Stories

A Polk County Judge’s order that the City of Des Moines refund a majority of the $12.6 million a year it has collected with a franchise fee since 2004 is “ironic,” Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie said.
“It is ironic that just two weeks ago the state enacted legislation which memorializes Iowa cities’ right to collect [...]

A Polk County judge has ruled that the City of Des Moines must refund aportion of the franchise fee it has charged utility customers since 2004.
Of the $12.6 million a year raised from the franchise fee, the city must refund $9 million, according to the ruling by Judge Joel Novak. The fee, which amounts to [...]

Cities can now charge a 5 percent franchise fee for gas and electric utilities under a bill signed into law by Gov. Chet Culver, easing but not solving budget problems for Iowa’s capitol city.
Des Moines City Manager Rick Clark told The Des Moines Register that the city would face a $5 million budget shortfall in [...]

DES MOINES — Wednesday’s “tea party” protest at the state capitol did not actually involve much tea, but it gave a wide variety of conservative constituencies a soapbox to voice their concerns. The crowd, numbering around 700 people, brandished placards of all kinds, ranging in subjects from immigration to global warming to the Federal Reserve.

[Update: A commenter with a longer historical perspective than mine says President Lyndon B. Johnson drew a crowd of 125,000 to a campaign rally.  Still, 25,000 is the largest crowd in recent history, at least.]
There does not seem to be a reliable source to cite for this claim, but Sen. Barack Obama’s rally today in [...]

Two full days after the Des Moines Register’s “exclusive” tip that Sen. Barack Obama would return to Iowa Thursday, the location and time of the event have not been released.
In the final weeks of the campaign, the majority of the Democratic presidential nominee’s public events have been large rallies.  Saturday in St. Louis, he attracted [...]

Members of the group Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement will meet with officials from Hy-Vee Inc. tonight to demand the company’s grocery in a poor neighborhood in Des Moines not only remain open but also remain a full-service location.

It was a campaign that focused as much on a man who wasn’t running as it did on the eight who were, but in the end the race for three open seats on the Des Moines Public School Board went to the incumbents.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled today that Des Moines Public Schools properly handled money collected from a 1999 sales tax increase for school construction.

This week Hy-Vee Inc. revealed that its Harding Hills supermarket, the subject of bitter controversy since the company announced last fall that it would close the store, will remain open in its current form for two to three years.

The announcement, which came during a closed-door meeting between Hy-Vee leadership and representatives from Iowa Citizens for [...]