Cascade Drainage Meeting Report

 

Willows south of my house standing in water March 2020.

Susie, Wollenberg, Hosch, Knepper and I met with Eric Schmeckel, DBQ County Soil & Water Conservation liasonThursday at 11 a.m. & came to the conclusion that he would:

a) Pull the permits of Custom Precast and Knuth Farms (both in the county) and check to see that they align with the county drainage requirements. With the snow on the ground it is hard to see what mitigation measures may have been taken. 

b) As intended, we surveyed the area and he seemed taken aback at the condition of the stream that runs behind Cascade Manufacturing, the Legion et. al. Not surprised either the water doesn't make it to the North Fork , but spills out into Staner's field and up onto my and other East side properties. In fact, it roars through there with such velocity that it tearing the trees off the bank, which he observed--something I hadn't noticed, when I walked it in spring & summer. Having a look with snow on the ground is also useful. 

c) I agreed to contact the Cascade City Administrator and have a meeting with Schmeckel, the council, and possibly one of the Dubuque County Supervisors, because according to Schmeckel they are becoming increasingly concerned about these drainage issues, as well. Please set up a meeting so we can discuss these issues.

d) I had put McDermott's farm on the issues list, because I was under the impression that Iowa law prevented a CAFO as close to a town as John McDermott's farm (He has 3!). Schmeckel said that fell under the DNR jurisdiction, contact Manchester, which I will do. 

e) Mr. Schmeckel insists that what is required is a comprehensive drainage plan for Cascade, which must be written, passed into ordinance and followed.

Pursuant to b) above, if you/council/mayor/property owners or any interested party wants to meet, I am willing to do so. However, I think the City of Cascade, really needs to get its house in order vis-a-vis its own drainage ordinances. McAllister Electric, the business next to it and MACC Storage have not a single blade of grass, green space or other mitigation between them. Likewise, between 1st and 2nd Ave. Cascade Lumber and the old Pioneer Office the length of that street up to the Bent Rim is nothing but hard surface on the east and gravel on the west, which Schmeckel agreed in the meeting today was 90-100% impermeable.

A drainage nightmare--the street south of the Bent rim

I have taken pix and I am sending you one just down from the Bent Rim. On the other side of the street, Cascade Lumber has covered so much area with gravel and constantly driven loaded semis on it that it is tantamount to cement. The water is running off the back of it with such velocity it is dragging the rip-rap and fence right down into the stream. The city needs to address these violations of its own code. There are some good citizens out there--Eastern Iowa Excavating, American Iowa Manufacturing and Webber Metals appear to have a decent ratio of grass to impervious surface. I am unsure about McDermott Oil and some of the others. I will walk/bike it all again in spring and report again.

Compare & Contrast a Private Citizen at City Council with Deference to Mike Beck

 

              The contrast between how an ordinary citizen with an issue before the Cascade City Council and Mike Beck is currently on full view. During the pool construction, the city brought heavy equipment on my lawn, tore up the grass, and I want to be reimbursed for fixing it. I was not there for the discussion because the city had previously published that meetings were closed because of Covid. The following meeting Mayor Pro-temp Andrew Kelchen rudely refused to hear it or tell me to put it back on the agenda.

Meanwhile Mike Beck gets a special meeting to discuss breaking his promise to the city to run a street to the park he gave the city—limestone outcropping land he can’t dig a basement in and can’t sell anyway. And there is lots of discussion:

1)      The street to the park will be closed and then he has another lot to sell for $50,000

2)      City workers are against it because a cul-de-sac is far harder to (snow) plow and becomes a safety issue.

3)      More hard surface (an additional house, garage, and driveway)  invalidates the drainage plan, which is already a problem.

They are starting over with the special meeting bit, because they screwed it up on the first try, and Councilman Hosch called them on it. But if you are an ordinary citizen, don’t count on getting one, you get a rude ration…

Some Economic "Tough Talk" about Schools

 

Is there something more fiendishly depraved and debased going on in politics when it comes to education? Are opportunities in this society so reduced by technology, over-population and all the rest of it since the 1960’s and 70’s that money spent on education is doing nothing but assuaging societal guilt? Just window dressing? A handy method of keeping kids out of harm’s way so their parents can work? Is it that we really don’t even intend to educate them because there are no jobs for them anyway? Especially when we are bringing in/allowing scads of workers from elsewhere?

            For the past several years, Republican dominated legislatures like ours here in Iowa have routinely funded education below the inflation level, which is effectively a reduction, when Iowa schools have never needed funding increases more, considering that the state has become a Mecca for immigrants working in meat packing plants around the state. Their non-native, non-English speaking kids need more language help and special services.

Only they are not alone. Is there anybody who doesn’t realize there are more kids with autism in classrooms these days?

We never saw them when I was in school, but that may have been because anybody who wasn’t “socially acceptable” was kept home. The environmentalists say it is toxic chemicals we’re spewing into our world; Anti-vaxers say inoculations. Whatever. These kids are in classrooms now. They need highly refined special attention, psychologists, teachers trained to write Individual Education Plans (IEPs), special discipline techniques and all the rest of it. Schools are absolutely staggering under the burden of it all, and what they need is more budget for personnel to deal with the issues confronting them. Not less.

 

Country Schools--Old & Brand New

             Primarily out of Covid concern, my thoughtful, Fort Collins niece and her husband have put their five-year-old in a co-op “pod” first grade with friends’ kids.

New name, folks, but a very old concept: the country school! Once upon a time in the last century, neighboring families sent their kids to the closest school, usually one room with a wood burning stove, a few books and a blackboard.

            The physical plant number and varying grade levels of pupils—forced children to become independent learners, able to work on their own at a very young age. With a child in most every grade, older students gave younger ones lessons, providing “oldsters” valuable review. The teacher was executive, who assessed the various levels of math, reading and writing competency and grouped kids at similar levels and set the schedule.

            An academically talented young people, especially girls, would become the teacher’s assistant, go to high school, get a year of college, in summer school or by “correspondence” and become teachers themselves. Most students emerged from country schools with a solid level of overall literacy that might put some of today’s to shame.

            While most country schools had fewer than a dozen students, some had as many as 2 dozen—the one I attended at St. John’s Placid was 5^th to 8^th grade—had that many. First to 4^th was in the nun’s living room, which is where my niece is going: in the teacher's living room. 

Summer School: "Flipping God the Bird" & Coming out Trans

            Concerned by what teachers often call the “summer slide,” this spring, after school was canceled when a couple of  neighborhood kids showed up at my door looking squander some time, I gave them each a YA novel out of my own library and assigned them book reports.

            Just then I was writing one myself—of a new book called Unbelievers, an Emotional History of Doubt for a magazine called Free Inquiry by a prof at Durham University in England. The book turned out to be a fascinating read about the history of people who publicly advertise themselves as atheists.  Very dangerous business in the middle ages: Galileo Galilei ended up under house arrest next to the gallows for it.

However, as time went on, it became the kind risqué behavior people committed to getting attention frequently engaged in—like doing drugs or coming out trans these days. I called my review-report Flipping God the Bird across the Ages showed the kids how I made notes without defacing the book and  told them to bring reports back in a couple weeks and I would check them.

 All summer elapsed and I never saw the kids nor the journals I gave a couple other neighborhood telling them to keep track of their daily activities.  My books are gone and so are my journals, but at least I got an A+ for effort this summer. And FI editor loved my review!

 

Freelance Unpaid Teacher

 This spring I was writing a "book report" aka review for a magazine called Free Inquiry, which is the official organ of the Secular Humanist Society. I had told the editor he should review a book called

Unbelievers. 

The methods I used are would just as well with Little House on the Prairie, Little Women or The Education of Little Tree. Around the same time (mid-April) a couple neighborhood kids came to my door.  I gave them each a book (out of my own library), and showed them how to annotate places where something you might use.  I told them to bring it back in a couple weeks and I would check it. This is the 2nd week in August and I still haven't seen any book reports.

I also had a couple wide-line journals--I don't like wide lines because I write too much--and gave those to a couple of other kids and told them to bring the journals back every couple weeks and I would check their mechanics. Mechanics, spelling etc.  I haven't seen those either.

The time, energy, effort and money needs to be taken out of sports entirely and put into academics, so we are graduating kids who can read and write. Students don't need to be in school. They need to be involved in real educational activities. 

Big Changes in Florida:

I had not been to Florida for the past three years, and recalling last years winter--snow every day for often for a week and some -50 degree temps--I was happy to have saved enough to fly to my
sister's in Estero. There, on previous occasions I have made myself useful cooking dinner, cleaning and running the dog.
This year I had the Tough Talk out of School manuscript to submit, so my "vacation" consisted of getting up every morning at five or six, working till 1 or 1:30, climbing into my swimsuit and riding the bike up to the pool, sunning and swimming for a couple hours, after I ran the dog around the block.
The thing I noticed immediately was the birds. Three years ago, when I was there for the first time, there were no birds in the yards of any of the homes, nor were they on the parkway up to the pool. This year they were everywhere, and
my sister says development is responsible.

There are several in my sister's neighborhood, tearing up the ground to build houses that the birds have been displaced from their wild places and are forced to search for food and dry their wings in places they never went before--along the parkways and in the yards of residences. This fine for the birds, since they can be airborne in an instant. Panthers and bears have a harder time because they need habitat.
The human species is destroying all others, but
we seem not to notice.