Roughly 19 women are killed with a firearm in domestic violence homicide-suicides each month, according to a new report released Thursday from Everytown for Gun Safety shared exclusively with The 19th. 

“When we look at the public discourse on gun violence or on gun violence prevention, it tends to surround very public mass shootings,” said Sonali Rajan, senior director of research at the gun violence prevention nonprofit that advocates for gun control. The type of violence covered in the new report is a “conflation of two public health and public safety crises” — intimate partner violence and suicide. 

Ninety-nine percent of incidents in the report, which looks at data from 2014 to 2020, involved a man shooting a woman. Men make up 87 percent of suicides by firearm in the United States. 

“Firearms make it five times more likely that an abuser will kill their female partner,” Rajan said. Access to a gun also increases the likelihood of death by suicide because of impulsivity and the lethality of firearms.

Nearly 5,500 women were killed by an intimate partner across seven years of data, according to Everytown. In a third of those instances, the abuser then killed themselves and 85 percent of those dual tragedies involved a firearm. The figure is likely underrepresented due to uneven state-by-state data collection. It also doesn’t include women who were injured by their partner’s firearm, or threatened with one. 

Crucially, this type of lethal violence is preventable. Policy analysis showed that states with strong gun control laws had three times fewer incidents of domestic violence homicide-suicide versus states with the weakest legal codes. 

“The lethality and accessibility of firearms give abusers in suicidal crisis the ability to overpower and harm multiple people with little chance for intervention or survival,” according to the report. 

When an abuser shoots their partner, then kills themself, the trauma ripples through a community. Everytown gathered a focus group of 43 survivors of this type of violence last year, and participants reported that children were witnesses in 43 percent of domestic-violence homicide suicides. 

One tool Everytown points to that can help prevent such crimes is an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO), which confiscates firearms from someone deemed to be an immediate threat to themselves or others. 

A study of Oregon’s ERPO law found such orders were most frequently issued against someone at risk of suicide — important because 1 in 4 members of Everytown’s focus group said perpetrators of intimate partner homicide-suicide had a history of suicidal behaviors. 

“Research very clearly shows that laws that are intended to disarm abusers work and they’re really, really critical to the safety of survivors,” Rajan said. A paper from 2018 found states that prevent subjects of domestic violence restraining orders from owning a gun had a permanent reduction in intimate partner homicides. Extreme risk orders have been shown to result in fewer suicides.

Doreen Dodgen-Magee was among the people who testified in support of creating Oregon’s law. Thirty years ago, she held a party on the eve of her niece’s first day of kindergarten. Family and loved ones filled Sarah’s backpack with love notes and well wishes. The next day, Dodgen-Magee got a phone call saying Sarah’s father had shot and killed Sarah, her younger siblings, Rachel and April, and their mother, Laura, in a fit of jealous rage. He also shot Dodgen-Magee’s mother-in-law, Margaret, who survived but needed a caretaker for the rest of her life. 

Dodgen-Magee believes an ERPO could have helped save Laura and her children. 

“It’s not just having those laws in place, but then doing the really hard work of making sure that everyone in the community knows about them,” she said. 

ERPOs didn’t yet exist in Oregon in 1995. Dodgen-Magee and her husband had helped Laura recognize the signs of an abusive relationship and supported her when she filed for divorce. Laura’s ex had a history of violence; after she moved out to live with her mom, he broke into their house and raped her. Laura filed for a restraining order, but it didn’t prevent her death. 

After the shooting, Dodgen-Magee found journals where Laura wrote down her fears of her ex killing her. She wrote that if anything happened to her, Dodgen-Magee and her husband should get custody of her children. But Laura’s ex was able to get a gun and kill them all. 

Today, Dodgen-Magee is a psychologist and teaches continuing education units for other practitioners. In every training, she has participants look up ERPO laws in their state and save the appropriate hotline to their phone. The laws don’t do any good if the people equipped to help aren’t aware of them, or the women who are in danger don’t know about their existence. 

There isn’t a day that goes by without Dodgen-Magee reflecting on her lost family members and how the tragedy has shaped her life. 

“I feel more compelled than I do called to this work. I feel like I must,” she said. “I must make the world understand that these were four beautiful, beautiful, important people in the world who should still be here, and could still be here if we could come together around making sure that people who shouldn’t own firearms or have access to them don’t.”

Kansas Bureau of Investigation director Tony Mattivi, right, and Attorney General Kris Kobach talk to reporters during an Oct. 1, 2025, news conference on illegal retail sales of marijuana and THC products. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — Kansas Bureau of Investigation director Tony Mattivi and Attorney General Kris Kobach announced a crackdown Wednesday on “brazen” sales of marijuana and THC products as law enforcement raided 10 shops in six cities across the state.

The two spoke to reporters at a news conference in Topeka while the raids were underway, and they said additional stores would be targeted later Wednesday and again on Thursday.

Mattivi said the KBI was targeting illegal retail drug sales because teenagers were suffering dire health consequences from consuming products with high concentrations of THC.

“I was at one of these locations earlier today,” Mattivi said. “The violations of the Kansas Controlled Substances Act are brazen. These places are selling pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes. They’re selling marijuana bud. They’re selling marijuana flower in canisters and cigarette by cigarette.

“The places that we’ve identified today are nothing but weed dealers in strip malls, and we cannot continue to not enforce our controlled substance laws when we have these substances causing bad effects on Kansas kids.”

Mattivi said a Kansas child would face less resistance buying marijuana than tobacco cigarettes.

“That has to come to an end, and that’s what we did today,” he said.

The KBI and local law enforcement spent weeks planning the raids in locations where local prosecutors had agreed to bring charges, Mattivi said. The initial wave of targets included smoke and vape shots in Concordia, McPherson, Pratt, Salina, Topeka and Wichita. The seized products would be sent to KBI or private labs for testing, Mattivi said.

While Kansas is surrounded by states that have legalized marijuana to some extent, the drug remains illegal here. Kansas lawmakers have considered bills in recent years that would legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes, and the House passed legislation in 2021, but Senate leadership has stonewalled various proposals. The issue is expected to resurface in the next year’s legislative session, ahead of election season.

For now, Kobach said, the laws have to be enforced. And, he said, there are many illegal products available at stores in Kansas, including THC vapes and THC teas.

“In recent years, enforcement of our laws against marijuana and THC in Kansas have been intermittently or, in some jurisdictions, not enforced at all,” Kobach said. “And so this is an announcement that that period of lax enforcement is ending, and the KBI has taken the lead in identifying places that have become particularly brazen in their selling of marijuana products.”

Kobach and Mattivi traced the rise in illegal sales to the 2018 Farm Bill passed by Congress that legalized some hemp products.

“Since the Farm Bill passed, there’s been a growing acceptance of some of these products, whether they’re CBD or or THC,” Mattivi said. “Over time, these shops, I think, have pushed the envelope and pushed the envelope and pushed the envelope.”

Some of the products, Mattivi said, contain 75-95% pure THC.

“Part of the problem that we’re dealing with when it comes to THC and marijuana is that there has been a continuous rise in the concentration, or the level of purity, the level of THC, that’s present in these products,” Mattivi said. “This isn’t the 6 or 7% THC ditch weed that a lot of people in this state are familiar with.”

The KBI said the following stores were raided midday Wednesday: Two EZ Smoke and Vape locations in Wichita, Whiskey River Trading in Pratt, Cigarette Outlet in Pratt, Pratt Tobacco and Vape in Pratt, Space Out Smoke Vapor & Tobacco in Salina, Vapor 100 in Salina, Mountain Gypsy Vape Shop in Concordia, The Hanging Leaf in McPherson, and Sacred Leaf in Topeka.

I actually wrote this article yesterday before the government shutdown happened so I don’t really discuss that, but it sounds like we may end up going through all this again if the Trump regime goes through with its plans to use the shutdown to fire a bunch more people who are important, but who no one in charge is smart enough to understand what they do.

Remember when Elon Musk and his merry band of DOGE vandals were going to revolutionize government by firing everyone and slashing everything? Yeah, about that. Turns out when you fire people who actually know how to do essential jobs, you eventually need to… hire them back. Who could have predicted this shocking turn of events? (Spoiler: literally everyone who was paying attention.)

The General Services Administration is now desperately begging hundreds of federal employees to come back after Musk’s cost-cutting blitz left the agency “broken and understaffed.” These are the same workers who were supposedly dead weight that needed to be eliminated to save taxpayer money. Funny how that worked out.

The General Services Administration has given the employees — who managed government workspaces — until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.

Those who accept must report for duty on October 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation, during which time the GSA in some cases racked up high costs — passed along to taxpayers — to stay in dozens of properties whose leases it had slated for termination or were allowed to expire.

A seven-month paid vacation. Let’s pause to appreciate the stunning “efficiency” here. These workers got fired, kept getting paid, and now the government is begging them to come back because—surprise!—they actually knew what they were doing, were needed, and when they were suddenly cut loose it turned out to be an expensive mess that made it harder for the government to function. Meanwhile, taxpayers footed the bill for both their salaries and the mounting costs of properties that couldn’t be properly managed without them.

Of course, this was pretty much what a ton of actual experts warned would happen.

This is exactly what happens when a bunch of overconfident, under-informed Silicon Valley bros assume that complex government operations are just inefficient startups waiting to be “disrupted.” GSA wasn’t some bloated tech company with redundant product managers—it’s the agency that manages thousands of federal work spaces. You know, actual critical infrastructure that keeps the government functioning.

And, of course, GSA actually had a strong and incredibly effective team that worked on efficiency… and Musk fired them all.

“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate official. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

Becker, who represents owners with government leases at Arco Real Estate Solutions, said GSA has been in a “triage mode” for months. He said the sudden reversal of the downsizing reflects how Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had gone too far, too fast.

“Too far, too fast” is a charitable way to describe what amounts to institutional vandalism. This wasn’t thoughtful government reform—it was pure destruction for the sake of destroying anything a bunch of ignorant, incurious idiots didn’t understand, on the assumption that if they didn’t understand it, it couldn’t be that important.

They were wrong, and now taxpayers are left footing the bill.

Also, we’re not just talking about GSA here. There’s a pattern here of institutional destruction masquerading as reform. The rehiring wave is spreading across multiple agencies as the reality of Musk’s “efficiency” vision crashes into the actual requirements of running a government:

Last month, the IRS said it would allow some employees who took a resignation offer to remain on the job. The Labor Department has also brought back some employees who took buyouts, while the National Park Service earlier reinstated a number of purged employees.

The scale of this backtracking is breathtaking. When you’re rehiring at the IRS, Labor Department, National Park Service, and GSA simultaneously, that’s not fine-tuning—that’s admitting your entire approach was fundamentally broken.

In the end, the massive job cuts that were supposed to save money have, instead, created expensive messes that cost way more than the original “inefficiencies” they were meant to fix:

The administration slashed GSA’s headquarters staff by 79%, its portfolio managers by 65% and facilities managers by 35%, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, provided the statistics on condition of anonymity.

As a result of the internal turmoil, 131 leases expired without the government actually vacating the properties, the official said. The situation has exposed the agencies to steep fees because property owners have not been able to rent out those spaces to other tenants.

This is what happens when you mistake activity for achievement. DOGE fired nearly everyone who managed the government’s portfolio of real estate and then acted shocked when nobody was left to manage the portfolios. Now taxpayers are on the hook for “steep fees” because properties couldn’t be properly vacated. The government is paying rent on spaces it’s not using because the people who knew how to handle lease transitions were… fired to save money.

And now they’re desperately trying to hire them back so they won’t even save money on the decrease in salaries.

Even DOGE’s own metrics show how spectacularly this has backfired:

DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts,” which once boasted that the lease cancellations alone would save nearly $460 million, has since reduced that estimate to $140 million by the end of July, according to Becker, the former GSA real estate official.

From $460 million in supposed savings down to $140 million in actual savings—a 70% reduction in their own projections. This collapse in projected savings reveals the fundamental flaw in DOGE’s approach: they counted theoretical benefits from lease cancellations without accounting for the institutional knowledge required to execute those cancellations. The real number, factoring in transition costs, legal fees, and operational disruptions, is almost certainly negative. And that’s assuming you trust DOGE’s remaining figures. Which you probably shouldn’t.

This entire debacle perfectly illustrates the fundamental flaw in the “government is just a broken business” mentality. Government agencies exist to serve public functions that often don’t map neatly onto Silicon Valley efficiency models. When you fire the people who understand complex lease agreements, regulatory compliance, and interagency coordination, you don’t get innovation—you get extremely expensive chaos.

The particularly galling part is that these workers will now return to clean up the mess created by their own firing. They’ll spend months untangling lease complications, rebuilding institutional knowledge, and reestablishing relationships with contractors and other agencies. All of this remedial work will cost far more than their original salaries ever did.

The Government Accountability Office is now investigating this mess, which means taxpayers will also foot the bill for studying how badly DOGE screwed up:

The Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog, is examining the GSA’s management of its workforce, lease terminations and planned building disposals and expects to issue findings in the coming months, said David Marroni, a senior GAO official.

So we’re paying to study the costs of the effort that led to the cuts that didn’t save money but instead cost more money. It’s inefficiency all the way down.

This is what happens when you let tech bros cosplay as government reformers with no oversight or expertise. They mistake complexity for inefficiency, assume institutional knowledge is just bureaucratic dead weight, and believe that “disruption” is always improvement. The result is predictable: expensive chaos that requires the very expertise they dismissed to fix.

The federal employees now being begged to return have every right to negotiate better terms, demand back pay for the chaos they didn’t create, and insist on job security protections against future DOGE-style tantrums. They’re the ones who will clean up this mess, rebuild what was broken, and restore the basic functions that kept government working before Musk decided to reinvent the wheel as a square.

Rather than government efficiency we ended up with expensive performance art designed to satisfy the digitally-inspired fantasies of people who think running a government is like optimizing a social media algorithm. The only thing DOGE has efficiently accomplished is proving that some people’s expertise actually matters, even if—especially if—Silicon Valley billionaires don’t understand what that expertise does.

I am reminded of Rod Hilton’s viral Mastodon post from a few years back about Elon Musk:

If you can’t see that, it says:

He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

I get the feeling that a lot of government workers who previously thought he was a genius may also now choose to stay away from Musk’s cars and rockets. As they should.

Today, the Lego Game Boy officially goes on sale. It’s surprisingly good. But in Australia, one woman has already created a more amazing version. Natalie the Nerd, the self-taught circuit board designer and Game Boy modder whose gorgeous transparent Game Boy we featured in August, is doing what Nintendo and Lego didn’t: make it playable.

Let me be clear: this is not an emulator. Natalie did not stuff a Raspberry Pi in here. It’s far more impressive than that. What you’re seeing are real Game Boy cartridges, running on real Game Boy chips, soldered to a real circuit board of Natalie’s own creation. Working buttons, too.

To fit it into the Lego Game Boy, she had to create a complete Game Boy board smaller than a Game Boy cartridge itself — so she did. Adding “the smallest screen kit on the market” did require removing a few bricks, though, she tells The Verge.

It’s not complete — not just yet. The working buttons, for instance, aren’t yet mounted on a PCB; she tells The Verge they’ll fit on a custom 3D-printed Lego piece.

She’s already wired up USB-C for power:

And here’s a look at the insides and where they live:

Now, to answer your obvious question: is this a one-off, or something you might be able to do yourself? The chances are good that you might if you’re skilled! Natalie sells aftermarket components for Game Boy modding, shares circuit board designs, and is planning to share this too. “I am going to release it once I am happy with it,” she writes on X.

I’ve spent considerable time lately documenting how America’s corporate elite have transformed themselves into the exact cartoon villains that Marxists always claimed they were—groveling before authoritarian power, paying tribute to criminal regimes, abandoning every principle they’ve spent decades claiming to represent. But criticism without constructive alternatives is just intellectual masturbation, so let me offer some practical guidance for any CEO who might still possess a functioning moral compass.

If you are a person of influence in the corporate world, if you actually care about this country and its future, if you understand that your company’s long-term interests depend on the survival of constitutional governance—here’s what you should do immediately.

The Board Room Speech You Need to Give

Call your senior executive team together. Get all your board members on video conference. Tell them that you are committed to the company’s interests, and that one of the things you believe serves the company’s interests is maintaining basic ethical standards—both inside the company and in the society where the company operates.

Remind them that at the end of the day, we are all members of that society, and it is in all of our interests that we live in a free and fair nation governed by law rather than personal whim. Point out that if your company were to make bribes or pay favors to foreign governments, you would face criminal liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Ask them: do any of us think that’s wrong?

Then ask the crucial question: what do we think of the idea of paying bribes to the president of our own country in order to get government licenses or approval for business transactions? Is it really our position that we’re just going to go along with this as “business necessity,” or are we going to lawyer up like responsible corporate citizens and sue the government when it demands tribute?

The Legal and Moral Framework

Here’s what principled corporate leadership looks like in practice:

Refuse Tribute Payments: When administration officials suggest that regulatory approval might go smoother with a “contribution” to Trump-approved causes, document the conversation and file complaints with relevant authorities. Yes, this may slow your approval process. That’s the point—legitimate government doesn’t operate through tribute systems.

Challenge Illegal Conditions: When agencies attach political loyalty tests to routine business transactions, sue immediately. Every settlement payment, every accommodation to illegal demands, every “pragmatic” compromise with corruption makes the system worse for everyone while temporarily protecting your immediate interests.

Coordinate Resistance: Work with other companies facing similar pressure to challenge corrupt practices collectively rather than individually. The administration can intimidate isolated companies much more easily than coordinated business resistance backed by serious legal firepower.

Maintain Public Standards: Continue operating according to constitutional principles even when the government doesn’t. Maintain transparent procurement, independent auditing, ethical business practices that demonstrate what legitimate governance should look like.

The Business Case for Constitutional Governance

This isn’t just moral positioning—it’s strategic necessity for any business that wants to operate in sustainable market conditions:

Legal Predictability: Tribute economies destroy the rule of law that makes long-term business planning possible. When regulatory approval depends on political loyalty rather than legal compliance, no business can predict future operating conditions.

Market Integrity: Corruption destroys competitive markets by making political connections more valuable than product quality, innovation, or efficiency. Your company’s success should depend on serving customers, not serving regime officials.

International Reputation: Every American company that accommodates Trump’s tribute demands destroys America’s reputation as a reliable business partner and constitutional democracy. This makes international cooperation more difficult and expensive for everyone.

Talent Retention: Ethical employees don’t want to work for companies that pay bribes to maintain market position. Brain drain toward companies with integrity creates competitive disadvantages for collaborationist firms.

The Historical Examples

The German Industrialists’ Mistake: Business leaders who thought they could use the Nazis while remaining untouched discovered that authoritarian regimes don’t honor implicit deals with collaborators. When their usefulness expired, their collaboration became evidence of their expendability.

The Post-Apartheid Reckoning: South African businesses that accommodated apartheid found themselves facing massive legal liability, international boycotts, and domestic fury when the system collapsed. Their “pragmatic” accommodation became permanent reputational damage.

The Post-Soviet Transformation: Russian oligarchs who built fortunes through corruption under Yeltsin discovered that their wealth made them targets rather than protected them when Putin consolidated power. Corruption doesn’t create security—it creates vulnerability.

The Choice You Face

You can continue the current path—paying tribute, staying silent, accommodating illegal demands, hoping that compliance will protect you when the regime’s appetite for control inevitably expands. This path leads to the complete destruction of competitive markets, constitutional governance, and ultimately your own legitimacy as business leaders.

Or you can choose the harder path of principled resistance: challenging illegal demands through courts, coordinating with other businesses facing similar pressure, maintaining ethical standards despite government pressure, and demonstrating that American business still believes in American values.

The Stakes for You

Every day you delay this choice, you make capitalism’s eventual reckoning more severe. Every tribute payment, every silent accommodation, every “pragmatic” compromise with corruption provides ammunition for socialist organizers who argue that business interests inevitably choose authoritarianism over democracy when their privileges are threatened.

You are proving their argument correct. You are validating every Marxist critique of capitalism through your own behavior. You are ensuring that whatever emerges from this constitutional crisis will be far more hostile to market systems than anything you would have faced by choosing resistance over accommodation.

The Leadership Opportunity

The irony is that principled resistance would actually enhance your long-term position rather than threatening it. Business leaders who stood up to authoritarian demands, who defended constitutional principles despite economic costs, who chose democratic integrity over oligarchic access—they would emerge from this crisis with enormous moral authority and political capital.

Instead, you’re choosing the path that maximizes short-term comfort while ensuring long-term destruction. You’re preserving immediate profits while discrediting the market system that makes profit accumulation legitimate.

The Bottom Line

If you actually believe in the free market capitalism you’ve spent decades defending, then defend it. If you actually think constitutional governance serves business interests better than oligarchic tribute systems, then defend constitutional governance. If you actually care about leaving your children a country worth inheriting, then stop acting like the cartoon villains in someone else’s revolution.

The hour is late, but it’s not too late. American business still has the resources, legal standing, and collective power to challenge systematic corruption if you choose to use them. But that window is closing rapidly, and every day of continued accommodation makes the eventual reckoning more severe.

You wanted to be remembered as job creators and wealth builders. Keep accommodating authoritarianism, and you’ll be remembered as the useful idiots who handed socialists the perfect argument for why capitalism cannot coexist with democracy.

Choose wisely. History is watching, and your children will live with the consequences of whatever choice you make.

But not much time. The choice is yours, but you have to make it now.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Building the suburbs brought many changes to Johnson County’s landscape. Homes, shopping centers, and roads all required changes in the natural topography, vegetation, and streamways. Creeks were straightened or buried in concrete, lawns replaced native plants, and heavy machinery reworked hills and valleys. These changes had lasting effects on the county’s streamways. Read on to learn what happened to our streamways – and what you can do today to help protect them.

Building the Suburbs

After World War II, federal programs like the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration made homeownership more affordable, fueling suburban growth across the nation. In Johnson County, this era marked a dramatic shift from a rural, agricultural landscape to bustling neighborhoods and commercial developments designed to accommodate a rapidly growing population. 

In the 1940s and ’50s, developers utilized new machinery to extensively reshape the land. They flattened hills, filled valleys, and redirected creeks with concrete. Forests were cleared, plains were leveled, and construction surged; often encroaching upon wetlands, hills, and flood-prone areas. This rapid development changed the county’s water systems in ways we still experience today.

• Creek channels straightened and concreted – reduced local flooding but pushed flood risk downstream into Kansas City, Missouri.
• Streamways buried underground – destroyed natural habitats for aquatic and plant life.
• Soil compacted and stripped of vegetation by bulldozers – caused erosion and increased sediment in creeks and storm sewers.
• Lawns replaced native vegetation – shedding more runoff, carrying fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides into waterways.
• Hot runoff from pavement and lawns – sometimes 10 degrees warmer than streams, harming aquatic life.
• Faster, more forceful flows – scoured stream banks, deposited debris, and degraded habitats for fish and insects.                

The Cost of a Perfect Lawn

The lush, green lawn – long a symbol of the American Dream – comes with hidden environmental costs.   

1. Chemicals and care: Lawns often require fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and constant upkeep. Many grasses aren’t suited to Kansas’s climate, leading to soil erosion and vulnerability during droughts. HOAs often enforce lawn standards, further encouraging unsustainable practices.
2. Runoff and pollution: Lawns behave more like concrete than sponges, sending runoff with fertilizer and chemicals into creeks. This pollution fuels harmful algal blooms, depletes oxygen in water, and endangers aquatic life. Even grass clippings swept into storm drains add to the problem.
3. Water consumption: Sprinkler systems can use 12–16 gallons per minute. On hot summer days, WaterOne’s daily usage jumps by 150 million gallons – mostly to keep lawns green. Overwatering also increases the risk of chemicals leaching into groundwater.               [image 4 and 5]

A Healthier Water Future

The scale of suburban water challenges can feel overwhelming – but individuals can make a difference. Here are seven actions recommended by local water experts:

• Plant native species – Deep-rooted plants prevent erosion, filter toxins, and withstand drought.
• Create a rain garden – Johnson County’s Contain the Rain program offers 50% reimbursement for adding native trees, flowers, and shrubs.
• Install a rain barrel – Collect runoff for reuse and get 50% reimbursement through Contain the Rain.
• Rethink your lawn – Swap some water-hungry Kentucky Blue Grass for native plants.
• Limit chemicals – Reduce fertilizers and pesticides, and try alternatives to sidewalk salt in winter.
• Clear your gutters – Keep chemicals, lawn clippings, and debris out of storm drains.
• Protect the soil – Maintain groundcover in gardens, fields, or construction sites to reduce erosion.           

Learn More – Visit the Special Exhibit!

Want to learn more about what in the area? Visit the Johnson County Museum to explore the Museum’s special exhibit, “Ripples: Water, Community, and You.” You can plan your visit at JCPRD.com/Ripples!

Thank you to our exhibit sponsors!

We’re grateful for the generous support of Black & Veatch, Burns & McDonnell, HDR, The Parks & Recreation Foundation of Johnson County, and TREKK Design Group. Their partnership helps us bring the vital story of water to life — for you, your family, and our entire community.