Oct 28

State to recommend dissolving Farragut school district

Posted on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

!!!!!!! (Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil):

The fate of the Farragut Community School District remains unknown, but the situation is now dire after the Iowa Department of Education announced it will recommend dissolving the district. …

The Hamburg Reporter first reported the Department of Education’s recommendation late Tuesday afternoon. District officials were notified in a teleconference Friday, Hinrichs said. The Daily Nonpareil independently verified the announcement Tuesday evening with the state agency as well as Nishnabotna officials.

THAT is the sound of an administrative nuclear bomb about to be detonated for the third time in Iowa history.

The Hamburg Reporter did its work after a very vaguely worded press release came out Monday morning and it got multiple sources confirming things on the record:

Farragut School Board President Jenny Varellas confirmed that they had heard from the Department of Education on Friday, Oct. 23, that it would be recommended that the Farragut School District be dissolved. Varellas said, “with that information in mind the focus of the Wednesday night meeting has changed from discussion about the PPEL to more of a question and answer session, and what-ifs.”

There is nothing so far about the Hamburg school district’s status, but if this comes to pass, there’s a heap of chaos about to descend on Fremont County.

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Oct 27

Where is Harmony City?

Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

“Then would you mind telling me what you’re doing in the middle of a plain in Iowa — and what I’m doing here, for that matter?”

Occasionally in books or movies a character will drop a reference to some place in Iowa. The most common reasons appear to be a) to show that this person has connections to the Midwest, providing flavor and minor characterization; b) to show that this person is a rube who has no idea how the civilized world works; or c) because there’s a plot device that needs something happening in the middle of nowhere.

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is an example of the last. That’s where the quote at the top of this post comes from. A scientist associated with the government is sent to check out Project X, an ultrasonic ray capable of causing great destruction. The radius of the weapon is described as such:

“a circle with a periphery extending from the shore of the Mississippi, roughly from the bridge of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, to Des Moines and Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Austin, Minnesota, to Woodman, Wisconsin, to Rock Island, Illinois.”

Here’s what it looks like on the Iowa map if you circumscribe all of those locations. (Woodman is a pretty small town.) Note that part of the circle follows close to the Mississippi. There are two nearby railroad bridges in real life, the Government Bridge for the old Rock Island Railroad in the Quad Cities and the Union Pacific bridge at Clinton.

The square in the middle represents the center of the circumscribed area. It is not the center of the shape represented by the polygon inside it, since the circle includes a much greater area to the south. This square is directly over La Porte City.

Since no original name was given, the true site is up for grabs. The website Conservapedia, for example, pinpoints Harmony City as being Dunkerton, 18 miles due north of La Porte City. Black Hawk County, in general, makes for a reasonable geographic location of the project.

Note: This post is not intended to be political. It is merely a discussion of Iowa in literature. It just so happens that this is a very political book.

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Oct 26

North Tama football’s worst season in a century

Posted on Monday, October 26, 2015, at 10:09 AM by Jeff


Friday was like this.

Since 1921, when football was reinstated at Traer High School after the national period of safety concerns, only one team had gone winless in a season. The 1939 team went 0-8.

This year, the Redhawks finished 0-9, being outscored 407-56 including three shutouts.

The 3-24 record of the last three years is the worst since Traer went 3-24 in 1958-60, and that was bracketed on either end with a 1-4-1 abbreviated 1957 season and Traer-Clutier going 3-15 in 1961-62.

Here’s to hoping things look up next year.

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Oct 23

IA 58 meeting in Cedar Falls Tuesday

Posted on Friday, October 23, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

A public hearing with a presentation about changing IA 58’s intersection with Viking Road into an interchange will be held Tuesday, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reports.

The roadbed for current 58 will be lowered and a very tight SPUI constructed. I have no idea how that’s going to work, but it’s certainly going to mean lots of disruption when it happens.

A rendering included with the article shows the proposal to build a new flyover-ramp interchange with US 20 as well. You can see the right-of-way lines left behind as an entirely new four-lane would be built just to the west of the current center point of the interchange (where 20 goes over the road) and then go in an elevated S-curve over Ridgeway Avenue and the current road (part of which would be eliminated) before hooking up with the current road south of Viking. However, that interchange and another tight SPUI at Greenhill Road have no money and aren’t in the five-year plan.

Retail east of the 58/Viking intersection has grown tremendously over the past decade and a half, from the Farm & Fleet and Wal-Mart to largely supplanting College Square Mall with a Target, strip-mall storefronts, and a McDonald’s (which is a recent enough development I only know about it via a picture with the article).

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Oct 22

Register’s ‘Lost Schools’ on IPTV tonight

Posted on Thursday, October 22, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The Des Moines Register‘s documentary about the changes and decline of rural Iowa’s school districts airs on Iowa Public Television at 7 tonight. Former North Tama principal Nick Pace is among those interviewed.

In conjunction with that, Iowa Public Radio interviewed reporter Jason Clayworth, photographer Charlie Litchfield, and a small-school shared superintendent in southwestern Iowa. (Sidney is misspelled in the chatter.) The interview is about 50 minutes long.

Sunday’s Register had a “what does it all mean” type of piece, and as far as ISU economist David Swenson is concerned, we’re past the point of no return. Former opinion writer Richard Doak also wrote about it, and for the most part avoided a broadside against rural Iowa.

(For the record, I was not consulted, aside from the very beginning of the project when I floated/agreed with Corwith-Wesley and Southeast Webster-Grand/Prairie Valley as potential candidates to be covered.)

Plug and reminder: My timeline of changes to Iowa school districts over the past 30 years gets updated after I dig up new information or when things happen.

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Oct 21

THE FUTURE IS HERE

Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2015, at 6:29 PM by Jeff

…now what?

UPDATE: Instead of sweeping, the Cubs got swept, and we haven’t abolished lawyers. This is the timeline that sprung from when Marty didn’t hit the Rolls-Royce on Oct. 27, 1985. Future imperfect, indeed.

UPDATE II: USA Today has been capitalizing on 26-year-old product placement a very good sport about BTTF Day coverage, and has a landing page with links to all the articles it’s done about the trilogy.

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Oct 21

US 61 Grandview construction update

Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Story from KWQC. If you watch carefully, you’ll see a few seconds of the street sign with “Co Rd 252” on it at the former west end of IA 252. That intersection will be on sort of a frontage road because the four-lane is being built to the west with an interchange at IA 92.

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Oct 20

Package of 80/380 interchange plans available

Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2015, at 10:21 AM by Jeff

After a meeting at the end of last month, the DOT released the set of plans for the complete reconstruction of the I-80/380 interchange from a cloverleaf into a sweeping interchange with flyover ramps. It’s broken into nine PDF maps. The big project could be done in pieces based on availability of money — for example, it could do the long ramp from eastbound 80 to northbound 380 first.

One lane will be added in every direction around the interchange, making I-80 10 lanes wide total for the short distance between I-380 and the Coral Ridge exit.

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Oct 19

More about Iowa’s northern and western borders

Posted on Monday, October 19, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Years ago, I wrote about my research into the back-and-forth of the 1830s and 1840s in creating the shape of the state of Iowa. I mentioned that I had never seen any proposal of a northern border of 45° from the Mississippi River to the Missouri River, including the southern third of Minnesota and all of eastern South Dakota.

However, as part of an “Iowa 101” course co-sponsored by The Des Moines Register, DMACC, and Graceland University, a foray into the history of Iowa’s northern and western borders that relies almost exclusively on research into Minnesota’s borders does indicate that a straight line that far north was considered at least at one point.

In the end, all the future inhabitants of the land between 43°30′ and 45° N were deprived of their chance to be Iowans, while those east of the Missouri and Big Sioux Rivers were spared the horror of becoming Nebraskans.

The lesson has a curt dismissal of “how far the future Iowa would extend to the south” and I must point out that this certainly wasn’t settled easily, and is among the more famous border disputes in the country.

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Oct 16

Two gamecast firsts for ISU-TCU

Posted on Friday, October 16, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Saturday’s game will have two firsts for Iowa State, not counting the possibility of the Jack Trice Stadium scoreboards registering triple digits for the visiting Horned Frogs.*

The game will start at 6 on ESPN2. Iowa State has never been in a Saturday night game on ABC, ESPN, or ESPN2 in the current “every game on TV somewhere” era. (2011 Oklahoma State was a Friday, 2013 Texas a Thursday.) So this game takes the easiest picking of those off the list.

ESPN’s Beth Mowins will do the play-by-play. Mowins did the radio play-by-play for the 2012 Liberty Bowl, but still to my knowledge this will be the first time a woman has called an ISU football game on TV. Mowins has called plenty of Iowa games, because she often gets assigned the 11 AM Big Ten game, but ISU is almost always on FSN or FS1 in that time slot. (A notable exception is last year’s TCU game, on ABC because there was a light slate of games and TCU was a College Football Playoff contender. TCU proceeded to paste ISU to the point of kneeling in the red zone in the fourth quarter, only to find out that the playoff committee did not look kindly on mercy.)

Whatever happens in the TCU game, Baylor will be looking to surpass it next week when the Cyclones go to Waco…and that game will be on “the ESPN family of networks” at 11 AM. If Mowins is assigned that game too, that’s going to be a heck of a curse to escape from.

*BLOOD. SO MUCH BLOOD. And not just from the eyes of the Frogs either.

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