The coal plant at Iowa State University, which disposes of its coal ash in an unlined quarry in Waterloo (photo by Jason Hancock/Iowa Independent).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency originally promised to release draft regulations on coal ash disposal by the end of 2009, and in doing so, open the rules up for public comment. That deadline was pushed back indefinitely last month following revelations of differences between the EPA and White House officials. And as The Iowa Independent reported in December, a potential loophole in those guidelines — designating coal ash as a hazardous material if it’s kept wet and non-hazardous if it’s moved to a dry landfill — has many worried that the federal rules won’t adequately deal with the issues in Iowa.

Last month Cedar Rapids-based environmental law center Plains Justice, along with Washington, D.C.,-based Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice, called on the EPC to publicly support federal regulations designating all coal ash as a hazardous waste. The EPC, a nine-member board charged with advising the state on environmental policy, has agreed and will demand federal regulators craft new rules that address the public health risks associated with current disposal practices.

“Recent delays in EPA action is of concern to the EPC and we felt that it is important to let EPA know that the commission feels that new rules are necessary and important to assure protection of public health and the environment in Iowa,” said Susan Heathcote, a member of the EPC.

In Iowa, there are four coal ash disposal sites that are considered dry landfills and have received state waivers allowing them to accept ash without protective liners to prevent toxins such as mercury, zinc, lead, arsenic and selenium from leeching into groundwater. The sites are also not required to test groundwater to see if the pollution is already taking place.

An EPA report released last year found the cancer risk to be 1 in 2,000 from exposure to arsenic in drinking water for residents living near unlined landfills containing coal ash and coal refuse, which is 500 times the level usually regarded as safe by current federal regulations.

Gov. Chet Culver and legislative leaders have said that once the EPA releases draft rules the state will determine whether to work on its own regulations. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources began drafting tougher coal ash regulations in 2008 before opposition from site owners and coal-burning businesses, along with uncertainty about what regulations the federal government may eventually impose, caused the effort to stall.

Heathcote said the EPC also considered updating the state’s coal ash disposal rules last year, but that effort was abandoned based on the original promise from the EPA to issue its own rules by year’s end.

“Since Iowa would need to comply with any new federal requirements for coal ash disposal, and since the and the time-frame for federal action was relatively short, the DNR staff recommended, and the EPC agreed, to postpone action on state rules until we saw what EPA would propose in the federal rules,” she said.

Hubbell was responding to a request from Cedar Rapids-based Plains Justice and Washington, D.C.,-based Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice for the EPC to to pass a motion at its upcoming meeting supporting federal regulation of coal ash as hazardous waste, among other provisions.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to release draft rules governing coal ash disposal this month. A potential loophole in the rules has many activists afraid Iowa’s biggest coal ash concerns, unlined and unmonitored former quarries and mines that use the ash as fill, could be left unregulated.

In July, Hubbell said state lawmakers should hold public hearings on coal ash disposal to see if stricter regulations were needed. In a letter to Donna Wong-Gibbons, public health specialist for Plains Justice, she said she is hopeful the EPA’s new rules will adequately protect public health.

Below is Hubbell’s letter to Wong-Gibbons.

Dear Donna,

If we have time, we can certainly discuss your proposal during our General Discussion.  I will say in these times of economic distress, I would not be in favor of requiring states to come up with the money to do this.  First, we need to require groundwater monitoring to see if there is a problem.  If there is a problem, then the entities creating the coal ash or storing the coal ash need to correct it.  I’m getting tired of the public having to carry the costs for waste disposal.  I understand business will, in all liklihood, transfer the costs of disposal to consumers.  But people need to know what the real cost of using coal is so they can support alternatives.

At the end of the day, I think coal ash disposal needs to be part of a comprehensive plan that deals with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Hopefully, the Obama administration and EPA will come up with a solution that we can all embrace.

Sincerely,
Charlotte Hubbell

The Iowa Democratic Party launched a Web site over the summer to promote criticism of each Republican candidate for governor, and they added Branstad to the list after he resigned as president of Des Moines University to focus on building a campaign.

The Democratic party also paid for advertisements through the Google AdWords ad network that ran on many political news sites, including the Iowa Independent. The ads say, in large, red, letters, “Terry [loves] taxes,” with a 1980s-style stencil depiction of the former four-term governor’s face. It links to a page that lists tax increases that happened under the Branstad administration. For Iowans who read political news, they were an almost constant presence on every Web page they visited.

Web ad from Gov. Terry Branstad (Screen grab: 11/13/09)

Now, Branstad’s campaign is fighting back with a Web advertisement of their own. In theirs, Branstad appears in front of a podium wagging his finger next to large text that says, “Proven. Tested. Ready.”

The ad uses messages pretty common to establishment-supported Republican campaigns. In 2000, then-Gov. George W. Bush used the tagline “Proven. Tested. Ready to lead America.” at the end of television advertisements.

That’s the closest to an exact copy I could find, but there are more: In 2007, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney ran an ad called “Tested, Proven” in Iowa. In 2008, former Nebraska Gov. and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns used the phrase “Proven. Tested. Trusted.” as his catchphrase in a successful bid for U.S. Senate.

In terms of political strategy, there’s no doubt that this one is “Tested.” Arguably, it has also been “Proven.” But is it “Ready”?

Either way, the ad shows that the Branstad team knows they need to define themselves to Internet users before the other side does it for them.

Online ads are not incredibly expensive, but to ensure that Branstad’s ads appear rather than Democratic attacks, the campaign is forced to ‘outbid’ all other buyers for the same space. Google typically charges buyers money each time a visitor clicks on their advertisement on Google’s site or a third-party Web site like the Iowa Independent, and they pay third-party Web sites a portion of the revenue that generates. Each time a page with a Google advertisement loads, the system decides which advertisement to display based on the highest price each advertiser is willing to pay for it.

That means that the Iowa Democrats can continue to offer higher prices for displaying their ads, forcing Branstad to raise his bids, and vice versa. All in all, over the course of months, a bidding war could cost each side a few thousand dollars — and make lots of Web site owners happy.

And for the record, no matter how many times I see excessive punctuation in campaign ads, it bothers me every time.

The Associated Press is reporting that James Carabelli, the chair of the Macomb County Republican party, is suing the Michigan Messenger and its parent organization, the non-profit Center for Independent Media, over the Messenger’s report last month in which Carabelli was quoted as saying the party planned to use lists of foreclosed homeowners as the basis for Election Day challenges.

“As soon as we see the complaint, we will issue a response on Michigan Messenger,” said Jefferson Morley, National Editorial Director for CIM.

CIM sponsors the Iowa Independent, the Michigan Messenger and online news sites in three other states and Washington, D.C.

“His recent statement in Iowa that he would veto the new Farm Bill as now written helps firm up his reputation for independence from lobbying interests, but puts him more at risk in swing states like Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Missouri, and maybe Indiana — or even the critical state of Ohio, which people often forget is in the Corn Belt,” Cross told Iowa Independent. “Perhaps he expects that his national media campaign will mention his opposition to ethanol and other subsidies, probably not a bad idea at a time of rising food and fuel prices.”

McCain’s opposition to farm subsidies and hostility to ethanol are well-chronicled. Here is The Associated Press from earlier this month reporting on McCain’s visit to Des Moines and comments on the Farm Bill:

“I do not support it. I would veto it,” McCain said. “I would do that because I believe that the subsidies are unnecessary.”

McCain was in the heart of farm country, a place where subsidies for corn and ethanol fuel are wildly popular.

His long-held opposition to subsidies has cost him in Iowa, the state that traditionally begins the presidential nominating process and is a potential swing state in the fall. Yet the Arizona senator didn’t hesitate to bring up the issue.
“I just thought I’d start out with that non-controversial statement,” he said as he began the town hall-style meeting.

The nearly $300 billion bill would pay for farm and nutrition programs for the next five years.

Given Obama’s “weakness with rural Democrats,” perhaps McCain, an Arizona senator, figures he has some room to run in farm country, Cross said.

“But he (McCain) had better beware those swing states,” Cross said. “Farm prices may be high, but farmers and their economic allies are in the squeeze, too.”

Obama touted his support of renewable fuels during campaigning in Iowa and frequently mentioned his farm country constituency in Illinois — which has many of the same interests as Iowa producers.

For his part, McCain is now being swept up in the “food versus fuel” debate that many in farm country regard as nothing more than a straw man for big oil.

Ethanol is far from the only energy source to be propped up with government subsidies as evidenced by a Texas state comptroller’s report released this week.

And in Grand Island, Neb., this week — an area where corn and livestock and biofuels are vital — Rick Tolman, chief executive officer of the National Corn Growers Association, told the Grand Island Independent newspaper that a “massive disinformation campaign” against ethanol was started by the oil industry which doesn’t want the competition.

It also may have been started by those, such as the meat industry, that want corn to return as a low-cost feed for livestock, he said.

Some school officials opposed the four-year terms out of concern that a board majority could turn over at one election. But Patti Fields of the Iowa City school board backs the legislation. “It is hard enough to find candidates to run to make the elections competitive, let alone four to knock off four,” she said.

“41 states have school board terms of 4 years or more.” Fields told Iowa Independent. “It can take two to three years for school board members to get a good understanding on how things work and run, and a four year term actually gives members a year or two to really work effectively. Right now it is possible to have a new board member every year, and that can have its disadvantages.”

Fields also said auditors are very supportive of the bill as it would reduce the workload of school elections in even numbered years, which fall less than two months before general elections.

Fields, who is completing her first three-year term this year, said her main reason for supporting the bill is the money involved. “Locally it is $10,000 to 12,000 a year, but as a state it is a million dollars a year,” she said. “I do not believe that we are being good stewards of tax dollars holding elections every fall for a possible 5 percent voter turnout.”

One step that might increase that turnout is the voting center provision of the bill. Voting centers would allow voters to vote on Election Day in a precinct other than the one in which they live, such as a polling place they drive by on the way to or from work. The provision is designed to test out the voting center concept in lower turnout city and school elections, and would not apply to primary and general elections.

Under both versions of the legislation, ballot measures would have to be held either with regular elections or on predetermined dates during the year. In Johnson County in 2004, five cities held nearly identical cable franchise elections on three separate dates. With the primary and school elections thrown in, this meant an election a month during the run-up to the presidential election.

The bill would also codify the agreement between the Secretary of State and small political parties that has, since January 1, included the Greens and Libertarians on voter registration forms. Minor parties need to have run a candidate for statewide office in the last ten years and get 850 signatures on a petition to qualify for “political organization” status. They can lose that status if statewide registration drops below 150.

Iowa Department of Economic Development director Mike Tramontina had strong comments for what he believes is the prevailing mindset at the state’s research colleges, which he says are more interested in research grants than entrepreneurship.

At some prestigious U.S. coastal schools master’s students in the sciences and business are walking around with dreams of “making a billion dollars” by launching the next Google or Yahoo. They are interested not just in creating intellectual property but transitioning it to wild wealth, Tramontina said.

“At Iowa State, that is not cool,” he said. “We do research. We need to spur entrepreneurship at our universities.”

I asked Tramontina more about this after his presentation to the Carroll Area Development Corp., because his remarks hit on something I’ve observed for decades here: Iowans think more about working hard than smart.

“With the pace of change in technology places that are succeeding today are really able to shorten the time from a discovery until something is actually a company and that is producing jobs,” Tramontina said. “That is something other places have had to do and we need to do, too.”

Perhaps some of Iowa’s answers with entrepreneurship can be found in Northern Ireland, a nation where, thanks to a raft of tax policies and incentives, start-ups are “flourishing,” according to The New York Times.

This emphasis in Northern Ireland is new and took hold like wildfire. We have had various prescrptions to improve, for example, venture capital investment here in the state. But perhaps we need something more audacious.

Here is some of what The Times reports is going on in Northern Ireland:

Income tax rates in Ireland today are 20 percent on the first $50,000 of income and 41 percent on income above that. But there are value-added taxes of 21 percent levied on all goods and transactions, with the exception of health and medical services, children’s clothing and food. The tax on corporate profits, though, is 12.5 percent, which is an incentive to own a business.

The founder of a high-traffic Native American blog — native unity.blogspot.com
— is an 84-year-old activist journalist living in Yuma, Ariz.

Bobbie Hart O’Neill is part Mohawk Indian from her mother’s “Canadian side of the family” dating back to the American Revolution “when the Cryslers got involved with Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant during the American Revolution –  on the Tory side.”

 O”Neill, who has published possibly the best column I’ve ever read on getting old, is no newcomer to the Internet.

She tells Iowa Independent that with the help of Annie Nordbo, founder of the Native Celebrities Web site, she started the Native Unity site in the summer of 2003.

“ I consider myself to be a Native American activist as I minored in ethnology and Native American studies during my college years,” O’Neill said.

A native of Messena, N.Y., O’Neill was raised on the St. Lawrence River and headed west in 1944 to attend the University of Arizona. “I have been more or less a Westerner ever since,” she said.

Native Unity joined Iowa Independent in expressing outrage over the nation’s lack of attention to a suicide epidemic at the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. The New York Times carried a page 9 story on the tragedy on the same day it front-paged Paris Hilton.

“Rosebud is one of the most, if not the most, poverty-stricken reservations in the nation,” O’Neill said. “The Lakota have always been a proud people, and their nation is not one to readily accept government bureaucratic practices without an argument or even a fight.”