Jim Pillen personally recommended lobbyist Julie Bushell for a no-bid state contract worth $2.5 million — $208,333 a month. In January, Nebraska's Republican state auditor said that deal "smacks of favoritism" and that the state broke the law by never saying what emergency justified skipping the bidding process. Lincoln police have been investigating the contract since March.

Now new records show Bushell's reach inside Pillen's government started months before that contract — and that Pillen's office sat on a warning about what she was selling.

A Flatwater Free Press investigation published September 18, built on dozens of emails obtained through public records requests, lays it out.

The sensors, and the warning

Nitrate pollution is a serious Nebraska water problem: nitrogen fertilizer from farm fields can seep into the groundwater people drink.

In early 2024, Bushell's Lincoln tech company, Ethos Connected, was selling a fix: real-time nitrate sensors for wells. Pillen spoke at the opening of the company's new production facility that January. And Bushell's company paid a lobbying firm $39,000 to lobby in 2024, including on a bill to set aside money for sensors like the ones it made.

State scientists weren't convinced. In a January 2024 memo to Pillen's chief of staff, Jim Macy — then director of Nebraska's Department of Environment and Energy — wrote:

"None of my scientific team can point to any proven current technology that meets a basic benchmark."

He warned that "some in the industry are providing hopeful Information rather than proven fact."

The Democratic state senator carrying the sensor bill, Eliot Bostar, told Flatwater nobody in the Pillen administration ever showed him that memo. "I have no recollection of it," he said.

Then the doubts disappeared

Here's what happened next, according to the records:

• Macy left Pillen's cabinet in April 2024.
• That same month, lawmakers set aside $1 million for real-time nitrate sensors.
• The official cost estimate dropped the doubts. The estimate for Bostar's original bill had said the environment department was "not aware of current technology" that could do the job. The one for the bill that set aside the money — rewritten by agency leaders and approved by Pillen's policy adviser, emails show — no longer mentioned any.
• Weeks later, a deputy director emailed Bushell to plan how to spend the money. "We'd love to chat on the sensors and what could work with the program dollars," he wrote. The next day he wrote a colleague that they'd want to discuss strategy with the governor's office "as we receive direction from the Governor."
• In May 2024, the state signed Bushell's no-bid contract.
• By August, she had a standing seat in biweekly meetings on a $307 million federal grant.

The department's former interim director, Kara Valentine, told Flatwater: "We didn't know what her role was, who was paying her … or what her goal was." But one thing was clear, Valentine said. A Pillen policy adviser told her that Bushell spoke for the governor.

What Pillen's office says

The state never ended up spending the $1 million on sensors, and Bushell's company never got that money. Bushell told Flatwater that any suggestion she used her position to steer money to Ethos "is false," and that her work delivered a return that "dwarfed other state contracts."

Pillen wouldn't do an interview or answer specific questions. His spokeswoman said "it's political silly season" and that the premises of Flatwater's questions "cherry-pick quotes from disgruntled bureaucrats."

The documented problem isn't whether a check cleared. It's how the governor's office ran state business:

• A lobbyist with a product to sell got a no-bid contract the governor personally recommended — one the state's own auditor said broke the law.
• The state's top environmental official warned the governor's office in writing that the product was unproven, and the lawmaker pushing to fund it never saw the warning.
• The official cost estimate dropped those doubts, with sign-off from the governor's own policy adviser.

The state ended Bushell's contract early, in February 2025 — a month after the auditor started looking into it. Pillen's office said it no longer needed her because Pillen now had a direct line to the Trump White House.

Lawmakers didn't wait for Pillen to fix it. In April, the Legislature changed state law to strengthen oversight of no-bid contracts.

Not the first time with nitrates

This is the same governor whose own hog farms drew scrutiny over water pollution. When a reporter found nitrate nearly 45 times the safe limit on Pillen's hog farms, his answer was to attack the reporter: "The author is from communist China."

And it fits a pattern of putting allies in positions of power. This month Pillen put the two state senators who sponsored his tax cuts on the board that forecasts Nebraska's budget.

What the record shows

Jim Pillen recommended lobbyist Julie Bushell for a $2.5 million no-bid contract that Nebraska's Republican auditor said "smacks of favoritism" and broke state law, and that police are still investigating. Emails show that before the deal, his chief of staff got a written warning from the state's top environmental official that the nitrate sensors her company sold were unproven — a warning the lawmaker pushing to fund them says he never saw — and that the official cost estimate was rewritten without those doubts with approval from Pillen's policy adviser.

Source

This post is based on the Flatwater Free Press investigation. Photo: Flatwater Free Press.