Winners

It's nearly impossible to dislike L.D. McMullen. The CEO and general manager of Des Moines Water Works is like the grandfather you wish you'd had - an affable guy with a jolly demeanor and persistent smile. He's still spun as the administrator who kept a cool head during the flood of 1993 and, at the helm of a vital public utility, has a way of charming all stakeholders. But this nice guy comes with an eye-popping price tag, as McMullen is one of the most lavishly paid administrators in the water utility business. While the national average pay for a water works GM for a population exceeding 50,000 hovers around $138,000, with comparable executives in Kansas City and Minneapolis earning $144,000 and $111,000 respectively, McMullen has proved in no uncertain fashion that nice guys don't finish last, pulling in more than $200,000 a year. And last week, the Water Works Board met behind closed doors to make L.D. a little bit richer, bumping his salary by another 3.5 percent to an eye-popping $212,070 annually, with another $20,000 thrown in for a special retirement fund. But while the majority of the board swallowed the raise, those in the know warn Cityview that citizens should be wary of the industry-leading hype: Des Moines isn't a leader in water innovation, only executive pay.

Losers

Apparently, Muscatine school board member Paul Brooks doesn't just discount the theory of evolution. He also doesn't believe in judicial precedent either. Last week, a federal judge in Pennsylvania handed down a strongly worded decision, ruling that teaching intelligent design in public schools is unconstitutional. But Brooks, who believes that "If Darwin's theory of evolution is mentioned, the fact that something else could have happened needs to be presented, too," doesn't buy into the whole third branch of government theory. Regardless of the clear scientific consensus backing Darwinian evolution - and, no, the Discovery Institute doesn't count - Brooks says he'll push to make intelligent design part of the Muscatine science curriculum in the next several months. And while it's one thing to tie up the already-overburdened legal system with a clearly religious debate and embroil the school board in a pointless exercise in defending rational curriculum, it is quite another to flagrantly detract from the education of local kids by turning public meetings into a church-sanctioned circus when a federal judge has not only ruled against, but also made a laughingstock of the "breathtaking inanity" of the entire argument. In fact, continuing down a dead-end road is the kind of beat-your-chest grandstanding that only more clearly proves that humans did indeed evolve from monkeys, and such apish intelligent design proponents are knuckle-dragging evidence that some folks are certainly lagging on the evolutionary ladder.

More than 20 state and national housing advocacy groups have asked the NCAA to prohibit scholarship athletes who receive housing stipends from living in federal
subsidized housing. The group says athletes, who are not allowed to work, are
claiming "poverty" and clogging up housing earmarked for the truly needy, paying
little if any rent. It is unclear how or if the NCAA can take action, but Sen. Tom Harkin's bill asking for tighter regulations on college students who want to apply to live in government housing was signed by President Bush, so athletes like Hawkeye Brian Ferentz, whose father Kirk makes $2 million-plus per year to coach the Iowa football team, may have to actually start paying rent so poor people don't freeze to death while on a waiting list for the federal program they are actually entitled to use.CV

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