Future Cascade Hotel Work Session

            Far more interesting than the meeting, was the work session that followed the Cascade Council regular meeting last evening.

            A collegiate-looking guy in his 40s wearing blue cords and a gray V-neck sweater named Mike from Wyndham Hotels and Michelle a voluble young woman in a tight black dress with a sun or a sunflower on it from IKWE, the finance arm of a small-town hotel building, both spoke.

            We listened. And learned that the city has already done a survey to probe the need for a hotel.  Seems one will cost in the vicinity of $4 mill, $70,000 to $100,000 “per key,” as their jargon calls, i.e. rentable rooms.

            IKWE’s role in this will be to “help the city decide what is the best fit…” and rustle up investors.  She hinted there might be a couple in Dubuque and would look for local ones. Get your checkbook out, Ladies & Gents, the next meeting will be the investors.

            Some of it was pure sales pitch: Mike said, they could offer “a gamut of options to cater to the community.” Michelle asserted, “A hotel keeps money in the community.” An overnight guest eats in local restaurants, buys gas, antiques, etc.

            The hotel, which will need an acre or two, will be located on the Miracle Mile/Urban Sprawl (depending how you see it)just as you come into town. The mayor said the city already had the infrastructure out there.

          

So far the city has spent taxpayer money installing infrastructure on the east/industrial side of town, neglecting older portions of the city, a couple of which desperately need new sewer lines. As we left the meeting Michelle asked me if I were the newspaper, “No.” Just the loyal opposition with a Critical Eye Q!

Who Paid for the Cascade Pool?

1965 was a very eventful year. For six weeks, I walked two blocks from Grannie O’Neill’s to Clarke College in the rain while the Mississippi flooded downtown Dubuque. Clarke, Loras, and high school students were recruited to fill sand bags and make sandwiches.

 Early in ‘65, the Cascade City Council—Carl Cigrand, Merly Dolphin, Bob Kurt, Bill Talbert and Dr. Tom White—assessed citizens for curb and gutter and was dealing with an ice jam that necessitated meeting with the county supervisors and Army Corps of Engineers. They wanted to blast it out, but were nervous about what else might get blasted. At a special meeting in mid-March they adopted permanent remedies to guard against such problems in the future. 

Nonetheless, on Apr. 6^th, the five decided to apply to the Iowa Comptroller to transfer $70,000 from the Cascade Utility having received a petition signed by 210 people to build a pool. On May 5^th  citizens went to the polls and voted 374 to 39 to build it. Later that month Council did a trade with Legion: land on the edge of the Legion Park for updating the existing tennis courts—then located just north of the pool, plus a water main to near 3^rd base.

On July 28, 1965, the council accepted the bid of $69,200 By Pascal P. Paddock to build  the pool. For the balance of the year at regular and special meetings council worked out the kinks. On Sept. 7^th Council paid the first installment $31,652 for the pool and on Nov. 1, the 2^nd of $17,043.

The following year council set a special election for April to establish a park board to run the pool.  It passed and on June 6^th Cliff Less, John Sullivan and Herb Green were named to the Cascade Park Board. The 3^rd installment was paid Paddock was $5,000.

The Cascade Municipal Pool opened the first Sat. of June 1966 with no citizen having donated a dime. On June 28^th the pool balance of $2,896 was paid to Paddock.

Aside from astonishingly low cost of installing the ’65 pool, the real take-away here is that NO citizen was hit up for even a dime for it. I have long advocated stronger city/citizen control of the Utility for years for just this reason. So far the Utility has donated only $2,743.04. What have we done with city money? Keep checking back here, Critical Eye is looking into it.

Skunked: In Your Face on FACEbook

I published a newspaper in the early 90s heavily colored by the Democratic Socialist ideas I imbibed bumping around Europe in the late 70s and early 80s, when I published a catalog there. You could articulate those things then. 

 If people disagreed with you, they put a dead skunk in your mailbox and/or a cut-out of one in your yard. I kept the cut-out because I thought a skunk spraying perfume was amusing, but there is nothing amusing about attacks on journalists or the extreme, poke-in-the-eyeball nature of some of the postings on social media. The very configuration of Facebook, Twitter et. al. makes the expression of nuanced ideas impossible. FACEbook is very aptly named because it is so often, so in-your-face. What saw and so admired in Germany, especially, was 10 people sitting around a table discussing a topic, reacting to one another, saying things like I can see how you would say that but...nuanced positions are virtually impossible here.
Our education system may also responsible. Are we teaching students healthy skepticism? Teaching them to effectively pat their heads and rub their stomachs intellectually? To look at scientific proof for global warming. To ponder whether 
immigrants can be both decent, desperate people AND used as cheap labor by business to undermine native populations, which has resulted the drift to the right we see in almost every country? If not, we're all SKUNKED!

Big Bum Steer...

..from the weather folks last night--they called for the first freeze north of Hwy 30. As a result the last rose of summer, (?) along with some fine marigolds and zinnias not destroyed by recent rains, is blooming on my kitchen counter:

I'm afraid that life will increasingly difficult for weather forecasters thanks to global warming. I mean, who remembers a first freeze without a first frost first?

Old Damacus

The open market in central Damascus showing the ruins of a previous civilization. Is it all gone now?

In 2006, while I was teaching in Tarsus, Turkey, I took a weekend bus trip to Damascus. George W. Bush was president and saber-rattling--there was talk of making the country off-limits for Americans--so I ran down and bought a ticket.

The bus ride was an eye opener. From the eastern Turkish city of Antioch, we drove southeast into Syria along a desert road bordered by a row of trees and not another scintilla of vegetation on the landscape. The wind was blowing so hard a bus full of people bucked around like an empty box. The trees planted in a single row along the highway were bent over from the relentless wind.

The Courtyard of a Damascus Mosque

When we arrived in Damascus the Tour took us to too many mosques, though they are lovely. What I found more interesting was a museum across the street from one of them with a huge banner out front saying: Oldest Alphabet of Human History.
I told the tour guide I was going over there, and he about had a stroke on the sidewalk. Fortunately(or un-), the museum didn't open till the afternoon, so I saw another mosque, admittedly lovely, but I'd rather evidence of human intellect, rather than religion which often seems the source of wars.

 

The next place we went was a Roman bath.

I guess the country was called Arabia then, but count on this, Paris, Germany, Israel or Turkey, anyplace else you go around the Mediterranean, you will find Roman baths, aquaducts, and temples. Busy beavers--they didn't just conquer, they built. We have done as much conquering, I wonder if we are doing as much building.
I once heard and interviewer ask an archeologist during the 1st Gulf War, where would be a good place to have  war so as to avoid destroying antiquities.  He said he couldn't think of one, the place was such an overlay of civilizations.

What I despised about Turkey was photos of Bashar el Assad and his father everywhere. Dictators are nasty and seriously lacking in any sense of shame. They think the people they are willing to barrel bomb should adore them. Makes me sad to wonder what has happened to some of the people in this picture--Are they refugees in Turkey or Germany? Has the soldier in the foreground facilitated the bombing? How many are dead? Maimed? Is the statute of Saladin still proudly riding or in a million pieces on the ground?

Sad to look at these old pix.

Just Like the Good (?) Ole Days

Monday night’s city council meeting was a replay of the good ole days: My kinsman Ken McDermott, a well-known mover and shaker, was there wanting to buy a vacated section of Washington Street for 50 cents a sq. ft. (The open lot kitty corner from Bent Rim adjacent with three old elegant oaks on it.) 

I was there having recently bought the vacated section of 2^nd Ave. NE. Beyond the obvious: 2 vacated city streets, there is virtually no comparison. Councilman Andy Kelchen inquired what I’d paid. Ans: $500 in legal and recording fees and $1,200 i.e. 15 cents a sq. ft.

Councilman Mick Delany did the math reflecting the differences between them and came up with $1.78 a sq. ft. Those differences include:

1)      It is on the high value end of town

2)      Not in or adjacent to the flood plain (or put there by city development)

3)      Little or no fill will be required to make buildable lots

4)      Sewer & water hook ups are readily available and no sump pump will be required to have flush toilets on the main level or lower levels.

My kinsman McDermott is interested in buying the property to subdivide it and use the street to make more spacious lots. He and his Mom & Dad have not mowed the property for 75 years! In fact, two other people currently own it. By contrast, I am not a developer and “my” is buyer having reservations about installing a sump pump.

My kinsman Ken is right about one thing however—he complained “the city was always-helping developers”— I couldn’t agree more. From the days of Dan, the Con Man, Conrad (late 1980s), to Callahan Construction (90s) to Beck (2000s) to the last $50,000 the city gave Jesse Loewen, too much tax money has gone to developers.

This is indirectly connected to the other major item on the agenda—the tennis courts in the community park, which council has been struggling with since last summer. Understandably, council does not want to spend $70,000 (the high estimate) to resurface the courts and nobody will guarantee any cheaper fix. Worse, the whole issue is complicated by drainage problems.

A critical eye cannot help but observe that when developers go off with a large share of the city budget and the state forces us to build a sewer plant to accommodate their businesses, there is not enough money to resurface tennis courts or rebuild the swimming pool. There isn’t even enough to provide all citizens decent water as my (See my 25^th Aug. post). If a developer wants to pay 50 cents a sq. ft., you can bet it is worth 3 or 4 times that.

Trump Tariffs: Right for the Wrong Reason?

Thought I would share with Critical Eye readers a letter I wrote Menard's this week, which I suspect is the experience of many of us. The economists and Mr. Trump never consider it, but the American people must: cheap, "disposable" products are filling our landfills, endangering our water.

Dear Menard's:

Let me tell you, I was perfectly flabbergasted to look up your headquarters and find you are a Midwestern company, in view of this complaint—a series of fabulously shabby products:

1)      Taped to the top of this letter is the paint coating of a “universal kitchen basket strainer,” which peeled off 6 weeks after I bought it. I took it back; they replaced it, and in six weeks the same thing happened again. The steel(?) seems to be holding up but the white paint coating does not adhere.

2)      A far more expensive item was a fire pit I bought spring 2017 for a reunion that fall, but which I installed in the yard in July, when the bottom fell out of the one I had. Though the new pit retailed for over $100, the grill that holds the wood cracked in 2 months. I went back to Menards (DBQ) and asked for a new grill, so I didn’t have to throw the whole fire pit in the landfill. No help from them—my brother fabricated one out of old rebar and it is still in use.

3)      That summer I also bought an Ames yard cart. It was so new and got such light use that the notification attached to the inside saying you could transport 250 lbs was still affixed to it. Early June, I went to the neighbors to get some free dirt and roll it back down the hill. One of the wheels got stuck, became flat and the cart would no longer roll. My fix-it brother said there was nothing he could do. Menard’s replaced it.

4)      Early this year, my old garden hose bit the dust. I bought a new one 5/8 in diameter, asking the clerk if it would be problem to attach it to a regular size hose. She didn’t think so.  I exchanged it for longer one because my yard is very large.  The first night I used it, I forgot to turn the water off and when I got up in the morning there was a “fountain” in my yard where the brand new hose split and was spewing water in the air. When I brought it back, returns would only give me half the $ back—something that had to do with the computer and the previous exchange.

I thought enough is enough. I went to Lowe’s down the street and bought a hose Made in America. I paid $10 more for it, but look at the waste of time, gas and contributions to the landfill these cheap products generate. While I am no fan of his, I support Trump’s tariff on Chinese products, because they are cheap junk. In the end, I conclude they cost us more. This letter is to encourage the Menard’s Corporate leadership to draw the same conclusion.

Critical Eye has served one company notice that the way we are doing business is not acceptable. Feel free to copy the letter, insert your own product tales/descriptions and send it to the corp headquarters: 5101 Menard's Dr., Eau Claire, WI 54703.