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Storm Lake City Hall is stonewalling us so hard on basic public information it makes one think that an attempt is being made to obscure poor management. The city now demands a fee for access to the minutes of airport commission meetings or King’s Pointe Resort monthly income statements. We don’t know for certain if these basic records even exist.
There are serious problems with the airport fueling system, and with expanding facilities to accommodate bigger airplanes. Where are the minutes of the commission meetings? Why are they not posted on the city website? There’s a charge for a clerk to look.
The city manager is playing cat-and-mouse with our simple question: Is the resort turning a profit? We are told that monthly income statements do not exist. Here is what the operating agreement between the vendor and the city states:
“By the 25th day of each month, Manager shall submit to Owner (c/o City Clerk or Clerk's designee) a summary of the prior Fiscal Period's revenues and expenses, including, but not limited to, a profit and loss statement and balance sheet, a reconciliation of the Operating Fund account for said Fiscal Period, and a report that includes year-to-date income and expense totals by line item and in comparison to the Operating Budget. Owner may obtain an annual audit performed by independent certified public accountants as part of its annual audit of all City functions, and shall allocate the proportionate costs of such audit as a cost of the Resort.”
Something clearly is amiss. City officials act as if they know nothing about monthly income statements. These records should be available at no cost to the public. All suggestions are that the resort is operating in the red, but the public is not entitled to know as a matter of course.
Water rates are rising fast. Property taxes are ballooning. The city is shelling out fees to lawyers in a deep dark litigious hole with Buena Vista County over city tax revenues that vanished into thin air. Our streets and storm sewers are not in good shape. You can understand why some think that the less the public knows, the better.
City Hall is betting that we will not pay for public information, and that the public does not care about any of this stuff. What they don’t want you to know is costing you money and limiting our progress as a community. In the absence of a clear commitment from the city council for full public transparency, you will not get the details on the airport or the resort, or how we sort out fair water rates.
Government should not operate this way, but we have become accustomed to it. Secrecy has become official policy. Watch your taxes rise and your freedoms erode. The citizen no longer owns the public record, the bureaucracy does. The bureaucracy is contemptuous of the public interest. The civic good is set aside for administrative interest, and we are expected to accept the diminished role of the citizenry. Democracy is being subsumed on multiple levels, including right here in Storm Lake.
We need a change in Storm Lake. They cannot manage city operations, and they are trying to obscure it from all of us.
Farmers are willing to adopt conservation practices if they can get some help. A report from the nonpartisan Center for Rural Affairs notes that Iowa farmers doubled their participation in key conservation programs when the Biden Administration’s Inflation Adjustment Act targeted funds at the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program.
Each program has been chronically underfunded and oversubscribed so the benefits have been limited. This has been on purpose, to keep moving product into the field and grain into the pipeline. The spike in participation when real money was put to it is remarkable.
The report said the extra money made a “significant impact” on the environment. They are popular with farmers. The Trump Administration stripped the IRA funding back to baselines set in the Farm Bill. The programs will again be over-subscribed.
Farmers want clean air and clean water. They do not want to plant the river bottoms. They feel that they are in a system that offers bad alternatives. They are eager to participate in programs help them stay whole, not so much about things that appear to just cost more money. Conservation programs that pay are exceedingly popular but not with the petrochemical industry. If you cannot regulate agriculture, you don’t need to pay for stewardship. Let farmers chase each other to the bottom and agri-industry cleans up the consolidated mess.
Iowa has come to the point where middle managers risk getting sacked for talking up diversity. “I’m still going to say DEI, I say it in my classes. I don’t care,” says Andrea Tinoco, assistant director of leadership and student organization at the University of Iowa, in a secretly recorded video that found its way to Fox News. She also said the U of I will continue to spend money on such corrosive things as inclusion of minorities.
That prompted a full response: a complaint from Gov. Reynolds, and a full-throated pledge from U of I President Barbara Wilson that an investigation will ensue. Tinoco was placed on leave. “We have reached out to the Board of Regents office and to the Iowa Attorney General’s Office to coordinate our efforts,” Wilson said.
The full force of the state is coming down on a woman who was never heard from before until she was surreptitiously exposed for being an agent of inclusion.
Sleep better knowing that more than $2 million in funding for DEI programs at state universities has ended. Now, if we could just clear out the subversives from Iowa City we would be getting on to that Brave New World.
Gravity is taking hold markets weighted by fresh threats of tariffs from President Trump. A jobs report was adjusted downward to reflect sluggishness fostered by the Trump taxes on trade. For that, the president fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for making the statistics accurate. Still tariffs are a drag on the economy. You pay the costs.
It is worthwhile to review the impact on export-sensitive Iowa, so dependent on agriculture. Chris Clayton of Progressive Farmer/DTN reported on Aug. 1 that China has made no commitments to buy soybeans for the new marketing year that begins Sept. 1. China accounted for nearly half of US soy exports for this marketing year. Pork exports to China are down 18% through May compared to 2024.
US ag exports to China are down 55% from 2024.
Trump is using tariffs to drive Brazil and China into each other’s thrall. Brazil replaced the USA as China’s preferred soy provider. Iowa assiduously courted the Chinese for 50 years and Trump has blown it up.
The full effect of tariffs on the US economy will be felt by the time of the midterm elections in 2026. Iowa voters should calculate their self-interest. The Trump brand does not serve us. He will bail out producers with $60 billion. That is not what they necessarily voted for. Farmers want to make their living from the markets, not from a bailout. That’s what Farm Bureau always said.
About 200 workers at the JBS packinghouse in Ottumwa, 10% of the workforce, were told they lost their jobs because their temporary status was revoked by the federal government. The workers were from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti, nations under repressive regimes. A few weeks ago we heard similar reports about the Tyson operations in Storm Lake that did not bear out.
It is curious that some meatpacking plants get raided and some do not. They all employ especially vulnerable workers under temporary protected status. These people are not criminals, they are victims of criminal governments.
JBS is owned by a prominent family in Brazil, the Batistas. President Trump is in a battle with the president of Brazil. Trump can’t afford much higher meat prices. They can’t deport all immigrants. He can afford to jab at JBS by picking on some of its workers as a pretense.
It’s a filthy business, sending these hard-working folks back to certain trouble. We remember when the USA was a harbor of freedom for refugees if they could get here. No more. Human lives are mere roles in a burlesque. It could happen here if the theatrics call for it. Trump campaigned on deporting all undocumented immigrants and temporary refugees. He was most emphatic about it when he claimed that Haitians were eating cats. He has no remorse. Think of the chaos for the innocent families, the schools, the businesses that depended on them. JBS will have to find some other dispossessed people to fill the jobs. That’s the stupidest and most inefficient part of the cycle, except it is most effective at keeping fear alive. That is the point.
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