Posted July 27, 2016in Civic Skinny
John Pappajohn and the late Robert Noyce will be given the Iowa Award later this year. The Iowa Award is the highest honor the state gives to a citizen, though most citizens have never heard of it. It’s given by the Iowa Centennial Memorial Foundation, and most Iowans haven’t heard
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Posted July 20, 2016in Civic Skinny
The Gabus Family Foundation — that’s Gabus, as in Gene Gabus and Gabus Motors — wants back the $300,000 it donated to build a new YMCA in Grimes. Plans for the Y were scuttled earlier this year after finances couldn’t be worked out, and the nine-acre site was sold
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Posted July 13, 2016in Civic Skinny
The fight between Prairie Meadows and the Internal Revenue Service could last years. It will cost a jackpot in legal fees. And it can’t be settled unless the Polk County supervisors are invited into the negotiations. That seems clear. This, too, seems clear. Before this thing is settled, the Legislature
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Posted July 06, 2016in Civic Skinny
The six-year graduation success rate for basketball players who entered Iowa State University in 2008 was 75 percent. That’s pretty impressive. Except the actual graduation rate was 6 percent. The graduation success rate for basketball players at the University of Iowa in that same class was an
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Posted June 29, 2016in Civic Skinny
State political platforms mean absolutely nothing, practical politicians agree, but the planks often show where the power lies in the parties. And occasionally a plank is so bizarre it can be used against that party’s candidates. Such is the latest platform of the Iowa Democrats, where — buried among the
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Posted June 22, 2016in Civic Skinny
Architect Kirk Blunck had assets valued at about $6.4 million when he died Jan. 24 under mysterious circumstances in a stairwell of the Teachout Building that he owned in the East Village. And the cause of death now has been determined, sort of. It was “multiple blunt force
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Posted June 15, 2016in Civic Skinny
Michael Gartner is on vacation. This column, about his father, ran in USA Today just before Father’s Day in 2006. My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he
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Posted June 08, 2016in Civic Skinny
Your tax dollars — or your medical dollars or tuition dollars or philanthropy dollars or something — at work: The University of Iowa is about to hire McDermott, Will & Emery, a Chicago law firm, to “assist and advise” it in response to a subpoena from the U.S.
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Posted May 25, 2016in Civic Skinny
Bill Ruud is not leaving the University of Northern Iowa for some idyllic small college in some idyllic small town. Marietta College, now with about 1,200 students, is an ordinary small college in an ordinary small town. The college fights for money and students, has laid off nearly
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Posted May 18, 2016in Civic Skinny
Two of the seven board members of the planned downtown convention hotel have resigned just as the hotel gets ready for its groundbreaking this week. Cynthia Eisenhauer and her husband — retired Chief Appellate Judge Larry Eisenhauer — are moving to Kansas City to be closer to their family (and
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