Stories

An employee in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Iowa received a national award from the U.S. Department of Justice in recognition of her continued service to the office and exceptional accomplishments in the wake of the June 2008 floods.

Responding to reports that victims of the 2008 floods who claimed certain deductions and exemptions on their state taxes will likely be forced to pay them back, Gov. Chet Culver said Wednesday he would do everything in his power to correct the problem as soon as possible.
Culver said he has directed the Department of Revenue [...]

“Passing the legislation was the easy part,” Culver said. “Now, we must get to work creating good jobs and revitalizing our communities.”

The Iowa House Friday passed a $115 million bonding bill to help University of Iowa officials rebuild flood-ravaged areas of the Iowa City campus.
The Senate passed a $100 million bonding measure earlier this month. An amendment to the House version, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Cohoon, D-Burlington, adds another $15 million to the bill for veterinary [...]

The Cedar Rapids Gazette has been awarded the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for deadline reporting for its coverage of the floods of 2008.
The award, given out annually by the Society of Professional Journalists for excellence in journalism, will be presented during the SPJ Convention and National Journalism Conference August 27-30 in Indianapolis, Ind.
On his [...]

Same-sex marriage will cause far more damage to Iowa than last year’s historic flooding, according to Eric Schumacher, pastor of Northbrook Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids.
Schumacher, in a column written for the Baptist Press, said that even though floods destroy houses, ruin offices buildings and displace families, recovery is still possible. Same-sex marriage, on the [...]

The conservative non-profit group Iowa Progress Project (IPP) has released a series of e-mail exchanges between state officials that it says calls into question Gov. Chet Culver’s response to last summer’s flooding.
A spokesman for Culver said the allegations fall “somewhere between nonsense and paranoia.”

Pull up the palm trees and other tropical plants, and it would be fairly easy to mistake some of the hurricane-ravaged communities scattered along the Gulf Coast for flood-weary Cedar Rapids.

In his Sunday column, Cedar Rapids Gazette Editor Steve Buttry said leadership has been lacking at all levels of government in response to the natural disasters that devastated the state last summer, leaving citizens out in the cold and on their own as they try to rebuild their lives.

Legislation calling for $56 million from the state’s $155 million emergency fund to be used to provide relief for victims of last summer’s floods and tornadoes was unanimously passed by the Iowa House Tuesday night.