available about the perceptions of politicians, whom one might expect to be dialed in to the nuances of public opinion.

In the new study, researchers surveyed 100 members of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, first asking about the politicians’ own support for four different climate policies: providing grants and loans to improve home energy efficiency; taxing consumer products according to their environmental impact; imposing a “frequent flyer tax” that increases the cost of air travel depending on how often people fly; and raising taxes on red meat and dairy products.

The politicians were then asked to estimate support and opposition for the home energy efficiency and consumer product tax policies among the general public, among voters of different parties, and among their fellow MPs. The researchers compared the answers with recent public polling results on the same policies.

The MPs underestimated public support for climate policies, pegging support for the product tax at 14.9 percentage points and for the energy efficiency subsidies at 7.1 percentage points less than poll results suggest.

They also overestimated public opposition by three-fold for the energy efficiency subsidies and almost two-fold for the consumer product tax.

“MPs who are personally less supportive tend to underestimate public support more, while even highly supportive MPs still underestimate on average,” the researchers write.

 

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The MPs overestimated how far apart voters of different parties are on climate policy, judging a 25 percentage point difference between Labour and Conservative Party voters on support for the insulation and product tax policies when the actual spread is just 12 percent.

The politicians thought that Conservative voters in particular are much more likely to oppose climate action than these voters actually say they are.

MP perceptions of public attitudes shape their own choices as politicians. Individual MPs who thought public support for the consumer product tax was lower were also less willing to advocate for it publicly, regardless of their own stance on the issue. MPs who perceived the tax as less popular among fellow parliamentarians were also less willing to promote it, again regardless of their own opinions.

This is what’s known as a “spiral of silence,” in which the misperception that a policy or position is unpopular dampens an individual’s willingness to advocate for it.

For half of the MPs, the researchers presented information about public polling results on the first two policies before asking the politicians to gauge public support for the second two. They wondered if this information might cause the MPs to consider that climate policies in general might be more popular than they had assumed.

But this wasn’t the case. The intervention didn’t improve politicians’ estimation of public support for climate policies; neither did it increase their willingness to advocate for the policies in public or in Parliament – even among MPs who personally supported the policies.

“Together, these findings suggest that misperceptions of others’ preferences at the elite level within Parliament are structured in a way that may actively discourage climate leadership, by presenting public opinion on climate policy as both weaker and more polarised than it actually is,” the researchers write.

Source: Tanase L.-M. et al. “Perception gaps in the British Parliament reveal a possible pathway to stronger climate action.” Communications Sustainability 2026.

Image: Based on an image by Yutthana Gaetgeaw/iStock.com. ©Anthropocene Magazine.

Whatever else AI may do, its data centers will consume vast amounts of energy and keep driving fossil-fuel emissions for years to come, lending us humans a distinct helping hand in overheating this planet

Funding freezes, grant terminations, program cancellations, and a woefully understaffed USDA have disrupted the programs and services farmers and rural communities rely on to build environmentally resilient and economically viable businesses.

As soaring consumer prices, supply chain disruptions, and reductions in government-provided funding and services threaten communities, localists can help bolster local markets and inspire mutual aid efforts, helping mobilize folks to take more responsibility for their own collective resilience and well-being.

• The New York Times devoted 2,000 words to bike lanes and the politicians who ridicule them, never once considering whether they make streets and all of their users safer.
• The Trump administration is appealing a federal court ruling barring it from withholding funds for a $16 billion Hudson River rail tunnel. (Trains)
• The U.S. DOT is weakening rules governing fuel economy for heavy-duty commercial trucks. (E&E News)
• West Coast leaders from British Columbia to Baja are looking to create the infrastructure for electric semi trucks along Interstate 5, one of the busiest freight corridors in the country. (Government Technology)
• A motorist drove onto a sidewalk in Fort Collins during the popular Tour de Fat parade, killing one person and injuring five others. (Coloradoan)
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• As in many places, cyclists in Minnesota are worried about getting doored. (Star Tribune)
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