Political Lines Redrawn Around Laurens

Proposed new legislative lines give Laurens two Congressmen, two state representatives and a new state senator. Someone will get forced out! The lines were drawn to reflect the census of 2010. All legislative districts must be the same size.

The new Iowa 10th House District would include Pocahontas, Humboldt, Calhoun and parts of Webster counties. Two Republican members of the current Iowa House--Tom Shaw and David Tjepkes--live in opposite corners of the district.

Our proposed new state senate district will include all the same areas plus most of Webster county. Fort Dodge Democrat Daryl Beall would be our state senator until the next senate election.

Pocahontas county is the virtual heart of the proposed Fourth Congressional District. It reaches from Missouri Valley to Carroll to Ames to New Hampton, including everything to the northwest. Republican incumbents Tom Latham and Steve King both live in this district.

The state legislature must approve or reject this map by the end of April. Current office holders will remain in place until the 2012 elections.

Rolfe Land Brings $6775/Acre

Fifty people gathered at the Rolfe Community Center this morning for the auction of 120 acres of farmland a mile north of town. It was last on the market in 1966 when it was purchased by Jim and Esther Wilson. The high bidder today was a local dairyman, Dean Duitscher, who bid $6775/acre. The runner-up bidder was also an area farmer.

The land has no buildings. It is on Hwy 15. It is rolling and has at least one terrace. The corn suitability rating (CSR) is 69.7 on the 115.3 net acres. The gross price divided by the net acres and the CSR produces a value of $101/CSR point. The current tenant has a lease that extends through this summer.

More details about the property were still available on the auctioneer's website immediately after the sale.

Yesterday the local price of corn was $6.82/bushel. Soybeans were selling for $13.47/bushel.

Joelson Calls Community Pow-Wow

The L-M school superintendent wants to talk. He has invited the community to a meeting two weeks from today. The topic for the 6:30 p.m. session will be "What does it mean to be an educated adult in Lauren-Marathon in the 21st century?"

Superintendent Iner Joelson issued the invitation in the school's current "Update" publication, a blue booklet that arrived in area mailboxes last week. He reports that school board members recently read The Global Achievement Gap (available on Kindle even!) and want to re-invent the public school, not just "reform" it. He says "we need your help" because "while [the board] focused on the urgency of change, we had great difficulty . . .in defining a specific area to address."

Joelson also referred his readers to a new website that was "formed to help Iowan's find a common voice to promote the need for innovation in education."

Last year the L-M school was called a "school in need of assistance" by the federal government. The No Child Left Behind Act(NCLB) is slowly bearing down on all public schools. It expects all students to be on grade level by 2014. Schools that don't appear on track to meet that goal will be penalized. However the NCLB law is due for re-authorization this year.

Meanwhile the Iowa House wants to cut state aid to education.

New Rural Atlas Tells Our Tale

A new on-line atlas from the US Dept of Agriculture has just been posted. It tells many figures about Pocahontas County. Here are a few:

--We had a 10.5% poverty rate in 2009.

--We were 38% employed in services; 19% in manufacturing; 13% in agriculture.

--Nearly 10% of us lack a high school diploma(see poverty rate above but don't jump to conclusions); 28% have a college diploma.

--We had 806 farms in 2007, but a quarter of them had less than $10,000 in sales.

--Only 28% of farm operators work off the farm. Only 1% sell food directly for human consumption.

The new website is a map. Roll your cursor over the county of your choice and read all about it. How does Pocahontas compare to where your relatives live? Why don't they move here?

Laurens Shrinks As Fast As County

The Laurens population fell from 1476 in the 2000 census to only 1258 this time, a drop of nearly 15%. That virtually matches the county decline of 15.6%. In the previous decade the city had declined only 5% while the county shed residents nearly twice as fast. The census reports 106 vacant housing units in Laurens, a vacancy rate of 15% Why can't we escape that number of 15%?

Havelock has 138 residents, down from 177 or 22%. Pocahontas fell 9% to 1789.

Marathon has 237 in the current census, down 22% from 2000. Albert City has 699, down only ten residents from the last census. All the 2010 numbers are at this website.

State Grows But County Shrinks

Pocahontas County shrunk by 15.6% in the last ten years. Our population dropped from 8662 to 7310. We are the fastest disappearing county in Iowa. We won that honor once before. Only seven Iowa counties have a smaller population. Meanwhile the state grew by 4%. The map shows the counties coded by rate of change with dark purple dropping by the greatest percentage and dark green increasing the greatest percentage.

Laurens Wins What Gamblers Lost

More than $15,000 in casino winnings were transferred to Laurens today when the Pocahontas County Foundation awarded its 2011 grants. The money went to four projects. An additional $65,000 went to other projects around the county.

The proposed Memory Lane park on South Third Street was granted $10,000. It was the second largest grant given this year, topped only by the $15,000 award to the Palmer fire station.

The Laurens Library will receive $4,000 to replace computers for patron use. The City of Laurens gets $2,000 for its work of digitizing the cemetery records.

Kids Korner Day Care will buy a Wii and two laptop computers with the $1650 it received today. Director Michelle Sandvig predicted the audience would be able to hear squeals of delight from the children when the computers arrive.

The Havelock fire department won $6,000 for new protective gear for firefighters. The Pocahontas Hospital's new wound center received $6,000. Libraries in Rolfe and Plover also received grants for computers. Among other recipients were Pocahontas Congregate Meals, the cities of Fonda, Pocahontas and Rolfe, Pocahontas Chamber of Commerce, the Pocahontas Community Band, and the Fonda Arts Center.

The Foundation grants were preceded by a speech from Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey at the Rialto Theater in Pocahontas. The Foundation is a creation of the Pocahontas County Economic Development Commission. It has operated since 2006.

Prettiest Train in Havelock

Two long rows of brand new identical hopper cars sit on the Union Pacific Railroad siding at Havelock. When the Union Pacific took control of the old Chicago and Northwestern rail line in the mid-1990's a similarly good-looking set of hopper cars came down these same tracks for the maiden voyage by the new owners. Nothing that attractive had been seen since. Until now.

Prosperous New Year: Local Governments Have Little Debt

Laurens may be surrounded by a debt crisis--from Wall Street to California, from Athens to Washington, D.C.--but local governments are in excellent shape.

Pocahontas County carries no debt whatsoever.

The city of Laurens owes $2.6 million, about $2200 per resident. All the cities of Iowa average about $1500 in debt per resident of Iowa. (Unfortunately this figure assumes all Iowans live in a municipality.) Emmetsburg and Pocahontas each carry about $1800 per resident.

The Laurens-Marathon school district is paying off a debt of $2500 per student. Sioux Central's debt is similar. Pocahontas Area Community School owes nearly eight times as much per student as Laurens, due to the new construction nearing completion. Their enrollment will also increase if they combine with Palmer-Pomeroy in the near future. A vote will be held this winter.

Iowa Central Community College also appears on our property tax bills. ICCC owes $37 million. Its debt ranks exactly in the middle of Iowa's thirteen community college districts.

So that leaves personal credit card debt and mortgage or car payment debts. How is your new year looking?

The figures in this story are derived from data at the office of the State Treasurer.

Laurens School "In Need of Assistance"

Acting under the infamous federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, Iowa officials have put Laurens-Marathon elementary and middle school on the state list of "Schools in Need of Assistance (SINA)." There are 356 Iowa schools on the list, including elementary schools in Spencer, Storm Lake, and Fort Dodge. One fourth of all Iowa schools are said to be in need of assistance, but few of them are small rural schools.

Laurens reached this list after being on the "watch list" in 2009-2010.
Also on the new watch list are Emmetsburg Middle School and Pomeroy elementary school.

"The reality is that every school will end up on the list [by 2014] because statistically it's not possible to reach a 100 percent (student proficiency ranking)." says Barb Besch, Spencer's school improvement director, quoted in the Spencer newspaper in August.

Laurens made the list because students were not testing well on reading. Laurens made a previous poor showing in a Des Moines Register comparison in April, 2008. The Register compared the grades of graduates who enrolled at UNI, ISU and SUI. Laurens was in the bottom half while West Bend-Mallard and Pocahontas ranked in the top ten.

The SINA list was made public in August, and was featured in the school publication Laurens-Marathon Update, December/January/February 2010-2011 which arrived in local mailboxes last week. The Update included two messages from superintendent Iner Joelson. While one message was indeed from Joelson, the second was boilerplate provided by the state officials who put Laurens on their SINA list.

In his personal message, Joelson said the SINA list "often stigmatizes the school and the community, not to mention the teachers, students and staff." But he added, "I am confident that we are not on the list because of bad teachers."

In the second, pre-drafted letter Joelson explained that students had not made "adequate yearly progress" for two consecutive years, but also alleged that L-M is "offering a top-quality education." The sentence "Unfortunately, our district is not able to provide school choices because there are no other elementaries in our district for students to attend" was also taken from the state sample letters. Presumably Joelson does not actually think it unfortunate that we lack a second elementary school.

However that sentence does reveal what many observers say is the ultimate effect of NCLB: not to educate children, but to create turmoil, even to the end of changing schools into cash cows.