No matter what community in which one lives, there is almost always one constant complaint: There is nothing to do around here.
Let us amend that statement here and now. Instead of that statement, we should be inquiring: What is there to do around here that I heard about but never did?
The battle over whether rural Kossuth County residents should be forced through eminent domain to accept the construction of a carbon pipeline across their properties is real-time battle between personal property rights and the argument such an installation serves the public good. The proposed public good is ethanol. The question is: Is ethanol worth it.
After spending the night off the beaten path parked at a Red Cross station near the outskirts of Paris, we had a simple breakfast of coffee and the special sweet waffles Guido’s mother had made and sent with us.
By Kathie Obradovich, Editor in Chief, Iowa Capital Dispatch, copyright-Iowa Capital Dispatch
Iowans turned out in better-than-usual numbers for last month’s city and school board elections. It’s always encouraging to see improvements in voter participation.
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, attributed the higher turnout to increased voter engagement in local issues.
I’m writing this a week before Thanksgiving, but you will be reading it when Thanksgiving is over and we’re into December. My point is, it’s hard to know what tense to use when writing in the now but being read in the future. Oh Bother, as Winnie the Pooh would say. I love quoting Pooh and his friends, as you’ve probably noticed if you’ve read one or more of my columns.
During the Algona Community School Board meeting on Oct. 11 and the Lu Verne School Board meeting on Oct. 21, both local school boards approved the following members to be on a joint reorganization committee. Algona CSD’s six members will join four members who have been appointed by the Lu Verne CSD to serve on this committee.
I don’t own any land that will be impacted and my livelihood isn’t directly connected to the proposed construction of carbon dioxide pipelines across Kossuth County and other parts of rural Iowa. So it has been a fair statement that I don’t have a dog in the fight.
A local temporary redistricting commission met twice in the past two weeks to begin the process of setting districts for 2022 and a subsequent decade of board of supervisor elections. But the commission isn’t drawing the lines for the supervisor districts. The commission is only determining where the county’s precinct lines will be drawn. Confused?
After leaving Roger and Marilou at the Belgian seaside, we stopped short of the French border, about 10 miles away, to fill with gas using our Belgian Francs. Going from country to country in 1983 always required changing money. Some businesses close to a border accepted a neighboring country’s currency but there was usually an exchange rate difference. To avoid reduced value of our money, we bought gas or groceries before crossing into another country.
