Posted February 05, 2020in Civic Skinny
No one seems to have noticed — there’s not even a press release on the website — but Matt McCoy was elected chair of the Polk County Board of Supervisors last month. Ordinarily, that would hardly be worth more than half a paragraph, for the Democrats won control of the
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Posted January 01, 2020in Civic Skinny
The Des Moines City Council on Dec. 16 gave the go-ahead for the plan by developer Jeff Young to turn the old Franklin Junior High School into an entertainment center, gathering place, office building and hotel. There were a few questions about signage and sidewalks before the unanimous vote, but
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Posted December 04, 2019in Civic Skinny
Marty Tirrell, the sports-talk guy who shouted on the radio but smooth-talked friends, wives, relatives, acquaintances, advertisers and strangers as he bilked them out of millions of dollars, has made a plea deal with federal prosecutors. On Dec. 6, he pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud, and
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Posted November 06, 2019in Civic Skinny
UPDATE: On Nov. 13, Drake and the Des Moines School District announced plans to build a $19.5 million stadium just east of the Knapp Center. The 4,000-seat stadium would be used for high-school football and soccer games and soccer games by the Drake’s women’s and men’s teams. Under the agreement,
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Posted October 02, 2019in Civic Skinny
An Iowa businessman is poking around to see if he can drum up support from some colleagues to make an offer to buy The Des Moines Register. “Iowans have looked on as the newspaper’s owners and managers have attempted to stop the bleeding [in circulation and news coverage] by
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Posted September 04, 2019in Civic Skinny
The Governor’s office sat on more than $600,000 of legal bills from the Nyemaster law firm in the costly Chris Godfrey trial until the trial was over. The bills — which raise to nearly $2 million the cost to the taxpayers so far in defending the seven-year-old lawsuit — were
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Posted July 31, 2019in Civic Skinny
AUGUST 7 UPDATE: Christopher Godfrey’s attorneys have submitted bills of $4,130,673.38 for fees and expenses in the retaliation and discrimination lawsuit he won against former Gov. Terry Branstad and Brenna Findley Bird, who was counsel to the governor. The bills in the seven-and-a-half-year-old case follow a jury verdict of $1.5
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Posted July 03, 2019in Civic Skinny
Editor’s Note: Michael Gartner was out this month, so the rest of us scrubs pulled together the following. The Des Moines Social Club is “in financial hot water” and “looking to reorganize,” according to recent headlines. A nonprofit’s non-profitability isn’t ordinarily news, but the downtown entertainment venue is bankrolled largely
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Posted June 05, 2019in Civic Skinny
Titan Tire is a deadbeat. The company or its affiliates own those 38 acres at 16th Street and MLK Jr. Parkway on the edge of downtown, land where the soil is dangerous and the buildings are dilapidated. Demanding the site be cleaned up, the federal government has been suing them
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Posted May 01, 2019in Civic Skinny
The city of Des Moines has paid Mark Evans $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit he filed after hitting a 6-inch-high, unmarked curb the city built across what most bikers believed to be the bike path on MLK Parkway at 16th Street. The accident, around noon on April 16 of
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