Posted September 02, 2026in Stray Thoughts
In recent weeks, people from Cherokee, Des Moines and Ottumwa have contacted the Iowa Freedom of Information Council with concerns about the refusal of local officials to share documents distributed to city council and school board members before they meet. Typically, Iowa government boards and councils send their members
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Posted August 17, 2026in Stray Thoughts
You would think a school district readily knows its A-B-C’s. Not the Des Moines Public Schools — at least not when informing the public what its 6,600 employees were paid during the academic year that ended June 30. Yes, grade school teachers still call roll in alphabetical order.
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Posted August 11, 2026in Stray Thoughts
Game shows have one virtue Iowa’s open-records enforcement system does not: Winners and losers know on the spot what prizes are theirs to keep. Hendrik Van Pelt learned this firsthand. In February, the Guttenberg man won a case before the Iowa Court of Appeals when the judges affirmed
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Posted August 05, 2026in Stray Thoughts
The Iowa Supreme Court typically opens its rulings on the state’s public-records and open-meetings laws by reciting that the cases start with a “presumption of openness.” But a new study of the court’s open-government decisions finds the presumption now wins only about half the time. That is a marked
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Posted July 27, 2026in Stray Thoughts
Novelist Charles Dickens poked his quill pen at government bureaucracy 175 years ago with his accounts about a fictionalized department he called the “Circumlocution Office.” “Circumlocution” often is used with disdain to describe writing or speaking that is intentionally vague, evasive or overly wordy. Sadly, the personnel departments in state and
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Posted July 20, 2026in Stray Thoughts
When District Judge Adria Kester studied at the Drake University Law School, she must have opted out of the “Law of Holes” coursework. I have written before about the first Law of Holes, in connection with Davenport city officials and their penchant for hiding facts from taxpayers. The Law of
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Posted July 13, 2026in Stray Thoughts
Whether you work for the federal, state or local government, you best just accept that blame and criticism go with the job and move ahead. Decatur County Attorney Alan Wilson learned that lesson a few years ago. So, too, did Michael Hansen, the Newton mayor at the time. It is
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Posted July 06, 2026in Stray Thoughts
Buried words, like buried treasures, sometimes surprise and enrich. But buried landmines only create problems now, and later. Such is the case with a passage buried in a 71-page Iowa Supreme Court decision last month. In a unanimous ruling, the court decided that a law authorizing Iowa prisons to block
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Posted June 22, 2026in Stray Thoughts
As Americans celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday with parades, speeches, fireworks and other patriotic traditions, much attention will focus on familiar symbols of our history — monuments, battlefields, historic landmarks. Yet Independence Day also lets us reflect on lesser-known stories of people and places that illuminate the ideals on
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Posted June 15, 2026in Stray Thoughts
It has been a while since you heard a United States leader say, “The fault is mine alone.” If you visit Abilene, Kansas, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Museum offers countless artifacts of leadership — far from the battlefields of Europe and the White House where the five-star general left
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