September 30, 2015: The first leg of my trip to Door County included clinching US 63 in Minnesota (again) post-Rochester bypass reroute. I then went to the east end of MN 60 as it crossed the Mississippi River. This was my last Mississippi River bridge to cross between St. Paul and St. Louis.
(The original photo has a lot of background, pretty trees at the river, but they’re not the subject.)
By the end of this year, Broadway through Council Bluffs will no longer be part of the Iowa highway system. US 6 will have to be taken off its straight route through the city and moved onto I-29 and I-80. After hearing about this last fall, Dan Drackley had another thought, and it makes so much sense it’s never going to happen.
It has to do with West Omaha and what used to be Elkhorn. In the last decade, US 6 was upgraded to a full elevated freeway west of I-680. However, in Elkhorn, the freeway loses the US 6 designation but doesn’t pick up US 275 for 2 miles. Instead, it’s Link 28B (an inbetween designation used in Nebraska).
US 6 runs north-south from just north of I-80 exit 432 to Elkhorn, with NE 31 co-signed the entire way (204th Street in Omaha). Shortly after leaving the four-lane coming down from Fremont, US 275 is paired with NE/IA 92 all the way through Omaha to I-29 (Center Road, Industrial Road, L Street, and then South Omaha Bridge Road). The two US highways cross over there.
BUT…if Nebraska switched US 275 onto West Dodge Road/Dodge Street, and rerouted US 6 onto I-80, there would be one designation for the four-lane all the way west of I-680 and the two routes would meet in Council Bluffs. Name confusion would be kept to a minimum since the streets are usually referred to by their local names anyway.
In the quick-and-dirty maps below, I’ve highlighted US 6’s current and suggested routes in light blue, and US 275’s in orange. Coming up diagonally from Lincoln, 6 would have an itty-bitty southern jog to get onto I-80 and stay on it until Exit 8 in Iowa. (Alternately, it can follow NE 31 and NE 370 and get on I-80 at Exit 439.)
The beauty of this plan is that no street would need a change in jurisdiction. L28B takes over the short piece of 275 running from the four-lane to NE 92, and then NE/IA 92 stays the same, crossing the Missouri River on the same bridge it does today. NE 31 remains on the north-south road through Gretna. US 275 comes into Iowa with I-480 and has its multiplex with I-29 extended 6 miles.
This plan also fits nicely with the massive upgrades and improvements to make I-29/80 a dual carriageway. US 275 would be in the local lanes with I-29 and US 6 would be in the express lanes with I-80 the entire way.
BUT…this would require coordination and cooperation between two states, and there might not be enough time between now and when Broadway is turned over to make this happen. The other possibility is that because the construction is ongoing, the change on the Nebraska side could wait until a final signage project at the end of the decade. US 6 would still come into the state on I-480 in the interim, but have a “detour” onto I-29 and I-80.
Speaking of up-and-coming locations zooming past more-established ones, the Census Bureau put out its 2015 state population estimates at the end of the year. Iowa crept upward, but it’s no match for what’s going on in the South and West.
Utah, the 34th-largest state in the Union in 2010, is now estimated to be the 31st-largest, right behind Iowa. It just missed the 3 million mark, but likely passed it in the intervening six months. At their decade-so-far averages of growth, it will be a tight contest between the Beehive State and Hawkeye State in 2020.
No state has overtaken Iowa in population since Oregon (which, by the way, now has 4 million people) did it in 1989, but that’s a function of there being fewer states that haven’t done it already and the next ones down (Mississippi and Kansas) growing as slowly as Iowa.
Elsewhere in the Midwest, Minnesota is likely to lose the U.S. House seat it retained by the skin of its teeth in 2010 and four other Big Ten states are likely to lose one each as well.
The result of North Liberty’s mid-decade special census is out, and the city’s bigger. Much bigger. It added the population equivalent of Spirit Lake in five years to reach 18,228. Depending on the outcome of a Waukee special census being taken for the same reasons, North Liberty will crack the top 25 largest Iowa cities while also surpassing two county seats.
In 2010, five of the seven cities immediately above North Liberty in population were suburbs (Newton and Indianola the others) and this census leapfrogs or challenges their 2010 numbers. The three above those — Ottumwa, Muscatine, and Fort Dodge — are a jump up but reported population growth of less than 1% in a decade.
(On a possibly related note, Ottumwa is losing both its Target and Kmart stores in a four-month span, which has to be a blow to the city. The next closest ones are in suburban Burlington, Iowa City, and Des Moines.)
Newton’s struggles were well-publicized after Whirlpool bought Maytag and told the city to drop dead. Newton High School departed the CIML a decade ago, but it’s going to face some old opponents as Class 4A football goes from 46 to 48 teams. This will only be a two-year bump, though, because Iowa City Liberty High School opens in 2017 and will have a football team in 2018. Thus, twice in a short span, North Liberty will get the best of Newton.
Nebraska has held much tighter control over specialty license plates than Iowa, but in the past few years that has loosened. Now Nebraskans can have specialty plates for Creighton University, the state’s sesquicentennial (2017), and members of the military.
But coming soon, developed by the Nebraska Corn Growers Association, is a colorful way to glorify corn. Soon, residents from Rulo to Scottsbluff can have a giant ear of maize draped over the leftmost quarter of the license plate.
The Omaha World-Herald article linked at the top notes that Nebraska will have a new default plate in 2017, changing every six years, while Iowa continues cycling through the reverse alphanumeric that started in 2012 and still uses the 1997 design. What won’t change in Nebraska, as far as I know, is the use of numbers for counties based on vehicle registrations from 1922.
EDIT: Sesquicentennial year corrected.
When Bill Snyder started his first year as Kansas State’s football coach, three months before Taylor Swift was born, the Wildcats trailed in their series with Iowa State by 20 games. The Iowa State program as a whole had about 100 more wins than KSU, and perhaps surprisingly, was only 30 losses under .500 — not an impossible climb (7-4 for 10 seasons would’ve knotted it up).
Today, ISU leads the series by a mere three games (after literally fumbling it away last year), and the next meeting will be the 100th. The Wizard of Manhattan has only lost back-to-back games against ISU once. Snyder could win his 200th game next season, making him responsible for just under 40 percent of KSU’s all-time wins.
But there’s a longer-term trap the Cyclones are in danger of: Supplanting Kansas State as the fourth-worst power-conference football team in history, by both percentage and all-time losses.
I started tracking this when ISU was closing in on its 500th all-time victory (and 600th all-time loss). I started with the 2011 NCAA record book (PDF), which for whatever reason is the last that listed every Division I-A team by (official) all-time win percentage. From that list, I took every power-conference team that after the 2010 season had fewer than 500 wins plus Rutgers, which had 600 losses. I then checked each team’s media guide and sports-reference.com to sniff out as many discrepancies as I could and create adjusted W-L-T numbers. From there, and adding statistics up to the present, here’s what I found:
The Cyclones lead the Wildcats in win percentage by a mere two-thousandths of a point. If each team repeated last year’s record next year — 3-9 for ISU, 6-7 for KSU — KSU, with one fewer overall win, would lead in all-time percentage by one-ten-thousandth. ISU would be fourth from the bottom ahead of Northwestern, Indiana, and Wake Forest.
At least things are looking up for basketball seas…oh. Or women’s bask…oh.
(Here would be a good spot for a Duffy cartoon: The Adair water tower with a frowny face.)
The school district that won the first two state championships in Iowa’s current 8-player-football classification is no longer able to continue on its own. Adair-Casey has approved a whole-grade sharing agreement with Guthrie Center, starting next school year. This news is an outgrowth of last week’s blog post about football classifications through a reader e-mail.
PDF documents on A-C’s website show the district has been looking for a partner for two years (March 2014 FAQ, June 2015 FAQ, survey with sideways-scanned results [UFF DA -Ed.]) and took the next step in the fall.
The schools set the record for the highest-scoring football game in state history in 2014 when the Guthrie Center Tigers (literally the second-most generic name ever) beat the Adair-Casey Bombers (awesome name) 99-66.
Depending on how you treat AGWSR (acronym or spelled out), Adair-Casey is the first/second name alphabetically of all Iowa school districts. I suggest a very obvious combination for a new name: Adair-Guthrie, a name that (1) keeps the alphabetical place, which has benefits, (2) is firmly geographic, only now referencing the two counties instead of the cities, and (3) throws a bone to the district losing its high school (of course, this isn’t helping Gladbrook-Reinbeck at the moment but I digress).
Prime-time CBS drama “The Good Wife” focused Sunday’s episode on fictional presidential candidate/Illinois Gov. Peter Florrick running against the actual candidates for the 2016 Democratic nomination. In the end, the Iowan who got shown in the best light might have been Chuck Grassley, as the hook of the episode was about visiting all 99 counties, and “the full Grassley” was name-checked early and often.
The portrayal of Iowa and Iowans was not especially flattering. There was a visual gag of sorts of the candidate’s bus going to “Rock Valley”, “Merrill”, and “Anthon” — all real towns in different but adjoining counties in northwest Iowa — but the downtown city block was literally the same one in each establishing shot. Presumably this was a commentary on how all the towns blur together/are indistinguishable. Aside from the start of the episode with farmscapes and a campaign bus driving on the wrong side of the road, the only piece of Iowa culture besides the caucuses themselves that figured in any way was the “loose-meat sandwich” (Maid-Rite is a brand name). Florrick’s wife — the title character, Julianna Margulies — was overheard called traveling in Iowa “a nightmare” on the campaign bus and Florrick spat out his sandwich on camera, and supposedly these were the last straws for voters. (It lost a little bit of the punch because the reporter was portrayed by comedian Mo Rocca.)
BUT…if this was how a candidate was really running a campaign, to literally take a fork in the road for a stop that day, with no advance team…then it’s no surprise that he ended up fourth of four. Literally the absolute last thing a low-polling Democratic candidate should do the day before the Iowa caucuses is visit the counties containing Rock Valley, Merrill, and Anthon!
Despite the accuracy the show strove for to get three towns in a day’s bus ride and say the campaign manager graduated from Des Moines Roosevelt, it stumbled by having the “bellwether precinct” at fictional “Foothills High School” and screwing up the map at the finish.
News personality Chris Matthews — playing news personality Chris Matthews, naturally — called out the Democratic results with an on-screen map. However, the map did not match what actually happened. Matthews said Florrick won Polk County “and the three he visited yesterday” but the map showed Allamakee, Marion, and Van Buren — three very far apart in real life, and not the ones he visited. (FWIW, the results were Hillary Clinton 51, Bernie Sanders 27, Martin O’Malley 17, and Peter Florrick 4. This episode gave O’Malley more attention than real-life voters are.)
But what the candidate’s mother said at the end may be what the writers really wanted to say: “Do you know what was invented in Iowa? (No.) Neither do I, because Iowa has contributed nothing to our union and I don’t understand why a state so insignificant gets the right to kick off a presidential primary.” Character motivation aside, ouch.
Among the things invented in Iowa were the tractor, the electronic digital computer and the loose-meat sandwich. Kisses, Hollywood! 🙂
(P.S. Don’t think I didn’t notice that your gung-ho Florrick supporter drove a car with an Illinois license plate.)
The classifications (but not districts) for the next two years of Iowa high school football are out, and North Tama finds itself looking up.
With 107 students in grades 9-11 (the “BEDS number”), North Tama will be the smallest public school to play 11-man football. The only one smaller is Le Mars Gehlen, with 95, and the next up is Algona Garrigan, with 109. Heck of a time to start a capital campaign, Redhawks.
Gehlen, North Tama, Garrigan, and Lynnville-Sully are the only four schools with a BEDS number under 115 — the cap for 8-man football — that will play 11. There are five teams with a BEDS number above 115 allowed to play 8 — Northwood-Kensett, AGWSR(!), Wayne, Easton Valley, and a combined Graettinger-Terril/Ruthven-Ayrshire — based on enrollment projections.
Along with AGWSR, Iowa Valley is another district-football-era North Tama opponent to make the drop to 8. It’s the fifth such team based in a county seat (Marengo), although Guthrie Center had been but now is the smallest 1A school (possibly for travel-related reasons).
The Redhawks will start next season six years removed from a state championship but only one year removed from a winless season, with a new coach, in an at-least-slightly reconstituted district, with a numerical disadvantage for bodies on the field. Snap on your chinstraps.
UPDATE 1/9: Reader Chris Andringa says that Guthrie Center is in 1A because its classification includes Adair-Casey, which was blank at the top of the IHSAA list. In that case, the class split is at 157, the BEDS number for both Pekin (A) and Clayton Ridge (1A).
September 14, 2015: The north end of WI 42 brings you right to a ferry to Washington Island. It does not lead to the Ultimate Question.
An unexpected four-day break offered me the chance to close some gaps in my Wisconsin travels. I went to the Door County peninsula (years before, I had just ducked across the county line) and had quite a scenic drive. Unfortunately, some closures on WI 42 meant I wouldn’t get all of that highway clinched.
On this trip, I clinched US 10 in Wisconsin and by extension all of US 10 from Fargo to the ferry at Manitowoc, plus two counties sticking out of my map. I only have eight counties to go in Wisconsin — but those eight are along or near US 8, which is quite a ways up.
