May 16, 2012

You are here: Home / 2006 / June / Archives for 27th

I-S-U researcher explores better way to find power outages

June 27, 2006 By

Research by an Iowa State University engineer could make it a lot easier to track down outages along miles of power lines. I-S-U Engineering and Computer Science Professor Arun Somani says one of the few options to find a downed electric wire is to go look for it in person.

Workers drive along the highway to see what’s going on, and it takes a long time to detect the problem before they can fix anything, or send out a service crew. While there are some electrical testing systems too, they can’t report a problem as soon as it happens, and are less comprehensive than the system the professor’s testing in his lab today.

The system of “black boxes” he envisions could monitor the whole system at once. Monitors will be placed on utility poles and will communicate with each other and the home office by wireless technology.

Somani describes it as “health monitoring” of the entire power system. He says the utility industry’s been needing a system like this, and he thinks there will be applications in urban areas as well as the large remote areas the wires cross in a rural state like Iowa.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , ,

President’s top advisor raises funds for Iowa Republicans

June 27, 2006 By

President Bush’s top political advisor was in Iowa Monday headlining private fundraising events for two congressional candidates in Iowa. Karl Rove spoke at a fundraiser for first congressional district candidate Mike Whalen Monday afternoon in Waterloo.

Monday night, Rove was the featured guest at a Des Moines fundraiser for third district congressional candidate Jeff Lamberti. “He’s an important leader,” Lamberti says. “In the last two weeks I’ve had events with the Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and now we have the top political advisor to the White House.” Lamberti says that list demonstrates that if elected, he’d be able to work with party insiders and “produce results.”

Iowa Democrats were quick to criticize Rove’s campaigning in Iowa. The Democratic Party issued a news release titled “Congratulations for Not Being Indicted Karl Rove” — a reference to last week’s announcement that Rove would not be indicted as part of a prosecutor’s probe of a White House leak that led to the public outing of a covert government agent.

Iowa’s top elected Democrat, Governor Tom Vilsack, says he’s happy to welcome Rove to Iowa. “(Rove’s) going to continue to motivate people to take a real hard look at the failings of this administration and the need for a congress that will do a better job,” Vilsack says.

Lamberti, the G-O-P candidate in the third congressional district, shrugs off that charge. “I understand that Democrats don’t like Karl Rove primarily because he’s successful and success is winning elections,” Lamberti says. “We don’t see any downside because he’s an important national leader.” At the request of the White House, both of Rove’s appearances in Iowa on Monday were closed to reporters .

Filed Under: Politics & Government Tagged With:

Governor dismisses Republican claims they can’t trust him

June 27, 2006 By

Iowa’s outgoing Democratic governor dismisses charges from Republicans who say they cannot trust him on a bid to redo a property rights bill because the governor went back on a deal over teacher pay.

Governor Tom Vilsack says he violated no agreement when he used his item veto authority to ax out a section of the bill which would have created a new commission to establish first-ever guidelines for how to pay teachers based on classroom performance.

“The deal which was struck on teacher pay was on the amount (and) on the number of years. There was never ever any discussion in the room about the nature of the committee established to put together the model,” Vilsack says. “We have a committee working on this that is headed by Marvin Pomerantz who the last time I checked was a fairly prominent Republican whose concerns are mine which is the best interests of Iowa’s children. This committee I think will do a better job of looking at this issue.”

Last Friday, State Senator Bob Brunkhorst — a Republican from Waverly, said Republicans aren’t inclined to trust Vilsack’s word when it comes to a deal on the property rights issue because he went back on a deal over teacher pay. “We believed we had a handshake…on that. My members are telling me ‘Bob, why negotiate with a governor on eminent domain when, dang it, he vetoed our stuff that we’d agreed to,” Brunkhorst said as he slammed his hand on the lectern during a statehouse news conference earlier this afternoon. “So (Vilsack) needs to make some wrongs right.”

Vilsack says he’s committed no wrongs that need to be righted. “There just was not a deal and Senator Brunkhorst, with all due respect, was not in the room when the deal was struck so I’m not sure how he knows what the deal was,” Vilsack says. But Republican leaders in the Senate who were in the room says the governor’s wrong and Vilsack did renege on a deal.

Republicans are trying to get Democrats to join in voting to over-ride Vilsack’s veto of the bill which limited local government’s authority to seize private property for economic development projects.

Vilsack and other Democrats have been trying to avoid that. “We’ve proposed and suggested a fix, an improvement to the bill,” Vilsack says. “It’s up to the legislature to decide whether they want to do that or not. If they don’t, then they have the option to override a veto, which is part of the process.” Vilsack says he’s “worked really hard” to get along with legislators from both political parties.

Filed Under: Politics & Government Tagged With: , , ,

TouchPlay owners borrow phrase from governor in lawsuit

June 27, 2006 By

Owners of the TouchPlay machines are borrowing a favorite phrase of Governor Tom Vilsack as they sue the state to try and get back some of their investment in the program the Legislature shut down in early May.

Machine owners like Mark Jacobs of Ankeny says it’s an issue of “Iowa Values,” a phrase the governor uses often in describing his proposals for the state. Jacobs says they hope the jury will see that they didn’t create or design the TouchPlay program, they were “just pulled along into it.”

Joleen Hedley of Dubuque expanded on that idea, saying it’s not about gambling, it’s about the deal the state made with the TouchPlay owners. Hedley says the bigger issue is that state leaders “pulled us into a program, promised us five years with this program, and decided after 10 months they no longer wanted to be a part of it. And they were going to take no responsibility for it.” Hedley says the attitude of the Legislature doesn’t reflect “Iowa Values.”

Jacobs says he purchased 85 TouchPlay machines at eight-thousand dollars each after getting what he thought was a long-term commitment from the state. He says they got involved in November or October, so his company never recouped much of the investing and is “on the hook” for seven or eight hundred thousand dollars.

Hedley says her family business also still owes lots of money. Hedley says they invested one-and-a-half million dollars in 203 machines and still owe roughly one-point-one million dollars. Hedley says the machines are now all collecting dust.

Hedley says to her knowledge, all the machines are now sitting in warehouses, as there is no other use for them. Hedley and Jacobs are among 25 TouchPlay owners that joined a lawsuit against the state over TouchPlay — bringing the number of owners involved to 30.

Filed Under: Crime & Courts Tagged With:

Iowa improves in "Kids Count" survey

June 27, 2006 By

Iowa rose several notches in this year’s “Kids Count” report which ranks all the states based on ten factors of a child’s well-being, including children living in poverty, teen birth rates and low birth weight babies. Laura Beavers, co-author of the report by the Annie Casey Foundation, says Iowa ranks number-five overall this year, up from eighth last year.

Beavers says Iowa ranks best in the U.S. in terms of the percent of teens who are high school dropouts. Iowa reports only three-percent of teens between 16 and 19 are dropouts, compared to eight-percent nationwide. She says Iowa ranked among the top states in several categories, like the percent of children in single-parent families (24-percent in Iowa versus 31-percent nationally) and in the percent of children living in poverty (12-percent in Iowa, 18-percent nationally).

She says Iowa had the second-lowest percent of children living in families where no parent had full-time, year-round employment, which is “very good economically-speaking for children in Iowa.” This is the 17th year for the Kids Count report and Beavers says Iowa’s seen consistent improvement in recent years in several categories. Beavers says Iowa had a very low percentage — third-best in the nation — on the percent of teens not attending school and not working, what’s called the idle teen measure, indexing the “disconnected youth.”

In Iowa, about five-percent of teens between 16 and 19 fall into the category, or about half the national rate of nine-percent. While Iowa did very well in the ten categories, Beavers says there was one area where the state could stand some improvement.

Iowa’s worst showing was in the category of child death rates. Beavers says the percentage of deaths for children between the ages of one and 14 had Iowa at number-26 in the nation, which is right around the national average of about 21-deaths per 100-thousand children. New Hampshire ranked number-one overall. To see the full report, surf to “www.kidscount.org”.

Filed Under: Health & Medicine

Soldiers use state benefit to buy homes

June 27, 2006 By

Thirty-two soldiers who’ve been on active duty in the War on Terror have used the state’s home-buying assistance program for soldiers to move back to Iowa or settle in the state. Governor Tom Vilsack went to Coralville Monday to visit one of those soldiers — Jessica Kilgore who bought a house in Coralville with her soldier husband Paul.

The Kilgores have been married two years and this is the first home they’ve owned.
“They’ve only seen each other three times in that two year period because they both serve in the National Guard and they both have been stationed in Iraq at different times,” Vilsack says. “When one comes back, the other one leaves.” Jessica is home on a two-week leave.

On Friday, she saw her house for the first time. Iowa is the only state in the country to offer home-buyers’ grants to National Guard soldiers purchasing their first home. In the first year, one million dollars worth of grants were distributed. This year, legislators and the governor set aside another two million for the program.

The governor says so far, 450 families have received downpayment assistance worth a maximum of five-thousand dollars each. The Kilgores are both natives of Iowa who had been living in Washington state, where 26-year-old Paul Kilgore was stationed. His wife, 23-year-old Jessica Kilgore is on a two-week leave and near the end of her one-year rotation into Iraq.

Filed Under: Military, Politics & Government Tagged With: ,

Rare B-17 making flights in Iowa

June 27, 2006 By

A rare airplane is making a few stops in Iowa this week. A fully-restored B-17 bomber called “Aluminum Overcast” is at the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids today (Tuesday). Iowa native and World War Two veteran Carl Jensen took a tour of the four-engine plane and went for a flight, recalling his service on the same type of plane in 1944. Jensen was a volunteer.

Jensen says “Somebody had to do it. I had several (people) try and talk me out of it as we were going through training, but I was gonna fly. That’s what I enlisted for.” Jensen was with the 388th Bomb Group, 561st Squadron, and he and the crew were shot down in December of 1944. He was one of four from the crew of nine who survived.

He says “The only time I was really scared was after I was shot down. The last I remembered in the plane was when the navigator landed on top of me. When I came to, that was after the plane had blew up.” Aluminum Overcast is one of only about a dozen B-17 warplanes still flying. Tours are available today and tomorrow in Cedar Rapids. The plane will be in the Des Moines area at the Ankeny Airport Friday through July 2nd. For more information, surf to “www.b17.org”.

Filed Under: Human Interest, Military
Newer Posts »