Orascom's Lee County facility

On April 7, three of the five Scott County Supervisors – Carol Earnhardt, Jim Hancock, and Tom Sunderbruch – approved a stunningly short-sighted change to the Scott County Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP) that allows for spot zoning anywhere in the county’s unincorporated areas. Supervisors Diane Holst and Brinson Kinzer respected the community-at-large’s wishes and voted against the change in the spirit of true representation.

The county’s current Agricultural Preservation Zoning District prevents spot zoning – developments that don’t conform to the surrounding land use – on any agriculture property outside city limits. But the three supervisors provided the necessary votes to begin the approval process for a new zoning designation called an Industrial Floating Zone (IFZ) to skirt that protection. April 7’s vote was the first of three readings over the next four weeks that will change the CLUP to allow the county and Quad Cities First – the economic-development arm of the Quad Cities Chamber – to market prime farmland for a “megasite” (1,000 acres or more) to potential industrial operators.

The Iowa Economic Development Authority established 17 regional marketing groups – including Quad Cities First – to help attract industrial development to Iowa, and it’s offering marketing grants of up to $50,000 per project. The fund expires in November, so the pressure is on to get the IFZ passed before that deadline. (See RCReader.com/y/ifz1.)

The Greater Davenport Redevelopment Corporation – a partnership of Scott County, the City of Davenport, the Quad Cities Chamber, and MidAmerican Energy – owns and operates the Eastern Iowa Industrial Park, but it’s running out of sites to market, and none is large enough to qualify as a megasite. Ergo the Industrial Floating Zone, which by circumventing current protections for prime farmland will open up the entire unincorporated county to potential industrial development.

And this is precisely what makes the Industrial Floating Zone so egregious. Most counties and municipalities allocate specific acres of property for site certification as a megasite. Certification criteria demand that qualifying properties have infrastructure already in place. With the IFZ, this is not the case. It’s all up for negotiation, and no surrounding properties are protected from the intrusion, leaving an entire rural community economically insecure going forward. And county residents can bank on their tax dollars paying for necessary infrastructure as part of the incentives used to entice an industrial operation here.

The Sesser Egyptians circa 1940. Gene Moore is in the back row, fourth from the left.

Gary W. Moore had lots of dots to connect about his father’s life. The problem was that, for many years, Gene Moore refused to talk about them.

Illustration by Nathan Klaus

In a recent interview, Rock Island County Board Chair Ken “Moose” Maranda trotted out an old saying: “County government is only as good as the taxpayers want it to be.” He continued: “And that’s because of statute. Everything has to go to the public.”

Somewhat charmingly, Maranda actually says “statue” when he means “statute,” but his meaning is still clear: Because Rock Island County is not a home-rule government, it’s constricted by state law in ways many municipalities are not. So if it wants property-tax revenue beyond state caps, it has to get approval from voters via referendum.

If the City of Rock Island is unwilling to devote the resources to operate and upgrade the Hauberg Civic Center, it’s hard to imagine a better owner than Bridges Catering.

Bridges – now based in Princeton, Iowa – is an established family company whose owners have deep roots in Rock Island. It plans to renovate and maintain the Hauberg mansion consistent with its historic character, expand public access, and use the site for both food preparation and events with fewer than 100 people. Shifting the mansion, its carriage house, and grounds into Bridges’ hands would add property and sales taxes to Rock Island’s coffers, and eliminate from the budget an event-rental facility (operated by the Parks & Recreation department) whose financial performance is in the red and getting worse.

Dave Heller. Photo by Kevin Schafer (KRichardPhoto.com).

It goes without saying that Dave Heller is a baseball guy. He is, after all, the Quad Cities River Bandits' managing partner, and he has an ownership stake in three other minor-league teams.

He talks about his first ownership experience - as a business partner with legendary players Don Mattingly (Heller calls him "Donnie") and Cal Ripken Jr. And about road trips to see his baseball idol Tom Seaver when he pitched for the Mets and Red Sox.

When I inquired about his favorite River Bandits player, he quickly answered, "Carlos Correa, without question. ... Great work ethic, great natural ability, great with kids. He'll be a special star. ... The idea of having an overall number-one pick like Carlos here is really exciting to us. Two years later, and he's in the major leagues and tearing it up."

Heller grew up in Baltimore, but he wasn't an ardent Orioles fan. "I wasn't passionate about the Birds the way other people were," he said. "I really kind of just loved baseball writ large. I could watch a Cardinals-Cubs game and enjoy myself every bit as much as watching an Orioles-White Sox game."

Yet the 53-year-old doesn't run the River Bandits - or any other team he owns - like a sports enterprise. In an hour-long conversation last week, the game itself felt incidental. Heller said his model for the myriad improvements, additions, and promotions at Modern Woodmen Park during his tenure was "county fairs. ... I think the idea of bringing some of that county-fair atmosphere into a ballpark is really healthy and fun and productive."

Treating the ballpark like an amusement park might rankle baseball purists, but it's good business - particularly when one considers that minor-league owners manage the venue and not the team. The goal is to get people through the gates - and all the better if some of them only know ERA as an acronym for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Davenport started Iowa's debate over using cameras to ticket vehicle owners for speeding and running red lights, so it's appropriate to look at one of its intersections as an illustration of the current situation - 11 years after the city began automated enforcement.

From 2001 to 2004 - before any traffic cameras were installed - Kimberly Road and Elmore Avenue averaged 7.0 red-light broadside crashes per year. From 2011 to 2014 - years when speed and red-light cameras were in operation - it averaged 1.0 red-light crash annually, a drop of 86 percent. The percentage decrease is slightly greater if one only considers red-light crashes in the directions of camera enforcement - east- and west-bound speed and red-light cameras.

From the city's perspective, this represents clear evidence that the traffic cameras have improved safety at the intersection.

Yet earlier this year, the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) ordered that the City of Davenport turn off traffic cameras at Kimberly and Elmore, which it did in April. While the city presented data on broadside crashes - those in which somebody running a red light was a direct cause of an accident - the state looked at all crashes within 150 feet of the intersection.

And here the picture becomes muddled. In three pre-camera years, total crashes averaged 10.3. The DOT evaluation found 15.5 total crashes per year after camera activation, including 23 in 2013.

Gary Statz, a traffic engineer with the City of Davenport, said those numbers aren't really in conflict: "In 2013, we had a spike in crashes out there, and I don't know why, but we just did. So the average of [total crashes] those two years was pretty high, and they came to the conclusion that the cameras weren't effective ... .

"My argument would be that most of the crashes had nothing to do with the cameras. The red-light crashes were almost nonexistent, but we had a lot of rear-end crashes that were well back from the intersection. Traffic backed up further than people thought, [and they] just weren't prepared to stop. That seemed to be most of them. ...

"I found the vast majority of the rear-end crashes occurred well back from the intersection" but within 150 feet of it. "We only found three [in 2013] ... that occurred during the yellow or at the beginning of the red. ... When it happens five seconds after it's red, and it's 10 car lengths back from the stop bar, you can safely say the camera had nothing to do with it."

Ultimately, though, the City of Davenport opted not to appeal the DOT's order at Kimberly and Elmore. "I didn't really agree with what they said," Statz said, "but we didn't argue it."

This anecdote highlights a few key elements of the present battle over Automated Traffic Enforcement (ATE).

When Iowa's motor-fuel tax increased by 10 cents a gallon on March 1, it represented a road that was both brave and opportunistic.

It was also stupid, for two key reasons: Raising the gas tax doesn't fully address the funding need for critical road improvements, and over time it will provide less and less money while road-construction costs continue to increase.

Despite that, the hike was still brave, because raising taxes is never popular among voters - especially when they feel the pain every time they visit the gas pump. The Des Moines Register has polled Iowans about a gas-tax hike for the past five years. While the amount of the hike in the question has varied over the years, opposition to an increase was 70 percent in 2011. Opposition has eroded since then, but it was still 58 percent in February 2014.

Which leads us to opportunistic. Mirroring national trends, from July 2014 to early 2015 gas prices dropped from more than $3.50 per gallon in the Quad Cities and Des Moines to under $2, according to GasBuddy.com.

Prices have risen since then but are still more than a dollar cheaper than in mid-2014, so legislators saw a window of opportunity. The February 2015 Des Moines Register poll found 48 percent support for a 10-cent gas-tax hike and only 50 percent opposition - and the cost of fuel was certainly a factor in that shift.

The timing was great in political terms, too, just after a statewide-election cycle. The problem of deteriorating roads and bridges - and the choice for a solution - had been on the table since late 2011, but there's nothing like the longest period of time before an election to spur legislators into unpopular action.

Amaney A. Jamal

Since 2005, the Arab Barometer project that Amaney A. Jamal co-founded has interviewed ordinary people in the Arab world about their views on (according to ArabBarometer.org) "governance, political life, and political, social, and cultural values."

So Jamal had extraordinary insight into the Arab Spring that began in 2010, and its aftermath. In a phone interview last week, she said she had seen the seeds of change but didn't know if or when they would blossom. "It was very clear and obvious in our public-opinion polls that the status quo was not sustainable," she said. "That the levels of frustration, the levels of mass discontent with the status quo were there. What was not clear was whether ... there was going to be some sort of trigger to bring it all down."

Jamal will present "The Arab Spring: Did All Go Wrong?" - St. Ambrose University's Folwell Lecture in Political Science & Pre-Law - on February 9, and the answer to that question should be obvious enough to anybody who pays attention to international news.

Sheryl WuDunnThe 2009 book Half the Sky is filled with stories that are heartbreaking and inspiring - and often both. The Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-and-wife team of Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn gives you precisely what you'd expect from a book subtitled Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. There are lots of anecdotes supporting the idea that women across the globe face horrific violence, discrimination, and marginalization. That's countered by personal stories that provide hope for change. And both are supported by statistics and academic studies.

"We think that one of the greatest moral challenges of our time is the gender inequality and the brutality that many women and girls face around the world because of their gender," said WuDunn - who will present a lecture version of the book on October 21 at St. Ambrose University - in a recent phone interview. "We also think one of the most effective ways to address a lot of the inequality is through educating girls and bringing them into the formal labor force ... . And we talk about a lot of these issues by telling stories of women who have been facing these challenges, and of other women and men who have come up with solutions."

But the book is also surprising - in ways that are both very small and very big.

It's long been an article of faith with me that the seemingly perpetual growth in the number of state-sponsored gambling outlets is poor public policy. Common sense says that the amount of money people will spend on these games has a ceiling - one that we've almost certainly reached by now.

If that's correct, then further expansion of legalized gambling is a fool's errand, as the money generated by it won't increase meaningfully. Once gambling has reached a saturation point in a region, revenues will just get shifted from gaming company to gaming company and state to state and local government to local government.

But like all articles of faith, I had no proof for my hypothesis. So I decided to test it, and the Quad Cities market seemed like an excellent laboratory.

What is now the Isle of Capri casino in Bettendorf opened in April 1995 - making us a three-casino community. (I'll refer to the casinos by their present names throughout this article.) We now have almost two decades of gaming information with the three-casino marketplace, and a handful of variables allow us to see what happened here when this happened there: the December 2008 move of Jumer's from downtown Rock Island to Interstate 280; the recession that hit in 2007-8; new casino competitors in eastern Iowa in 2006 and 2007; and the 2012 introduction of video-gambling machines in Illinois outside of casinos.

What I found didn't exactly support my hypothesis of a Quad Cities gambling pie with a fixed size. Rather, the data suggest there are ways to add new customers to the local gambling market - but that the pie has nonetheless been shrinking for a decade.

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