Apr 09

Arnolds Park school to close … eventually

Posted on Monday, April 9, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The Okoboji school district approved a bond issue for a new middle school Tuesday (story: Spencer Daily Reporter). The district covers the Iowa Great Lakes area south of 175th Street, with Arnolds Park, Milford, Okoboji (yes, there’s a town of that name), Wahpeton, and West Okoboji, and down to include Fostoria.

The new building, would be separate from the existing high school in Milford but would be on the same land. The existing middle school, which was Arnolds Park High School until a merger, will be closed and sold. (An appraisal of the building and land [large PDF] found that while the almost-lakeside site is a good place for development, it’s worth slightly more alive than dead.)

This is not entirely a typical “pass bond issue, close old school” situation, though. Dickinson County is one of three counties in northwest Iowa that peaked in population in the most recent census. Although a good portion of the population is seasonal, enrollment in the district has been steady to slightly growing (PDF). Milford shares a city border with Arnolds Park, so while the latter is technically losing its school the new one is only four miles away. (Interestingly, while the site for the new one can be seen from the present high school, it’s not currently inside Milford’s city limits!)

Construction of the new facility, according to the article, will take 18 to 24 months, so it could open in the fall of 2020.

Next door, Graettinger-Terril approved a bond issue by a 17-vote margin (story: KICD) to build a new gym, new classrooms, and other things.

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Apr 08

All April in a week

Posted on Sunday, April 8, 2018, at 11:00 AM by Jeff

When Mother Nature gets off the sauce, or as tired of winter as we are, but not without 3 to 4 inches of snow first.

aprilweektemps

Exactly five years ago, it was the other way around.

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Apr 05

Last ride on the first escalator

Posted on Thursday, April 5, 2018, at 10:10 AM by Jeff

IFApril 1, 2018: Through the window on the first floor of Sears at Waterloo’s Crossroads Mall.

The new Sears Roebuck Department Store, twice as big as the old and sparkling with the innovations of a “more modern and fashionable” head office, will open its doors to the public at noon Tuesday, with a grand opening scheduled for the following morning. — Waterloo Daily Courier, March 24, 1969

A full-page inside spread in the Courier showed off the accoutrements of “one of the largest and most modern department stores in the Sears chain.” According to the photos, Sears “will be the first store in the Crossroads Center enclosed mall, the first such facility in Iowa.” It had the first escalator in Black Hawk County.

IF

The first steel beams planted at Crossroads Mall were for the Sears. It was one of the first 14 stores to sign long-term leases. Fifty years almost to the day that “Shopping Center Building Started” (Courier, March 27, 1968) foretold a massive new development for Black Hawk County, that first store is counting down to its last sale, another data point in the retail apocalypse.

When it closes, there will be four full-fledged Sears stores left in Iowa — Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Des Moines, and Sioux City.

IF

As I mentioned before, this was “my” Sears. I would put good odds that this was the first place I rode an escalator. (Mom’s was the Des Moines downtown Younkers.) I remember taking detours past the TVs on the way from Bishop’s (closed January 2011) to Waldenbooks (closed January 2010).

Nearly every major appliance for 40 years, including my college fridge, came from here. The demise of the Waterloo store and the long-term decline of Sears in general can be summed up in this anecdote: In the search for a vacuum at the end of last year, Mom tried Sears first. The kind she wanted wasn’t in stock, and she ended up finding one cheaper online.

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Apr 04

50th anniversary of MLK’s assassination

Posted on Wednesday, April 4, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

LorraineWreath
December 29, 2001: A wreath marks the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis. The building of the Lorraine Motel was incorporated into the National Civil Rights Museum.

Our trip to the 2001 Independence Bowl, like so many vacations both with family and by myself, had a big dose of history involved. My brother was doing a History Day project on the Little Rock Nine, but that wasn’t needed as a hook to visit two key sites in the civil rights movement: Little Rock Central High School and then the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum’s path takes you near the place Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, its significance amplified by everything you’ve seen and heard in the time before.

Then in 2009, in my second and so-far last trip to DC, we went to the Lincoln Memorial at night. Along with a small cluster of students, I listened to the “I Have a Dream” speech — standing at the spot where King gave it. That, too, was very powerful.

I don’t think it’s possible to hear the end of the last speech he gave, the day before he died, without getting chills.

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Apr 03

D is for Dumont

Posted on Tuesday, April 3, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

July 7, 2015: The closed Hampton-Dumont Intermediate School in Dumont. The lighter-colored concrete portion with the school name is where the connection to the original school building was; that part was demolished in the 2005-06 school year.

The passage of a bond issue in 2004 made the closing of Hampton-Dumont’s site in Dumont a matter of time. The voters in Dumont probably knew it, too, because they had voted in large numbers against the referendum before — twice in 2002 alone. The main thrust of the bond issue was to build a new middle school in Hampton, because the existing one had assorted age and Americans with Disabilities Act issues.

The Mason City Globe-Gazette quoted Superintendent Lee Morrison in 2004, when a $7.9 million bond issue passed: “I think they realized we have a commitment to that building,” referring to the fear expressed by some Dumont voters that their school building would be closed.

But by 2009, after the new middle school had opened, HD’s enrollment had dipped about 5% since 2000. That was enough for the school district to decide to end attendance at Dumont, which by then was down to fourth-graders only.

When I saw the building in 2015, except for the grass in the asphalt play area and slightly-too-big foliage close to the building, the Dumont school looked like it could have been in use yesterday and reactivated tomorrow. Archived stories from the Globe-Gazette used for this blog post also merited some tweaks to the Hampton and Dumont year entries on my school timeline.

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Apr 02

Could the state drop IA 922?

Posted on Monday, April 2, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


May 18, 2017: From the interchange at the south end of IA 922/Business 151. These shields have been replaced with the new wide style and small arrows. The Business 151 page has a bunch of new photos BTW.

The Iowa DOT, freed from its maintenance of spur routes and low-traffic highways in 2003, appears to have a decommissioning strategy the past few years. Urban arterials have been prime candidate for deletion, and it’s easy to see why: They don’t carry much long-distance traffic, it cuts out lots of lane miles for the distance involved, and then cities are free to reshape the roads as they please (or as they need, with underlying infrastructure issues).

  • Perhaps the most known and longest-issue case is University Avenue in Cedar Falls and Waterloo (IA 934), which feels like the state wanted to unload since it re-established jurisdiction in 1998. The state paid Waterloo $28 million (PDF) — $1873.86 per foot — to be rid of that portion.
  • Business US 169 (IA 926) was turned over to Fort Dodge in 2014.
  • IA 92 was rerouted around Muscatine when Mississippi Drive was transferred to the city (PDF).
  • West Broadway in Council Bluffs — a road that, as the Lincoln Highway, pre-dated the state system — was transferred to the city of Council Bluffs in 2016, along with the north half of IA 192, and earlier this month the rest of 192 followed. For now, at least, Kanesville Boulevard remains under state control.
  • When the Southwest Arterial is completed in Dubuque in 2019, US 52 will be rerouted onto it. Central Avenue and the one-way pairs downtown that carry it and IA 3 will be given to the city.
  • Not transferred to city control, at least not yet: Business 61 through Davenport, now IA 461.

Untouched in all of this is Business US 151 in Cedar Rapids, which is IA 922, nearly 9 miles long. It’s all urban arterial surface street, four or five lanes throughout. There is an ongoing construction project on the northern part of the route, 27th Street to 40th Street.

Combined with earlier work, this is putting the north half of the route in pretty good condition. So how about talking about a turnover? The state could dead-end the 922 designation at the end of the construction, or farther southwest, maintaining the 1st Avenue Bridge and the Williams Boulevard portion.

(This is all speculation, if it’s not clear. There is no discussion about this at the moment, yet it seems like something that should be, especially as the state will add Linn County mileage with the IA 100 bypass. I suggested the same thing regarding US 69 between Des Moines and Ankeny as it is upgraded this year.)

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Mar 30

Square 218 shields a threatened species

Posted on Friday, March 30, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


July 15, 2007: Despite the difference in digits, these shields are the same size around. The east end of IA 8 is one of the few places left in Iowa where you see square US 218 shields as you drive the latter route.

In about the middle of the decade, Iowa started moving toward larger shields at two scales: Wide shields (3 feet wide by 2 feet high) for all three-digit routes, and jumbo signs on four-lane roads. (Ironically, this has not been applied to interstates…yet.) In my opinion, the wide shield is wildly unnecessary, especially in Iowa, where only one three-digit US route does not have a 1 in it.

With mass replacements going on across the state, there are only three segments of US 218 where wide shields are not the order of the day: Between the IA 57/58 interchange and US 30, along I-380, and the short final standalone segments from Donnellson to Keokuk. But with a February sign letting for southeast Iowa, the latter isn’t going to be in this case for long. The 218 shields in the city of Keokuk, and all the US 136 shields, aren’t included in that letting, so they’ll stay for now.

Since the bulk of 218’s entire route is in Iowa, replacement like this will spell the end for the squares — but they won’t be gone entirely. All of the county roads that intersect 218 — including those from the Second Great Decommissioning — retain the squares. We just won’t see them on the mainline while traveling the route.

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Mar 29

Return of the Demon Sheep

Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

It’s probably not news that footage used in campaign ads will be reused and recycled over the course of multiple elections. But there’s one now that takes the reuse to a new level because the original content is somewhat notorious.

The ad is from the Iowa Credit Union League, in response to a bill in the Iowa Legislature that would tax credit unions the same as banks while reducing banks’ tax rate. It aired on KGAN between the Kansas-Duke Elite Eight game and the “60 Minutes” Stormy Daniels interview (right in that period when a network goes through an unavoidable tonal shift).

The clips originated with Carly Fiorina’s 2010 Senate primary campaign in California. Time magazine reported at the time:

The ad was so weird — employing montages of pigs and sheep, a robotic wolfman dressed in wool, graphic illustration evoking Monty Python — that it spread online like swine flu on a pig farm.

The Demon Sheep segment starts around the 2:20 mark; frames above match around 2:26 and 2:51.

I’d put a string of sheep puns here, but the ads covered all of them already.

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Mar 28

Benton County closing front door to courthouse, installing metal detector

Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

IFJuly 23, 2015: When RAGBRAI had a noon stop in Vinton, the south-side front door of the courthouse was open.

A procedure once reserved for only the biggest county courthouses in Iowa is trickling down to at least one more.

Starting Monday, all visitors to the Benton County Courthouse in Vinton will be restricted to the west entrance and will have to go through a metal detector, reports the Cedar Valley Times. The north and south doors will be restricted to emergency exits. The article does not say what, if any, extra costs will be incurred from the added security (or the metaphorical effects of slamming the front door shut).

According to a Quad-City Times article reprinted in the Sioux City Journal, in summer 2014 only 10 courthouses in Iowa had metal detectors including Woodbury which had just started that August.

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Mar 27

Analysis of 2018 RAGBRAI map

Posted on Tuesday, March 27, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


July 23, 2008: RAGBRAI passed through the center of Iowa (well, close enough) in 2008 and will again this year.

The Register’s preview appears to be trying to tell me something.

If you can locate Ute, Aspinwall, Dana, Peoria and Harper on a map, you should launch a candidacy for statewide office.

*clears throat, raises hand*

If nominated, I will not run; if elected, well, you’ve done worse.

Since the Register switched to releasing daily maps on the RAGBRAI website, there’s been a little less of the history invoked in the main route stories. This route passes through five towns that have never been on it before, and despite being a short central route travels some roads that haven’t been used either ever or recently.

  • Towns RAGBRAI has never been to but will hit in 2018 are Aspinwall, New Sharon (on the century loop aka Karras Loop), Wellman, Kalona, and Blue Grass.
  • Towns not visited in the last 30 years are Soldier (1987), Moorhead (1981) (gravel loop this time), Ute (1987), Charter Oak (1987), Melbourne (1976), Harper (1986) and Keota (1986).
  • Given the map, if Lambs Grove ends up on the route, the ride will pass through 46 incorporated places including 2 on the loops.
  • Parts of the Lincoln Highway in Greene, Boone, Story, and Marshall counties will be followed. The segments from Scranton to Boone and Ames to State Center repeat 2008.
  • Segments RAGBRAI has never used before: IA 141 through Aspinwall, through Ledges State Park, the roads in the Karras Loop, Keota to Riverside (mainly IA 22), and Wilton to just north of Blue Grass.
  • Bettendorf gets stiffed AGAIN. This is just mean. The city should lobby hard to be the endpoint in 2022, after the I-74 bridge is completed. The cycle would be just right.
  • Because the ride passes through Kalona this year, Traer is now the second-largest community not adjacent to a metro area that RAGBRAI has never been through, behind only Alta. (Alta’s been left out of FIVE separate Sioux-City-to-Storm-Lake segments; is the railroad crossing an issue?) Overall, Traer is the 12th-largest city completely unscathed by the pie-eating hordes, although there are five larger that haven’t seen riders in at least 30 years.

I have updated my RAGBRAI towns list to include the 2018 list.

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