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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 count on most. Fort Dodge faces those same pressures. We’ve seen enrollment decline just like everybody else, and that hits our funding directly. But here’s the difference: we didn’t wait for a crisis to start planning. We’ve been making careful, steady adjustments for years so we wouldn’t ...

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, developers and investors in one room, the energy was unmistakable. The highlight video we shared told part of the story: projects advancing, ground being broken, capital invested, housing rising, and employers doubling down on their commitment to this region. But the real story goes deeper than project ...

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 state’s budget. In the 1990s, Medicaid generally took about 7 percent of the budget. Since the turn of the century, Medicaid spending has grown significantly. Last year, Medicaid accounted for 22 percent of the state’s budget. This year, the state is also absorbing the end of extra federal ...

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 blacklisted from selling to 15 percent of the nation’s pork market.  Since Prop 12 went into full effect on Jan. 1, 2024, consumers have been subject to inflated pork prices: the average price per pound of a pork loin in California has risen more than 40 percent. And pig ...

Blizzard impacted paper delivery, but subscribers could still read the news

Winter wasn’t done with us yet. After we were teased with some beautiful sunny 60 degree days Mother Nature sent a blizzard our way. The snow fall totals weren’t that substantial, but just a few inches of snow combined with sustained winds of 30 miles per hour and gusts in the 50 plus mile range made travel after dark nearly impossible. Many of you woke up the next morning to find the sun out and little snow on the ground and thought “ what was all the fuss about?” There were blizzard warnings and programming interruptions by your favorite weatherman telling you how bad ...

The high cost of being cheap

The Iowa Legislature is at it again, trying to eliminate publication of legal notices in newspapers. And it will cost Iowa’s citizens way more money than it saves. Republican sponsors say it will save money for cities and counties, but as editor Art Cullen noted in his editorial last week, scrapping public notices will keep Iowans in the dark about the public’s business. Legal notices are the minutes of city council and board of supervisors meetings, the bills that they pay, the people that they hire and other official actions they take. They are the notices that alert you if a ...