The U.S. Senate last night approved a 373-Billion-dollar omnibus spending bill that includes fifty-Million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa. Kelly Hayworth is city administrator in Coralville, where the rainforest is planned.Hayworth notes the bill still needs the president’s signature but adds that Bush was supportive of it before Christmas. He says the money’s the shot in the arm needed to finish the financing of the plan. The project’s not going to be a burden, he says, because backers have done studies to prove a lot of people will come visit and the project will be self-supporting. Hayworth says the name Coralville comes from the region’s prehistoric past as a tropical sea, and cites a professor who came in the late 1800s to study geological formations that proved it. By using different sources of power, they hope it can not only generate its own power but also be used as an educational tool about renewable energy. The renewable energy option would include wind, solar, and something the developers call “fuel cells.” The project is an education complex envisioned as three football fields in length and fifteen stories high.
