Sunrise along the Mississippi River at Leach Park, Bettendorf.
Lee Enterprise stock nearly doubled in price to $1.71 a share earlier this week after news the company had received approval to exit bankruptcy and complete its planned debt refinancing.
The Davenport-based publisher of 48 newspapers, including the Quad City Times, filed for voluntary bankruptcy December 12, 2011 in order to get a small group of lenders bound to terms of the refinancing.
The Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) staff has raised several warning flags about legislation sought by MidAmerican Energy to shift the risk of building a new nuclear power plant to utility ratepayers.
In a memo sent to the IUB and state legislators in December, the IUB staff warns that "some of these (bill) provisions could create incentives for the company to engage in behavior that could be contrary to the public interest in certain situations."
To illustrate what might happen, the staff report gives this possible scenario:
Lee Enterprises -- owner of the Quad City Times and 47 other daily newspapers -- earned $14.5 million in its first quarter ended December 25 despite a 4 percent drop in revenues for the period.
The 32 cents per share in earnings compares to net income per share of 42 cents in the first quarter of 2011. Revenues fell from $207.7 million in the first quarter of last year to $199.6 million this year.
Coal-fired power plants comprise seven of the top 10 emitters of greenhouse gases in Iowa, according to a new online database of large stationary sources compiled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
On a national level, coal-fired electric generating plants make up 96 of the top 100 emitters of so-called greenhouses gases which trap some of the Earth’s outgoing energy, thus retaining heat in the atmosphere.
Power plants are the largest source by far of greenhouse gas stationary source emissions, totaling some 2,324 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, according to the EPA. Petroleum refineries are a distant second emitting 183 million metric tons of CO2 each year.
The heralded expansion of Alcoa's Davenport Works will add $300 million in new construction, an estimated 150 new jobs, and a significant increase in the facility's emission of volatile organic compounds (VOC's).
The increased emission of VOC's -- which lead to the formation of ground-level ozone -- is high enough to require the company to obtain a modification in its Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit. The plant's air quality construction permit is under review by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), which will hold a public meeting on the issue at 6:30 p.m., Tuesday (1/17) at the Bettendorf Public Library.
The aluminum manufacturing facility at 4879 State Street currently emits an estimated 240 tons of VOC's each year, and that would be increased by an additional 247 tons with the planned expansion announced last September.
National air quality standards were exceeded 39 times in Iowa during 2011, a significant drop from the 85 exceedances recorded in 2010, according to the latest report from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (IDNR).
All 39 exceedances last year were recorded in Muscatine - 37 for high SO2 (sulfur dioxide) levels and two for high PM 2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 microns).
In 2010, 33 air quality exceedances were recorded in Muscatine, 10 in Clinton and nine in Davenport.
A tax increment financing (TIF) deal to entice a Von Maur department store to move from Iowa City to Coralville appears to have triggered renewed efforts to reform state TIF laws.
One developer group, the Professional Developers of Iowa (PDI), is warning members about "a strong bipartisan effort to curtail TIF" in the upcoming legislative session, blaming the recent Coralville incentive for the renewed attention.
The paid circulation of the Sunday Quad City Times fell below 60,000 in 2011, a 15 percent decline from five years ago.
According to figures from the Lee Enterprise, Inc. 10K (annual report) filings, paid circulation of the Sunday Quad City Times has fallen from 68,562 in 2007 to 59,482 in 2011. Ten years ago, the Sunday paper's circulation was just above 71,000.
MidAmerican Energy paid $44,000 for "public perception" research as part of its 3-year, $15-million study on the feasibility of building a nuclear power plant in Iowa.
The assessment bill from Des Moines advertising/public relations firm Flynn Wright, Inc. was among the $2.3 million in expenses MidAmerican Energy charged to Iowa customers in the first year of the feasibility study.
Davenport recently approved a $1.3-million engineering contract to plan sewage system improvements aimed at alleviating overcapacity at its treatment plant and the discharge of partially treated sewage into the Mississippi River.
Meanwhile, Bettendorf -- one-quarter owner of the Davenport treatment plant -- is eyeing a four-year 49 percent overall sewer rate hike to fund its share of the plant upgrade and pay for a new sewer interceptor and lift-station for future development of the I-80/Middle Road corridor.
January 25, 2011 by Thomas Raphael-Nakos
Fresh off the most recent series of political accusations and counter-accusations by political candidates and commentators, it is useful to understand something of the nature of aggression.
Whether verbal, physical or psychological, aggression inspires a cycle of revenge that continues to poison relationships through time.
Why is it we human beings are so prone to engage in violence? How is it that when we attack one another aggressively we find ourselves caught up in ever-expanding cycles of aggressive behavior?
The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, in his 'The Sonnets to Orpheus,' asks: “Does it really exist, Time, the Destroyer…? / Are we really as fate keeps trying to convince us, / weak and brittle in an alien world?” *
January 23, 2012 by Donald Kaul
Among the strange things that happened last year — and there were many — perhaps the strangest was the end of the Iraq War.
Did you notice it? I wouldn't blame you if you didn't. It hardly even registered on the home front's Richter scale.
We didn't leave in triumph (that was World War II). We didn't leave in confused embarrassment (that was Vietnam). We just left. We practically tiptoed away, hoping nobody would notice. And nobody did, hardly.
I remember the end of World War II. I was a 10-year-old in Detroit. My parents took me downtown to experience the celebration, for which I am forever grateful.
It was an extraordinary moment — an explosion of joy and relief and sense of victory, unlike any I had seen before or since. They didn't call it "V-J Day" for nothing. It stood for Victory over Japan, and the entire nation gloried in that triumph.
January 13, 2012 by bgierke
Last weekend while discussing politics in general and the (then) upcoming Iowa caucuses in particular, a friend offered that President Obama is a Moslem. I didn’t know which response should come first: who cares or no he’s not.
I guess it is elementally a case of an evolutionarily natural wariness of the "other," but isn’t the internecine conflict between and amongst the three closely related Abrahamic religions crazy? Obviously, Islam would not be the subject of so much attention but for Bin Laden et al. But, uh, Hitler was born into a Catholic family.
And was confirmed, and sang in a choir in a monastery. Stalin was born Eastern Orthodox and attended seminary. Stalin became an atheist and Hitler sort of backgrounded religion. But, still, why don’t horrors perpetrated by Christian soldiers come up in polite conversation while recent violent jihads do?
One’s personal belief system aside, we all have amongst our friends observant Christians, Jews and Moslems. And, there is beauty in each tradition. The case in point: in Arabic, the word for beauty, virtue and goodness is the same. Thus, in the Muslim mind, they are not separate concepts.
December 23, 2011 by Greg Gackle
Last year many of the major cities in Iowa -- including Bettendorf -- kicked in $25,000 each to fund a lawsuit by the Iowa League of Cities against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The lawsuit, challenging the EPA's authority to enforce regulations concerning discharge of partially treated sewage, didn't get to first base because the league's Washington, D.C. law firm missed a filing deadline.
The case was dismissed by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, and that was thought to be the end of the intergovernmental legal feud underwritten on both sides by taxpayers.
The league, however, is now making a second legal run on the EPA, thanks, in part, to the Washington law firm's agreement not to charge the league any more than its original $170,000 fee agreed to the last time around.
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