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City, county have different functions

Local Columns

In the comment section of last week’s piece, there were a few questions for me that were more focused on the city. Fixing roads, streetlights out, city council decision-making, etc. I get this a lot when talking with folks about what they’d like to see from the Board of Supervisors. To be fair, the lines can get blurry, especially when we’re all trying to solve the same kinds of problems, and especially since my district - District 4 - falls squarely inside the city limits of Fort Dodge. Here’s the short version of how city government differs from county government: City ...

Religious freedom must not be taken for granted

Local Columns

Q: What have you learned about the FBI’s bias towards American Catholics? A: From my top spot on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’m pushing to get answers from the FBI about its efforts during the Biden administration to tie certain Americans of Catholic faith to violent extremist views. New information I recently released showed the anti-Catholic Richmond memo was widely distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees across the country during the Biden administration. What’s more, the newly released records showed the targeting of Catholics based on biased sources included ...

Summer fun is here in the Fort Dodge area

Editorial

The long days of summer are upon us, with seemingly endless hours of daylight to be enjoyed. In fact, at least on weekends, you might as well call them the long, lazy days of summer. Locally, there will be plenty of things to do on those on summer weekends. For example, Lehigh River Days will be back from June 20 to June 22. It will include some traditional staples of years past, such as the log rolling contest. That consists of people standing on a log in a four foot deep pool of water and trying to keep the log spinning without falling off. It will include live music, mud ...

Frontier Days 2025 to kick off summer

Editorial

This weekend there will be a sure sign that the summer season is truly at hand. What is that sign? Frontier Days 2025, of course. Frontier Days is the annual Fort Dodge event that draws thousands to the downtown parade and the Fort Museum and Frontier Village. The three-day festival continues a Fort Dodge tradition that is returning with a theme this year of “Hats Off to Those Who Came Before Us.” Not content to rest on applause for past glories, organizers have labored hard to produce a truly exceptional event. Frontier Days 2025 will have familiar features, but there will be ...

Opposed to North 15th Street plan

Letters to the Editor

To the editor: The City Council is proposing to reconfigure North 15th Street from the Village Inn intersection to the Kwik Star intersection ( 20th Avenue North to Second Avenue North). The North 15th Street corridor is a main traffic corridor for Fort Dodge and the second busiest road in our community. The council wants to reduce this busy corridor from four lanes to three lanes. The three-lane road is actually a two-lane road with a middle left-turn lane. The council and city claim they want to do this to reduce the number of accidents on the North 15th Street corridor. Yet ...