Who said Missouri wasn’t Southern?
According to KTVO and Bluegrass Today, a Missouri state legislator has proposed giving the title “Bluegrass Queen Rhonda Vincent Highway” to a portion of US 63 running north from Greentop MO. Greentop, the honoree’s hometown, is at the very bottom of the Iowa state map as US 63 continues south toward Kirksville.
If she’s the queen of her genre, wouldn’t it make sense to run it an additional three miles to Queen City?
If the price of a stamp hits 50 cents and media outlets give it scant coverage, did it happen at all? Is it a sign of how much people aren’t mailing things? Or is it related to the fact that stamps don’t have prices on them anymore?
The price increase, effective Jan. 21, was announced in October. There are scattered stories from smaller TV stations and newspapers; WBBM, perhaps the most prominent place I can find it, rolled it into a story about all price increases in 2018. (Did you know Chicago has an amusement tax?)
I learned about it when I stopped by the Traer post office — “We have the new LOVE stamps.” “Well, I think it would be a little weird to put those on my bills.” — and the price came out evenly.
Political/statistical analysis website 538 says fixing gerrymandering is hard. At one point it resorts to a computer algorithm that completely ignores all jurisdictional boundaries in a quest to make “competitive” districts.
What if gerrymandering is a problem better solved by mathematicians and computer scientists than politicians and political scientists? What if we could move to a system that didn’t consider race or partisanship at all — one that had no pre-assigned winners and losers, costly litigation or drag-out fights in state capitals?
Yes, what if? What IF? If only we could find some place ordering
districts be convenient and contiguous, preserve the integrity of political subdivisions like counties and cities, and to the extent consistent with other requirements, reasonably compact.
Iowa’s 1980s congressional districts, the first drawn under a nonpartisan process. Complete series of maps here.
At this point, asking “how do we avoid gerrymandering” without saying “IOWA DOES IT” is journalistic malpractice.
Finding my 32,000th photo was more complicated than it should have been. It turns out that I accidentally mis-set the time on the camera (yes, you youths, there was such as thing as “manually setting date and time”) and so on my Great Plains trip, the file names were not aligned with the dates they were taken. Plus, I had to integrate photos from a backup camera.
It ended up that the milestone-holder (bottom) was rather pedestrian, so I also have one that I first thought was #32,000.
August 5, 2016: Wyoming welcome sign on I-80 at the Nebraska/Wyoming state line. From here, it’s only slightly farther to Salt Lake City than it is to Council Bluffs.
August 6, 2016: Historical marker east of Sidney, Nebraska, on US 30. Irrigation is vital to Nebraska agriculture, especially west of the 100th meridian.
September 8, 2010: South beginning of IA 98, in unincorporated Leando. Leando (pop. 115) and Douds (pop. 152) were granted Census Designated Place status for the 2010 census.
In the early 20th century, it was common for small-town newspapers to run items from other papers across the state telling of recent developments. It’s fitting, then, that I learned of the death of an original highway number in that way.
The Marshalltown Times-Republican carried a snippet from the Van Buren County Register — a paper so small it doesn’t appear to have a website — about the transfer of IA 98 to the county. According to the blurb, the DOT gave the county $2.31 million on Dec. 28. Transfer of the highway was agreed upon back in May 2014, when the state said it would build a new bridge across the Des Moines River. The bridge was the only reason 98 survived the Second Great Decommissioning.
IA 98 was born July 1, 1920, as a spur highway to Eldon, and it never strayed far from home. From World War II onward, it was merely a spur route from IA 16 to Douds (on the north side of the river) and Leando (on the south side, and also site of an elementary school).
IA 98 is survived by siblings IA 93 and IA 96, two other routes near in number that started as spurs but were extended later on.
Two former state highways in Iowa owed their existence to manufacturing.
One of them stuck around until the Second Great Decommissioning. IA 386 was an oddball route that had both ends facing southwest. There’s only one thing of note along its 2.7-mile route: The John Deere Dubuque Works.
1953
The other, the first IA 396, is much more obscure, only around six years. Its number was immediately recycled, so it had no lasting effect on the Iowa map. Jason Hancock was pretty sure it ran along North 19th Avenue East and East 8th Street North in Newton. And at that intersection we find…well, I already spoiled it in the headline.
Maytag Company Builds $5,000,000 Factory at Newton
The Maytag company will construct a $5,000,000 plant at Newton, Iowa, according to an announcement made this week by Fred Maytag, president of the company. The organization … has maintained a plant in this community since the first Maytag washing machine was manufactured in 1907.
— Dixon Evening Telegraph, Dixon IL, May 6, 1948 (garbled OCR text edited)
Maytag announced a new factory in 1948, and IA 396 was designated in 1948, running right past the spot where a shiny new industrial complex appears in 1950s aerial photos. Awfully coincidental, don’t you think? This blog post is speculation, but I think there’s pretty strong evidence.
Today, something like this would not get its own number. It would be handled through the Revitalize Iowa’s Sound Economy (RISE) program, created in 1986 to “promote economic development in Iowa through the establishment, construction, and improvement of roads and streets.”
It’s not the Maytag factory anymore. Whirlpool slammed the door on it shortly after buying the company. Newton has gone all out in efforts to find tenants to fill the sprawling space; just last April a commercial real estate firm announced Maytag Plant 2 was refurbished for use.
Jason also notes that IA 387, which went to the Davenport Municipal Airport, passed a Caterpillar factory, but the state once had highways running to or past every airport of marginal size.
Every year, Bill Connelly of SB Nation ranks the top 100 college football games of the season. This year, two Iowa State losses, and one huge win, made their way on the list, at #84 (Oklahoma State), #8 (Oklahoma), and #6 (Iowa). Wedged between the latter two is Iowa’s loss to Penn State.
(This is not an endorsement of Connelly’s other work, from his magical computer formulas to SBN’s sitewide obsession with destroying the NCAA model, but the yearly list is a fun one to read.)
While working on revisions to my Sioux City Highway Chronology page — for some reason I never uploaded new entries and a new 1972 map when I finished it; they’re there now — I got to thinking about the era of a historic bridge there.
The Combination Bridge was one of six Iowa border bridges opened in the 19th century later part of the state and US highway system. Only one remains, the Government Bridge to the Rock Island Arsenal, and it doesn’t carry any highways anymore. For all but its last five years, the Combination Bridge was the way across the Missouri River in the Sioux City area. It was replaced a week before its 85th anniversary.
The state of Iowa recently celebrated its 171st birthday, which is just more than double 85 years. With an online calculator, I figured a factoid: On December 16, 2016, for the first time since 1945, the existence of the Combination Bridge covered less time than half of Iowa’s statehood.
Some residents of the Harmony school district don’t want to be a part of a consolidation with Van Buren, according to this article from the Burlington Hawk Eye. In November, the AEA denied all requests to shift land from one district to another (Google Doc), including land bordering other districts. (Harmony’s eastern border, on average, is about three miles east of the Van Buren County line.)
The article happened to indirectly address something I’d been wondering — if a consolidation would result in the Douds school closing. It said the Douds school is full, and a reorganization could result in some students in the existing Van Buren district going to the Harmony school instead.
Reminder: When Harmony started whole-grade sharing, Bonaparte Elementary closed, and students were moved to the school that is at the intersection of J40 and W46 north of Farmington.
It’s a three-paragraph, 30-second story from WHO, but it tells so much. According to the story, based on numbers from the city, Ankeny built 567 new single-family homes and 539 other residences in 2017. That makes for 1106 housing units as defined by the census (or so I interpret).
In 2010, the entire town of Audubon had 1106 housing units, according to the Census of Population and Housing report from 2012 (PDF) that has everything related to those numbers. Now, keep in mind that the percentage of single-family homes there is much greater, but the point is roughly the same: The entire residential complement of a county seat was built new in Ankeny in 12 months.
Two-thirds of Iowa counties had fewer housing units in 2010 than in 2000, according to the census statistics.
