It’s probably hard to see, but at the beginning of the year, NBC TV tweaked its classic Peacock logo. Trade publication NewscastStudio has an explanation with before-and-after GIFs.
Overall, 2023 is the 70th anniversary of eight TV stations that at least partially include Iowa in their broadcast areas. This includes all three stations in eastern Iowa and three NBC affiliates (KWWL being on both lists).
I have done my best Indiana Jones impersonation and plumbed the depths of the Internet Archive to bring back a little bit of the 20th century: Traer’s Quasquicentennial (125th) anniversary website. This set of webpages appears to have eluded multiple computers and Zip disks, but I think about 85% is there.
The complete schedule for the second weekend of August 1998 is there, as is a rundown of associated events in the first half of the year.
What isn’t there is pretty random: A lightened version of the 125th logo used as a background on multiple pages, the big version of the second “Where in Traer” contest, the February calendar image, and a couple little icons from the calendar.
Back in the ’90s we made websites with colored and mottled backgrounds. One of the Q pages, about a traveling replica of the Vietnam Wall, had a black marble background. This image (which is tiled as needed) wasn’t archived, but I was able to find a version by tracking the file name and stumbling upon a really, really Netscape-era Tripod (!!!) site from user “coopiedog”. (It took WORK to make pages like that! We had to churn the code by hand or use steam-powered HTML editors!)
There’s no specific website for the sesquicentennial this year. The town’s website has information, but most everything else is put on a Facebook page.
EDIT: You know what would be really swell? Actually putting a link up there.
The second of two intersections on US 30 between the United school and the IA 17 interchange will be converted to a right-in-right-out intersection within a year. The meeting was in April. The diagram is here.
The intersection with T Avenue, which goes north to meet IA 17 at the latter’s now-relocated east-west jog, has already been turned into right-in-right-out for westbound traffic, eliminating eastbound left turns. Now the intersection with 230th Street, which goes west to IA 17 before 30 curves northward, will have its median removed. Then only eastbound traffic will be able to turn there.
I could see a case for full closures at both intersections, but that wouldn’t eliminate the most important one on that stretch of 30. That’s a mile east at U Avenue, which is the access for both United school and the ISU Agricultural Engineering and Agronomy Research Farms. It wouldn’t be impossible to create a bridge/frontage road system to make the stretch of 30 between the IA 17 and Lincoln Way exits into controlled-access, just expensive. It would be slightly less work than what’s going on between Ames and Nevada, and we know how complicated that has been.
The DOT is having a meeting Thursday at Jester Park in Granger regarding changes to access to IA 141, with new construction. The plan wouldn’t make the highway controlled-access, but it wouldn’t be uncontrolled access either. The project would take place in 2025.
It’s a lot of work to solve a trouble spot: The intersection of IA 141 and NW 121st Street, between the IA 415 and IA 17 interchanges. Here’s a story from WHO in 2013 about a crash there that sent three people to the hospital. That story says additional warning blinkers had recently been posted.
By the middle of 2019, contractor Snyder & Associates had created a plan with multiple options. The first was a stoplight at the intersection, which carried an “elevated risk of high-speed high-severity crashes” due to its location. The second was a J-turn, which Iowans in other places have strongly opposed. There’s additional background about the process on Snyder’s website on an undated page. Last December, Axios had a story covering part of this project, in regards to the fact that partially closing 121st’s intersection with 141 would block the most direct route to Jester Park Golf Course.
A slightly modified version of Snyder’s third option (large PDF) is what’s on the table for the meeting Thursday. This one has a lot of parts:
The 2024-28 draft five-year plan puts a $12.667 million price tag on the project, up from just over $10 million in the 2023-27 plan.
A “full build” option from 2019, extending IA 415’s pavement from the interchange westward to NW 121st Street, which also included work at the intersection of IA 415 and NW Beaver Drive, is not part of the plan in Thursday’s meeting.
One note about a minor intersection in Marshall County has led me to investigate the status of an even more minor location.
The Marshall County Board of Supervisors approved turning the intersection of E35 (Main Street Road) and T37 (Zeller Road) into a four-way stop, the Marshalltown Times-Republican reports. This intersection is a slightly odd case, county-road-wise, because the paved road makes a turn. Because of this, the county engineer said, “your brain just thinks that rock road must stop, and it doesn’t.”
The Marshall County engineer told the supervisors that he plans to pave Main Street Road east from the intersection this summer. This is interesting because the road on other side of the county line isn’t much. Main Street Road turns into gravel 290th Street on the Tama County side and wobbles its way southeast to C Avenue and then T47.
South of the intersection, T37 goes to Le Grand. There is an abandoned bridge at a skew to the road, and it was used into the 1950s. Looking at that bridge made me scroll a little westward, and a completely unrelated road got interesting.
Three Bridges Road connects E35 to Quarry Road, except that it doesn’t. Sometime in the 1980s, a bridge on the road was closed. The bridge remains in place, but I can’t look up any information at the moment. Bridgehunter’s website is in the midst of a radical redesign that’s adding dynamic elements, something that often ends in pain for everyone involved.
As late as the 2013 Marshall County map, a bridge icon was at the location with a road going over it. The 2022 county map does not show any bridges on Three Bridges Road, but does show a continuous road north of Quarry. That should be dead-ended and the line between the intersection of Three Bridges and Yates roads and the stream removed.
Sioux City CBS affiliate KMEG was the last in Iowa markets to come on the air, in 1967. It didn’t have local news broadcasts for 16 years, 1983-99. The entire news operation is being cancelled again.
The Sioux City Journal (h/t Dave Busiek) and KSCJ radio both say that KMEG’s last local broadcast is tonight. Sinclair will run a national news show there instead, as it does on KFXA in eastern Iowa. See also this blog post from North Pine Broadcasting.
Sinclair moved KMEG from Channel 14 to Channel 44.3 in 2021.
King Charles wields the Holy Hand Grenade. https://t.co/Ra9RzIb3fn
— Matthew D White (@MatthewDWhite2) May 6, 2023
Dangerous rabbit has bitten at least 2 Perry residents https://t.co/wqW0uGA03M
— KCCI News (@KCCINews) May 10, 2023
The Iowa Legislature’s push to limit yearly growth of property taxes, signed by the governor in the last week of the session, includes a change that affects school bond issues.
Until now, a bond referendum could be held at any of five dates in a two-year cycle, as seen on this page from the Department of Education about the Physical Plant and Equipment Levy. PPELs are often paired with revenue purpose statements, which spell out how a school is to spend sales tax money. This law will result in either their separation or a delay in the latter if the district wants to keep them together. A PPEL is separate from a bond issue.
A number of districts, including North Tama, had votes in March where the only thing being voted on was a bond issue. Green Mountain-Garwin had a PPEL, revenue purpose statement, and a school board vacancy.
Now those March and September bond votes are things of the past. Here’s what House File 718 says on the timing: “For any political subdivision of this state, if the special election is in whole or in part for the question of issuing bonds or other indebtedness, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” A consolidation vote may still take place on the other specified dates.
The bill text, which does not set an odd/even rule, doesn’t match the Legislative Services Agency’s fiscal note issued April 24. Separately, that LSA note points out that local governments, including schools, will incur costs under the new rule that every registered voter must be mailed a paper copy of the text of the bond measure. (The bill text includes an exception to the “unfunded mandate” law.)
This means that 2023 is the last year where schools get more than one shot in 12 months, and November is the only option. (Those six votes that sank North Tama’s bond issue are looming pretty large.) In even-numbered years, bond issues will have to compete for attention with every position from county supervisor up to governor or president. Ironically, the even-year general election wasn’t on the list of options before.
Finally, the bill bans schools from creating a new Public Education and Recreation Levy, or “playground levy”. Only 28 districts, including BCLUW and East Marshall, had the levy in 2022, according to this map from the Iowa Association of School Boards. Those that have one may keep it.
Iowa PBS’s “Market to Market” show did a 6½-minute feature on “Tama Jim” Wilson last week. Wilson, originally from Scotland, came to the Traer area before the Civil War and eventually became Secretary of Agriculture under three presidents.
I’m going to embed the video, but based on previous experience it’ll still require going to YouTube.
Following a reader’s letter, I dug in on the history of the Clearfield school for the 1982-92 school years. It got so complicated I had to make a spreadsheet. The Clearfield district, on the Taylor/Ringgold county line, dissolved in 2014.
