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We approach the November municipal elections colored with the fact that Storm Lake cannot afford to keep up. The city council had to beg off from a $300,000 state grant to replace blowers at the wastewater plant because we couldn’t afford to pay the balance of the project. The police department eliminated its community service officer positions. Library hours are reduced.
Where does all the money go? Nobody knows but the wizard. The city lost track of millions in tax revenue that the county sent to the wrong accounts. So we are short, and it shows. To make it worse, the city and county are neck-deep in legal fees over a lawsuit in which the city tries mainly in vain to recover the lost funds. We will pay the lawyers more than the city could hope to recover.
So it goes in The City Beautiful. Don’t ask for much because you won’t get it.
It may be some relief that at least one candidate, Don Piercy, is raising questions. He would like a forensic audit, for example, to find out where those missing tax revenues went. Voters have an opportunity to get involved in imposing some fiscal order onto city hall. We are taking more from the taxpayer while reducing basic services.
We should do better. Voters should demand it.
They’re kicking up a dust storm bringing in another bumper crop. So much of it they have to bag it up in the field for storage. The elevators are full. All those beans with no place to go. Trump just raised the ante on China again with the threat of 100% tariffs in retaliation for Chinese trade hostilities. It’s tough on prices. We wait to see what the bailout will be.
We thought it would never quit raining earlier this summer. Seemed like the mower was going every other day. Then the spigot shut off, just like that. It looked like we had snapped out of a five-year drought. The weather turn in moments. You have to wonder if we are not lingering amid a drought that has set upon the Great Plains.
Net income is down. You would like to blame it on Biden, but … Fertilizer prices were up in September over August.
China turned to Argentina as a soybean supplier. Trump is not so sure he wants to talk with Chinese leader Xi just because.
Weather and markets. The bane of an agricultural living. We have no control. People ask: What does the farmer think? It matters very little because he controls only the choice of whether to plant or stay in bed, and often even that is beyond his authority. The semis await the combines if they don’t just bag it up. The dust was so thick you could barely find your way through 3 & 71, the dirt swirl center of the universe. It must be October, except it’s so hot you wouldn’t otherwise know it.
We are eager for State Auditor Rob Sand to build out a platform as he runs for governor. He starts at a good place: Sand will reverse the privatization of Medicaid that costs more, denies access and harms providers while mainly benefiting insurance administrators.
Sand has been a critic of the move, made in 2016, to transfer management of Medicaid from the state to private insurance companies. In 2021, the auditor reported a nine-fold increase in denial-of-care claims from Iowans. The insurance companies are raking in millions. It costs the University of Iowa Hospital and clinics millions in wasted time trying to get paid from the insurance bureaucracy. Prior approval is a net loss for the state system when you consider all the costs, and especially when denial of care makes the patient even sicker.
It’s not a sexy issue. Not like banning books or being perversely obsessed with transsexuals. This is about delivering health care efficiently, and managing scarce resources effectively. We need to get back to these basics of providing care to the elderly and infirm.
Since 2016 scores of nursing homes have closed in rural Iowa, including Albert City, Newell and Storm Lake. Rural health care depends inordinately on Medicaid, and gets hurt the worst when the tourniquet is applied. Rural hospitals are closing, too. The private sector does not always do things better.
Rural Iowa needs high-quality health care that we can afford. Cheating Medicaid payments is not the way to improve things. We did the 10-year experiment and turned out worse off than before. Sand is right. The state should manage Medicaid with a goal of improving rural health care access.
Our streets and roads could be better. That’s our message to State Rep. Megan Jones, R-Sioux Rapids, who is the new chair of the House Transportation Committee, and to Bill Anderson, the Cherokee economic development director who serves on the Iowa Transportation Commission.
Hwy. 10 is a rumble. Hwy. 7 isn’t a lot better. Cherokee and Buena Vista counties are challenged by ethanol and soy plants that need infrastructure development we can’t afford. Our roads take a beating from huge honey wagons that don’t pay their fair share. Storm Lake’s streets do not recommend The City Beautiful.
Rural Northwest Iowa needs stronger advocacy.
Jones and Anderson are in a position to at least remind leaders of the Iowa Department of Transportation that we are not part of Nebraska, where the roads are better than around here.
We should have a bike trail connecting Storm Lake to Lake View. To the Iowa Great Lakes, too. They have talked about it as long as we can remember.
You can barely get to Des Moines or Omaha for the construction detours, thanks to the Biden infrastructure bill. Somehow, we didn’t get let in on that. We’re not asking for light rail from Storm Lake to Cherokee. We would like a better Hwy. 7.
The Trump Administration’s immigration raids in big cities are turning off important voices in MAGA world. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, and conservative podcaster Joe Rogan are calling to back off the gestapo tactics terrorizing immigrants undocumented or not.
“As a conservative, and as a business owner in the construction industry, and as a realist, I can say, we have to do something about labor,” Greene said last week. “And it needs to be a smarter plan than just rounding up every single person and deporting them just like that. I’m going to get pushback for that, but I’m just living in reality from here on out. If anyone’s mad at me for saying the truth, then, I'm sorry.”
Good that Greene is running with reality these days and forward. Everyone should have understood that Trump meant it when he said he wanted to deport all undocumented immigrants, including nice ladies in Chicago just going to the store to buy some meat.
Said Rogan, “I really thought they were just going to go after the criminals. I really thought there was enough gang members and enough people, MS-13 members and whatever they were looking for, that they would just go after those guys.”
As masked troops bear down on Chicago, people begin to appreciate the fear. That is the point. Keeping the workforce in constant fear keeps everyone in their place, malleable. It creates miserable anxiety in places like Storm Lake. Rumors fly to spark more fear.
You cannot run an enterprise this way, Greene finally acknowledges. Rogan may be naive, but at least he is keeping his eyes open. The zealots are losing the base.
Trump’s support among independents is tanking with these raids by masked men in camouflage. If he keeps it up, no amount of gerrymandering could make up for the defeat the Republican Party will suffer in November 2026. It perplexes us how people could not hear him say during the campaign that he was going to deport millions of people, criminal or not. Aides such as Tom Homan and Stephen Miller said the same thing.
Now that people are reminded what an authoritarian sweep looks like, they see freedom fleeting. It will have consequences.
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