A Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper
After observing the City of Storm Lake’s clever machinations over the last few months, I have formed an inescapable conclusion: Our highly paid city hall apparatchiks are only consolidating and maintaining their power. Like that old folk song says, “You can’t beat the machine.”
All politics is supposed to be local, and those secretive, closed-door meetings with carefully chosen “civic leaders” are there to baldly divide (and propagandize) the remainder of Storm Lake voters. This is nothing more than the synthetic manufacture of consent and permission structure. Any organization can form a committee of bobbleheads to sell the desired official narrative.
City Hall would prefer to ignore the citizens at their grubby grassroots level, promote their luxury, pet projects that only a few citizens want, and neglect basic ongoing maintenance of aging infrastructure, every bit as important to our quality of life.
Storm Lake deserves better than this bad governance.
And, what are those fundamental responsibilities of local governments? Reasonable people can disagree on a few of these, but I might suggest: police and fire protection, for two; emergency services, including the ambulance(s), and our hospital emergency room. Water, streets, sewers, snow removal and the ongoing maintenance of that infrastructure. That’s really about it.
Instead, we get city leadership’s vanity projects or the bright, shiny objects of diversion: 1. Spoil site park development, costing $10.6 million+; and a dog park on East Ninth. 2. Reducing one automobile traffic lane on Lake Avenue to yield two bicycle lanes. Cost $3.3 million+private money. Pssst: It’s those pesky robot bicycles, we MUST regulate them, but John Deere Gators are just groovy! 3. How about city-sponsored childcare? It’s personnel building IPERS and government health benefits! What could go wrong with this — when the city inevitably hires its next card-carrying pervert? A few more million, please.
For maintaining existing city infrastructure, the municipal game is defer, delay and deny. Around that, the city manager wants us to recognize “her frugality.” I’m not feeling it:
Exhibit A: The underground airport fuel tanks. Too bad the airport jacked aviation fuel rates above market, and the largest commercial user flew out of town! No factories from them here, either. Because Keri’s reputation precedes her.
Exhibit B: Storm sewers on Cayuga are now getting much more love lately, the industrial park area. My crystal ball envisions a large aquaduct from the industrial park costing millions of dollars, taking out some of Craig Wells’ farmland in the process.
Poor Keri. She was licking her fiscal chops to get a 70 million dollar feed mill on the city tax rolls through annexation, but she must now drain that ground and the county, innudated themselves on the east side of the courthouse — ain’t inclined to play ball with their drainage districts. Justice couldn’t be more poetic or divine.
Exhibit C: King’s Pointe, a zombie entertainment venue and storied money-pit that most of the citizens of Storm Lake cannot afford to visit without a city subsidy or carve-out. Guest rooms are blocked out of service (again, due to lack of maintenance), making ad hoc rentals at higher profit margins less possible. Perhaps we should site a gambling boat on Storm Lake to stop the city expenses from hemorrhaging, but making our working poor that much more desperate.
But if it’s a lousy property, no one will stay there. Constituents deserve statements of KP cash flow every month, not just cherry-picked reports they want us to see. An annual profit of a few hundred thousand dollars on a $28 million facility is an abysmal ROI and misallocation. Just saying.
Storm Lake city government has become an empire. We have a half-dozen+ department heads and leaders collecting $100,000+ per for sit-on-ass positions. When any organization becomes larger, it grows to serve itself and other members of the hive. Soon, the empire doesn’t relate to the citizens it governs, viewing them as profit centers or vassals.
Storm Lake will probably issue $100-150 million in bonds in the next few years, and they should borrow those funds extremely carefully.
Are commercial and industrial water users paying the unit marginal costs of their usage ranges, or just the unit average total cost of that massive new infrastructure?
Can city employees bargain with John Tyson, know the difference and represent the city stakeholders more competently, given their own problems with personal pay levels? I really wonder.
City tax rates may be stable for the next year, but if the tax base increases (and it has!), city revenue will increase as well. And, it sounds like we are going to need it.
City managers are gatekeepers. Ms. Navratil is here to shield her elected council members and mayor from the raw nerves, complaints and pain expressed by the citizens, voters-unwashed, and to fall on the sword if the political environment becomes untenable or hostile. Aside from that, she is City Hall’s dominatrix.
Storm Lake should live and budget as though they pay taxes in perpetuity, rather than leave town in five years, when city employment ends, move to Tennessee with no state income taxes and residential property taxes one quarter of what they are in Storm Lake.
At the bare minimum, we expect our elected leaders to do what they promised to do, consistent with personal integrity and their oath of office.
The City of Storm Lake government does not just need a reboot. It needs a whole new operating system.
Wyatt Yon, Storm Lake
I’m writing in response to Alan Guebert’s article about corn carryover and how it’s growing larger. He thinks the carryover could eventually be as large as the new crop. There’s talk of year round E-15, ok, maybe. I’ve got an idea, they’re called cows. Cows eat grass and hay. If every farmer had some cows, there would be corn acres replaced with pasture and hay ground.
I know what you’re thinking, cows are too expensive, ok, what about sheep or goats? Another benefit to hay and pasture is with these torrential rains, the top-soil won’t wash away. One more idea: a food grade oats mill is nearly complete in Albert Lea. Ninety-two percent of the food grade oats we use is imported, could be a good market. Diversification is not a bad thing.
Brian Sievers, Storm Lake
Iowa is operating at a deficit and has reduced its much-touted reserves by 40% in just two years to balance our budget. Republican legislators remain unconcerned, saying this was predicted and will reverse in a year or two. But nobody has explained why revenues will increase so significantly, other than the magic of supply-side wishful thinking.
Kansas offers a horrible warning of what is more likely. In 2012 Kansas sharply lowered its tax rates and quickly saw devastating consequences on financial ratings, educational outcomes, cuts to public services, etc. In response, legislators passed tax increases and a new governor was elected in 2017. Course correcting wasn’t easy, but no laws made it impossible.
Unless Iowa’s tax revenues significantly increase our reserves will bottom out in three years. How likely is that big turnaround? The Philadelphia Federal Reserve ranked Iowa’s economic growth 25th a year ago; this year we dropped to 50th. Wallet Hub ranks Iowa in last place for economic activity. Other agencies offer similar low rankings.
If a bill (SJR 11) currently in the Iowa House Ways and Means committee passes, we will vote in November on a proposed constitutional amendment requiring approval by 2/3 in both House and Senate for any future income tax increases. If this passes, it will be almost impossible to reverse course; only 17 Senators could hold up changes to improve our state’s finances.
This bill is completely unnecessary and should be voted down. If our revenues increase, we simply retain the lower tax rates. But if bankruptcy looms, we need the option of correcting our mistakes. If you believe in magic, clap your hands, children. But I’d suggest some caution; why take away future choices that just might be necessary?
Sue Ravenscroft, Ames
On the TV show NCIS, the main character LeRoy Gibbs has a list of about 99 rules to live by. Number 13 is “Never involve lawyers.”
I feel lawyers are like taxes — a necessary evil. We need lawyers because the law is so vast and complicated. Legislators put new laws on all the time but rarely take any off. Lawyers are educated to know the law or where to find it.
The thing is, lawyers cost money. I don't live there but, I cringe when I read about the City of Storm Lake suing the county. Isn't that like crapping in your own nest? HEY taxpayers, that's your money and YOU voted these people in and it’s NO WONDER the roads don't get fixed.
I’d have so many questions. Aren’t there guidelines or rules and regulations in place and if not, are they going to fix it? Where was the auditor, the assessor, the treasurer, the comptroller and couldn’t the county attorney tell if a law was broken?
They say they need more time, but they had time to VOTE THEMSELVES A RAISE. It’s always about the money. When there's no transparency all kinds of nasty words come into my head like coverup, fraud, payoff, embezzle and corruption.
Also suspicious is not asking State Auditor Rob Sand to investigate. He's already paid by the state and I think the almost half a million to lawyers could be better spent. If a mistake was made, own up to it. Why must thousands suffer?
Judges need to quit just slapping the wrist on white collar crime. I hope I don’t need a lawyer soon so I’ll tell you this. I thought this lawyer wasn't doing his job so I asked his secretary, “Do you know what 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea is?” She said “No.” I said “It’s a good start.” She had a hearty laugh.
P.S. Gibbs rule #36. If you think you’re being played, you probably are.
Dave Haynes, Duncombe
My first response is to Donald Trump “undermining ethanol.” The irony offers a possibility for politicians who suck up to ethanol to stop that nasty habit. Ethanol is an unsustainable practice from a wide-view lens. The sustainability argument against crop monopoly has never been persuasive. Now Iowa’s black-gold dirt is depleted of nature-made nutrients that took thousands of years to cook.
“Farm bill erosion” flatly states that “cheap corn won the argument over stability, diversity and sustainability.” Human beings suck up and kiss ass generation after generation.
Nathan Sage “Beware the attacks” is time travel, 45 years backward.
I read Catcher in the Rye, shadowing Holden Caulfield as he taught me about phonies. I read the novel several times and felt the losses more acutely each time. There would be no saving children from falling off the cliff.
If Nathan Sage accuses a potential successor to Joni “we’re all going to die” Ernst of being phony, I’m okay with that. I’m also okay with Josh Turek running to unseat Ernst. Fresh off watching Olympians do beautiful daring things, I put my coins on Turek, a para-Olympian, born with spina bifida, caused by his father’s exposure to Agent Orange.
Americans are exposed to a lot worse than character attacks. I think we need to judge the suckups and the punch-downs, the mierda that gets thrown at us from our elected leaders. A lot of competing factors make up a human being. Let’s not give all our creativity and curiosity to artificial intelligence. That’s the “A” right, artificial? Like phony?
Gretchen Reeh-Robinson, Mount Vernon
We write in firm and solemn opposition to House File 2324, now before the Iowa General Assembly.
This measure forbids school districts, charter schools, and innovation zone schools from entering into partnership with their public libraries, denies students the use of their school-issued identification to obtain books and learning materials,and closes the schoolhouse door to the humble bookmobile. Historically, these arrangements have been neither radical nor reckless. They are the ordinary, time-tested instruments by which communities enlarge opportunity and nourish the minds of our young. To abolish them is not to strengthen education but to diminish it.
In this matter, let us proceed with clarity. Parents possess the first and rightful authority over the upbringing of their children. They may consent. They may decline. That power rests with them. This bill removes that discretion and substitutes for it a broad and inflexible command of the state. The government should not displace the judgment of families in order to narrow access to books and the common storehouse of knowledge.
We are compelled also to observe the uncertainty of the legal ground upon which such efforts stand. Portions of Iowa Senate File 496 have been restrained by the federal courts for failing to meet constitutional measures. Standards described as “age-appropriate” remain unsettled and contested. Yet this proposal would extend similar undefined expectations to public libraries which are institutions long governed by established Iowa law and guided by professional standards that respect both parental rights and constitutional liberty.
The fundamental right to read broadly and without governmental scrutiny is no recent nor distant contrivance. It is Iowa’s inheritance. In 1938, in Des Moines, Library Director Forrest Spaulding set forth the principles that would become the Library Bill of Rights which has been adopted by professional associations concerned with librarianship, information science, and the First Amendment. Iowans have long affirmed that access to information is indispensable to a free people. From the largest city to the smallest rural crossroads, libraries and the bookmobiles that carry them across open miles have stood as quiet assurances that no child’s prospects shall be limited by distance, poverty, or happenstance of birth.
House File 2324 would sever trusted partnerships, place public servants in legal uncertainty, risk costly lawsuits to Iowa’s community, and retreat from our state’s long tradition of local cooperation and civic trust. It would exchange discretion for prohibition and partnership for separation.
We urge the members of the General Assembly to reject this measure.
Let us preserve parental choice. Let us honor constitutional restraint. Let us sustain the freedom to read. Let us celebrate liberty and the robust use of our libraries. Let us support each other as we engage and encourage the next generation of leaders to be readers bravely taking on the world of ideas and philosophies.
Iowa’s story has long been one of building schools with libraries, communities with outreach, and rights with responsibilities.
Let us not now erect barriers where bridges have long stood.
Cathy Zimmerman, Iowan, Association of Bookmobile & Outreach Services Executive Director, Former Bookmobile Librarian
Sam Helmick, Iowan, Iowa Library Association Past President, American Library Association President, Iowa Governor’s Commission on Libraries Past Chair, Bookmobile Librarian
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here