Comments on: Tom Brokaw steps into rural consolidation debate

By: mobilityscooter

mobilityscooter — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:07:10 +0000

What a scary avenue to put one's knowledge…consolidating agencies, offices take courage to start with. What more with citizen who care not to the pros and cons but would rather say an immediate NO. I rather think of other ways to unite the public instead.

By: mobilityscooter

mobilityscooter — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:07:10 +0000

By: eean

eean — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:41:11 +0000

If the courthouse is the only thing keeping the town alive... maybe it should die. We do have too many county governments in the Midwest. California gets by with its large Spanish-land grants just fine.

Not so sure about education and health depts, seems like you need one of those every 40 miles anyways. Similarly smaller colleges provide a different atmosphere then a large one, and its not clear to me that they cost more.

@turkeystone the analogy to tv stations is silly. We have access to multiple TV stations, but pre-and-post consolidation we have access to only one county government.

Not that I'm a fan of Brokaw... his presidential debate was atrocious.

By: turkeystone

turkeystone — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:07:25 +0000

While Mr. Brokaw may have roots in the Midwest, he seems to have climbed too far up the tree to remember where he came from. Put another way, having been paid the million$ and million$ that he has through the years, he can't see that there are other price tags attached to consolidation. What would he understand? Perhaps if all television networks were consolidated into one, and one news organization brought us the news. Of course, we've already started down those slippery slopes and are paying for it dearly.

Mr. Brokaw, please. It's not just about the $$$ costs. The greatest generation could have told you that. Sorry to read that you don't understand it anymore.

By: Newswatch

Newswatch — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:23:32 +0000

Rather than consolidate local government and end duplications that hurt no one, Iowans will stubbornly and pridefully hold on to archaic traditions and let the squeeze be felt at the state level, where cuts are inevitably harsher and lead to the elimination of front line child abuse investigators, for example.

When the economy slows, the need for social workers, law enforcement and other frontline workers increases. Keeping these departments fully staffed is more important than maintaining 99 county recorders.

Modernizing government and making it more efficient is one of the imperatives coming out of this economy. These efforts fail when consolidation studies are done in isolation -- each level of government looks at itself, but never at its relationship to the whole.

Tom Brokaw is right. But so is the author of this post. We'll never go there. We've got too much pride -- which in this case turns out to be one of Iowa's greatest faults.