Sep 26

Town’s worth of housing coming to Bondurant

Posted on Wednesday, September 26, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Earlier this month, the Bondurant city council approved plats for two developments that will add 240 homes, the Des Moines Register reported. The once-small suburb more than doubled in population between 2000 and 2010 to become Iowa’s 99th-largest city. In 2015, a special census reported a population of 5481, vaulting it past SIXTEEN county seats and closing in on more.

Now, while “housing units” include individual apartments in federal census statistics, those are practically nonexistent in rural Iowa. With that taken into account, building 240 houses is roughly the 2010 census equivalent of adding:

  • Burt (pop. 533, 232 housing units)
  • Delmar (pop. 525, 227 housing units)
  • Garwin (pop. 527, 254 housing units)
  • Latimer (pop. 507, 230 housing units)
  • Maynard (pop. 518, 239 housing units)

You get the idea. Adding merely the 440th-largest city in Iowa (Garwin) to what officially was the 99th-largest but is now unofficially around 71st would propel Bondurant past seven more county seats to be breathing down Orange City’s neck at the 6000 mark.

That is, if it didn’t happen already. The special census was three years ago, after all.

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Sep 24

Benton County US 30 meeting Oct. 4

Posted on Monday, September 24, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

As construction on the US 30/218 interchange creeps along this fall, the remaining four-lane in Benton County is still waiting. And that means, yup, another meeting! This one is in Blairstown on Oct. 4. I don’t expect any surprises for the segment between 218 and about a mile east of the future IA 21 interchange.

The new lanes, to run just south of the existing ones, won’t be built for years — in fact, it won’t be until after June 2011, the 10th anniversary of the release of initial options for where to put the four-lane. For me, though, I would’ve preferred an ETA between five years ago and yesterday.

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Sep 21

Iowa State-Akron preview

Posted on Friday, September 21, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

(Akron’s mascot is a kangaroo.)

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Sep 20

‘My guardian angel wears a bow’

Posted on Thursday, September 20, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

A senior cheerleader at MMCRU (Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn/Remsen-Union) died suddenly as she arrived at school last week. The cause of death was determined to be a blood clot in her lungs.

MMCRU’s Friday night football opponent, Okoboji, postponed the game to Monday and then collected more than $2000 for a scholarship in memory of Natalee Henke, the Sioux City Journal‘s Tim Gallagher writes. Other schools in northwest Iowa also made gestures of support, the Le Mars Sentinel reports.

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Sep 19

Middle part of University Avenue to be rebuilt

Posted on Wednesday, September 19, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The city of Waterloo will rebuild University Avenue (old IA 934, but most known as old US 218) from the Cedar Falls city limits east to Greenhill Road before the easternmost section to US 63, the Waterloo Courier reports.

Waterloo’s west University segment includes the vacant Kmart. (Want to spot major 1970s thoroughfares? Look for where the Kmarts were.) This segment abuts the part in Cedar Falls that is now infested with roundabouts past College Square. One of those roundabouts was the site of a cement-truck tipover last week.

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Sep 18

IA 141 flyover construction begins Oct. 1

Posted on Tuesday, September 18, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Construction of a flyover ramp at the I-35/80 interchange with IA 141 may begin as early as Oct. 1, the Des Moines Register reported earlier this month.

The final plans were released two years ago and work won’t end until 2012. The flyover ramp will replace the northbound/eastbound exit loop to 141, which comes to a stoplight with Urbandale Drive.

The 100th Street exit nearby should be open by the end of the year, the second interchange on I-35/80 around Des Moines that wasn’t in the original construction (86th Street).

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Sep 17

Part of last four-lane 20 opens today

Posted on Monday, September 17, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Today, new eastbound lanes of US 20 will open from east of Moville to County Road L25 west of Correctionville, according to an e-mail from the DOT. The 7½-mile segment is the first extension east from a segment that opened 59 years and 11 months ago. The new eastbound is more or less on top of the old two-lane. A segment running east from L25 opened last year, so this completes the expressway from Sioux City to the north side of Correctionville.

This is the piece that touches a four-mile segment that was the first rural four-lane 20 in Iowa, the only segment in Woodbury County that overlapped with the paving of the early 1920s.

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Sep 14

Revenge of the Crimson Monkey

Posted on Friday, September 14, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

At the end of 2016, my decision looked obvious: Schedule the vacation to run over the first weekend of October 2017. There will be no reason to watch football that Saturday, because Iowa State is playing at Oklahoma, and Bob Stoops’ Sooners will grind the Cyclones into a fine powder. It wasn’t until later that Stoops decided he didn’t want to play anymore.

So what happens? The Cyclones upend the world order with a 38-31 win en route to their second-best season in my lifetime, becoming the only team in the nation to beat Oklahoma in the 2017 regular season, and earning the first of two road wins over ranked opponents that year. (Which, ahem, is two more than Michigan has in a decade.) Frankly, it’s the most concrete evidence yet that God set SimUniverse on “haywire” mode.

Now, after some conference machinations, Iowa State and Oklahoma will play in September for only the second time ever (1966). And, after some machinations by Mother Nature, it will be only ISU’s second game of the season. As of this writing, ISU is judged to have the toughest schedule in the country.

But! While last year’s shocker has caused some rewriting of my meditation on the nature of suffering, not all is cleansed. Iowa State still hasn’t beaten Oklahoma at Jack Trice Stadium. Ever. Iowa State hasn’t beaten Oklahoma at home since 1960. The Sooners, again/still a top-10 team, might have a score to settle.

Through the 2025 season, Iowa will play Ohio State four times. Iowa State will play Oklahoma twice as many. If ISU managed to beat Oklahoma seven out of every eight years for the rest of the century … OU would still lead the series in the year 2100.

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Sep 13

Stuff the ballot box

Posted on Thursday, September 13, 2018, at 10:02 AM by Jeff

North Tama is in the running for two different items in KWWL’s “Friday Night Heroes”. That’s the link to the sports page, as the voting changes every week. NT vs. Wapsie Valley was last week’s GOTW, but let’s do it again!

First is the voting for tomorrow’s “Game of the Week”: NT against top-ranked Hudson. In 1997, a rainy 7-6 loss to the Pirates in the second-to-last game of the season kept the Redhawks out of the Class 1A playoffs. Now the two teams are back in the same district, and this game could determine the district champion if everything goes well.

Second is the “Play of the Week” from last week: “Skylar Staker (North Tama) 17 yard game-winning touchdown pass to Hale Hulme in final minute” against Wapsie Valley. What’s interesting is that WV has its own play from the same game in the voting, an 88-yard kickoff return. The game was played at Upper Iowa University in Fayette because of playing conditions at Wapsie, the Waterloo Courier reported.

Happy Homecoming and Go Redhawks!

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Sep 12

ISU’s search for a fill-in opponent

Posted on Wednesday, September 12, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The following is not to be taken seriously or literally.

Ames, Iowa — Iowa State has announced that it will play Deep State on Oct. 20, filling a need for a 12th regular-season football game.

Deep State has risen in prominence the past couple of years, making it an ideal opponent for the Cyclones after the season opener against South Dakota State was rained out. Deep State has a heavy East Coast presence, but is believed to have people everywhere.

Neither Deep State’s athletic director nor its football coach were available for comment.

Persistent rumors that ISU’s 2017 Kansas State and 2013 Texas games, and possibly others, were instead actually played against the Deep State Zebras have not been confirmed.

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