Hey, remember this post? I didn’t!
But now it’s here: Starting today, IA 8 between Traer and IA 21 is closed through at least late July for culvert construction (news tip: KCRG). The official detour is D65 through Buckingham.
The closure is west of the west 21 junction, not east as the link says. I’ve made my share of west/east goofs recently, so I can’t throw too many stones here. (If you ever see a similar mess-up on my end, let me know.)
The Southeast Valley school district, which will become official in mid-2023, can trace its history to 1914.
One of the first experiments in school consolidation, to be tried in this part of Iowa, will be at the town of Lanyon, just north of Paton township in Webster county. By unanimous petition of the patrons of the district No. 1, in Paton township, known as the Gust Burgh school, that district will be added to Lanyon and the same will be voted on by the patrons of the consolidated district within a short time.
— Jefferson Bee, June 17, 1914
Harcourt, just to the north, consolidated weeks after Lanyon, and/but the two communities would not be unified school-wise until Southeast Valley’s whole-grade sharing began in 2014. A 10-room, 2-story, $18,000 Lanyon Consolidated School building was dedicated May 1, 1917 (Gowrie News, 5/10/17). The structure would exist until the early 2000s. Multiple other towns in the area would form consolidated districts in 1919 and 1920.
The journey from Lanyon to Southeast Valley is long and big — as in, two-thirds the size of Rhode Island big. To tell that story, we need a family tree, or since I started work on this in March, a bracket with a couple round-robins and “pigtails”.
(I am extremely my parents’ child.)
As the family tree shows, there are a lot of former districts involved. The map below covers the top half only, the Prairie Valley district. The Southeast Webster-Grand district is east of PV, and not drawn in. (I hope the district differentiation is clear; I know it’s a lot of lines.)
At the bottom of the map is Lanyon, with the four-square-mile square in Greene County that was Paton No. 1 school to its south.
Through the Jefferson Bee, Jefferson Herald, the Globe Free Press/Paton Patriot/Rippey News and other sources, here is all I know about the district’s history.
The Prairie Valley and Southeast Webster-Grand school districts started whole-grade sharing as Southeast Valley in 2014. Almost a decade later they will be officially consolidated. Although the vote was March 1, the merger won’t go into effect until 2023, based on the current rule that reorganizations take effect July 1 of the calendar year following the vote.
The Fort Dodge Messenger has reported — twice — that Southeast Valley will be the second-largest school district in the state in area, behind Western Dubuque. This would have been correct a few years ago, but not anymore. The consolidation of Van Buren and Harmony in 2019 created the largest one-high-school single district. In addition, if Algona and Lu Verne merge as expected, that district will be ahead of Southeast Valley.
In 2021-22, pre-consolidation, Southeast Valley is the sixth-largest one-high-school area in the state. No new two-way whole-grade-sharing arrangements have been enacted since 2016. (Clay Central-Everly is the only district to have given up its high school since then.*)
Much more Southeast Valley history is coming Friday.
*Learned while writing this blog post: CCE only had one year of sending students in grades 7-12 to multiple schools. Then in 2020 it exclusively set one-way sharing with Spencer (story: KICD), reportedly because the state only allows one partner school. That surprises me, given that Andrew currently splits its students in grades 9-12 between Maquoketa and Bellevue.
*Learned while writing the previous note: Andrew is giving up its junior high students this fall, officially tuitioning to Bellevue but also having Maquoketa as a partner. (story: Bellevue Herald-Leader) That would explain things.
Central and eastern Iowa counties that are not on the present four-lane section of US 30 are very determined to get on it, and won’t take any half-measures.
From “The Center Square”, a news organization focused on “state- and local-level government and economic reporting”:
Eighteen counties, cities and other entities are partnering with the Highway 30 Coalition to oppose the Iowa Department of Transportation project, which would stretch between Lisbon to DeWitt. Instead of the five-year construction of Super 2, the partnership advocated for construction of a four-lane highway.
A Super-2 adds passing and acceleration lanes. It would not require bypassing towns. A DOT spokeswoman said, according to the story, that a four-lane would triple the costs involved (before inflation, I might add). The coalition has commissioned a study for later this year on feasibility of a four-lane corridor.
I covered the release of the 2019 planning study and noted that there are a lot of hazards, water and otherwise, to a four-lane corridor between Lisbon and De Witt. In 2017, I noted that traffic counts notably drop east of Stanwood. The link from then now goes to a 2020 AADT map, and it shows the same. In fact, by these counts, one could make an argument for four-laning all of IA 1 in Johnson County, or at least Iowa City to Mount Vernon, before more of US 30.
The story also reveals that the Missouri Valley bypass has been delayed a year. Farther west, Fremont-to-Schuyler in Nebraska is supposed to be getting a four-lane 30 sometime soon, though I don’t know where that is progress-wise.
In the meantime, my proposal from five years ago to dust off 30-year plans at the west 30/169 junction would seem like a comparatively easy component to get moving.
The last part of the White Pole Road between Anita and Adel under state control is losing its original concrete, but it hasn’t been visible for more than a quarter-century.
A 2-mile segment of IA 25 between Casey and Menlo uses old US 6. This segment, which was US 32 in 1926-31, went from gravel to paved in nearly all of western Iowa in 1930. It just so happens that the middle of this two-mile segment is where contracts were split, and paving in Beaver Township (through Menlo) was finished days before Thanksgiving 1929.
From the Casey Vindicator via the June 12, 1930 Guthrie Center Times:
To give our readers some idea of the magnitude of that day’s [June 10] work we give the following general statement of operations: First the road bed must be put to the proper grade, then the more perfect subgrade must be constructed, the steel forms which serve the double purpose of forms for the slab and a track for the mixing and finishing equipment must be set up. The crushed rock, sand and cement must be unloaded from the railway cars and hauled by truck to the mixer from which it is spread, packed, leveled and smoothed, 100 feet, linear measure of 18 foot paving requires practically one carload of crushed rock, one-half carload of sand and one-fourth carload of cement. In other words the 1430 feet of paving laid on Tuesday required approximately 27 carloads of material to build.
The DOT is going to completely rebuild this section of road this summer. According to a short video/slideshow, the 91-year-old concrete still exists underneath a 3-inch asphalt overlay (with widening) from 1984. This means, by inference, that when US 6 was shifted onto I-80 in 1980, drivers were navigating 50-year-old pavement! In 1970s cars, which are practically boats! On an 18-foot-wide road!
I wonder how many other roads in Iowa still have original concrete under asphalt overlays, waiting for the inevitable complete-rebuild. As for the rest of the White Pole Road, we’d have to ask the Guthrie County engineer, but I strongly suspect that hasn’t changed.
[rant]
Now, about that video/slideshow: Since the start of the year, the project meeting site has included almost zero project documents. Instead, each page demands registration and either visiting a different page or opening an app (FAQ here, and be warned, “stakeholders” are involved).
I do not want to have to create an account to see project files. I do not want to have to deal with something “optimized for mobile.” I want to be able to download a PDF — a 30-year-old-format, universally viewable, local-copy PDF. Why is this being made so difficult?
[/rant]
Iowa Highway Commission blueprints from 1926 show plans for a bridge at North 4th Avenue East across Elk Creek.
A tiny, nearly-century-old bridge on the east side of Newton has no firm replacement plans despite being closed for years.
The Newton Daily News reports that the North 4th Avenue East bridge is stuck in two different limbos: Jurisdiction is split between the city and county, and replacement is subject to both Iowa DOT and Iowa DNR approval. To meet environmental standards, the replacement needs to be twice as long, which will significantly increase costs.
The bridge was built in 1926 in conjunction with paving of US 32 across much of Jasper County. It remained part of the cross-state route until a new alignment of US 6 was built in the 1950s, and was open through at least fall 2011. There is a string of houses east of the bridge that have to take a detour to head west.
August 5, 2017: This intersection of southbound US 218 at the US 18/IA 27 four-lane in Floyd is being turned into an interchange.
The Avenue of the Saints is getting another stoplight, but it’s only going to be around for a couple years.
Construction season is starting — though, as this KIMT story says, it hasn’t been feeling like it weather-wise. There is an immediate start to work on a new US 18/218 interchange at Floyd, where 218 leaves the Avenue of the Saints. Eastbound traffic will be moved to head-to-head in the westbound lanes for construction of a bridge. The other bridge will be built next year, according to the story, although it might be contracted in the next two months because the 2022-26 five-year plan crams everything into FY22 spending. For now, a stoplight will be set up at the 18/218 intersection.
IA 19 was paved between Nora Springs and Charles City in 1922, but it was not until a decade later that the diagonal bypassing downtown Floyd was built. Slightly similarly, perhaps, this interchange has been under discussion for a DECADE.
When the interchange is finished, multiple nearby intersections will be closed off, including at Liberty Street and Packard Avenue, which US 18 used to go in/out of Floyd before 1932. In addition, since the US 30 interchange is now complete, US 218’s only at-grade intersection with a US route for its entire length will be its south end at US 136 in Keokuk.
The original turn of US 20 in Jesup became so accident-prone after the highway was paved in 1922 (as IA 5) that the Highway Commission had a special project to create a curve in the road in 1929. That curve, seen above, exists to this day, although it’s no longer part of a highway.
Earlier this year, news came that the curve was in danger of being vacated by the city and sold to the owner of the adjoining land that includes Jesup’s former grocery store, which closed in 2019.* This caught the eye the Historic Route 20 Association, which raised awareness online about the historic character of the road. (I contributed some information, but I also figured it was a done deal. Shows what I know.)
Monday night, the Jesup City Council decided not to proceed with vacating the road, KCRG reports. That means the concrete curve will stay intact — for now, anyway.
*Jesup’s newspaper followed the grocery store at the end of 2021. Here’s the goodbye note from the editor.
A month ago, the Clarinda school district voted to end a partial-day sharing arrangement with South Page High School that had students from the latter coming to the former in the afternoons. According to the Clarinda Herald-Journal and KMA, increased enrollment in Clarinda and staffing concerns played roles in the decision. Left unmentioned, the latter story notes, is the sports sharing agreement; South Page has not had independent athletics since 2019.
Tomorrow night, reports KMA, there will be a meeting in College Springs to talk about a partial-day sharing agreement with Bedford. Bedford is one of the other two districts that borders South Page, but it’s 40 miles away.
Elsewhere in Iowa, Ar-We-Va has been doing partial-day sharing with Carroll since 2016. Paton-Churdan had an agreement with Greene County for 2019-21, but the only update I can find is that the retiring Greene County superintendent “was proud of the continued sharing partnership with Paton-Churdan.” (Said the Jefferson Herald when the previous agreement was ratified: “It may actually be easier to persuade North Korea to de-nuclearize than to convince the Paton-Churdan Community School District to enter into whole-grade sharing with its neighbor to the south.”)
July 17, 2020: Paullina has a welcome sign with digital message board on the north end of downtown.
O’Brien County, in northwest Iowa, has received a $5,300 grant from the Iowa Economic Development Authority. The county plans to use the money to bring bloggers to visit, reports KIWA.
I don’t know if we still need a paragraph of explanation about what blogs are — or maybe we do because what’s left of blogging is trending toward (ugh) influencing. The blogs mentioned in the KIWA story, one of which is done by a member of the tourism committee, have “O’Brien County Ambassadors” in their headers now.
