Stories

With former Gov. Terry Branstad’s recent return to politics after a decade out of office, Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson decided to take a trip down memory lane. The veteran reporter went into her archives and found the audio from Branstad’s last campaign kickoff event back in 1994.
In a speech delivered on the farm where [...]

Iowa administers 28 different state tax credits with an estimated total value of nearly $500 million, according to reserach done by Radio Iowa’s O.Kay Henderson.
In the wake of allegations of misconduct surrounding the state’s film tax credit program, Gov. Chet Culver said there needs to be a review of all tax credits that the state [...]

The Legislative Oversight Committee will discuss the possibility of an investigation of the state’s film tax credit program when the panel meets Thursday, the committee’s co-chair told Radio Iowa’s O.Kay Henderson.
Sen. Rich Olive, D-Story City, said the legislature may look at all of the state’s tax credit programs in order to ensure taxpayer money is being [...]

Technophobes, beware! The following post gets pretty deep into the weeds…
When the Iowa Independent launched version 2.0 more than a year ago, we were Iowa’s only major news site built on the open-source Wordpress blogging platform. Since then, other prominent news organizations have followed suit, including the (Cedar Rapids) Gazette and Radio Iowa.
Wordpress, which was [...]

Conservatives in Iowa would be “incensed” if they were paying more attention to how far to the left U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley has drifted, a leading voice in the state’s social conservative movement told Radio Iowa’s O.Kay Henderson.
Bill Salier, who ran unsuccessfully for the right to challenge U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin in 2002 and [...]

Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson has the scoop on a bill proposed by Sen. Matt McCoy, D-Des Moines, that would remove the words “husband” and “wife” from Iowa laws and replace them with the word “spouse.”

A public works program that mirrors that presented by President-elect Barack Obama will be unveiled in Gov. Chet Culver’s Condition of the State address, the governor told Radio Iowa.
Culver said he expects millions of dollars to come into Iowa from the federal government, money that can be used to repair damage from this summers natural [...]

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 [...]

Iowa ranked 50th among states in amount of credit card debt, according to analysis by a credit and information management company in Chicago.
The company, called TransUnion, found that Iowans carried just $4,300 worth of credit card debt in the third quarter of 2008, compared to $5,300 for the average American.

Iowa has spent nearly all of the money it gained from suing tobacco companies in the 1990s, according to a report by Radio Iowa.