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Local Columns

Honored to serve, focused on Fort Dodge’s future

As I begin my fourth month serving as mayor of Fort Dodge, I want to begin with a simple but heartfelt thank you. I am deeply grateful to the citizens of our community for the trust you’ve placed in me to lead. It is truly an honor, and I will do my best to make our city and region a better ...

Jerry Fitzgerald’s life a study in resilience, determination

Despite the passage of seven decades, Jerry Fitzgerald remembers the scene as if it were yesterday. He was 13-years-old, an eighth grader at Corpus Christi School, and the scene was a tiny second-floor apartment above Anvers restaurant in downtown Fort Dodge where he lived with his dad ...

Steady Leadership, Standing Apart

School districts all over Iowa are having a tough time right now. Enrollment is dropping, costs keep going up, and state funding isn’t keeping pace. A lot of communities have had to make painful cuts — slashing programs, letting good teachers go, and scaling back the very things families ...

Momentum with intention

There are years when a community stays busy, and there are years that define its trajectory. For Webster County and the Fort Dodge region, 2025 was a defining year. At our annual awards dinner, as we gathered leaders, employers, public officials, educators, health care professionals, ...

Explaining the state’s proposed HMO tax

Regarding HF 2739, a bill which some of you have reached out about, here is the background and facts about the bill. It is a bill in the Ways and Means Committee, but it actually deals with the Health and Human Services budget. Iowa’s Medicaid program consumes an ever-growing amount of the ...

Prop 12 is a hogwash ‘government knows best’ approach

With passage of Proposition 12 in 2018, California voters overstepped constitutional boundaries and effectively hogtied pig farmers across America. Pork producers were faced with a dire choice: either fork out tens of thousands of dollars to comply with California’s mandates or get ...