Stories

A day after Gov. Chet Culver voiced his opposition to any tax increases to help solve Iowa’s budget problems, Democratic legislative leaders said they have not given up on the idea of increasing the state’s gasoline tax.

The changes are coming fast and furious at the “Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon.”
Des Moines Register Publisher Laura Hollingsworth informed readers in a column published Friday that the paper will be shedding some pages and combining some sections in an attempt to cut costs.

Iowa’s court system will have to turn to employee furloughs to meet the expectations of the budget cuts, and the result will be gaps in services, Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Marsha Ternus told lawmakers this morning.

It’s time for Iowa to declare a “war on potholes” and put people back to work, and the first step to that is an increase in the state’s gas tax, Senate President Jack Kibbie said this morning in his opening remarks to the legislature.

Former Des Moines Register Washington correspondent Jane Norman is once again writing for an Iowa audience.
Norman has been hired as a columnist for IowaPolitics.com, a non-partisan, for-profit political news service that aggregates news and publishes a daily newsletter. Norman will be writing a column entitled “A View From D.C.,” where she will try to put [...]

Davenport-based Lee Enterprises Inc., which owns 49 daily newspapers including the Quad City Times, the Sioux City Journal and the Mason City Globe Gazette, announced yesterday that it was laying off 39 employees at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The news follows earlier reports that the company’s average share value has fallen below $1 per share over [...]

The legislature will say no to any new spending that isn’t attached to the flood recovery effort, Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said this morning.

“I’ve been in the legislature for 20 years, and I’ve never seen a bigger challenge,” Gronstal said of the state’s budget situation. “We will be saying no to just about everything this session.”

“Everyone you talk to [at the Des Moines Register] is nervous, is scared, is trying to figure out what’s going to happen next, and unfortunately a lot of the economic news we’re getting isn’t very promising,” Hollingsworth said.

Perception is reality, and a good example of that old adage is a recent teleconference about President-elect Barack Obama’s stimulus plan involving the mayors of Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
Both The Des Moines Register’s Jason Pulliam and Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson were listening in, but when it came time to write a story, both [...]

During a taping of Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press,” state Auditor David Vaudt said taxpayers will have to decide whether they really want the services their state government provides, and if they do they will have to pay for them in more taxes.
So, the real key is citizens also need to understand that we can’t [...]