The Big Ten and SEC will soon be heading to the Las Vegas Bowl, taking turns facing the Pac-12 when the game moves into a new billion-dollar NFL stadium in 2020.

The Big Ten, Southeastern Conference and Big 12 unveiled bowl lineups for the 2020-25 seasons Tuesday. Other FBS conferences are expected to release their future bowl agreements over the next several weeks.

The Big Ten has six-year agreements with 11 bowls , including new deals with Las Vegas and the Belk Bowl in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Big Ten will alternate with the SEC in Las Vegas — the expected new home of the Oakland Raiders — and in Charlotte, with the Big Ten taking odd-numbered years in Las Vegas and even-numbered years in Charlotte.

"The city of Las Vegas is a world-class destination that will be attractive to the participants and fans from our schools, and the support provided by the Raiders organization and ESPN will create a tremendous opportunity to elevate this game into a must-see event during the bowl season," Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said in a statement.

The Las Vegas Bowl has been matching the Pac-12 and Mountain West or BYU in a game played on the first Saturday of bowl season. The new Las Vegas Bowl will be played after Christmas and receive the Pac-12's top team not participating in the College Football Playoff or a New Year's Six game.

For the SEC, Las Vegas becomes the farthest point west in its bowl lineup.

"The Las Vegas Bowl provides the SEC with a new and exciting destination for our student-athletes and traveling fans at a location outside our traditional geographic footprint and in a much-anticipated matchup with a Pac-12 Conference opponent," Commissioner Greg Sankey said in a statement.

The Las Vegas and Charlotte deals will replace the Holiday Bowl in San Diego for the Big Ten. The conference is also adding the Cheez-It Bowl in Phoenix to its lineup, and will no longer send teams to the First Responders and Armed Forces bowls in Texas.

The Quick Lane Bowl in Detroit will match a Mid-American Conference team against the Big Ten, starting in 2020. The Atlantic Coast Conference did not extend its deal with the Quick Lane Bowl after six years.

The SEC added a new agreement with the Gasparilla Bowl in Tampa, Florida, and did not renew its contract with the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana. The SEC will head into the new bowl cycle with 10 postseason slots , not counting the playoff. Over the last five years, the SEC has only had enough bowl-eligible teams to fill its Independence Bowl slot twice.

The Big 12 is sticking with its current eight bowl partners through the 2025 season.

Villanova’s Eric Paschall is much less famous than his childhood friend Donovan Mitchell, but Paschall has at least one thing Mitchell wants.

“He’s always like ‘I wish I would have won the national championship,'” Paschall said — which he accomplished in 2018.

While Mitchell has missed out on that, at least at the collegiate level, he did find one thing Paschall wants now: NBA success.

After growing up as neighbors, the two friends started playing together as soon as when they were eight years old, for the Riverside Hawks AAU team. Later, they played for The City AAU team, winning national championships even as 13 year olds. Paschall was the first to dunk, but Mitchell was the first to throw down a windmill.

Want to know what Mitchell was like then?

“Same person he is now,” Paschall said. “If you meet Donovan, he’s the same exact person. He blew up out here, and he’s still the same dude, and me and him still talk all the time. He hit me up before this workout to just say, ‘Hey, go do your thing.’”

Paschall just as Mitchell did two years ago, has been going around the country, showing off his game for NBA teams. As a 6-foot-7 big man with a 6-11 wingspan, the 22-year-old has impressed teams by showing a versatile game for the Wildcats. He can score inside thanks to his wide shoulders and strength, but has shown touch to score on the perimeter as well.

“He’s a good shooter, he’s got a body that can play stretch 4, with his strength. He has NBA range,” Walt Perrin, Jazz vice president of player personnel said after his workout with the Jazz on Tuesday. "Now, he didn’t shoot it very well today, but we know he has NBA range. We know he can shoot the ball.

The Ringer’s mock draft draws a comparison to a young Paul Millsap, another undersized forward that found success in the NBA through his ability to help a team in multiple ways. Paschall doesn’t have Millsap’s rebounding acumen — Millsap was one of the best NCAA rebounders of all time — but much of the all-around potential is there. Others see more limited upside, though.

For Paschall, he’s trying to show off his jack-of-all-trades game to NBA teams in workouts.

“To play in the NBA for me, I’m going to have to be more of a complete player,” he said. “So just doing all the little things defensively, being able to guard guards and bigs, being able to pass the ball, shoot the ball, score the ball. Anyway I can get on the floor, I will.”

And of course, if the Jazz draft him, it won’t hurt that he’s familiar with Mitchell — and his teammates — even before getting into the NBA.

“I’ve been out here with Donovan and I’ve been around the guys, I just like the culture. Everybody’s cool, everybody accepted me just cause I was Donovan’s friend,” Paschall said. “It was cool being able to talk to everybody and be able to just fit in. I really like the program, I really like the way they play.”

He wasn’t alone at the workout, of course. Ole Miss’ Terence Davis, UCF’s Aubrey Dawkins, Washington State’s Robert Franks, Virginia Tech’s Ahmed Hill, and Troy’s Jordan Varnado were the other five participants.

Among them, Davis is the highest-regarded prospect at the moment, thanks to his shooting, defense, and relatively quick first step for a 6-4 guard. He’s been rising up during the pre-draft schedule.

“At the beginning of this process, I wasn’t in the mocks. Got a G-League [combine] invite, played well, got invited to the [NBA] combine, and I’ve just been taking advantage of the opportunities,” Davis said. “Now, they have me top 40 in the process, so things have been in my favor.”

Jazz free-agent mini-camp

On Tuesday, the Jazz also announced the participants in their annual free-agent mini-camp, which helps the team find out about available players for summer league, their G League team, and even Jazz training camp. Here’s the list of players who will work out with the Jazz:

Of note are former first round picks Lucas Noguiera, Justin Patton, Cameron Payne and Thomas Robinson. Willie Reed played for the Salt Lake City Stars last season, as did Isaac Haas, Tre’Shaun Fletcher, Jairus Lyles and Tanner McGrew.

New York • The NBA’s first international Finals may be a coup for Canada, but decidedly not for ABC.

Viewership for the first two games of the series between the Golden State Warriors and Toronto Raptors was down sharply from last year's finals — 28 percent for the first game and 29 percent for the second, the Nielsen company said.

While LeBron James fans may point to the star's absence, geography likely accounts for most of the drop. Toronto's television audience is not included in the Nielsen ratings, since it's out of the U.S. Missing one team's fan base is a huge hurdle for ABC.

It's Golden State's fifth straight appearance in the finals, while Toronto is there for the first time.

The most hopeful sign for ABC is that the teams split the first two games, raising the possibility of a long series. Viewership traditionally increases with competitive series.

The surest sign that summer is near is the return of NBC's "America's Got Talent," which was the top non-sports program of the week.

Behind the basketball, ABC won the week in prime time, averaging 5.4 million viewers. NBC had 3.92 million, nipping CBS and its average of 3.91 million. Fox had 2 million viewers, ION Television had 1.4 million, Univision had 1.3 million, Telemundo had 1.1 million and the CW had 650,000.

Fox News Channel was the week's most popular cable network, averaging 2.24 million viewers in prime time. MSNBC had 1.48 million, HGTV had 1.29 million, USA had 1.14 million and Hallmark had 1.12 million.

ABC's "World News Tonight" topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.1 million viewers. NBC's "Nightly News" had 7.3 million and the "CBS Evening News" had 5.3 million.

For the week of May 27-June 2, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: NBA Finals Game 2: Golden State at Toronto, ABC, 13.89 million; NBA Finals Game 1: Golden State at Toronto, ABC, 13.38 million; “NBA Finals Post-Game” (Sunday), ABC, 9.89 million; “America’s Got Talent,” NBC, 9.75 million; “60 Minutes,” CBS, 7.01 million; “NCIS” (Tuesday, 8 p.m.), CBS, 6.14 million; “The Big Bang Theory,” CBS, 6.03 million; “Young Sheldon,” CBS, 5.86 million; “NCIS” (Tuesday, 9 p.m.), CBS, 5.58 million; “Songland,” NBC, 5.51 million.

As the United Methodist Church has spent decades debating the place of LGBTQ Christians in its ministries, the Rev. Adam Hamilton has emerged as “the Pied Piper for Methodists in the middle.”

At the global denomination’s General Conference meetings in 2012 and 2016, Hamilton — who pastors the largest United Methodist church in the United States — supported measures that would have allowed United Methodists to disagree with its rulebook, which asserts the “practice of homosexuality” is “incompatible” with Christian teaching.

More recently, he backed the so-called One Church Plan, which would have allowed churches and regional bodies known as annual conferences to decide whether to allow LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage.

In February, that plan — which also had been recommended by the denomination’s Council of Bishops — failed at a special session of the General Conference in St. Louis. Instead, delegates adopted what’s known as the Traditional Plan, which strengthened language in the denomination’s Book of Discipline barring LGBTQ United Methodists from marriage and ministry.

In response, Hamilton convened a meeting of more than 600 United Methodists from every annual conference in the country at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kan., to discuss what’s next for the second-largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

“It’s one thing if we could’ve found a way to change the policy but still leave room for people who hold different views,” he said. “It’s another thing for us to not only not do that but to invoke punishments.”

During the May meeting, known as UMC Next, Hamilton and others adopted four guiding principles, which include a commitment to rejecting the Traditional Plan and resisting its implementation.

Hamilton recently spoke to Religion News Service about UMC Next, how his own beliefs have evolved about what the Bible has to say to LGBTQ Christians and why he believes the United Methodist Church is worth fighting for. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been very outspoken about your support for greater inclusivity in the United Methodist Church. Why is that?

From the time we started the Church (of the Resurrection) — so this has been 29 years — LGBT persons have come to the church.

I would say 16 or 17 years ago, my own thinking began to shift on how we read Scripture as it relates to gay and lesbian people.

I was wrestling with the question of the Bible and how you deal with these texts that have God having the Israelites destroy 32 city-states and kill every man, woman and child. The answer that seemed most compelling to me was recognizing the role of culture and historical context in shaping the biblical authors’ values and retelling of their own history.

And so I’m wrestling with that at the time and really wrestling with what I thought I knew about LGBT persons and how God might look at them. At the time I told people: “This is a safe place for you. I’m not going to beat up on you from the pulpit. We want you here, but I believe that God’s will is that you be celibate if you can’t change.”

I was preaching a sermon right before General Conference in 2004 related to gay and lesbian people and the Methodist Church’s position on homosexuality, and I invited congregation members to share their stories. I received 200 or 300 emails, and I remember it was 1 in the morning and I’m reading them, working on my sermon and just weeping in my living room, thinking what I have always believed does not capture how I think God looks at these people whose stories I’m reading.

That led to a sermon that I preached then and that if you read it today, you wouldn’t think was really dramatic, saying that I don’t know that what I have believed about gay and lesbian people and homosexuality is accurate or right and that we are going to be a place that welcomes everybody.

Fast forward to this year’s General Conference … what nobody really anticipated was that the Traditional Plan would pass. I wasn’t certain the One Church Plan would pass, but I certainly did not anticipate the Traditional Plan passing.

What’s happened since that vote? What discussions have you been part of?

What I can tell you is that there’s not a consensus yet as to exactly what needs to happen.

Some traditionalists are ready to dissolve the church and then form new expressions of Methodism. Other traditionalists I’ve talked to say, “I don’t want to dissolve the church, and I want to stay in United Methodism, but I can’t stay in the church if you’re going to be doing [same-sex] weddings somewhere else.”

There are a lot of centrists who say, “We’re ready to dissolve the church and start something new.” But there are, I believe, many, many more who would say, “I don’t want to give up on the United Methodist Church.”

There are probably three major conversations that are happening that I’m aware of.

One has to do with, yes, go ahead and dissolve and create and divide the assets and create two or three new expressions of Methodism and allow every annual conference to migrate towards one or the other of those.

There’s another one that says we keep the United Methodist Church and we allow annual conferences to migrate towards one or the other of these expressions, but they remain within the United Methodist Church and they become branches within one United Methodist Church.

And another one is some people think on the traditional side, “If we make it hard enough, the centrists or progressives will leave.” And on the centrist or progressive side, there is talk like we make it hard enough, we protest enough that the traditionalists will leave.

And then finally there’s the conversation of whether centrists and progressives are able to stay together.

Some of these discussions that you mentioned about creating different branches of the church sound like the Connectional Conference Plan that was voted down at the special session. Do you think this will come up again at the 2020 General Conference in Minneapolis?

I would say they’re all variations of what that plan was attempting to do. I think that was a plan that most people weren’t really that interested in and thought it was too complicated to even pass.

But in the absence of finding any other possible solution, it may be that enough people would support that.

What will happen is over the summertime there’ll be more of these conversations happening — traditionalists and centrists and progressives; sometimes in conversation together, often in their own groups. It is possible that by 2020 General Conference there would be an agreement in principle, and then the next four years would be spent working that out.

Tell me more about UMC Next. Who was part of this meeting, and what was your takeaway?

We had different voices at every table. We had LGBTQ persons who were there. We had folks who were probably center-right. The one thing that they shared in common was they did not agree with the Traditional Plan and they wanted the church to be more inclusive of LGBTQ persons. I would say two-thirds of the people were centrists and a third were more progressive.

And so we would have these conversations. We would have a leader of the group introduce the topic, and then people were talking about what we value about the Methodist Church, what we’d leave behind if we could.

And then that turned into discussing various possible ways forward, which included the things we talked about: resist, dissolve the denomination and form something new or disaffiliate and form a new coalition or something that looked like a modified CCP-type plan where we would find some structural way to hold as many people in the Methodist Church together as possible.

But we don’t have clarity.

I would say many of the progressives who were there tended to favor leaving and forming something new. And I would say a slight majority of the centrists tended to favor staying and living into what we believe and continuing to work for change.

There was a sort of a two-pronged approach in the end: We’re going to continue to live into what we believe the church should look like, and, at the same time, we are going to be in conversations preparing for whatever the ultimate solution is.

Resistance is not a permanent solution. Resistance is a means to getting to another place.

At the town hall you held at your church immediately after the special session, you talked about the possibility of leaving the United Methodist Church and said you weren’t interested in becoming a nondenominational church. Why is being a United Methodist important to you?

It would be easier for our church to become nondenominational. But when I was 18, I actually felt called by God to be a Methodist, to be a part of a denomination, to help bring renewal and revival to that denomination.

I began studying John Wesley and the early Methodist movement and this idea of revival in the church — an evangelical revival that started on the campus of Oxford University by a professor at Oxford. There was this whole intellectual side of the faith, coupled with a fervent, passionate heart faith.

People say this to me: “I can’t figure you out. Are you liberal or conservative?” My answer is always, yes, of course. Do I have to pick? Because those two are really both important ideas — to be open to reform, generous in spirit, and at the same time to be conserving things that are the historic core of our faith.

Methodism is a both/and, not an either/or kind of faith. You move from that to this idea of this connection — that in the U.S. there are 32,000 churches and we are connected together. There’s an accountability that comes with that. And so all of that is part of the reason why we feel committed to these people in this community and don’t want to walk away from it.

Another idea you had mentioned during the town hall was possibly withholding parts of apportionments to the denomination. Is your church withholding apportionments, or do you know of any others that are?

There are a number of churches that have.

Typically, we pay in full at the beginning of the year every year as a way of expressing our commitment to the denomination and to those other churches. What we did this year is we had already paid the first half before General Conference, and we have withheld the second half. We will pay it before the year’s out.

We do want to express that what’s happened is not OK with us and that we want to have the church be prepared for what happens if churches like ours leave.

This week marks 100 years since Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote.

Passed in the wake of a cataclysmic world war, it wasn’t ratified until 1920.

Many of the women who had lobbied for it (it was first introduced in Congress in 1878), including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were dead.

Faith played a key role in the fight for women’s suffrage. Religious convictions compelled many to campaign on behalf of women’s suffrage — and many to fight hard against it.

“Religion comes up quite a bit and in many different ways,” according to journalist Elaine Weiss, author of “The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.”

The battle for voting rights, according to Weiss and other experts, drew together women across a spectrum of religious practice, from Quakers to women active in the holiness movement who saw social reform as a means of testifying to their pursuit of holiness.

Many women’s suffrage proponents, including campaigners such as Lucretia Mott, emerged from the abolitionist movement. They saw suffrage as a matter of divine justice as well as human rights, Weiss said.

Other women viewed the right to vote as not only a political and social but also a moral issue — as did their opponents.

“The movement to win votes will see many clergymen on both sides, and they will use biblical arguments to bolster their side,” said Weiss, who noted that many denominations, including Methodists, Presbyterians and Catholics, were divided on the issue of suffrage.

Women’s suffrage was a divisive issue for Jewish clergy as well.

Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise traveled around the country giving lectures in support of women’s right to vote, according to Weiss. Wise, who at the time was rabbi at New York City’s Free Synagogue, was a founding member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage and cut a 45 record to promote the issue.

“He had a huge rivalry with a rabbi [Joseph Silverman] from Temple Emanu-El, a large synagogue in Manhattan,” she said. “They fight from the pulpit about this for years, each giving his own religious spin.”

One of the icons of the suffrage movement was Anna Howard Shaw, a physician and minister who became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and led it from 1904-1915 (she died in 1919, before the amendment was ratified).

Erin Sears, a rising second-year student at the Candler School of Theology and a United Methodist, said she has studied Shaw while in college. But she wasn’t always aware that faith played a role in the fight for the right to vote.

“It’s really important that women know that other women were standing with them for years and years in their fight to be treated fairly. As a woman seeking ordination [myself], it’s really humbling and inspiring to be in a line of women who put their faith into action,” Sears said. “It’s a witness that faith goes beyond church buildings and that we spill into the world.”

Other supporters were drawn into the battle for women’s suffrage as part of the temperance movement led by educator and evangelical social reformer Frances Willard.

In 1879, when the Methodist Willard became president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she began to align domestic virtue with social change, according to Calvin College historian Kristin Du Mez.

For women affected by their husbands’ drinking, powerless to protect their own children, voting became a means to acquire political power and do good at the same time.

“Willard strategically draws more and more women into women’s rights activism, cautiously and incrementally,” said Du Mez. “Wives and mothers needed to vote. It’s a good Christian woman’s duty to vote. The needed to vote to protect their families.”

By the end of the 19th century, said Du Mez, suffrage had become a respectable cause in which Christian women could be engaged.

At the same time, those who opposed the voting campaign amped up their own faith-infused rhetoric, said Weiss.

They “use religion as a cudgel to beat the suffrage movement,” said Weiss. “If women vote, the moral health of the nation will be in danger.”

Using arguments based on biblical texts and accusing suffragists of being immoral, opponents said that Eve’s subservience to Adam in Genesis was divinely ordained, she said.

African American women such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Church Terrell and Harriet Forten Purvis also were deeply involved in women’s suffrage, but they are not as well known.

“Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that white women ought to be given the vote before black men,” said Episcopal priest and scholar Kelly Brown Douglas, dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary. “It came down to this matter of race, of white women feeling that they had a prerogative and privilege over black people. ”

Weiss agreed.

“The 19th Amendment was colorblind,” said Weiss, adding that leading suffragists felt they needed to reach out to white racists to gain their votes. “The way it was implemented was not.”

Like abolitionism, the campaign to gain black men and women the vote was always rooted in the black faith community, said Douglas, and was defined by the quest for racial justice, rejecting the Christian narrative of slave-holding whites.

On the other hand, she added, the role of white American churches, including her own denomination, has been more complicated: sometimes advocating for racial justice and sometimes for the structural privileges that come with being white in America.

What can be gleaned from this historical moment?

This anniversary, Douglas suggested, can become a catalyst to reflect upon the historical record and resolve to act to remedy the racial wrongs that still plague today’s America.

“Repentance is always due,” she said. “Churches have to tell the truth about their own history and to ask the question, who have we been and who are we in the struggle for social and racial justice.”

Though much has changed since Willard’s death at the end of the 19th century, Christian feminists like her, who drew “average” American women into a burgeoning social movement and empowered them, may provide inspiration for those who want to create alliances between feminists of faith and secular ones, she suggested.

“How can we have better conversations, big-tent coalitions, and include women of faith?”

An agenda that excludes women of faith is likely to be less successful, she said.

“Frances Willard would be heartbroken at the division between most of American Christianity and Christian feminism. That would cause her grief,” said Du Mez. “I wonder if our polarized framework right now isn’t hiding a quieter sphere worth holding on to.”

But Weiss, who is a member of the Jewish Conservative movement, said she is apprehensive about the thought of bringing God into the public realm.

“Morality yes, religion no,” she said. “As a person of faith, I don’t believe religion has any place in the public sphere.”

So, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert last week received a lifetime achievement award from Governor’s Refugee Services Advisory Board. A board he created and whose members he appointed.

That does not diminish the good news that Herbert would even want public recognition of his genuine efforts to welcome, assimilate and boost the hopes and prospects of refugees who are seeking a new life in this land of refugees. Too many members of his Republican Party these days would run and hide from any suggestion that they have not fully capitulated to the practicing xenophobia of their Dear Leader.

Even when politicians manipulate and spin — especially when they manipulate and spin — it matters greatly what image they seek to maintain. It tells us not just what those leaders and would-be leaders think of policy and politics, but what they think of us.

Even running Herbert’s award through the most cynical of filters, it appears that he thinks he gains politically from being seen as a friend of refugees and immigrants. That his long-developed political savvy tells him that he will make more friends than enemies — for himself, his administration, his legacy, his successors and his state — by displaying decency and a lack of fear than by donning the armor of white supremacy that now clothes the temporary occupant of the White House.

Utahns can feel good about the fact that that is the image their governor has of them.

Or maybe there is no spin here at all. Especially as Herbert is not seeking another term in office, and so has the luxury of not caring what anybody thinks, we might even dare to think that this compassion for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free is who he really is. That he would deserve such an award even if those who bestowed it didn’t work for him.

It would be better, of course, if Herbert would more fully reject the whole of the president, who basically has nothing to offer anyone other than a promise to protect white people from somehow being replaced by people who are, well, not so white.

It would boost his, and Utah’s, image even higher if our governor were less simpatico with the administration’s disdain for public lands and affection for all things fossil-fueled.

Still. Being a friend to refugees is no small matter these days. And perhaps it is not just Muslims and Africans and Mexicans who can come to Utah and thrive.

Maybe those who might gain the most from Utah’s attitude are real Republicans. Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan Republicans. Folks who welcomed immigrants and refugees and saw the desire of those souls as the strongest evidence that America is great because so many people want to come and live here.

In 1995, a religious scholar and fan of all things Irish by the name of Thomas Cahill published a book titled, “How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe.”

Its thesis, derided by some other historians as vastly oversimplified, is that after the Roman Empire fell, as the continent of Europe was overrun with warring Vikings and Vandals and Visigoths, much of the wisdom of Classical Rome and Greece found refuge in remote Irish monasteries.

There, Catholic monks who had little else to do busied themselves making ornate copies of Homer and Aristotle and Euclid.

When it all calmed down again in France and Germany and Italy, all that knowledge made its way back to its birthplace and flourished into the Renaissance and beyond.

Also, there is the theory, outlined by Neil deGrasse Tyson in his version of “Cosmos,” that primordial life on earth was barely getting a single-cell cilia-hold on existence when some cataclysm — volcanoes, meteors or some such — basically wiped it all out. Except the upheaval was so violent that a great deal of matter, with attendant life forms, was ejected into space, spun around for some millennia, then, Davie Bowie-like, fell to Earth when the planet had once again become hospitable to such things. Hence, us.

So we have the example Herbert has set.

We have #NeverTrumper Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox first out of the gate in the contest to replace him.

We have Sen. Mitt Romney occasionally working himself into a state of medium dudgeon.

We have former Rep. Jason Chaffetz deciding his hitch on White Supremacist TV might not endear him to most Utahns were he to run for governor. (Not to mention the huge pay cut he’d have to take.)

Which means there might be some slim hope that real Republicanism — not the rot that has set in at the top of the party, in Congress and in right-wing media — might hide out in Utah until the coast is clear and the rest of the nation is ready to welcome it back.

OK. I’m grasping at straws here. But, if Cahill and Tyson are right, we’ve come back from much worse.

gpyle@sltrib.com

Twitter, @debatestate

Five Utah nursing homes are potentially at risk of losing Medicaid eligibility — and funding — including one Ogden facility that federal administrators say has failed to make improvement since being identified as having “a history of serious quality issues.”

A U.S. Senate report released this week includes a list of 400 nursing homes nationwide that are either designated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as a Special Focus Facility, or SFF, or as a candidate for that designation. SFF denotes facilities that “substantially fail” to meet standards of required care.

“Many documented cases of abuse and neglect occur in facilities affiliated with the federal Special Focus Facility (SFF) program,” the report states. “The SFF program is designed to increase oversight of facilities that persistently underperform in required inspections conducted by state survey agencies.”

In Utah, Ogden’s Lomond Peak Nursing and Rehabilitation is designated as an SFF facility, while the other four Utah locations named in the Senate report are candidates for the SFF designation. Those four facilities include Salt Lake City’s Pine Creek Rehabilitation and Nursing, West Valley City’s Rocky Mountain Care – Hunter Hollow, West Jordan’s Copper Ridge Heath Care and South Ogden’s Mountain View Health Services.

Joel Hoffman, director of the Utah Department of Health’s Bureau of Licensing and Certification, said facility surveys are completed on a roughly annual basis, with the worst-performing locations identified as SFF and SFF candidates. But while that process always results in lower- and higher-scoring nursing homes, he said, the surveys do identify local poor-performing locations.

“If it was me, or a loved one of mine, in a facility and I saw this list and they were in one of these facilities,” he said, “I would want to probably contact us at the [health] department and find out why.”

Representatives for the five Utah nursing homes listed in the report either did not respond to requests for comment, or could not be reached.

A CMS listing of SFF facilities, last updated in May, states that Lomond Peak had its most recent survey in March and that the facility had not improved in the six months since its SFF designation. Nursing homes added to the SFF program are expected to improve and “graduate” within 18-24 months of their designation, the report states, or face termination from federal health care programs or be allowed a time extension if there has been “very promising progress.”

Nursing homes in the SFF programs are also subject to more frequent inspection by administrators. No additional information was provided in the Senate report regarding the Utah facilities, but CMS documents state that SFF is intended to address nursing homes with more frequent and more serious problems, including harm or injury experienced by residents.

“When deficiencies are identified, we require that the problems be corrected,” the report states. “If serious problems are not corrected, we may terminate the nursing home’s participation in Medicare and Medicaid.”

Hoffman said serious deficiencies include real or potential harm to residents, like delayed test results and medication, insufficient staffing or hazards like unsafe water temperatures.

The four candidate facilities will continue to be inspected on an annual basis, he said, but would face the increased scrutiny of the SFF designation if their performance does not improve.

“Hopefully they’re noticing that and working hard to alleviate those lower scores,” he said.

Hoffman also said that while some residents’ costs are paid privately or through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the bulk of Utah nursing home revenue comes from Medicaid and Medicare recipients. And termination from those programs, Hoffman said, would likely coincide with decertification by the Utah Department of Health.

“In Utah, it probably would shut them down," he said.

Provo • Some of them live together, most of them hang out together and all of them run together — at 7 in the morning, most days.

And now they are going together to the 2019 NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Austin, Texas, this week.

Six BYU distance runners will compete in one event — the 10,000 meters — on Wednesday night at the Mike A. Myers Track and Soccer Stadium as the school will break its own record for most entries in a single event at nationals. The previous record was five, set by BYU in the decathlon in 1975.

What is in the water in Provo?

Brotherhood and a winning culture, says senior Rory Linkletter, the 10,000 meters champion at the West Preliminaries in Sacramento two weeks ago.

“What coaches and former athletes have built here is a really good environment to succeed in,” Linkletter said. “The expectation keeps getting higher and higher and people just live up to it because it is contagious. It is an awesome thing to be a part of.”

The other qualifiers are seniors Connor McMillan (4th), Clayton Young (8th) and Dallin Farnsworth (10th), junior Connor Weaver (11th) and sophomore Conner Mantz (5th).

Linkletter and BYU track and field coach Ed Eyestone said the night the six Cougars qualified in Sacramento is one they will never forget.

“We’ve just been blessed with a very nice team culture over the years, and success breeds success,” Eyestone said. “Guys have had that winning attitude and bought into that team culture that supports one another.”

Fellow 10,000-meter runners Michael Ottesen, Brayden McClelland and Danny Carney qualified for regionals, but weren’t among the 12 from the West Preliminaries who qualified for nationals.

“I jokingly say the 10,000 is the most exciting event in track and field,” Eyestone said. “Twenty-five laps of controlled fury.”

For Linkletter, who will become the head cross country coach at his alma mater, Herriman High, next fall, watching five teammates finish in the top 12 behind him still brings out every emotion imaginable.

“It was such a great experience to see those guys advance with their best races of the season, best races of their lives, and the excitement and emotion they were able to show,” he said. “It was clear that they really, really believed in themselves throughout the season and didn’t care what the odds were. They just put themselves in it.”

So the top 24 runners in the country in that event will converge Wednesday in Texas, where conditions are expected to be hot and muggy.

“We have a good opportunity to do some good things,” Eyestone said. “Four of our guys [Linkletter, Mantz, McMillan and Young] are ranked very high. But the East regional runners are strong and competitive. Austin isn’t going to be about fast times. It is going to be a war of attrition where we are going to have to battle the heat and humidity as well as the 25 laps.”

In all, BYU will have 22 entries at the meet (16 men, 6 women), the most in school history, and should post a top-10 team score on the men’s side and a top-20 score on the women’s side. Men’s events will be Wednesday and Friday, while women’s events will be Thursday and Saturday.

“It all boils down to the event coaches that we have here at BYU,” Eyestone said. “They are great at building their own culture in their event groups. We are a diverse group, but the commonality we have is we are all passionate about the sport.”

Especially the 10,000 meters.

Eyestone said other top BYU athletes to watch are Andrea Stapleton-Johnson, who is ranked No. 1 in the high jump, and Erica Birk-Jarvis, who returned to the sport after giving birth to a child 16 months ago and is ranked No. 2 in the steeplechase. Brenna Porter is a threat to make the podium in the 400-meter hurdles.

Utah State, Weber State and Southern Utah will also be represented at nationals.

The Aggies will send javelin thrower Sindri Gudmundsson and Cierra Simmons-Mecham in the women’s steeplechase.

The Wildcats will send Tawnie Moore in the 100-meter hurdles, Kate Sorensen in the 400-meter hurdles and Nathan Dunivan in the discus.

The Thunderbirds will be represented by George Espino (800 meters), Frank Harris III (high jump), Kasey Knevelbaard (1,500 meters), Skyler Porcaro (javelin) and Angie Nickerson (5,000 meters).

London • Making nice at the end, President Donald Trump eased up Tuesday on his frequent criticisms of outgoing British Prime Minister Theresa May over her handling of the tortured Brexit deal, declaring that history will remember her fondly if the United Kingdom can successfully leave the European Union.

The latest chapter in the allies' storied "special relationship" played out as anti-Trump protesters — with the infamous Trump baby balloon bobbing overhead — thronged the streets of nearby central London.

The president’s unexpected compliments for May come just days before she was set to resign the leadership of her party after failing to secure a Brexit deal. She will depart as prime minister once her successor has been chosen.

"I have greatly enjoyed working with you. You are a tremendous professional and a person who loves her country very much," Trump told May at a news conference near the prime minister's Downing Street office. But he couldn't resist a slight dig, evoking the two years of broadsides he had lobbed at her by recalling that he had urged her to sue the EU rather than try to negotiate a departure.

Trump said he would have "sued and settled, maybe, but you never know. She's probably a better negotiator than I am." And he added that the deal May came away with was a good one and "perhaps you won't be given the credit you deserve."

May voiced hope her successor will be able to achieve Brexit.

“I still believe — I personally believe — that it is in the best interest of the U.K. to leave the European Union with a deal. I believe there is a good deal on the table,” she said. “Obviously, it will be whoever succeeds me as prime minister to take this issue forward. What is paramount, I believe, is delivering on Brexit for the British people.”

Earlier in the day, Trump jokingly suggested that May "stick around" until a new U.S.-U.K. trade deal was brokered. May and her aides chuckled at that.

Trump said Britain and the U.S. would be able to strike a "phenomenal trade deal" once the U.K. had left the EU — music to the ears of pro-Brexit Britons. But, in words sure to alarm those in Britain concerned about Brexit, he said that "everything"— including the National Health Service — would be "on the table" in future trade negotiations. In a later interview that will air Wednesday on ITV's "Good Morning Britain," Trump appeared to back away from that idea, saying he didn't envision the health service being part of the talks, adding, "That's not trade."

Most Britons are protective of the state-run NHS, which delivers free health care to all, and many worry that private U.S. health care firms could try to gain access to chunks of it as a condition of a trade deal.

On a separate issue, Trump said he anticipated "no limitations" on the future sharing of intelligence with the U.K. as the U.S. continues to press its longtime ally to ban Chinese company Huawei amid espionage and trade concerns.

Traditionally, U.S. presidents avoid injecting themselves into the domestic politics of other nations. But Trump didn't hold back — right after claiming that he would not comment on Britain's internal matters.

He renewed his praise of Conservative lawmaker Boris Johnson, who is campaigning to replace May as Conservative leader, and of another contender, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt. He said he'd turned down a requested meeting from Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and took new swipes at one of his most vocal critics, London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

Afterward, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and Trump met at the U.S. ambassador's residence, with Farage tweeting that they'd had a "good meeting."

Trump previously had voiced support for a "hard Brexit," which could have a devastating impact on the U.K. economy, according to many experts. That stands in contrast to a previous White House position that the departure should be as painless as possible. Others in the U.K. are pressing for a second referendum that could keep Britain in the EU.

As the pageantry of Trump’s British state visit gave way to politics, an economic meeting between the leaders at St. James’s Palace brought together 10 leading companies — five from the U.K. and five from the United States. CEOs and senior representatives from BAE Systems, GlaxoSmithKline, National Grid, Barclays, Reckitt Benckiser, JP Morgan, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs International, Bechtel and Splunk were listed as attending.

While the corporate leaders gathered, protesters began to assemble across London. Leaders of Britain's main opposition party joined demonstrators at a rally in Trafalgar Square, just up the street from May's Downing Street office. Also in Trafalgar Square: a 16-foot robotic likeness of Trump seated on a golden toilet.

Trump glossed over the protests, saying he saw "thousands of people in the streets cheering" and waving U.S. and U.K. flags, but just a "very, very small" group of protesters. "There was great love," he said.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump later toured the Churchill War Rooms, the British government's underground command center during World War II. Then it was time for a fancy reciprocal dinner that the Trumps hosted at the U.S. ambassador's residence for Prince Charles, his wife, Camilla, and other dignitaries.

On the menu: heritage tomatoes with burrata, grilled filet of beef and vanilla ice cream with summer berries.

A day earlier, Trump had lunch with Queen Elizabeth II and tea with Prince Charles before a grand state dinner at Buckingham Palace.

Associated Press writers Gregory Katz in London and Darlene Superville and Deb Riechmann in Washington contributed to this report.

Portland, Ore. • A lawsuit by a group of young people who say U.S. energy policies are causing climate change and hurting their future faces a major hurdle Tuesday as lawyers for the Trump administration argue to stop the case from moving forward.

Three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals are hearing arguments from lawyers for 21 young people and the federal government in Portland but are not expected to rule right away. The Obama and Trump administrations have tried to get the lawsuit dismissed since it was filed in Oregon in 2015.

"It's just really disappointing to see the lengths that they go to — to not only not let us get the remedy that we're seeking, but not even let us have the chance to prove our facts or present our case at trial," said Nathan Baring, a 19-year-old from Fairbanks, Alaska, who joined the lawsuit when he was 15.

As the case drags on, sea ice that protects coastal Alaska communities from fierce storms is forming later in the year, leaving those villages vulnerable, Baring said Tuesday.

The young people argue that government officials have known for more than 50 years that carbon pollution from fossil fuels causes climate change and that policies promoting oil and gas deprive them of their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.

Lawyers for President Donald Trump's administration have argued that the lawsuit is trying to direct federal environmental and energy policies through the courts instead of through the political process.

"No federal court has ever permitted an action that seeks to review decades of agency action (and alleged inaction) by a dozen federal agencies and executive offices — all in pursuit of a policy goal," the attorneys argued in a March court brief.

Justice Department lawyers also assert that the young people had not identified any "historical basis for a fundamental right to a stable climate system or any other constitutional right related to the environment."

The lawsuit says the young are more vulnerable to serious effects from climate change in the future. The American Academy of Pediatrics, 14 other health organizations and nearly 80 scientists and physicians agreed in a brief filed with the appeals court.

"Today's children are expected to have poorer health as they age than today's adults do, because of the worsening and intensifying effects of climate change," three of the experts wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

They pointed out that the World Health Organization estimates that 88% of the global health burden of climate change falls on children younger than 5.

The lawsuit wants the U.S. District Court in Eugene, where the lawsuit was filed, to declare that the U.S. government is violating the plaintiffs' constitutional rights by substantially causing or contributing to a dangerous concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It asks the court to declare federal energy policy that contributes to global warming unconstitutional, order the government to quickly phase out carbon dioxide emissions to a certain level by 2100 and mandate a national climate recovery plan.

The case has become a focal point for many youth activists, and the courtroom in Portland was expected to be packed Tuesday. A video livestream was being set up at a nearby park, where a rally was expected to be held, said Meg Ward, spokeswoman for Our Children's Trust, a group supporting the lawsuit.

The U.S. Supreme Court last November declined to stop the lawsuit but told the Trump administration it could still petition a lower court to dismiss the case. A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit granted the Trump administration's motion to put the case on hold while considering its merits.

If the panel decides the lawsuit can move forward, it would go before the federal court in Eugene.

A Draper dog groomer who allegedly pointed a gun at a man who was hours late to pick up his dog has been charged with aggravated assault.

The woman — 56-year-old Lisa Hull — was also charged with drug, drug paraphernalia and firearm possession after police searched the Absolute Grooming’s property, at 656 E. 11400 South, and found 22 grams of marijuana, two guns and related accessories, according to charging documents.

Hull was arrested April 19, the day the man came to her store late to retrieve his dog. According to court documents, he arrived after the business closed at 6 p.m., and Hull “became upset” with him and then “exchanged words” with him before unholstering a gun and pointing it at him.

The man then went outside and called police.

Hull told police the customer was yelling at her and calling her names, so she took out the gun and tapped it on the counter to show “the weapon was real," court documents state. But an employee said the man was “respectful and apologized for being late to pick up his dog," and that her boss was “agitated” and waved the gun at him.

The employee also told police that Hull had two guns at the business and would smoke marijuana in the back room, a search warrant indicates.

Police later found a .44 magnum revolver, a .22 revolver, ammunition, 22.2 grams of marijuana and rolling papers in the business.

The Salt Lake Tribune attempted to contact Hull at the listed phone number for Absolute Grooming, but Hull’s business is no longer open and was replaced with another pet grooming business. Court documents don’t list an attorney for Hull.

Draper police also did not respond to The Tribune’s request for comment on the case.

Hull’s first court appearance hasn’t yet been scheduled, according to court records. She’s facing a third-degree felony count of aggravated assault, a third-degree felony count of unlawful possession of a dangerous weapon and two class B misdemeanor counts of possession of use of a controlled substance and possession or use of drug paraphernalia.

This Pat Bagley cartoon appears in The Salt Lake Tribune on Wednesday, June 5, 2019. You can check out the past 10 Bagley editorial cartoons below:

• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/06/03/bagley-cartoon-royal-pain/" target=_blank>Royal Pain</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/31/bagley-cartoon-smell/">The Smell of Freedom</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/30/bagley-cartoon-bring-gun/">Bring a Gun to a Gun Fight</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/29/bagley-cartoon-sick/">Sick and Twisted</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/28/bagley-cartoon-american/">American Tragic</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/24/bagley-cartoon-memorial/">Memorial Day 2019</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/23/bagley-cartoon-utah/">LGBeeTQ</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/22/bagley-cartoon-i-scam-nra/">I Scam the NRA</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/20/bagley-cartoon-donkey-air/">Donkey Air</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/05/17/bagley-cartoon-assessing/">Assessing the Assessment</a>

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Provo • Of all the major league teams that were talking about drafting him this week, BYU’s Jackson Cluff hoped it would be the Washington Nationals because of his relationship with scouts Mitch Sokol and Scott Ramsay.

“It’s just a dream come true, because of the opportunity,” Cluff said Tuesday after the Nationals selected him with in the sixth round, No. 183 overall.

Cluff, a shortstop who just completed his second season of college eligibility, becomes BYU’s highest draft pick since Jacob Hannemann was taken in third round of 2013 draft by the Chicago Cubs.

“The first thing I have to realize is that no one makes it on draft day. The work is ahead,” Cluff said via telephone from his home in Meridian, Idaho. “But just knowing all the sacrifices my parents and coaches and teammates have made, it is a pretty rewarding experience, knowing that your career isn’t over yet and you are going to get plenty of opportunities moving forward.”

Rounds 3-10 of the MLB draft concluded with Cluff the only player with Utah ties selected. The University of Utah’s Oliver Dunn, a Cottonwood High product, is expected to be taken early Wednesday when the draft concludes with rounds 11-40.

Other BYU hopefuls are pitchers Justin Sterner and Jordan Wood and outfielder Brock Hall.

Cluff said the Nationals gave him a heads up about 30 minutes before they drafted him so his parents and siblings could gather at home to share the moment with him. Cluff wasn’t listed among Baseball America’s top 500 draft prospects, but BYU coach Mike Littlewood predicted last week the returned missionary would be taken relatively early.

“A lot of scouts have shown up the last few months to watch him play,” Littlewood said.

Upon returning from his mission to Atlanta, Cluff hit .327 and added 56 RBI. He stole 12 bases and earned national player of the week honors twice this past season.

“These opportunities for [returned missionaries] are definitely limited, just because of age and whatnot,” Cluff said. “ But when it comes down to it, your play speaks for itself. If a guy is able to come home from a mission and play at the level he needs to, I think he is going to get an opportunity.

“Over the years, we have had guys at BYU prove that over and over again. So I hope it gives confidence to other people moving forward.”

Cluff’s father, Paul, a two-time All-American at BYU, was taken in the fourth round in 1989 and has groomed Jackson to be a baseball star from a young age.

According to MLB.com, the slot value for the 183rd overall pick is $266,000.

Cluff said he will fly out Sunday to the Nationals’ spring training facility in West Palm Beach, Fla., and work out the details of a contract. Barring anything unforeseen, he will be assigned to a team shortly thereafter and begin his professional baseball career.

Albany, N.Y. • Sixty-one people have been arrested after protesters frustrated by the slow movement of proposals to strengthen tenant protections blocked access to the Senate and Assembly chambers in the New York state Capitol.

The group, which included New York City Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams, marched through the Capitol chanting protests Tuesday before blocking the legislative doors. They were charged with disorderly conduct.

Two of those arrested were also charged with third-degree assault for allegedly hitting the Assembly sergeant-at-arms.

The state law governing rent control and rent stabilization rules in the New York City area are set to expire later this month.

While lawmakers are expected to renew the law, the protesters said they want stronger protections and possibly a statewide law.

The Democrat-led Legislature is scheduled to adjourn June 19.

Bob Welti, the smiling weatherman at Salt Lake City’s KSL-Ch. 5 from 1965 to 1991, has died at the age of 94.

The station said his family had confirmed Welti died Tuesday afternoon.

Welti began his television career in 1948 at the pioneering KDYL-TV, Salt Lake City’s first TV station. KSL hired him and sportscaster Paul James away to work with lead anchor Dick Nourse in the 1960s, and the trio embodied KSL’s on-air personality for decades as the station rose to lead the market.

Former station weatherman Kent Norton, who worked with Welti for years, said in an interview with KSL that Welti had an “extraordinary ability” to communicate with viewers. “It’s something you’re born with,” Norton said, “being able to connect with people one-on-one, through the camera.”

Welti grew up in Logan and worked at radio station KVNU while in high school before joining the U.S. Navy during World War II, he said in a July 1988 oral history interview with University of Utah professor Tim Larson.

He was working at radio station KDYL when station owner Sid Fox started KDYL-TV, initially known as Experimental Station W6XIS, according to a transcript of the interview. (The station eventually became KTVX-Ch. 4.)

Welti was an announcer at both the radio and TV stations the next year, he said, when program director Danny Rainger asked him, "Bob, who knows anything about the weather around here?" and he answered, “I do.”

Welti explained he had received “pretty good meteorological training" as a pilot in the Navy during World War II.

Rainger, he remembered, responded: “Good. You're our TV weatherman."

When Welti asked what a TV weatherman would do, he said, Rainger told him, “I don’t know. You’re the TV weatherman. You figure it out."

So, long before “radar and satellites and upper air charts and all that kind of stuff,” Welti said, he would draw weather fronts on a map of the country and share the forecast.

At KSL, he and Nourse and James had a special chemistry, Welti said, and he and James especially would “horse around” and share jokes on air until consultants stepped in and discouraged it.

On the first day the station had teleprompters, he told an audience at the Salt Lake City Public Library in 2006, James wrote a note and put it on the new screen as Welti announced the weather. “Your wife wants you to bring home a loaf of bread,” it said.

It’s “terribly hard” to not say the displayed words, Welti said, and as he struggled to stay focused, he described a high pressure area that had appeared “over a loaf of bread.” As soon as James started his sports segment, Welti said, he put up a note in retaliation that said, “Your house is on fire” — and James soon said, "Today the Cougars are on fire, ah, no ... "

“And so we agreed we’d never do that to each other again, never,” he said as the audience laughed.

During his talk, part of a World War II lecture series, he described his Navy pilot training and his enduring love of flying.

The biggest change he saw over his television career was the ease and speed of getting footage ready to broadcast, compared to the slow pace of developing film, he said in the 1988 interview. “If we had one or two film stories we were lucky, so most of the news was ‘talking heads’ back in the old days,” Welti said.

“And then the weather, of course, tremendous strides both in the accuracy of the forecast and the visibility of it,” he added. Computer graphics with information from satellites “have added so much to the visual presentation. It's so much more enjoyable to watch.”

With KSL’s wide coverage area, he said, “we can't take the time to describe the forecast for Idaho Falls and for St. George, but you can show it on a map in seconds.”

Sorry to learn of the passing of Bob Welti (middle). He anchored the weather @KSL5TV for 26 years before retiring in 1991. He will always be a key figure of our KSL legacy. pic.twitter.com/nFKZbTTUQA

— Dave McCann (@DaveMcCannKSL) June 4, 2019

Welti retired from the station in 1991. In a tweet posted Tuesday afternoon, KSL anchor Dave McCann said: “He will always be a key figure in our KSL legacy.”

James started at the station with Welti in 1965, called Brigham Young University football and basketball games for 36 years until his retirement in 2001, and died last October at the age of 87. Nourse, 79, had started at KSL in 1964 and retired from the station in 2007.

Welti’s family had moved to Utah from New York when he was 2 years old, after his father graduated from Cornell University and got a job at then-Utah State Agricultural College. Welti met his wife, Georgia Fullmer, at Utah State, where she was a student body officer and a homecoming queen, according to the family.

"Saw her on a white float going down Main Street. My little heart went pitter-pat, " he told Larson. They married in 1948 and raised five daughters; Georgia Welti died in 2007.

At the end of their interview, Larson asked Welti what he would want people to know about him in the future. Both the industry and Utahns were good to him, Welti answered — noting people rarely abused his listed phone number.

“Once in a great while I’ll get a call from some drunk at 3 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “‘Hey, should I take an umbrella to work tomorrow, ha ha ha’ and [they’ll] hang up.”

Welti added: “It’s just been a marvelous life. I can’t believe as I look back on my life how lucky I’ve been and how much fun it’s been.”

Some of their signs were made from used manila folders. A few were written in pencil on pieces of lined paper. One was laminated. Another was covered in gold star stickers.

But nearly all of them had the same message: “6%.”

That’s the raise roughly 200 teachers asked for Tuesday night as they filled every seat in front of the Salt Lake City board of education. They weren’t allowed to speak at the public meeting. So with their signs, they made their opinions known as best they could.

“Teachers are doing more than ever before,” Chelsie Acosta, a teacher at Glendale Middle School, said afterward. “And we’re done. We’re done being disrespected as far as finances go. This is our silent protest."

The room was crammed full with many educators standing in the back and along the sides. They all wore red T-shirts to show solidarity as a teacher union. And when it was time for the comment period — where “complaints concerning bidding or contracts” cannot, by Salt Lake City School District policy, be openly discussed until salary negotiations have finished — they all walked out.

“Now there’s nobody in that room. It’s empty,” said Mike Harman, vice president of the Salt Lake Education Association, which has been trying to broker salaries with the district for two months. “We want to show them that the whole system is dependent on teachers.”

The walkout comes as other districts across the state have announced big hikes to teacher pay — including $50,000 for an annual salary for starting educators in neighboring Canyons and Murray school district — in the so-called “bidding wars” to attract the best. Salt Lake City is one of the few that hasn’t yet made a deal.

Initially, school board members suggested a 3% raise. The local education association that represents teachers refused to accept without a strike. It’s largely been at a stalemate since.

Starting teachers in the district make $45,000. With the 6% bump, they’d be at $47,700 — still behind most others in Salt Lake County.

Brett Markum, a resource language arts teacher at East High School, carried a sign that said, “3%? That’s an insult not a raise.” He’s been with the district for 18 years and said it’s frustrating not to see a match so educators are paid comparable to their colleagues across the Salt Lake Valley.

“We’d like more,” he said. “We feel like we deserve better.”

The continuation of the salary wars comes amid statewide challenges in hiring teachers. And it’s the third year that the biggest districts in Utah have attempted to outbid one another by offering the highest pay.

Salt Lake City School District employs roughly 1,300 educators. The district and the board declined to comment, saying they keeps salary negotiations confidential until they are agreed upon. During the public meeting, board President Tiffany Sandberg said only that the comment period couldn’t be used to talk about contracts.

“Unless the speaker’s topic is on the agenda tonight, we will not be hearing about it,” she said. What was included as 3% increases for other district employees, including administrators and transportation workers.

As teachers left 30 minutes in, Sandberg added, “We’ll wait until the room clears out.”

A few of the educators who came held hands with their children or rocked babies to sleep. It was the night before the last day of school for the 2018-2019 year.

Jon Olschewski cradled his 1-year-old daughter while wearing a red T-shirt for his school East High; she had on a onesie with a red apple. Olschewski has taught auto shop there for three years and noted how most teachers leave the profession in the first five.

“I could be one of them,” he said. “I’ve got a young family. And I need more money. We’re looking at houses in Weber County right now; that’s a long drive to get here.”

According to a recent survey by Envision Utah, more teachers are leaving Utah classrooms than ever before and one of the biggest reasons they cite is low pay. The state now has a shortage of 1,600 educators with the imbalance expected to get worse.

Harman, who is also the district’s homeless education liaison, wrote “6%” on the back of last year’s salary agreement when Salt Lake City School District was among the top in the state. At that point, he said, they were able to recruit and retain the best in the field. Now, he’s not sure what will happen. Acosta is particularly worried about losing talented teachers of color.

James Tobler, president of the education association, said the union is asking for between a 5% and 6% raise from the board — which he expects can be done without requiring a property tax increase. But he’s also considering a wager with the school board to match Canyons School District’s $50,000 starting salary.

As part of the negotiation, the education association is additionally requesting more personal days for teachers, caps on class sizes and paid parental leave.

“Those haven’t got a lot of traction,” said Tobler, who teaches at Highland High School. “But the sticking point has been salary increases. We want our teachers putting their energy into their classes and helping their students instead of worrying about that next mortgage payment.”

A few at the meeting Tuesday said a 3% increase isn’t enough to keep up with inflation or rising housing costs. Some of the signs said “3% is NOT enough to live.”

Kellie May, who is currently Utah’s teacher of the year and works for Salt Lake City School District, said: “Us showing up says it’s important and we want to be seen.”

“We do it because we love kids,” added O’Lynn Elliott, an educator at Open Classroom, a charter in the district, “but it doesn’t mean we don’t want to be paid fairly.”

Many teachers, she said, stay late after school to help students and often grade papers from home. A lot of teachers also spend their own money on classroom supplies. She made her “6%” sign on a piece of red construction paper that she had to buy.

The Salt Lake City Council decided Tuesday to make funding for a proposal to refurbish the most plentiful drinking water well in Salt Lake City contingent upon a report from the administration on alternatives to the current plan.

Residents in the quiet historic neighborhood just south of the entrance to Memory Grove and City Creek Canyon thanked the council for the move later that night during a public hearing on the budget.

But a large number continued to express concerns over the possible effects of the Fourth Avenue Pump House project — including noise pollution, a loss of green space, a potential decline in property values, plans to chlorinate the well’s water on-site and the building’s modern design.

“We know the area to be just the essence of what a great residential neighborhood and park environment can be,” said Ivan Weber, who owns two properties near the area. “And now the city proposes to plunk an industrial facility, complete with unceasing low noise and possible waves of toxic odors, with certain waves of maintenance traffic right in the front yard. This is anything but trivial.”

Comments on the pump house were the overwhelming focus of the city’s second public hearing on its 2019-2020 budget, which the council is required to pass by June 30.

City officials say the refurbishing of the well — which provides a staggering 3 to 7 million gallons daily in summer months — has to happen for the good of the public and is crucial to keeping the city’s water system resilient, as well as meeting demand in the growing downtown area, around Capitol Hill and at Salt Lake City International Airport.

They have sought since 2017 to make the 76-year-old water source safer for employees and customers and to bring it up to regulation. But in response to residents’ concerns, they had already scaled back plans for a new 2,000-square-foot utility building over the well, located in a park at North Canyon Road and Fourth Avenue.

Several aspects of the well don’t meet state and federal regulations, and officials say the need to upgrade its electrical system is triggering a much wider overhaul, including bringing the well’s casing above ground, requiring a building around it. They also need to make it more safely accessible by maintenance workers without risk of electrocution.

City Councilman Chris Wharton, whose district spans Memory Grove and other areas of the city’s northeast bench, said Tuesday that the council “absolutely recognizes the health issues related to the Fourth Avenue Well, the importance of the water supply and the safety concerns of the existing facility.”

But his proposal seeks to find a compromise by requiring the Department of Public Utilities bringing forward a design that has a smaller footprint on the park and could reduce noise concerns before the council will provide project funding.

The design proposal calls for refurbishing the well, putting in new electrical, pumping and chlorine-injection systems and building an 800-square-foot pump house with a driveway, which would cost about $3 million.

Because the well is at a nexus of several of Salt Lake City’s historic districts, the design and wider effects of the new building will need approval from the city’s powerful Historic Landmark Commission. The commission is scheduled to further consider the project at its Thursday meeting.

“Shocking.”

That’s how Elizabeth Jenks described police reports that her friend Jeremy Sorensen was on the ground, fighting with an 18-year-old woman, when a passerby shot him to death.

Sorensen was the person who could calm down Jenks’ 3-year-old daughter during church and soothe her to sleep, she said. He was a voracious reader, Jenks said, and a loyal friend, though he often struggled to communicate and understand social cues.

“It only took maybe ten minutes into a conversation to realize how soft his heart was,” Jenks said.

Sorensen and the woman were fighting just before 8 p.m. outside of an apartment building near 500 North and 200 East when the passerby pulled his car up, got out, pulled out his gun and “yelled at” Sorensen, said Provo Police Sgt. Nisha King. The passerby “gave warnings” to Sorensen, who “did not respond" — so the passerby shot him twice, striking him at least once in the chest, King said.

The 18-year-old woman, whose name was not released, also was taken to the hospital for minor injuries she suffered in the fight with Sorensen, 26.

“That was shocking to me to hear that he was that aggressive toward another person,” Jenks said.

Less shocking, she said, was officers’ report that Sorensen did not immediately respond when the shooter threatened him with a gun.

“Now that I’m thinking more about his communication difficulties, I think it came down to a processing delay. It took him a little bit to sit back and think about things," said Jenks, who met Sorensen three years ago when he began attending Redeemer Church in Orem, where her husband is pastor.

Though he never disclosed any formal diagnosis, his friends believed he was on the autism spectrum, said Haley Sotelo, another friend of Sorensen’s from church. “Some of the signs were a lack of eye contact, not always being willing to speak, social anxiety,” Sotelo said.

Sotelo and Jenks both worried that Sorensen’s atypical reactions might be part of the reason the passerby shot him.

“I do think maybe the processing delay did play into the fact that he didn’t stop,” Jenks said. “It doesn’t make sense for someone not to stop when confronted by a gun, unless there’s something else happening.”

But Jenks and Sotelo also said they doubted the gun was necessary in the first place.

“Lethal action wasn’t necessary. The guy could have called the police and let them handle it. Or he could have pushed [Sorensen]. They did not have to use a gun. There wasn’t a weapon in sight. Not everything has to be met with gun violence," Sotelo said. “[I] honestly wonder if the shooter would have shot so quickly had Jeremy been white and not black.”

“I do feel that excessive force was used in this situation,” Jenks agreed. “I do feel like if it was another white guy off the street, a different course of action would have been taken and someone wouldn’t have lost their life.”

Police have not released the shooter’s name, or the name of the woman Sorensen was fighting with. The woman was “absolutely traumatized,” said King, who said the two were “acquaintances.”

The shooter is “cooperating,” with police, King said. The fight and the shooting took place in front of BYU-approved student housing, but King said police don’t know if Sorensen, the passerby or the woman are BYU students.

The passerby has not been charged; King said the case is being reviewed by the Utah County Attorney’s Office.

Dozens of swimmers were hospitalized — including at least three children who were admitted to a pediatric intensive care unit — after a chlorine pump malfunctioned at a Pleasant Grove pool Tuesday.

Swimmers were vomiting and passing out at the Veterans Memorial Pool late Tuesday afternoon when a chlorine pump failed and then turned back on, pumping out large amounts of chlorine and producing toxic fumes, police told FOX 13.

About 50 people were sickened, with ambulances taking 26 people to area hospitals and others seeking treatment later, according to Pleasant Grove police. Some of the patients suffered coughing and nosebleeds; some were unconscious, police said.

Fifteen children and one adult were taken to Timpanogos Regional Hospital in Orem; three of those children have been admitted in to the pediatric intensive care unit, hospital spokesman Nate Black told The Salt Lake Tribune. Eight remain at the hospital for observation, and five have been discharged.

Investigators expected all of the affected swimmers to survive, but they may experience “upper respiratory irritation," Pleasant Grove police Captain Britt Smith said.

The Tribune will report further details as they become available.

Editor’s note: The Salt Lake Tribune and FOX 13 are content-sharing partners.

Slowly, in fits and starts, Fox’s “X-Men” became the franchise nobody wanted — and the latest, and possibly last, chapter in the saga, “Dark Phoenix,” is the sad, misshapen end product.

It’s 1992, and this group of mutants seem scarcely to have aged since their debut in the rebooted “X-Men: First Class” (2011), which was set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The bald, mind-reading Prof. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) still runs his school for mutants, while also getting on the government’s good side by sending his adult mutants out on life-saving missions.

The blue-skinned shape-shiftier Raven, aka Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), is in charge of the mission squad, and she warns Prof. X against risking lives unnecessarily to appease the non-mutants running the White House. This argument becomes prescient when, while rescuing astronauts on the space shuttle, the telekinetic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) almost dies from absorbing a mysterious energy force.

That force enhances Jean’s powers, to the point where she loses control of her abilities. The memory barriers Prof. X installed in her brain as a child collapse, she learns uncomfortable truths about her parents, and she gets angry. Mutants get hurt, other mutants — like the exiled Magneto (Michael Fassbender) — want revenge, and Prof. X and Jean’s boyfriend Scott Summers, aka Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), are in a race to find Jean before Magneto or the authorities do.

Also seeking Jean is a group of aliens in human form, who know the source of that strange energy and want it for themselves. Their leader, Vuk, played by Jessica Chastain as if she had no pigment in her skin or hair, goes Palpatine on Jean, trying to talk her over to the dark side.

First-time director Simon Kinberg knows the X-Men franchise well — this is the fourth in the series he’s written — and he has a good handle on what mutant powers keep the audience involved. He includes plenty of scenes of the teleporting Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and the weather-controlling Storm (Alexandra Shipp), and the brainy Hank (Nicholas Hoult) makes a few transformations into the blue-haired Beast.

But Kinberg’s handling of action sequences are incoherent, with long stretches of objects and characters zooming about for no apparent reason. The death of a major character is handled clumsily, and it seems less to propel the story than to solve a contractual problem with an actor whose fame long ago outgrew the franchise.

Other plot points feel cribbed from that other Marvel franchise, particularly a rift between mutants that echoes “Captain America: Civil War” and an ending that copies the visuals of “Captain Marvel.” And at the movie’s center, Jean Grey is surprisingly hollow, and that’s on Kinberg, since Turner has shown on “Game of Thrones” that she can be as good as her material.

The “Dark Phoenix” storyline was tried in 2006, in Brett Ratner’s “X-Men: The Last Stand,” which is when the series started to turn sour. Bryan Singer’s “X-Men” (2000) and “X2” (2003), which melded tight action and a thoughtful allegory for xenophobia, showed years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe what a superhero series could do.

Then the franchise splintered. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine appeared in three solo movies, while a spinoff character, Deadpool, used the X-Men as a comic foil representing stuffy authority among superheroes. Meanwhile, the reboot, starting with “X-Men: First Class,” ran our now-younger heroes through nostalgic period pieces. The series brought back Singer for the time-twisting “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and the execrable “X-Men: Apocalypse,” before accusations of sexual misconduct surfaced and bad on-set behavior got him fired from “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

It’s telling that “Dark Phoenix” doesn’t have the “X-Men” name in the title, following the pattern of the “Deadpool” movies, “The Wolverine” and “Logan,” and the much-delayed “The New Mutants.” (Mark your calendars, in pencil, for April 3, 2020.) Some fans hope, with Fox being consumed by Disney, that the X-Men might hook up with the Avengers in a monster-sized superhero mash-up. Based on the evidence of this 12th movie, it’s time to give the mutants a rest.

——

★★

‘Dark Phoenix’

• Marvel’s mutants fizzle out in an incoherent action movie that should mark the end of two decades of “X-Men” machinations.
• <b>Where</b> • Theaters everywhere.
• <b>When</b> • Opens Friday, June 7.
• <b>Rated</b> • PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action including some gunplay, disturbing images, and brief strong language.
• <b>Running time</b> • 113 minutes.