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Storm Lake and Buena Vista County have racked up over $800,000 in legal bills over a lawsuit involving misplaced tax revenues. They could incur another cool million in expenses by the time trial rolls around in a year. Elected and appointed officials will continue to occupy their positions and draw paychecks. Ho hum. It’s just tax money.
The latest allegations are that the city failed to notice that the county was shorting the city on tax increment financing revenues. Millions of dollars were diverted to other taxing authorities. The city alleges the county shorts the city intentionally. It is all absurd and will lead to nothing good except for two competing Des Moines law firms.
A judge has already ruled that most of the city’s claim is out of bounds. What is left to argue will not yield enough to cover all the legal expenses.
This is hideously expensive. The losses cannot be recouped. Each party is at fault. This is a case of incompetence that has wasted millions. There should be some housecleaning done between city hall and the courthouse. At least there are elections in November.
Americans renew their ignorance by the generation, you can have faith in that. Iowa is a state of immigrants yet we have shamed, ridiculed, segregated and attempted to ban foreigners over the years. Then the pressure relents as things improve, waxing and waning like that. For whatever reason, it makes the body politic feel more secure by hassling those with the least when times are toughest. When things are fat, you couldn’t care less who sorts your garbage.
All five of our Republican candidates for governor campaigned on immigration issues despite it being a federal domain. The governor must do what he or she can to make life more miserable for someone in Denison or Storm Lake cutting meat in the cold or cleaning dung from a pit. Be sure to let voters know you will not let them have Medicaid or milk for the kids because the whole lot of them don’t belong here. That’s the message voters get.
You overlook the dairy barn. Or you claim that if meatpacking paid more we would not have to rely on Brown people from points unknown, which is always interesting discourse for beer-thirty time but bears no association to kill-floor reality.
Let’s just hassle them until they leave. That is the Trump MO. If the goons can’t scare them off, we will revoke their temporary protected status and send them back to Cuba where the lights are off. The latest: People awaiting green cards must return to their native country and wait. So if you are from Haiti and married somebody who was born in Newell, you would have to go back to Haiti and cheat death while you wait perhaps years for a green card. Newell is too crowded? This sort of bureaucratic Hades is actually celebrated by politicians who are, after all, responding to a deeply frustrated electorate. You may not solve the problem of cheap food, but at least you have given the circus crowd some free cotton candy.
To build up as much distaste and scorn as we have, there must be something wrong in a land that used to periodically invite the oppressed to be free. What is so wrong with our economic system that we must hassle our newest neighbors and deny them a shot at enduring freedom? Why is it popular for state candidates to run down people who are desperate? If people thought they were being treated fairly, and that their children will be better off, immigrants would not bother them. Something is wrong on the back roads of Iowa.
It’s not easy trying to manage in a rural Iowa village. In Early, you lose the school. There have been a lot of water problems. The town struggles trying to offer services, and necessarily looks at overhead at the library. Facebook would have you believe the city is abandoning the library. No so, officials contend. It shows how anxiety can distort communication in the most intimate environments.
The social media chatter indicates the strong sentiments for a whole community that has undergone a fundamental transformation under decades of relentless consolidation. Early is like so many small places that nobody pays attention to, that maintain a sense of community without the means to fully support their institutions. The library will keep on. Even in Storm Lake, the library hours and staff are reduced. The legislature is trying to contain rising property taxes. The situation is not improving despite lower state income taxes. The library in West Des Moines is okay.
This is written amid talk of a deal to end the Iran war and open up the Strait of Hormuz. Deals have come and gone at least twice. One does not put much stock in the words of Donald Trump or the fanatics running Iran. You can believe it when the boats float through. Iran has established its military control over the crucial strait 21 miles long through which much of the world’s fertilizer and oil flows.
No matter the resolution, it will take a long time for those markets to recover — if they ever do revert to established trade patterns. Already, urea prices alone are up 55% because of the blockage. Farmers are turning to manure as substitute.
Food prices will stay high with fertilizer and fuel prices. That does not mean that farmers will harvest a bounty. Wheat yields in Kansas and Oklahoma are supposed to be the worst in over 50 years because of drought. Farmers facing climbing input costs are forced to liquidate. Many around Iowa had the means to pre-book their needs for this crop year, before the bombs dropped on Iran. Not everyone did. The $12 billion in disaster relief payments from Trump’s tariffs breezed through some farmers’ hands so fast they barely felt it, eaten up by weather and war.
It is unlikely that fertilizer prices will recede much before next year. Farmers will not be in a happy mood for the general election in November. When farm income drops, nobody in Iowa is happy. It should doom the incumbent Republicans, but they stick by Trump to their peril. The second Trump term has been a disaster for agriculture so far. They must assume that farmers are stupid when they blame it all on the Biden Administration. Check your diesel prices then and now. It will take years to undo the damage to agriculture from the trade wars and the war on Iran.
Pope Leo laid down more than 42,000 words in an encyclical on artificial intelligence. That could be read as a sign that AI is for real and is here to stay. Everyone is using it. Few of us want to acknowledge that there is a huge appetite for energy to cogitate all that data that we demand at our fingertips.
NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) voices unite in opposition to data centers, which find Iowa attractive for its rivers and cheap electricity driven by wind. People don’t like wind turbines or solar arrays in their back yards or their neighbors’ yards, either. We can generate abundant renewable energy in Iowa — much more. Data centers can be built with closed loops that do not require fresh water. Battery storage can be made safe. Canada geese will still poop in Scout Park, worry not.
Even the pope blesses certain uses of AI, for medicine or to explore the heavens. Nearly all of us are using AI when searching the Internet for cancer cures, candidate finance or lasagna recipes. We must acknowledge that the power must come from somewhere.
If it can be done through wind turbines and solar arrays without sucking out the Missouri River, let it be done in Iowa. We don’t need to go back to nuclear or coal to energize the information economy. We don’t need to raise rates. We just need to be smart about it.
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