The new Faye's Field pocket park next to the Bettendorf Public Library and Family Museum is an inviting spot even in January with record 60 degree temperatures in recent days. A bronze sculpture of a girl reading a book with a dog in her lap symbolizes the park's purpose as an outdoor adjunct for library and museum activities.
Calls to Iowa legislators by members of AARP Tuesday (1/31) apparently delayed the first vote on a controversial bill giving MidAmerican Energy authority to raise electric rates upfront to pay for construction of a nuclear power plant.
IowaPolitics.com reported Iowa members of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) flooded the state legislature with more than 1,500 calls opposing the bill now before the Iowa Senate Commerce Committee.
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.
February 2, 2012 by bgierke
OK kids, you’ve got to check out this book: 30 Lessons for Living - Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans, a distillation of 300 interviews undertaken by a professor at Cornell University with elderly Americans deemed, by outside consensus, to have lived a good life.
The lessons are spread over several different areas of concern, but “there was no issue about which the experts were more adamant and forceful” than work. The title of that chapter is “Glad to get up in the morning – Lessons for a successful and fulfilling career." And it ain’t about the money, bub.
“You know those nightmares where you are shouting a warning but no sound comes out? Well, that’s the intensity with which the experts wanted to tell younger people that spending years in a job you dislike is a recipe for regret and a tragic mistake." Big money may not accompany one’s bliss, but following it is the only way a happy denouement might.
February 1, 2012 by Thomas Raphael-Nakos
The most accurate definition to describe the character of modern Western culture is the word consumerism. The thing that drives nearly every aspect of the way we live our lives and who we understand ourselves to be rests in the dynamics of consumerism.
We are what we buy. In fact, consumerism offers us the illusion of freedom: we believe that we can create who we are by what we purchase. If I can buy a BMW, I am one kind of person. If I can only buy a Ford or a Chevy, I am someone else, not quite as valuable in the society as the person who buys the BMW or the roomy mansion in a plush, gated community.
Though, there is a more specific subgroup in the scheme of consumerism that is even more definitive in making us who we are: entertainment.
Entertainment, and more specifically popular entertainment, overwhelmingly affects our character. Consumer products in general affect our external lives. The things we buy, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in and the vacations we take present us to the world as characterized by those things. Entertainment, rather than providing us with a façade that informs the world about who we are, informs our souls about who we become. Entertainment forms us from within.
January 30, 2012 by Donald Kaul
Newt Gingrich has a Super PAC called "Winning Our Future." Mitt Romney's is called "Restore Our Future."
I know, technically Super PACs don't belong to candidates. But only innocents like Boy Scouts and the Supreme Court believe that. In the real world, this new kind of political action committee, created in the wake of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, is a powerful campaign weapon.
Super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations, and individuals. They then may spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against specific political candidates as they wish.
Unlike traditional PACs, Super PACs are technically prohibited from donating money directly to political candidates. In practice, they serve a specific candidate, who directs them with winks and nudges.
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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