Tuesday, December 13, 2022

City Council: Kids' Essays, Ag Gag, Garbage, Nuisances & $9,000 Floor Mat

The Cascade City Council meeting began Monday evening more charmingly than usual: the winners of the 7th Grade Essay Contest--Cody Lynch 1st Place, Colie Leytem 2nd, and Mollie Orr 3rd reading their essays on the topic "If I Were Mayor." Predictably, they were entertaining, sweet and featured preteen perceptions of the office without much comprehension of the thorny issues of governing. 

Such as--neither Mayor Steve Knepper, nor councilmember nor city administrator seems the slightest concerned that my drainage proposal has been kept off the agenda. I had submitted it before the previous Mayor Greg Staner left office. He refused to hear it. I thought it had been enacted as part of the Storm Water Ordinance. I discovered it had not when the Administrator issued a building permit to a neighbor who has already covered 90% of his lot with hard surface. Though I was promised it would be on this agenda, it was not. I guess I will have to contact the Attorney General's Office on that one.

There was a long discussion of the two food pantries in town, one of which is about to lose it's home because the city

Council spent $8,987  on a floor mat for below the slide at the pool, which the kind of soft core issue this council loves. Along the same lines ignoring the undemocratic possibilities of a Nuisance Ordinance, council passed that on 2nd reading. Penalizing small/senior citizen households and those who compost, order less online and are generally less wasteful, Council raised the garbage rates without a 3rd reading. Rewarding wastrels and penalizing people who only put garbage out once every couple months, is apparently this Council's fairness and good governance.

The one bright spot in the whole proceeding, I did succeed in getting Councilwoman Oliphant to admit she was not aware that Chief Justice Stephanie M. Rose of the Southern District of Iowa had found the "Ag Gag" law a violation of journalists' right, therefore unconstitutional and informing her that the DNR had fined local manure pumping company $2,000 for two violations.





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