Attorney General Tom Miller will not investigate Linn County Auditor Joel Miller for alleged consumer fraud, he informed Secretary of State Paul Pate on September 11.
Less than a month into the new academic year, Iowa state officials changed guidance on student absences in a way that will make it difficult for school districts to hit a key metric for transitioning to online learning.
State Auditor Rob Sand had “great news” to share with members of the Iowa House and Senate Appropriations Committees in May. Federal officials had agreed not to demand repayment for alleged overbilling, provided that Iowa changed its billing practices for future audits. The savings to the state would amount to tens of thousands of dollars for each fiscal year.
Documents Bleeding Heartland obtained through a public records request confirm that key Reynolds administration officials were on board with the reform plan, and Iowa Senate appropriators took it up in June as the legislature was completing its work.
The records also show that State Representatives Gary Mohr and John Landon refused to move the fix through the Iowa House.
What they don’t explain is why.
When Iowans begin voting on October 5, they will see nine tickets for president and vice president at the top of the ballot.
The most controversial campaign may be that of Kanye West, widely seen as a stalking horse for President Donald Trump and a gravy train for Republican campaign consultants. He has been knocked off the ballot in some states but survived two objections to his candidacy in Iowa last week.
West’s inclusion reflects well on Iowa’s ballot access policies but poorly on the Republican operatives who got his name in front of voters.
Preethi Reddi found that eight Iowa counties along the Mississippi River continue to have more COVID-19 cases per capita than seven border counties on the Illinois side. -promoted by Laura Belin
In May, Governor Kim Reynolds and the four other Republican governors who elected against stay-at-home orders prematurely published an editorial in the Washington Post titled, “Our states stayed open in the covid-19 pandemic. Here’s why our approach worked.”
Recent data contradict that bold title and point to a need for change in Reynolds’s less aggressive approach to controlling COVID-19 spread.
Governor Kim Reynolds provided many jaw-dropping moments at her latest news conference on September 2: from falsely claiming to have implemented “a lot of” the White House coronavirus task force’s recommendations to defending her “personal responsibility” mantra to misleading about why the state still doesn’t provide accurate COVID-19 testing data, to walking away from a reporter’s follow-up question.
But one exchange, more than any other, crystallized why Iowa is still one of the worst states for COVID-19 spread.
The agency handling payroll for Iowa’s executive, judicial, and legislative employees will not follow President Donald Trump’s recent executive order allowing payroll taxes to be deferred for the last four months of this calendar year.
Wendy Noce, the Centralized Payroll program manager for the Iowa Department of Administrative Services, announced the decision in a September 4 email to state entities.
The Iowa Secretary of State’s office has confirmed in writing what Secretary of State Paul Pate said last week: county auditors may place secure drop boxes outside government buildings, to make it easier for voters to hand-deliver absentee ballots.
Linn County Auditor Joel Miller has opted not to fight the state’s interpretation and will remove three boxes his office had set up near grocery stores in the Cedar Rapids area.
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate has sent his statewide mailing of absentee ballot request forms to active registered voters, his office announced on September 4. “The forms include pre-paid, first class mail postage and an envelope to return the request form to the voter’s county auditor,” the news release clarified.
The secretary of state’s mailing will look like this on one side:
Update: Carver-Kimm amended her lawsuit in June 2021 to include the two claims originally filed with the State Appeal Board. She amended it again in August 2021 to add more plaintiffs and remove the third count related to First Amendment claims. You can read the latest version of the petition here. The case is scheduled for trial in the summer of 2022. Original post follows.
The Iowa Department of Public Health’s longtime communications director Polly Carver-Kimm filed suit on September 2, claiming she was wrongfully terminated, in violation of the state’s whistleblower law. Stephen Gruber-Miller first reported on the lawsuit for the Des Moines Register. I’ve enclosed below the District Court filing and Carver-Kimm’s parallel claims filed with the State Appeal Board.
Carver-Kimm was the lead media contact at IDPH for thirteen years before she was told to resign or be fired in mid-July. Her attorney, Tom Duff, has represented other well-known Iowans who have sued the state on whistleblower claims or alleging wrongful termination, including former criminal investigator Larry Hedlund (who had caught the SUV carrying then Governor Terry Branstad speeding) and former Department of Human Services Director Jerry Foxhoven.
The day she was ousted, Carver-Kimm told the Des Moines Register’s Tony Leys she was “embarrassed and saddened by the way the media has been treated during COVID.” She asserted that she was stripped of her duties and eventually removed for being too open with journalists seeking information about the pandemic.
Her court filing and an accompanying news release from Duff’s office are more specific about alleged violations of Iowa’s open records law.
If you visit coronavirus.iowa.gov and view the graphs on the “case counts” page, you might expect to learn how many Iowans were tested for COVID-19 on any given day, and how many of those tests came back positive or negative.
You would be wrong.
Every day, records of hundreds or thousands of old tests disappear from the website. Consequently, it is impossible to reconstruct an accurate picture of Iowa’s testing numbers or positivity rates, either statewide or at a county level.
In the clearest sign yet that the business establishment is preparing for a Democratic administration in Washington, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will endorse 23 first-term House Democrats, including U.S. Representatives Abby Finkenauer (IA-01) and Cindy Axne (IA-03).
Alex Gangitano was first to report the planned endorsements for The Hill on September 1. Other political reporters soon confirmed the news.
“Much of the spread that we’re seeing in Iowa continues to be tied back to young adults” between the ages of 19 and 24, Governor Kim Reynolds said during an August 27 news conference, where she announced a new proclamation closing bars in Polk, Dallas, Linn, Johnson, Story, and Black Hawk counties.
Reynolds noted that young adults are spreading coronavirus to classmates, co-workers, and others “by socializing in large groups” and “not social distancing.” She added, “While we still know that this population is less likely to be severely impacted by COVID-19, it is increasing the virus activity in the community, and it’s spilling over to other segments of the population.”
The official narrative seems designed to conceal three inconvenient facts. Reynolds didn’t follow expert advice that could have prevented this summer’s explosive growth in cases. For months, she discouraged young, healthy Iowans from worrying about the virus. And despite her “#StepUpMaskUp” public relations campaign, Reynolds has failed to practice what she preaches when attending large gatherings herself.
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate will not seek to prevent county auditors from setting up drop boxes outside their offices for voters to hand-deliver absentee ballots, he announced on Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” program on August 28.
The same day, state elections director Heidi Burhans told county auditors in writing that “a no-contact delivery system” for absentee ballots will be allowed “at your office or in the immediate outside area of your office building.”
Pate still maintains county auditors cannot set up drop boxes “throughout the community,” a warning shot at Linn County Auditor Joel Miller.
Dan Piller: The “Farmers Holiday” movement was the Black Lives Matter of the Corn Belt during the early 1930s. Mass protests, including blocking traffic, changed government policy.-promoted by Laura Belin
The churches, coffee shops, and co-operatives of northwest Iowa that gave us Steve King and a huge majority for Donald Trump in 2016 are no doubt generating massive disapproval of the Black Lives Matter protests, adding their voices to the call for “law and order” in the distant cities.
It might come as a surprise to many of these folks, who probably nodded through their Iowa history courses, that they enjoy their status as entitled owners of some of the richest farm land in the world primarily due to the government rescue of agriculture in 1933. That policy was a response to civil disorders that on several occasions prompted the governors of Iowa and Nebraska to call out their National Guards.
“This abomination may be the most visible misuse of official position for private gain in America’s history,” tweeted Walter Shaub on August 27, as President Donald Trump closed out four days of using the White House grounds and his official duties as props for his re-election campaign.
Not one Iowa Republican elected official or party leader objected.
Iowa’s official COVID-19 website will begin including positive and negative results from antigen tests in published statistics on cases and positivity rates, Governor Kim Reynolds announced at an August 27 news conference. Previously, the Iowa Department of Public Health had included antigen tests in the total testing numbers but considered all results from such tests “inconclusive.”
The governor and State Medical Director Dr. Caitlin Pedati said the reporting change reflects new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and more widespread availability of antigen tests across the state.
Physicians and public health experts had expressed concern that omitting the antigen positives from case counts was skewing the data and obscuring the spread of the virus.
The Iowa Department of Public Health is not tracking the rate of positive, negative, or inconclusive results from COVID-19 tests performed through Test Iowa, Ethan Stein reported for KCRG-TV on August 26.
State officials have declined to segregate data from Test Iowa so that the public could compare those results to COVID-19 tests performed in other settings. But I had assumed the state was collecting that information for its own analysis and quality control.
Not so, KCRG learned.
UPDATE: The state began reporting antigen test positives on August 28. Original post follows.
“I’m just imploring anybody who would listen,” Dr. Ryan Flannery said near the end of our interview. “I just want accurate data.”
The family physician who helped plan the Washington County Hospital and Clinics pandemic response has little trust in statewide or county-level COVID-19 testing and case numbers released by the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH).
Foremost among his concerns: the state’s dashboard (coronavirus.iowa.gov) does not report positive results from antigen tests.
Dan Guild has four takeaways from the first round of presidential polling following the Democratic National Convention. -promoted by Laura Belin
I wrote here frequently in 2016 about conventions and bounces. Four years ago, polling showed that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received a good bounce from their conventions. Did Joe Biden?
This is the first time since 1964 that we did not have high-quality polling between the conventions. The data, such as it is, shows four things.
Former Republican C.J. Petersen on the values and issues that drove him to run for the Iowa Senate and become the new chair of the Carroll County Democrats. -promoted by Laura Belin
In the fall of 2010, I knocked on the door of a 70-year-old woman in rural Grundy Center, Iowa. I was there on a mission: get Terry Branstad and Kim Reynolds elected governor and lieutenant governor of Iowa.
The woman was kind, and we discussed the issues of the day–jobs, health care, and her feeling that our state and nation were on the wrong track. “Trust me,” I told her. “Terry Branstad and Kim Reynolds are ready to lead Iowa’s comeback.”
Neil Hamilton: “It is almost impossible to find an Iowa farm family or ‘small business’ impacted by the estate tax, let alone one forced out of business.” -promoted by Laura Belin
Election season has brought the usual flood of TV commercials – generally trying to scare voters about the evils to expect if the opponent is elected. The ads are often marked by outlandish claims and even outright lies, but the ones deserving first prize for deception concern the so-called “death tax.”
No doubt you have seen them with salt of the earth farmers claiming the death tax threatens the very existence of their family farm and of rural communities. Who knows, perhaps these folks even believe what the political consultants asked them to say – they have been brainwashed with the claims for so long.
“Our state coronavirus website now includes the county by county 14-day average positivity rate for our school districts,” Governor Kim Reynolds announced at her August 6 news conference. “Schools and others will be able to check to see where each county stands on this important metric.”
State Medical Director Caitlin Pedati appeared via computer link at the same press conference, answering reporters’ questions about state policies on reopening schools.
Pedati acknowledged on August 19 that the Iowa Department of Public Health’s epidemiology team knew in late July that the positivity rates were inaccurate, because many recent COVID-19 cases were recorded as occurring weeks or months in the past.
An announced “fix” did not appear to solve the backdating problem. On the contrary: newly posted totals on the state’s coronavirus website increased the number of cases recorded for March and April.
Less than five months after the first Iowan succumbed to the novel coronavirus, the official count of COVID-19 fatalities reached 1,002 on the evening of August 18.
The pandemic has now claimed more Iowa lives than 60 years of foreign wars. Data compiled by the Iowa Department of Veterans Affairs shows 868 military service members died in Vietnam, as did two in Panama or Grenada during the 1980s, seven in the Persian Gulf war of the early 1990s, 64 in the Iraq War that began in 2003, and 31 in Afghanistan.
COVID-19 has killed more Iowans in five months than diabetes, the state’s seventh-leading cause of death, does in a typical year.
More Iowans have passed away of coronavirus since March than died in vehicle accidents during 2017, 2018, and 2019 combined.
Publicly available data show the pace of deaths has been accelerating, even before most Iowa students return to K-12 schools or colleges. Those official numbers almost certainly undercount the lives lost.
President Donald Trump came to Cedar Rapids on August 18, ostensibly to offer support after last week’s devastating derecho. Like most things about this presidency, his visit was not normal.
A typical president tours neighborhoods affected by a natural disaster. Trump didn’t leave the Eastern Iowa Airport during his hour-long visit.
A typical president meets with area elected officials, regardless of party. When President George W. Bush visited Cedar Rapids and Iowa City during the June 2008 floods, he spent part of the day with Democrats including Senator Tom Harkin, Governor Chet Culver, U.S. Representative Dave Loebsack, Cedar Rapids Mayor Kay Halloran, and county supervisors Rod Sullivan and Linda Langston. Bush was even photographed holding Halloran’s hand in a gesture of support.
Trump invited no Democrats to his briefing at the airport. Governor Kim Reynolds, Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig, and Cedar Rapids Mayor Brad Hart were among the Republican guests. One state legislator was there too: State Representative Ashley Hinson.
The Iowa Department of Public Health has erroneously recorded thousands of positive COVID-19 test results, distorting reported case numbers and positivity rates.
Rob Ramaekers, the lead epidemiologist for the department’s Surveillance Unit, acknowledged in an August 14 email that Iowa’s coronavirus website has recorded some recent cases as occurring weeks or months in the past. According to Ramaekers, state officials are aware of the problem and working on a fix.
The backdating means that publicly available numbers underestimate the positivity rate for COVID-19 tests conducted over the past two weeks, a key metric for measuring community spread.
At least six minor party or unaffiliated presidential candidates have qualified for Iowa’s general election ballot, according to the official list published on August 14. (Petitions for a seventh, Kanye West, are still under review in the Iowa Secretary of State’s office.)
One of the little-known presidential contenders, Ricki Sue King, set out to make history with her candidacy and succeeded. But she doesn’t want Iowans to vote for her.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and four Republican Party entities filed suit on August 12, seeking to invalidate tens of thousands of absentee ballot request forms in two large, Democratic-leaning Iowa counties. The plaintiffs allege Linn County Auditor Joel Miller and Johnson County Auditor Travis Weipert committed “illegal actions” when they mailed absentee ballot request forms that were pre-printed with voters’ information.
The Republican lawsuit is heavy on political posturing but fails to lay out a convincing legal case.
Dan Guild sees Joe Biden’s choice as influenced by Bill Clinton’s counter-intuitive but “phenomenally successful” pick for vice president. -promoted by Laura Belin
After weeks of speculation, Joe Biden has made his choice: Kamala Harris. He wasn’t late. As the table below shows, his announcement was actually a little earlier than most by a day or two.
Will it matter? Political scientists have studied the matter and usually concluded no. I think the answer is more nuanced than that.
Brad Zaun’s fifth campaign for the state legislature will be his toughest yet.
Like affluent suburban areas around the country, Iowa Senate district 20 has been trending away from Republicans. Democrats in the northwest suburbs of Des Moines did well in the 2019 local elections and more recently surpassed the GOP in voter registrations.
Zaun has adapted to the new environment with messaging that doesn’t mention his party affiliation, his votes for many controversial laws, his numerous attempts to ban abortion, or his early support for Donald Trump’s candidacy.
On the contrary, he is campaigning as an “independent voice” and leader on improving education and mental health services.
“Quite simply, when someone serves their sentence and pays the price our justice system has set for their crimes, they should have their right to vote restored automatically, plain and simple,” Governor Kim Reynolds said on August 5, shortly before signing a critically important document.
Executive Order 7 automatically restores voting rights to most Iowans who have completed prison sentences or terms of probation or parole associated with felony convictions. The Iowa-Nebraska NAACP estimated that the order paves the way for more than 40,000 people to vote this year. Going forward, approximately 4,700 Iowans who complete felony sentences each year will regain the same rights.
Reynolds had publicly promised to sign such an order seven weeks ago, after Republican senators declined to advance the state constitutional amendment that was her preferred way of addressing the problem.
Both the substance of the measure and the way the governor announced it revealed aspects of her leadership style.
The base pay for Iowa’s medical director and state epidemiologist Dr. Caitlin Pedati increased by 45 percent as the current fiscal year began on July 1, records obtained by Bleeding Heartland show. The additional $3,144 that Pedati began receiving per two-week pay period would translate to an extra $81,744 in base salary over twelve months.
The doctor leading the state’s COVID-19 pandemic response also received more than $55,000 in overtime pay from March through early July, even though her job class would not normally be eligible for overtime compensation.
Aspiring lawyers gathered in Des Moines on July 28 and July 29, for about eight hours each day, to take Iowa’s Uniform Bar Exam in person.
More than a dozen states, accounting for about two-thirds of exam takers, postponed or otherwise altered plans to administer the grueling two-day test that determines where attorneys can practice law.
However, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected calls to shift to an online exam or offer a limited “diploma privilege” so that graduates of the University of Iowa or Drake University law schools could practice in this state without passing the bar. Instead, the judicial branch’s Office of Professional Regulation took several steps to reduce the chance exam takers could spread COVID-19 to one another.
Van Buren County had 24 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of July 29, according to Iowa’s official coronavirus website. But the local health department had recorded 46 cases in that southeast Iowa county by that date.
The discrepancy in one small county’s reported COVID-19 case numbers could point to big trouble for managing school closures this fall.
The old saying, the “The Devil is in the details,” applies to Governor Kim Reynolds’ July 30 press conference in more ways than just the policy she announced.
Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate appears to be on a collision course with election administrators in Iowa’s second- and fourth-largest counties, which both lean Democratic.
Linn County Auditor Joel Miller and Johnson County Auditor Travis Weipert have proceeded with mailing absentee ballot request forms to every active registered voter in their jurisdictions, with voters’ information filled in. Miller’s office has nearly completed is mailing, and thousands of Linn County voters have already returned their forms. Weipert’s staff mailed the first batch of pre-filled absentee ballot request forms to Johnson County residents on July 27.
The same day, Pate’s staff attorney wrote to Miller and Weipert, asking dozens of questions about the mailings and demanding a broad array of relevant documents. Those letters sounded like the precursor to legal action.
Also on July 27, the lead attorney for the Republican National Committee asked Pate to take emergency action to block the Linn and Johnson County mailings and declare the forms invalid. His letter indicated that the national party may sue to stop Miller and Weipert from giving voters in their counties a supposedly “unconstitutional advantage in the November election.”
More Iowans than ever participated in the 2020 primary, and the event changed some features of the Iowa electorate. For the first time in at least 20 years, people who choose not to affiliate with any party don’t comprise a plurality of registered voters. Democrats and Republicans both outnumber no-party voters now.
In other ways, the 529,586 Iowans who cast ballots in the June 2 election resembled past primary voters. For instance, nearly three-quarters of them were at least 50 years old, while about 13 percent were under age 35. Those proportions by age group are remarkably close to corresponding figures from the 2018 primary, when only 288,749 Iowans voted.
Follow me after the jump for a closer look at this year’s expanded voter universe by party, gender, and age.
More than four months into the novel coronavirus pandemic, Governor Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Department of Public Health are finally acknowledging that slowing the spread of COVID-19 will require many more Iowans to routinely cover their faces in public.
Their “#StepUpMaskUpIA” campaign might have been more successful if state officials had pushed the message before reopening businesses and lifting other COVID-19 mitigation strategies in May and June. Instead, top officials waited until new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths had been trending upward in Iowa for weeks.
Public health experts at the University of Iowa urged state leaders months ago to call for universal use of face coverings. But at her televised news conferences, Reynolds repeatedly asserted that expanded testing would allow the state to “manage” and “control” the virus. At the same events, the governor regularly portrayed face masks as something vulnerable Iowans might need, or a precaution people could bring with them in case they found themselves in a crowded setting.
As recently as last week, Reynolds was photographed in close proximity to others, with no one’s face covered. Even now, she refuses to delegate authority so local governments can issue enforceable mask orders.
U.S. Senator Joni Ernst told members of the Iowa Farmers Union in June that she’d prefer for fossil fuel companies not to be eligible for COVID-19 relief funds.
However, months earlier she was among only two farm state senators to sign a letter aimed at ensuring that oil, gas, and coal companies would have access to federal funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Iowa’s seven largest cities are spending more on policing per capita and a greater portion of their municipal budgets on law enforcement compared to the 1990s, according to a new report by the Iowa Policy Project. Over the same time period, spending on social services per capita and as a share of the municipal budget has declined in six of those cities.
Colin Gordon and Peter Fisher authored “Policing, public safety and community priorities,” published on July 22 (also available in pdf format). They examined budgets for the 24 Iowa cities with populations of at least 20,000, because “it is in our larger urban settings in Iowa that the problems with policing — including a well-documented pattern of disproportionate minority contact — are most acute.”
Seven of the cities studied are “metropolitan”: Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Sioux City, Waterloo, Council Bluffs, and Dubuque. Seven are suburbs in large metro areas: West Des Moines, Ankeny, Urbandale, Bettendorf, Marion, Coralville, and Johnston. Three are college towns: Iowa City, Ames, and Cedar Falls. Seven are micropolitan cities: Mason City, Marshalltown, Clinton, Muscatine, Burlington, Fort Dodge, and Ottumwa.
