Misty and Dan Morrissey speak to the media on July 17, 2012, near Meyers Lake in Evansdale where their daughter Lyric Cook-Morrissey, 10, and Elizabeth Collins, 8, disappeared the previous Friday. Dam Morrissey's trial on drug charges have been moved from Black Hawk to Scott county because of publicity surrounding his daughter's disappearance. (AP/Charlie Neibergall)

WATERLOO — Trial for the father of one of the abducted cousins has been moved out of Black Hawk County because of publicity over the girls’ disappearance.

District Court Judge David Staudt ruled that it would be unlikely to find an impartial jury in the state’s domestic abuse and drug cases against Daniel Eugene Morrissey, 36.

In a ruling signed Monday, Staudt ordered Morrissey’s trials be moved to Davenport in Scott County.

He noted the results a questionnaire presented to residents found a substantial number had heard or read a great deal about the missing girls and Morrissey.

“The court further finds that the juror questionnaire results reveal that a substantial portion of the potential jurors in Black Hawk County have reached a fixed opinion concerning Mr. Morrissey’s guilt or innocence and would be unable to fairly assess the facts in his case,” Staudt wrote in his ruling.

He also noted that the disappearance was voted the top story in the Cedar Valley in 2012 and the survey was administered before the girls’ remains were found.

A Jan. 18 hearing has been scheduled to work out the details and set trial dates.

Morrissey, of Waterloo, is the father of Lyric Cook-Morrissey, who was 10 when she and her cousin, 8-year-old Elizabeth Collins, disappeared in July while riding their bikes in Evansdale. Their bodies were discovered at Seven Bridges Wildlife Area in rural Bremer County in December.

No one has been charged in their deaths.

At the time of the disappearance, Morrissey was awaiting trial for methamphetamine and domestic abuse, and his attorney, Kevin Schoeberl, argued coverage of the abduction hampered Morrissey’s ability of receive a fair trial in Black Hawk County.

Morrissey is facing four trials, and Staudt ordered that the first to go will be a case stemming from an October 2011 incident where found he was allegedly found inside a vacant home with meth.

Under the new Affordable Care Act, states have until Friday to notify the federal government whether they will set up a health insurance exchange. Individuals and small businesses would use the exchange to shop for health insurance among competing private plans and receive subsidies.

The law. intended to make health coverage available to most of the uninsured, calls for legislation to be enacted before Jan. 1, or the government will step in to establish a federally operated exchange. About 500,000 Iowans are expected to participate in an exchange.

Branstad was among a number of Republican governors who has delayed making preparations, hoping the law would be rolled back if Republican Mitt Romney was elected president. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have taken steps to set up an online marketplace for the new system, while about 10 have decided not to do so.

A state working group will attempt to meet the deadlines next week, said Branstad spokesman Tim Albrecht.

The group, including officials from the Iowa Department of Public Health, Department of Human Services, Insurance Division and Governor’s Office, has been managing the state’s efforts for an exchange, Albrecht said.

“Gov. Branstad continues to believe that if Obamacare mandates an exchange be built in every state, an exchange built by Iowa, for Iowa, is better than a one-size-fits-all exchange built by bureaucrats in Washington,” Albrecht wrote in an email.

“However, the federal government has not clearly outlined what is expected with regard to an exchange, and we await word on any constraints that may hinder states in their efforts to construct a state-specific exchange,” Albrecht said.

Consumer group officials demanded that Branstad allow them input into the new system.

“If you’re talking about setting up a health care system that so many Iowans are going to use … it’s imperative to talk to consumer groups and the people who represent them and the public in general,” said Anthony Carroll, an official of the American Association of Retired People.

The AARP is one of 35 organizations, including labor unions and community groups, that want to be involved.

Sen. Jack Hatch, D-Des Moines, said he hopes Obama’s re-election has forced Branstad’s hand.

“I have proposed for the past two years the creation of an insurance exchange and he has refused to meet with me in a bipartisan effort to start just the discussion of what an exchange would look like,” Hatch said.

Hatch, who chairs the Iowa Senate Health and Human Services Budget Subcommittee, said the delay may have left Iowa without adequate time to choose plans that would best serve state residents.

However, a spokesman for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said some leeway may be allowed after Friday’s deadline for states that have procrastinated.

”After declaring their intentions by Friday, states can take another month, until mid-December, to submit detailed blueprints, said spokesman Fabien Levy.

Federal officials have rejected plans to replace the Time Check Recreation Center, which was damaged in the Floods of 2008 and has been razed, with a new center in nearby Time Check Park. (The Gazettei)

Some of the youngsters that might have used a new northwest Cedar Rapids recreation center may be grown up and gone by the time it gets built.

In the latest chapter in the rec center saga, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has informed the state and city that it has rejected the City Council’s August decision to replace the flood-ruined, now-demolished Time Check Recreation Center by putting a new $3 million facility at the same place in the 100-year flood plain where June 2008 floodwaters climbed 14 feet high.

In a letter to the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division, FEMA’s regional office says that federal rules require the city to build replacement facilities outside the 100-year flood plain if “a practicable alternative” exists.

The FEMA letter, signed by Thomas Costello, FEMA’s recovery director in Kansas City, Mo., notes that the city of Cedar Rapids in past correspondence with FEMA identified two sites in Ellis Park outside the 100-year flood plain as possible locations for a replacement recreation center.

“As such, replacement of the facility in its original location or any other location in the 100-year flood plain cannot be approved,” Costello states.

Joe O’Hern, the city’s executive director of development services and its flood-recovery chief, on Friday said he would consult the City Council on what to do next.

Council member Don Karr, who grew up in the Time Check neighborhood, on Friday thought the city simply could elevate the new recreation center above the 100-year flood plain and keep it where the council most recently has decided to build it, in Time Check Park next to the spot there where the old recreation center had been.

O’Hern, though, noted that FEMA has cited a federal executive order that requires the site to be “outside” the 100-year flood plain, not “above” it.

Council member Monica Vernon said she had the same two goals in mind for the recreation center site, if it has to move, that she’s had before. She said she wants the center to help with commercial redevelopment along Ellis Boulevard NW and to back up to city-owned park area that can complement recreation center programs. Much of the Time Check area between the Cedar River and Ellis Boulevard NW is now open space where flood-damaged homes once stood.

Linda Seger, president of the Northwest Neighbors Neighborhood Association, aid the city should consider appealing FEMA’s ruling on the rec center site.

Seger added that it is important that the recreation center be built next to Ellis Boulevard NW to help bring the boulevard back to life. Problems in getting the center built shouldn’t be grounds for moving it to another part of the city, she said.

Rebuilding the northwest Cedar Rapids rec center has turned into a political football as the composition of the City Council has changed.

A first City Hall-appointed site selection committee had as one of its marching orders to pick a site outside the 100-year flood plain. For that reason, the first committee identified a couple spots in Ellis Park on Ellis Boulevard NW, about which city officials then wrote to FEMA to get the federal agency’s reaction.

Seger’s neighborhood association and residents living near Ellis Park both came out against putting the recreation center in Ellis Park.

Then this year, new council members Ann Poe and Scott Olson, both who said in their campaigns that they would vote against putting the center in Ellis Park, replaced two council members who chose not to seek re-election who favored an Ellis Park site.

A second City Hall site selection committee was named — with five council members on it — and the focus shifted to sites, even those in the 100-year flood plain, that would help with Ellis Boulevard NW’s revival. The committee decided to move the final site two blocks off the boulevard and back into Time Check Park, which the city owned before the 2008 flood, after it became unclear if the city could build on newly vacant lots purchased with federal buyout money.

The council approved the new site in August.

In voting to keep the rec center out of Ellis Park, the council never mentioned the Cedar Rapids Parks and Recreation Master Plan, which the council unanimously approved in April 2010 and which called for putting recreation centers in three “signature” city parks, Ellis, Noelridge and Jones. The city paid $212,999 for the park and recreation study.

Vernon on Friday said she disagrees with the piece of the master plan that calls for recreation centers in major parks.

Web Coach offers interactive personalized tools

The Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) will launch a web-based tool November 1 designed to help Iowans who have chosen to quit smoking. “Web Coach” is an interactive online program that provides each participant with a personalized experience. The Web Coach focuses on four essential practices to enable smokers to quit for life:

• Quit at your own pace

• Conquer your urges to smoke

• Use medications so they really work

• Don’t just quit; become a non-smoker

Each of these practice areas will include articles, videos, e-lessons and interactive worksheets to help participants successfully quit tobacco. Progress toward that goal includes a spending calculator, to help a participant compare the cost of tobacco vs. the cost of medication; a tobacco usage tracker, which allows a participant to track when and where they smoke to identify patterns and triggers; and discussion forums and online groups for more personalized social support. After quitting, participants can track how long they’ve been tobacco-free and see how much money they’ve saved and time that has been added back to their daily life since quitting tobacco.

“We’re excited to be able to offer this new tool to Iowans who’ve made the decision to quit using tobacco,” said IDPH Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Division Director Meghan O’Brien. “The data tells us the majority of smokers know they should quit and want to. Our objective is to offer tobacco users every possible tool they need to achieve their goals.” In 2011, approximately 2,800 Iowa deaths were directly attributable to tobacco use. Another 1,600 deaths were identified as likely being due to tobacco use. Estimated annual health care costs in Iowa directly related to tobacco use now total $1 billion.

For more information about Web Coach, visit www.quitlineiowa.org.

Solon High School junior Taylor Walkner (right) helps freshman Jalen Howsare stay in formation during morning marching band practice at the schoo Oct. 4. Howsare had his eyes removed at 18 months to stop the spread of cancerous tumors. (Jim Slosiarek,/The Gazette)

Jalen Howsare experiences things a little differently when he takes to the field as a member of the Solon High School marching band,

Before each performance, the 14-year-old freshman assembles his trumpet and dons his uniform. He warms up with his bandmates. He laughs and talks with his friends, calming his nerves before the coming performance.

If you didn’t know Howsare, it would be difficult to tell he’s blind.

Once he’s led to the field, his bandmates figure out where he’s supposed to go and guide him during each song.

“You have to watch out for other people around him,” junior Mikaela Lighty explains.

“Whoever’s closest to him takes control and takes him to his next spot and leads him by putting their hand on his shoulder,” said junior trumpet player Taylor Walkner.

There’s rarely a moment to stand still as band students weave around the 50 yard line.

“You need good band mates to help you get through it,” Howsare said. ”I worked on (marching) more and more until I finally had some idea of where I was supposed to go.”

His hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“People see how hard he works and there are no excuses,” said senior Lauren Benzing. “If he can do it, they can do it. I think that motivates people to work hard themselves.”

Band director Desmond Cervantez, who has been working with Howsare since sixth grade, agrees.

“He’s fearless,” said Cervantez. “He has to be to get out there on the field and put himself out there like that and he’s just doing an awesome job.”

Howsare marched with the band for the first time at a pair of competitions in September. Solon played a medley of Beatles songs including, “Yesterday, “Eleanor Rigby” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

“I like ‘Sgt. Pepper’s,’ that’s our ending song,” Howsare said.

Cervantez said he doesn’t change anything he does to accommodate Howsare.

“The kids just make it happen for Jalen,” Cervantez said. “I thought it would go well, but it’s brought everyone closer together even more than before.”

TUMORS FOUND

Tom Howsare holds the hand of his 18-month-old son, Jalen, as the boy rests on the lap of his mother, Kristi, after surgery to remove the boy's eyes in December 2003 (The Gazette)

Howsare’s blindness dates back to 1999, when he was 18 months old. His parents, Tom and Kristi Howsare, noticed something was wrong with their son’s eyes — they were glassy and overly reflective.

“We really didn’t think a lot about it,” Tom Howsare recalled. “But I said to Kristi, well, maybe we should go in and get it looked at.”

Doctors at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City found the boy had tumors behind his eyes and in the surrounding fluid, an illness called bilateral retinoblastoma.

At the time, Dr. Culver Boldt said it was the worst case of retinoblastoma at the hospital in decades. The Howsares made the difficult choice to remove their son’s eyes in order to ensure the cancer never returned. He now has prosthetic eyes and is cancer free.

Howsare has a teacher for Braille and a mobility coach who helps him learn to get around the school and ride the bus. He’s one of a handful of blind students at Solon, but the only one in the band.

BAND’S MISSION

Cervantez said the experience of having Howsare in the band has built upon its mission of giving back.

“We really are just a service organization that happens to play music,” he said.

The band has adopted a child from Uganda, raised about $1,000 for various charities during last year’s holiday show and has sent small groups to play at local hospitals and community locations.

“We’re all doing so much more that’s so much bigger than ourselves,” said junior Aiyana Cervantez, the band director’s daughter.

For Howsare, marching with the band is about living life without limits. He plans to go to college for computer programming and continue to play music.

“Nothing is impossible if you want it enough,” he said.

Between now and his high school graduation, Howsare’s parents plan to encourage him to try new things, meet new people and make lifelong friends.

“We want him to go to college and we want him to have that experience, we want him to meet a nice girl, we want him to have everything,” his father said. “God’s helped us deal with it. He helps Jalen every day and we’re just thankful.”

Solon High School freshman Jalen Howsare talks with fellow freshman Caitlyn Frederick as they study for a band test after morning marching band practicee earlier this month. (Jim Slosiarek,/The Gazette)

Erskine Bowles, president emeritus of the University of North Carolina, (left) and Iowa Board of Regents President Craig Lang officially install Steven Leath as Iowa State University's 15th president during a ceremony on Friday in Ames. (AP)

As Iowa State University installs a president and the University of Northern Iowa starts a search for a new leader, a recent national study shows college presidents are getting older and staying for shorter tenures in their jobs.

The shorter stays are likely due in part to growing external pressures, spurred in recent years by state budget cuts to public higher education, more calls for reform or change from legislators and increased expectations for more fundraising, presidents at Iowa’s public universities and the head of the state Board of Regents said.

“I think the job gets more challenging every year,” said UNI President Ben Allen, who, in his sixth year, is the most-senior of the leaders at Iowa’s three state universities.

Growing competition to attract students, increasing budget pressures and expectations from the outside for more accountability are some of the major stressors, Allen said. The outside world may demand change in a certain way, and faculty may see the path differently, he said. UNI last spring went through a tumultuous process of budget and program cuts.

Ben Allen

“It’s more effort you have to spend just to make those two forces match up,” said Allen, 65, who announced last month he will retire by next summer.

Most presidents are still struggling with the aftermath of the economic recession, and fundraising has become a much bigger part of the job, especially at public universities, University of Iowa President Sally Mason said. That’s especially true at the UI, she said, where the economic recession was coupled with the 2008 flood, which caused an estimated $1 billion in university damage.

Sally Mason

Mason spends at least 50 percent of her time on fundraising and building relationships with alumni and donors, she said, but it’s something she enjoys. The UI has raised about $900 million during her five-year tenure, Mason said.

The real cause behind shortened presidential tenures in recent years, Mason believes, is often politics or wildly differing views between presidents and governing boards about where an institution should be headed and how it should get there.

“I think probably the biggest thing presidents are dealing with these days is responding to market changes or things happening in our environment so much faster than we ever have in the past,” Mason, 62, said.

Top challenge

In a January survey by Inside Higher Ed, public university presidents ranked declines in state support as the top challenge facing their institutions over the next two to three years. Budget shortfalls tied for third among that group of presidents.

From 2006 to 2011, the average tenure of a university president declined from 8.5 years to seven years, according to a survey conducted every five years by the American Council on Education. In the meantime, the average age of presidents continues to climb. In 2011 it was 61, up from 60 in the 2006 study, and from 52 in the 1986 survey, meaning universities likely face a wave of retirements in the coming years.

Iowa’s state Board of Regents in recent years added deferred compensation for the presidents at the UI, ISU and UNI, as incentive to keep leaders longer, regents President Craig Lang said.

Craig Lang

Beyond financial carrots, the board also wants to provide an environment that entices presidents to remain, Lang said. The regents can do that by building good relationships with legislators and state leaders, so presidents can count on steady financial support, he said.

“I’m not surprised that the length of time served is shorter because I think the reduction in state funding across the country has led to some … real difficulty,” he said. “It’s just not as easy a position as it might have been 20 years ago, because of all these external roles, too.”

The regents also believe longevity is helped by choosing a president whose strengths match up well with the institution, Lang said. In the recent hiring of Steven Leath at ISU, for example, they wanted someone knowledgeable about bioeconomy, research transfer and commercializing intellectual property. In the search for Allen’s successor at UNI, strength in prekindergarten through 12 education will be a consideration, Lang said.

Gary Fethke

Gary Fethke, a former dean of the UI Tippie College of Business who served as interim president for a year before Mason was hired, wrote in July in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the high turnover of university presidents, while alarming, should not be surprising, given the decline in state funding to public education from 1986 to 2011 and the increasing pressure on public universities to enroll more students. Some recent high-profile president departures or near-oustings, such as those at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Illinois and the University of Virginia, reflect a governance structure that is poorly designed for the current challenging environment, Fethke wrote in the Chronicle piece, which he co-authored with a University of California-Irvine administrator.

“Presidents find themselves sandwiched between state legislatures and governing boards demanding significant shifts in how the university operates, and faculty senates defending an academic culture that is both resilient and excruciatingly resistant to change,” they wrote.

Having a supportive governing board that provides leadership without dictating or micromanaging is a big incentive for presidents to stay put, both Mason and Allen said, and Allen said the backing of the regents was meaningful to him last spring during the cuts at UNI.

The kind of challenges that Allen said keep him up at night — how to grow enrollment, how to position UNI for the future, how to deal with state cuts — are stressors that do impact a president’s health and probably lead to shorter tenures in the job, he believes.

Seeing many of her peers retire doesn’t bother Mason or spur her to think more about it for herself, but Mason said she is bothered by situations like those at Wisconsin and Virginia, where a good leader is “so discouraged that they feel they have to move on.”

“These are tough jobs,” she said. “It’s a partnership, and if you lose sight of that it can become very challenging and demoralizing.”

Cynthia Houston poses at the Community Health Center in Columbus Junction. Houston is uninsured and visits the clinic regularly for medical and dental care.(Brenna Norman/Brlington Hawk Eye)

About this project: IowaWatch.org, the Burlington Hawk Eye, The Gazette, Iowa City Press-Citizen and the Dubuque Telegraph Herald worked together this summer to report on the need for health care facing Iowans who do not have insurance. They reviewed more than two dozen documents and interviewed two dozen people.

Cynthia Houston didn’t panic when she lost her job at the Mount Pleasant school district in 2008. She looked for another job and paid the extra money to keep insurance through COBRA.

She found work but couldn’t afford insurance there. That was when she had a breakdown.

“I guess you’re in that nowhere land of: you don’t really qualify for help with this, you’re not old enough to get offered (insurance) for senior citizens,” said Houston, 60, of Winfield. “You’re kind of out there on your own.”

She eventually found help. But state efforts to help Iowans without health insurance pay for doctor visits and other medical care fail to reach all who could use the assistance, a review by five Iowa news organizations of the state’s health care delivery systems for uninsured Iowans reveals.

Geographic limits ensure that one program to which Houston was referred — IowaCare — does not reach all Iowans who need it, even though it is considered to be a last resort for Iowans ineligible for other programs that fund accessible, affordable health care.

One in 10 Iowans lives without health insurance. Estimates range from 312,600 by the Kaiser Family Foundation to 342,000 by the U.S. Census Bureau. They live in a state where some health care professionals predict fewer available primary care providers to handle growing demand for health care from aging baby boomers, working people with inadequate insurance coverage and others entering the health care market.

“It seems to me, from my perspective, to be a perfect storm,” Wendy Gray, executive director of Free Clinics of Iowa, said about that anticipated convergence of trends.

The health care workforce, which includes specialists, physician assistants, nurses and others, is a concern, said Dr. Stephen Eckstat, board president of Free Clinics of Iowa and CEO at Mercy Clinics Inc. of Des Moines.

But, he said, he expects Iowa to have enough primary care doctors, with Des Moines University and University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics graduating them and the doctors staying here.

The most serious concern, Eckstat said, is that people increasingly cannot afford insurance. “The crisis is financial,” he said. “There’s a lot of uncompensated care.”

Free clinic numbers

Free Clinics of Iowa’s network of 33 free medical clinics dealt with more than 13,600 patient visits in each of the past two years, up from 13 clinics handling 5,018 clinic visits in 2005. It did not count the number of patients making the visits but about 11,000 visits each of the past two years were by people lacking health insurance, the organization’s records show.

In Cedar Rapids, a community with two hospital systems, a federally subsidized community health clinic and a reputation for low-cost, high-quality care, some patients fall through the cracks and often rely on free health clinics for basic care.

Demand for the Iowa City Free Medical Clinic’s services has risen sharply over the last two decades, despite University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics being in the same city. In fiscal year 1991, almost 3,700 visits were made to the free clinic. Last year, that number had jumped to more than 6,200.

“We see uninsured patients, as well as patients who have insurance that excludes certain conditions, or policies with an extremely high deductible,” Jennifer Miller, the clinic’s case manager, said.

Unconventional areas

The Free Clinics of Iowa network’s small clinics, sometimes operating only three to five hours a week in church basements, community centers and other available buildings, aren’t confined to traditionally low-income areas.

Gray referenced clinics in West Des Moines, where the median household annual income was $63,978 and 6.1 percent of the people lived below the poverty level during the 2010 census, and Waukee, medium household income of $74,413 and 2.8 percent below the poverty level.

“Neither one of those communities would show up as underserved and underemployed,” Gray said. “But I can tell you, those clinics are busy.”

So are places like UI Hospitals and Clinics. A 2011 report from the Iowa Hospital Association shows the medical complex served almost 380,000 “community benefit” patients last year. That includes those with uncovered Medicaid and Medicare costs, patients who didn’t pay in full for their services and more than 12,000 “traditional charity care” patients.

Charles Palmer

“University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is committed to treating all Iowans, regardless of their ability to pay for their care,” hospital spokesman Tom Moore said.

“Certainly, people are accessing health care if they’re not insured,” Charles Palmer, director of the Iowa Department of Human Services, said.

But all health care cannot be free. Health care providers earn salaries and supplies and facilities cost money.

Assistance programs

State assistance programs that help people who do not have insurance pay medical bills fall under three programs:

• Medicaid, available to low-income and some disabled Iowans but also some with extremely high medical bills.
•  Healthy and Well Kids in Iowa, or Hawk-I, and a Medicaid expansion program in the Children’s Health Insurance Program for Iowa that covers children of low-income families.
•  IowaCare, for those ineligible for Medicaid or Hawk-I.

Almost one of every four Iowans is expected to use Medicaid this fiscal year, which started July 1 and runs through June 30. That is 698,000 Iowans in a program on track to pay almost $4 billion to 38,000 health care providers this budget year. The state will provide one-half of that money, the federal government the other half. (story continues below chart)

Enrollment in Iowa’s Medicaid program increased 5.4 percent in fiscal 2011 from the previous year. At least the increase slowed down. It was 9.4 percent in fiscal 2010 from the previous year, the human services department reports.

Expanding Medicaid in Iowa to include more patients would increase enrollment in the program about 25 percent, from 110,000 people to 130,000, the Department of Human Services predicted in a report it compiled for this budget year.

Expansion is being discussed, and people enrolled in IowaCare would be part of it, moving into Medicaid for full benefits there.

Future on hold

Despite moves to reach more people, Iowa is in a waiting game when designing a way to cover the costs of uninsured Iowans’ health care because of uncertainty over whether the state will expand Medicaid.

That expansion is called for under the Affordable Care Act, known better as ObamaCare.

The law allowed the federal government to take Medicaid funding away from states that did not expand coverage to more people. But while famously upholding the law during the summer, the U.S. Supreme Court said states are not obligated to expand. That led Gov. Terry Branstad to say Iowa should not expand because of costs to a stressed federal budget.

But the system Iowa has been planning, to date to increase coverage opportunities is based on expanding Medicaid. The reason: the Affordable Care Act has been law since 2010, and has deadlines for completing action toward full implementation at the beginning of 2014.

The state is using IowaCare, which started in 2005 as a replacement for Iowa’s old indigent care program, as its bridge to 2014. (story continues below chart)

The decision to do that was made two years ago, when the program needed to be renewed through 2013. Having IowaCare, despite limitations in that system, kept Iowa from having to start from scratch. But it is to expire at the end of next year, with no other substitute plan for covering those receiving it now.

Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney has said he would work with Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act but first would give states waivers that allow them to opt out of requirement of the act. President Barack Obama would continue to implement the law he worked hard to get passed and was upheld in the Supreme Court.

Branstad, a Republican, is waiting for November’s federal election outcome to determine how to proceed.

“While we don’t know the outcome yet, we’re prepared for either scenario,” his press aide, Tim Albrecht, said.

Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, D-Ames, the ranking minority member of the House Human Resources Committee, said she expects Medicaid expansion, which she supports, to get a full airing in the next legislative session.

“As we implement the Affordable Care Act in Iowa and we expand Medicaid, we will begin getting to more and more of these groups that we need to get to,” she said.

Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell

The Affordable Care Act orders states to provide Medicaid to people living below 133 percent of the poverty level. That 133 percent level is $23,050 in annual income for one person. It is $30,657 for people living in a family of four.

IowaCare limitations

The IowaCare program provides health care coverage for Iowans living below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, which is $46,100. Most patients in IowaCare get their care free, although some pay a portion of their costs on a sliding scale.

The program has more limitations – on medications, durable medical equipment and mental health, for example – than the Medicaid program.

Moreover, it never was established to serve as a be-all, catch-all program for uninsured Iowans. It replaced the Iowa Indigent Care Program, through which all counties but Polk sent low-income patients to UI Hospitals for free health care. Polk County had a program that sent patients to Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines.

IowaCare started with centers at the UI and Broadlawns, then expanded to include hospitals in Waterloo and Sioux City in October 2010, mainly because the long travel to Iowa City or Des Moines made the program impractical for people in many parts of the state. Eight centers exist now.

Dubuque’s Crescent Community Health Center, which started providing primary IowaCare services for eight northeast Iowa counties on Dec. 1, served more than 700 IowaCare patients during the first three months of 2012.

“We’ve been pretty busy with IowaCare,” said Julie Woodyard, Crescent’s director.

Gauging success

Peter Damiano

The Iowa Public Policy Center is studying the impact the Affordable Care Act will have on health care delivery. While Medicaid and Hawk-I have their established limits, attention has been given to the IowaCare program.

The UI center found problems when it surveyed 1,708 IowaCare patients in winter 2010-11.

Two of every five patients needing specialty care, for instance, had instances of being unable to see anyone at UI Hospitals and Clinics or Broadlawns, the survey showed.

On the other hand, the survey showed a majority of the people received preventive care, seen as a key to reducing health care costs.

“The way I’ve sort of come to think about this is that, for about a third of the people, the program seems to work really well, and provides excellent care,” said Iowa Public Policy Center Director Peter Damiano.

“For about a third of them it works pretty well,” said Damiano, a UI professor of preventive and community dentistry. “It’s not great, it doesn’t do everything, but it’s certainly a whole lot better than having nothing.

“Then for a third of them, it might be better than nothing but it’s not, at least in their view, a whole lot better than nothing.”

Jennifer Vermeer

The main reasons for not getting routine care when needed were transportation or travel distances to care centers, the inability to afford care, the lack of IowaCare coverage or trouble getting an appointment at UI Hospitals and Clinics or Broadlawns, the Public Policy Center study found.

“I think you have to take those numbers within the context of how the program is structured,” Jennifer Vermeer, director of the Iowa Medicaid program, said.

Only four centers provided IowaCare services when the survey was done, plus their volume went from about 5,000 at the beginning to the current 60,000, Vermeer said.

Looking ahead

Department of Human Services leaders expect the IowaCare program to cover 91,171 adults in this budget year, which ends June 30, 2013. It served 87,229 in all of fiscal 2012. People move in and out of the system, though, so those numbers do not represent how many are in during a given month. The number IowaCare leaders pay attention to is 61,100 clients, its current enrollment, and highest to date.

State officials have learned lessons from the IowaCare program.

Vermeer said experiences are showing that having medical centers as medical homes for patient care can help people with chronic diseases. Another lesson, she said, is that people need plenty of assistance to navigate the health care system, especially if they never had insurance before.

Vermeer said she sees improvement, given that only two IowaCare health centers existed before 2010, and only four before the recent expansion to eight.

“Now, with that being said, if you had all the money in the world is this how you would design a program? I would say no, because it does have a lot of access issues,” she said. “But we’ve done the best we can with both the state and federal resources that we had available to us to try and make the access as good as we can get it, within the very strong constraints of program financing and the program structure.”

The followingreporters  contributed to this report: Cindy Hadish, The Gazette; Christinia Crippes, Burlington Hawk Eye; Adam Sullivan, Iowa City Press-Citizen; Erik Hogstrom, The Dubuque Telegraph Herald; and Sujin Kim, IowaWatch.org

About IowaWatch

IowaWatch.org is a non-profit, online news website operated by the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, which is dedicated to collaborating with Iowa news organizations to produce explanatory and investigative work.

SEIU Union Local 199 member Jim Jacobson speaks to a crowd of fellow union members Thursday at the T. Anne Cleary Walkway on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City. SEIU Local 199 held a rally to draw attention to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic proposals on the same day he accepted his party’s nomination. ---- .(Justin Torner/Freelance)

Iowa’s labor movement is energized by a movement to peel back wages, benefits and even bargaining rights at the state level this Labor Day, leaders say.

When commentators pontificate about the state of labor each year around this time, they’ve tended to dwell on the overall decline in organized labor representation in the work force rather than resilient public sector unions.

A 37 percent share of public sector employees held union cards in 2011, according to census data. That’s five times the 6.9 percent unionization rate of the private sector.

Public sector workers are “the people who allow us to have a civilized society,” said Ken Sagar, president of the Iowa AFL-CIO.

It’s a broad and sometimes overlooked category of workers that tends to have a lot of training and experience. They include public school teachers, water treatment operators, highway maintenance crews, police, firefighters, librarians and, of course, tax collectors.

Ken Sagar

The 2008 recession and later the 2010 elections that brought Tea Party faction of the Republican Party to power, added fuel to movements to rein in public sector bargaining and benefits at the state level, where budgetary situations were arguably the worst.

The initiatives range from the Wisconsin bill led by Gov. Scott Walker that eliminated most collective bargaining rights last year, to more subtle proposals such as “free agency” for unionized employees that have surfaced in Iowa and elsewhere. Free agency would allow state bargaining unit employees to opt voluntarily to negotiate their own, individual contracts.

Branstad challenge

Gov. Terry Branstad

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad cited the state’s budget constraints this summer as he challenged state employees’ health benefits. He said 88 percent of state employees make no contribution to their health insurance premium.

Branstad urged workers to join him in voluntarily paying 20 percent of the premium on his state-funded health insurance, and on July 2 signed an executive order enabling state employees to voluntarily pay $200 monthly toward their health insurance premium.

The call for voluntary sacrifice went largely unheeded, as only 93 employees signed up by the end of July — most of them employees of Branstad’s own office, department heads or administrators.

What the request did evoke was a rebuke from Iowa’s largest public employee labor union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Iowa Council 61. AFSCME also filed a complaint with the Iowa Public Employment Relations Board against the governor, claiming he was interfering with the state’s regulations regarding collective bargaining.

Change in Iowa

It’s a far cry from what’s happened in Wisconsin, but Sagar has seen a change in Iowa union members’ attitudes.

Seventy-seven people showed up at one of the Iowa AFL-CIO’s political training sessions in the Quad Cities, Sagar said, including many first-time political volunteers. Other political training sessions in places like Sioux City and Des Moines were also well attended.

“Holy cow,” Sagar said. “People are charged up.”

Rick Moyle

Service Employees International Union Local 199 President Cathy Glasson said the 5,000-member union has made more calls to talk politics with its members as events unfolded in Wisconsin. The Coralville-bassed union’s biggest bargaining unit in Iowa is the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

“Our members very much saw that as a threat to their own working lives,” Glasson said. “It made our folks realize how important having legal representation in the workplace is in a state where sometimes you can just get fired for looking the wrong way. There are basically no rights for workers in Iowa unless you are in a union.”

Hawkeye Labor Council Executive Director Rick Moyle and Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Building Trades Council President Dave Hogan both agreed that rank-and-file members are more politically engaged as they learn about worker rights rollback efforts in places like Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Minnesota.

“I think that all of that has definitely had an awakening effect on our members and maybe folks who in the past have not been too active,” said Moyle. The council represents 40 affiliate unions with about 8,000 members in seven counties.

Great divide

Rep. Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha

The perspectives of state Republicans and union leaders could hardly be further apart in the debate over public sector benefits.

“Taxpayers have funded some very generous benefits that don’t reflect what’s happening in the private sector,” said e Rep. Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives. Paulsen believes total compensation for public sector workers is significantly higher than the public sector, although he struggled to remember statistics he’s seen quoted.

One oft-cited report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that total compensation for state and local government workers averaged $41.15 per hour in June 2012 across the United States compared to an average of $28.78 per hour for private sector workers. Total compensation includes both wages and benefits.

The discussion as framed by Paulsen is about how best to serve taxpayers.

“Is this where we should be spending our money or should we be making a larger investment in K-12 education or regents education?” he said.

While he would or could not specify the next step the Legilature will take, he said the issue is very much alive.

“What I know is this is something we intend to address and as we talk to Iowans they expect us to address.”

The discussion is framed quite differently by union supporters. They say it’s about a Republican agenda orchestrated by the groups like the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council to disempower unions and weaken America’s fading middle class.

When public sector wages and benefits fall, labor leaders say it also will weaken compensation in the private sector, which won’t have to compete as hard to attract workers.

“It doesn’t just affect organized labor,” Moyle said. “It affects every worker in the country.”

Telling Americans that public sector union workers are making more than they would in the private sector is part of a Republican “divide and conquer” strategy, said Sagar, who worked in operations at a Marshalltown power plant during his rank-and-file days.

The labor backers point to a February 2011 study called “Apples to Apples” by the Iowa Policy Project that attempted to present an accurate comparison of public and private sector wages and benefits by adjusting for things like educational levels and experience of the employees.

The study said male public employees made 7.9 percent less and female employees 10.8 percent less when such factors were considered. State employee compensation compared a little better to private sector employees, while local government employees didn’t fare as well.

Sagar said a huge raft of anti-union legislation launched after the 2010 elections is evidence of a concerted effort to undermine unions by the Republicans and their supporters.

Paulsen describes the timing as more circumstantial. He compared the public sector compensation evaluation to the push among states to reform their educational systems.

“It is not uncommon for Iowa to look at the same issues as a handful or even a lot of other states across the country,” he said. “It’s not as if somebody called me from out of state and said, ‘we’re addressing this issue in Indiana and could you look into it also?’ ”

Budgetary outlook

Paulsen said the budgetary situation the state is expected to face this year is looking better than last.

Legislators must still deal with many budgetary uncertainties, however. They include the impact of the drought on state revenue, whether the federal government’s budget balancing act will slash federal support to the states, and the budgetary impact of commercial property tax reform if that can be accomplished.

President Barack Obama’s administration announced a $22 million grant program in Iowa, Arizona and New Jersey that aims to identify potential substance abuse problems before they becomes full-blown disorders. In doing so, the program eschews decades of a war-on-drugs philosophy based primarily on law enforcement in favor of increased prevention and treatment.

The Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment grants would go to four federally qualified health centers across Iowa as well as Camp Dodge, home to the state’s National Guard. Iowa applied to participate in the program; states were selected based on proposals they sent which were independently reviewed.

“We want to identify problems that are lurking and might be going unaddressed,” said Pamela Hyde, administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. “High-risk patients are referred to specialty care, but there are others that can achieve treatment earlier.”

Members of Iowa’s congressional delegation said they were open to the new approach.

Sen. Tom Harkin

“I’ve always believed that prevention is the cheapest and best approach,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who also said many law enforcement organizations have long supported more prevention efforts.

“When you look at how long the war on drugs has taken place in our country, and the continuing problem we have with drugs that have negative and disastrous implications in people’s lives, it’s reasonable to look at alternatives that try to focus on keeping people from becoming addicted to drugs,” Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, told The Gazette.

Loebsack cautious

Only Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, was wary, saying that emphasis shouldn’t shift away from law enforcement.

“It’s not a matter of replacing one approach with the other,” he said. “In the short term, law enforcement is absolutely necessary. But I am certainly open to new ways to accomplish our goals.”

In the announcement, Obama administration officials made it clear that medical marijuana would still be classified as illegal under the program which would identify users for intervention.

Rep. Dave Loebsack

Gil Kerlikowke, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy — the administration’s so-called ‘drug czar’ and a former Seattle police chief — said only drugs that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration would be allowed.

“And of course marijuana has never gone through that process,” Kerlikowke said. “When you’re talking about screening and substance misuse, one misuse could be medical marijuana.”

Medical marijuana

Legally prescribed and legally used medical marijuana would be allowed, the officials said, if it were in a state that has approved the practice. But Iowa isn’t one of them. The issue is actually at a stalemate. In 2010, the state Board of Pharmacy said the state should allow it’s use for medical purposes, and referred the matter to the Legislature.

But lawmakers said they shouldn’t have to act, and that the pharmacy board already has the authority to set up guidelines and a system.

The board, in reply, has insisted it needs legislative authority. Attempts at a resolution were unsuccessful in the 2011 and 2012 legislative sessions.

Among Eastern Iowa’s four congressmen, Harkin and Braley said they would support a legalized system for medical marijuana.

Rep. Bruce Braley

“It’s appropriate from a medical standpoint for certain diseases,” Braley said. “If it’s legally prescribed and heavily regulated, and it’s for medically appropriate reasons, there ought to be an option available for pain management.

Only Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he opposed legalizing medical marijuana.

“Prescribed medicine should have the approval of the FDA,” Grassley said. “And there’s been no attempt to get the FDA to make a decision about this, and until you do, it shouldn’t happen. I’ve also seen dozens of studies that show there’s no benefit, so I’m going by science-based decisions.”

How program works

The Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment program would work by establishing screening centers in a variety of inpatient and outpatient medical clinics as well as non-traditional locales such as tribal areas and military bases.

Patients who are determined to be potential risks would be given a short, 10-minute interview to evaluate the possibility of a future substance abuse problems. The interviews would avoid a lecture-style or judgmental approach, officials said.

Sen.Chuck Grassley

“It’s about challenging the paradigm, not dividing the world into two groups,” said Daniel Alford, medical director for the Massachusetts Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral and Treatment Program, which received federal grants from 2007 to 2012. “There’s a group in the middle that we can intervene with.”

Alford, too, said medical marijuana will be one of the drugs for which clinicians will look.

“We’re screening for unhealthy use, so if it’s being done well and legally, in a state where it’s allowed, it’s no problem,” he said. “If it’s being used in a way that’s not prescribed, that will get identified.”

Dr. Stephen Scheckel

Once banned from the treatment area for fear they might hinder care, today family members more often than not are allowed to be with their loved ones during the traumatic experience.

“We don’t have a set policy,” said Dr. Stephen Schekel, medical director of the Emergency Care Unit at Mercy Iowa City, “but our unwritten policy is that family members are certainly allowed to come back into rooms with patients.”

Sandi McIntosh, director of Emergency Services at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, said there are circumstance when allowing relatives in the emergency room might be inappropriate.

McIntosh gave examples of domestic violence situations in which the relative might be responsible for the patient’s injuries or in cases where the patient might be in such bad condition that the family couldn’t handle seeing them.

“There is no black or white answer,” said McIntosh. “It depends what patients come in with.”

A family’s experiences

For one family in southeast Iowa, participating in the emergency room meant relieving their worst fears instead of deepening them.

John Loin

John Loin, 55, owner of Partner Construction in Fairfield, was repairing the foundation of a house with his son Noah early in the morning on July 3, 2010. It was a wet summer and Loin said he was rushing to make progress before it started to rain when his foot slipped on the lever of his excavator, pinning him between the machine and a concrete wall.

“I remember not knowing what to do,” said Loin. “I was in shock.”

Noah Loin, 26, pried the machine off his father, put him in his truck and drove him to the Jefferson County Health Center emergency room in Fairfield.

The nurses allowed Noah and his mom into the examination room with Loin.

“I would have felt awful if they hadn’t let me back with him,” Noah said. “I was worried that I was watching my dad die.”

Instead, the staff reassured the family and kept them present while they ran tests and X-rays. They quickly discovered that Loin’s shoulder blade was broken, but that his organs were unharmed.

Loin’s wife Jodi, a former nurse practitioner, was able to discuss the treatment plan and pain control with staff. Loin said including his family helped keep them calm.

Noah Loin

The family had the opposite experience later that summer when Noah Loin suffered a head injury while surfing in New Jersey.

He was taken to an emergency room in an ambulance and waited hours before he saw the family members who were vacationing with him. His mom asked to see him, but wasn’t allowed.

“The nurses said it was too crowded,” Noah Loin said.

‘This is Iowa’

Dr. Michael Miller

Dr. Michael Miller, clinical medical director of the emergency room at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, said it is common for bigger cities to limit family visits due to packed emergency rooms.

“But this is Iowa, so we let people be with their family,” said Miller.

Miller agreed with McIntosh that it isn’t always a good idea, though.

For example, he said, family members may be asked to wait while doctors run tests when trauma patients come in from an ambulance or helicopter.

“In those situations the patient is unstable … we are performing life saving-efforts,” said Miller.

Olivia Croskey

UI nursing student Olivia Croskey, who spent three months doing clinical rotations in the emergency room, said she’s seen family members be both a help and a hindrance in the ER. She said they can offer emotional support, help advocate for pain control, assist in the treatment plan and provide medical staff with a patient’s background.

But she said they also tend to speak for the patient, fight, and sometimes persuade a patient to do a procedure if they think it will save their family member’s life.

Croskey said that regardless of the pros and cons of family presence, she believes patients should make that call.

“I think it should be part of training,” said Croskey. “There’s a movement toward patient-centered care — their needs and values should be the number one priority.”

Miller said new staff at UI Hospitals are taught how to receive visitors.

“During orientation these issues are discussed, and it is then left to the discretion of the physician what is the safest and in the best interest of the patient given each situation,” Miller said.

Then there’s the question of what to do when a patient in full cardiac arrest is being resuscitated.

Sandi McIntosh

McIntosh said staff at St. Luke’s has come to a clear enough consensus to write into hospital policy that families are allowed in the room during such circumstances.

The practice supports the right of family members to be present in what might be the patient’s last moments, she said, and is endorsed by the Emergency Nurses Association and the American Heart Association.

Miller said there is general agreement at UI Hospitals to allow families in during resuscitation.

“Our physicians … all feel the presence of the family is important,” he said.

The USS Iowa passes under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on Saturday. (AP Photo/San Francisco Chronicle, Karl Mondon)

 The USS Iowa has left San Francisco and is on its way to its new home in southern California.

The battleship was surrounded by pleasure boats and other vessels Saturday as it made its way through San Francisco Bay.

The 887-foot long, 58,000-ton battlewagon is being towed to the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, where it will be transformed into an interactive naval museum.

The Iowa was scheduled to leave last Sunday but was delayed because of a storm system. As it turned out, its departure came on the same day as weekend celebrations were under way marking the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary.

Robert Kent, president of the Pacific Battleship Center, the non-profit organization that has been restoring the ship, said the delay seemed to work out for the better.

“We know that the delay was for a reason, and what better day to leave than this beautiful Saturday, with the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge occurring at the same time,” Kent told the station. “It couldn’t be better.”

The Iowa, first commissioned in 1943 and again in 1951 and 1984, saw duty in World War II and the Korean War. It took part in escorting tankers in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war before being decommissioned in 1990.

The ship once carried President Franklin Roosevelt to a World War II summit to meet with Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Chiang Kai Shek.

A dark part of the ship’s history took place in 1989, when 47 sailors were killed in an explosion in the No. 2 gun turret. After the blast, the Navy alleged that a crew member caused the explosion as a result of a failed relationship with a male crew member. A follow-up investigation found the explosion was most likely the result of human error.

The ownership of the ship was transferred this month from the U.S. Navy to the Pacific Battleship Center.

The congregation sings a hymn during Easter service on April 8 at St. Mark’s Faith and Life Center in Marion. (Nikole Hanna/The Gazette)

More than a year after a Marion congregation narrowly rejected a move to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination has removed the church and its pastor from its rosters.

 The Southeast Iowa ELCA synod, based in Iowa City, moved in April to remove St. Mark’s Faith and Life Center, 8300 C Ave., Marion, from the church rosters after the congregation became dually affiliated with both the ELCA and another Lutheran group, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ.

Both Bishop Michael Burk, of the synod, and the church’s pastor, the Rev. Perry Fruhling, call the move “saddening” and “disappointing,” but that’s where their views on the removal part ways. Fruhling calls the dual affiliation an attempt to “bring healing and unity” to a congregation divided by the vote to leave the ELCA. Burk said the dual affiliation with the LCMC is “becoming a member of two groups that are opposed to each other.”

The Rev. Perry Fruhling

“What in the end they sought to do was, on a congregational level, redefine membership in the ELCA,” Burk said. “They were looking at their local interests but I’m charged with looking at the issue as a whole.”

Fruhling sees it differently.

“To bring healing and unity to St. Mark’s, our leadership held conversations with the congregation and with Bishop Burk … about different congregations that had dual affiliations with the ELCA,” he said.

The congregation at St. Mark’s in 2010 had started discussing the possibility of leaving the ELCA. At issue for many in the congregation was the ELCA’s 2009 decision to allow gay and lesbian pastors in committed relationships to serve as clergy. Others felt leaving was a decision that would change the congregation’s outreach to those considered “unchurched.”

St. Marks Faith and Life Center in Marion. (Nikole Hanna/The Gazette)

The ELCA requires two congregational votes on issues to leave, and each vote must receive at least a two-thirds majority, or 66 percent. In the congregation’s first vote in October 2010, 67.1 percent voted to leave the denomination. In the second vote, taken in January 2011, only 60 percent voted to leave.

Fruhling said the dual affiliation was a way to bring the congregation together, remaining in the ELCA while at the same time branching into the LCMC, the denomination to which the congregation would have gone had the vote to leave the ELCA succeeded.

“There were several things that were a part of that decision to dual-affiliate,” Fruhling said, “the first of which was a moratorium on voting to leave the ELCA. We didn’t want there to be continued votes to bring that up, we wanted to put that to rest.”

“The goal of the dual rostering was unity,” he said. “We really wanted to bring people of two differing opinions together.”

Burk said the dual-rostering or dual affiliation is against ELCA policy and he and synod council members met with church leaders to encourage them to refrain from affiliating with both denominations. When the congregation failed to rescind one of the affiliations, the synod council removed Fruhling from the roster of ELCA pastors. A month later, St. Mark’s was removed from the ELCA church roster.

“Their council decided to join that body knowing that’s prohibited in the ELCA,” Burk said. He said ELCA policy doesn’t allow for dual-rostering, “especially if the church body you want to join is schismatic body.”

Bishop Michael Burk

According to a timeline on its website, www.lcmc.net/timeline, the LCMC was formed following the adoption of the Called to Common Mission adopted by the ELCA in 1999. The first gathering of “those who are committed to resisting the requirements of the CCM and the direction of the ELCA” was held in Roseville, Minn., in November 1999.

Without the ELCA affiliation, St. Mark’s loses the resources and benefits associated with belonging to the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States, including world outreach, youth programs and international ministries and missions. The ELCA has just about 10,500 congregations in the U.S., while the LCMC has just 500.

Many ELCA congregations that left the denomination after the vote regarding gay and lesbian pastors then joined the LCMC denomination because of its stance on homosexuality.

“(The LCMC) wasn’t just upset with the ELCA and deciding to leave, but they were doing everything they could to disenfranchise the ELCA, to undermine everything that the denomination believes,” Burk said.

Members of the St. Mark’s congregation are reluctant to talk about the situation. Even the congregation’s president, Kurt Beneen, referred all questions to Fruhling.

Burk said removing St. Mark’s from the ELCA’s rosters was not an easy decision.

“I encouraged them to take another vote, clearly they did not want to remain with the ELCA,” he said. “We wanted to be able to publicly wish them well, but their leadership didn’t want to follow the policy.”

He acknowledged there are other churches that have dual affiliations with other denominations, but those, he said, are transitory affiliations designed to ease the change from ELCA to the new denomination.

“There is not one congregation in the ELCA that dual rosters with the goal of staying in the ELCA,” he said.

Townsend, CEO of St. Luke’s Hospital, and Charles, CEO of Mercy Medical Center, say they aren’t surprised by a study that shows Iowa’s cost of providing health care to Medicare patients is ninth-best in the nation in cost-efficiency. Out of 34 hospitals surveyed in the state, not a single one was at or above the national median.

Cedar Rapids’ two hospitals helped with those results. St. Luke’s came in at $16,549, or 16th best in the state, while Mercy Medical was at $16,729, or 23rd best.

Ted Townsend

Townsend said the study simply validates a long tradition in Iowa of providing high-value health care.

“Individual hospital data is a little bit susceptible to normal variations in terms of where we are in the state — it kind of moves around a little bit,” he told The Gazette. “But in general, what this picture tells me is that we’re all grouped pretty tightly together and in a pretty good spot.”

Charles also cited Iowa’s positive health care history. But he added that Mercy has also worked hard to establish a strong primary care network to help patients find a good fit for their medical needs. The hospital is also in the process of creating a partnership with University of Iowa Health Care to boost accountability and quality even further, he said.

“That allows us to better manage their care, and our resources, by creating less redundancy and waste,” Charles said. “The patient benefits from better care coordination. As we look to the future we see the medical home concept evolving into population health management wherein we become even more accountable for quality outcomes and managing costs.”

According to the study, the national median was $17,988 for a hospital visit for a Medicare patient, as measured from May 2010 to February 2011. In Iowa, the median average was $16,427, with the lowest costs at Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines, Keokuk Area Hospital in Keokuk and Mercy Hospital in Iowa City. All three of those came in with a median average of $15,110. The study is based on federal Medicare data and was conducted by Kaiser Health News.

Townsend said while there are many reasons for the study results, he cited Iowa’s federal Medicare reimbursements, which have historically been lower than other states and which has meant hospitals tend to be leaner. In 2009, a study began to shift Medicare from a fee-for-service system to a value-based system in the state – a change lauded by hospitals and legislators.

Townsend said that change isn’t likely to have contributed to the actual study results, however, since the study was conducted between May 2010 and February 2011 — not long enough for the 2009 changes to have much effect.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in Washington, pointed to the 2010 health care reform law championed by the Obama administration. Harkin said the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, will duplicate Iowa’s Medicare rules on a national basis starting in October 2014.

Tim Charles

“We are moving from paying on the basis of quantity to quality, something that some of us here have been fighting for for years,” Harkin said. “(Iowa) stands to benefit even greater from the implementation of the act than other states. That’s why repealing the health care law would hurt Iowa. It would take us back to where low-quality and high-cost states get the most money.”

Like Townsend and Charles, Scott McIntyre, communications director for the Iowa Hospital Association, a Des Moines-based lobbying and advocacy group that represents Iowa’s hospitals, said the study fits in with Iowa’s general traditions of providing the right care at the right place at the right time.

“That sounds a little simple, but that’s really what it comes down to — not wasting patients’ time or quality of life with unnecessary tests or meeting with unnecessary providers,” McIntyre said. “Iowa’s medical practice culture has traditionally been centered around primary care providers, and that has allowed us to be a little ahead of the curve.”

Kaiser News chart:

Ffirefighters respond to a gas line explosion east of Hinton in northwest Iowa on Wednesday, Two men working with trenching equipment were injured when the equipment hit a buried natural gas pipeline in a farm field. (AP)

 The two men injured in a gas explosion when their trenching equipment struck a Northern Natural Gas pipeline near Hinton are recovering.

The Sioux City Journal says 33-year old Christopher Derocher, of Le Mars, and 28-year-old Jacob Brown, of Sioux City, were taken by ambulance to Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City.

Derocher was released. Brown is listed in fair condition at the hospital.

The two were working on a farm field drainage tile using excavating equipment when the pipeline was struck and burst sending flames hundreds of feet high around 2 p.m. Wednesday.

A Northern Natural gas spokesman says pipeline valves were shut off on either side of the break to stop the leak and fire. Repairs are under way. He says customers did not lose gas service.

Price Laboratory School students Paul Choekyong, 17, (left), of Waterloo and Jake Henry,18, of Cedar Falls, calculate how many repetitions of different weight lifting exercises it will take to burn off a candy bar they ate earlier .The school at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls is set to close June. 30 (Nikole Hanna//The Gazette)

Closing the Malcolm Price Lab School at the University of Northern Iowa presents some logistical and scheduling challenges for education field experiences at UNI, but it also offers an opportunity to expand partnerships with area school districts and to try new models, UNI administrators say.

But opponents of the June 30 Price Lab closure, recently approved by state regents as part of UNI budget cuts, say they fear the quality field experiences offered for UNI education students at Price Lab cannot be replicated elsewhere, and that scheduling and travel to different locations for the training will be added burdens.

“I can participate in extracurricular or volunteer opportunities at (Price Lab), or be involved with other programs there that I normally wouldn’t if the school was maybe a half-hour away,” Erin Thomsen, a 22-year-old UNI junior in elementary education from Naperville, Ill., said. “It kind of seems to me to be a step backward.”

UNI President Ben Allen and College of Education Dean Dwight Watson acknowledge losing the proximity of Price Lab will be one of the biggest hurdles in planning new models for students to get the field experience they now have at the lab school. But they say UNI will build the travel time into schedules and provide transportation for students who need it. Watson also believes this can be a chance for innovation, to build on collaborations with school districts in classrooms that are more akin to what UNI students will face when they are teachers.

“The lab school is icing, a little icing on the cake, but the cake is still rich,” Watson said of UNI teacher education.

With the closure, the nearly $3.3 million UNI allocated from the general fund this year for the lab school will go toward cost savings, expanding the Professional Development School partnership with area schools to replace the lab school field experiences, and to new research and development efforts that will happen around the state to replace Price Lab programs, officials said.

Of the lab school’s $5.6 million budget this year, about $3.3 million came from the UNI general fund, which is made up of state funding and tuition dollars. In addition to that money, Price Lab this year got nearly $2.1 million in open enrollment revenue, which is mostly the per-pupil funding the school gets per student from the state to support instructional costs. Those per-pupil state dollars will follow the students to whatever district they attend next year.

Recent years of state cuts resulted in about $24 million less to UNI, necessitating budget reductions, UNI officials say.

Ideally, the state would provide the funding to support both Price Lab School and the Professional Development School partnerships with area districts, Becky Hawbaker, coordinator of the development program, said.

“The loss of the lab school presents immediate challenges and risks in maintaining the high quality of both the field experiences and the school’s R&D function,” Hawbaker said via email. “However, it also offers an incredible opportunity to rapidly scale up a PDS model across a diverse range of schools and to ramp up the intensity of those partnerships.”

Price Lab School is one type of field experience for UNI education students, but they also go to districts for classroom visits, observations and co-teaching. Price Lab sees about 500 “level two” UNI education students each year, who spend about 13,000 field experience hours in the school. Another 700 to 800 UNI students spend time at Price Lab for methods classes that have field experience at the school.

It’s replacing those hours for level two and level three students that’s the biggest issue. Level two students must spend a minimum of 25 hours in the classroom. In level one, two and three combined, UNI students must log at least 80 hours of classroom time.

Level two students at Price Lab are heavily focused on assessment, said Nadene Davidson, interim director of UNI’s Division of Teaching, which oversees field experiences and Price Lab. Students teach segments, reflect on what they did and how it impacted achievement in the classroom, then reteach the segment or move on to the next segment, Davidson said.

Price Lab teachers are trained in this deep assessment and spend time working with the UNI students on it, lab school Interim Director Lyn Countryman said.

“One thing here is the teachers have time to talk to those students, and they know that’s their focus,” Countryman said. “So for the 25 hours they’re in the class, you probably spend another 15 to 16 hours with them in mentoring about what they’re doing and reflecting.”

Under a new field experience model, it may be hard for teachers in other school districts to find the time to spend on such things, said Countryman, who has been at UNI since 1990 and is in her second year as interim director.

“We are fighting for teacher education and the quality of teacher education that comes with this model school,” she said.

Price Lab teachers would bring their expertise to the new model, Watson said, but they would be freed of the responsibility of teaching kindergarten through high school students at the lab school. One idea is to distribute Price Lab teachers who are tenured UNI faculty to local schools, to work on-site with UNI education students getting field experience through a PDS model, Watson said. UNI also could provide funding for stipends or leave time for a district’s classroom teachers who participate, he said.

Superintendents from the Cedar Falls and Waterloo school districts, where UNI has for several years had the PDS model on a small scale, say they would guarantee field experience placements for UNI students.

“When you have all of those people working in collaboration, we all learn from each other,” Cedar Falls Superintendent David Stoakes said. “So the more UNI faculty we have in our buildings, it’s that much better for everybody.”

Sarah Montgomery, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction, teaches 25 UNI students in a semester-long integrated social studies and literacy methods cohort that works about three hours per week with sixth-graders at Lincoln Elementary in Cedar Falls. She hopes the PDS partnerships between UNI and local schools will ramp up in response to the Price Lab closure. Her UNI class meets at Lincoln, and what she teaches supports the elementary school curriculum.

“It’s really tight theory to practice,” she said.

But one Price Lab instructor said her time spent teaching high school students at the lab school better informs her instruction of UNI students. Physics instructor Karen Breitbach teaches UNI students three mornings a week and in the afternoons teaches high schoolers. The small size of her lab school classes means she can do hands-on activities that keep her students engaged, and she uses those experiences to help her UNI students who are learning about teaching.

“We know what they need to be able to do, we know where they come from, we know what works,” she said. “And I have time to interact with my university students. That is all so critical.”

Malcolm Price Laboratory School

• 

  Price Laboratory School in Cedar Falls. (Matthew Putney/The Courier)

  Mission: Located on the University of Northern Iowa campus, Malcom Price Laboratory School is a prekindergarten through 12th grade school that is a setting for clinical teacher education and research at the early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school levels for UNI students and faculty.

• History: The campus building now known as Sabin Hall was home for campus laboratory school activities from 1914 to 1953, when the elementary portion of the Price Lab School opened. The high school wing of the school opened in 1955.
• Enrollment: 366 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade as of Feb. 2012
• Budget: $5.5 million in 2011-12

Source: University of Northern Iowa

Who Price serves

Students

•  Students in the Cedar Falls school district in grades kindergarten through 12 who reside in Price Laboratory School’s attendance zone can choose to attend the school.
•  Kindergarten through sixth grade students in Cedar Falls who live outside the attendance zone can tuition-in to the Lab school if space is available, as enrollment limitations are set by the state.
•  Cedar Falls students in grades seven through 12 residing outside of the attendance zone can apply to attend and are accepted based on space and availability. If accepted, they do not pay tuition because per-pupil state funding follows the student to Price Lab.
•  Kindergarten through grade 12 students from other school districts can apply for open enrollment to the Lab school. Waterloo Community School District, which has a diversity plan, can deny the open enrollment application for a student to exit their district. The Lab school accepts students based on space and compliance with state open enrollment guidelines and enrollment limitations.

UNI students

•  Level 1: 30 hours total, three hours once a week for 10 weeks, most placements are within 50-plus metro-area schools. Typical activities: Observing, data collecting, clerical assistance, creating or preparing learning materials, providing small group or 1:1 instructional assistance, being exposed to teacher duties
•  Level 2: 25 hours total, ideally one hour per day every day for four weeks, most placements are at the Price Lab School. Typical activities: Observing, journaling, active interactions with students, writing a work sample to plan and implement two related lessons to the entire class.
•  Level 3: Elementary and middle level education: 40 hours in a one-week block. Secondary level education: Varies by program. Placements are in the metro area, with statewide, national and international options available. Typical activities: Observing and becoming involved in all instructional aspects of the classroom; ideally are teaching for full day at end of the week, under the supervision of the mentor teacher.

The circles are synonymous with standardized testing and, in Iowa, that’s been synonymous with the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

But last week, Department of Education Director Jason Glass told lawmakers that it was time to get rid of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in favor of the still-under-development Smarter Balanced Assessment.

Jason Glass

It’s a move some educators say is a long time coming and one that Glass forecasted this summer when he got the OK from Gov. Terry Branstad and State Board of Education President Rosie Hussey to make Iowa a governing member of the Smarter Balanced Consortium, which is expected to introduce a new national testing system by the 2014-15 academic year.

It also comes at a time when ITBS has made moves to better align its test questions to the Iowa Core and to provide students, parents and teachers more information about each individual test-taker.

But it may be too little, too late for ITBS.

“They go beyond just memorizing and regurgitating facts. Smarter Balanced assessments are computer-adaptive, so we get results much more quickly than is possible with paper and pencil, bubble-sheet tests,” Department of Education spokeswoman Staci Hupp wrote in an email. “These new assessments can be completed faster by the student, resulting in more time for instruction. The assessments also will allow for state-to-state comparisons, which have been difficult with a patchwork of state standards and tests across the country.”

Test basics differ

The Iowa Test of Basic Skills is a norm-referenced test. That means students are compared to other students who take the test, and results come out on a bell curve.

The Smarter Balanced Assessments are set up to be criterion-referenced tests. Those measure the students against a set of standards, and the results come out more like a yard stick.

The move toward criterion-referenced tests goes back decades but really got a boost with the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the move toward a nationwide Common Core.

Catherine Welch

And as that push toward criteria testing came, ITBS has tried to adapt, said Catherine Welch, a professor at the University of Iowa who also works for Iowa Testing Programs, which responsible for ITBS.

“We have aligned (test questions) to the Iowa Core in reading, math and (English language arts),” Welch said. “There’s a 1-to-1 ratio, so each question is directly related to one of the standards.”

Because of this, students will get individual Iowa Core reports when their results come out. ITBS also has expanded its college readiness report to include grade 6 through 11, and there’s new student growth information that charts a student’s progress over time and predicts where he or she should be on future tests.

Welch said she understands there is a significant push away from the ITBS by the governor and the Department of Education .

“I hope that the discussion will continue and we can be a part of that discussion,” she said.

Looking ahead

Sioux City Community School District Superintendent Paul Gausman said he was happy “to learn that the state was participating so vigorously” in developing the Smarter Balanced Assessment.

“It’s very important for us to have a criterion-based test,” said Gausman, who also serves as chairman of the Urban Education Network, which represents the state’s 17 largest school districts, including Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

He said the ITBS is good for what it is and the testing service has been as responsive as it can be, but the test doesn’t give teachers and administrators the measures they need.

“It provides a good snapshot, but what they are trying to do with Smarter Balanced is just much more comprehensive than what they can do with ITBS,” he said.

Still, it’s up to the Legislature if ITBS stays or goes.

Rep. Sharon SteckmanD-Mason City

“I think we have to be careful,” said Rep. Sharon Steckman, D-Mason City, a former teacher and ranking member on the House Education Committee. “We don’t know what Smarter Balanced is going to look like because no one has seen it yet.”

Jean Hessburg, spokeswoman for the Iowa State Education Association, said the union doesn’t have a position on the test.

“If Smarter Balanced turns out to be as good as it’s billed to be, it’s great,” she said. “But we don’t know what it will be.”

Gary Rogers Jr.

City Administrator Gary Rogers Jr. has resigned. His resignation came shortly after a closed City Council session last week to evaluate his performance.

City clerk Kim Downs today confirmed the resignation and said Mayor Tom Theis planned to issue a news release on the matter Wednesday. Reached by telephone today, Theis said he could not discuss the reasons for the resignation and the news release will state that Rogers no longer works for the city of Hiawatha, and the city is conducting business as usual.

Rogers, 58, could not be reached for comment. He came to Hiawatha from Waupun, Wis., in July 2009 following an extensive search to replace the previous administrator, who resigned.

The council’s agenda for Wednesday calls for a resolution and execution of a mutual settlement agreement between the city and Rogers. Mayor Their said the settlement involves salary and health insurance for four months.

The Rev. David Beckman (left) blesses balloons before they are released by the great-grandchildren of Gerald "Jerry" Ramm during the burial service at St. Joseph's Cemetery in Cedar Rapids on Dec. 9. (Liz Martin/The Gazette)

From balloons and magic markers at graveside services to cremation necklaces, fingerprint jewelry and even quick bar codes on headstones, mourners are getting more creative and personal in how they memorialize their loved ones.

Families in Eastern Iowa increasingly are swapping impersonal and uber-traditional funerals for creative and unique “celebrations of life,” according to area funeral directors.

“Years ago, there was almost a cookie-cutter approach to funerals, and now people really want to invest in making it a story and a celebration,” said Peter Teahen, director and owner of Teahen Funeral Home in Cedar Rapids. “We have transitioned from the 1960s and 1970s when people wore black for a year.”

Pop-culture songs are replacing “gloomy” music at services, videos and slide shows are overtaking somber decor, balloon releases are brightening graveside services and family members are writing their own eulogies.

“People are finally moving from the traditions they grew up with to realizing that this can be a meaningful and special event,” Teahen said.

Some people are exploring unique ways to carry loved ones with them after death, Teahen said. Memorial companies now can put cremated ashes into jewelry and locks of hair into pendants, and they can stamp rings, necklaces and lapels with a person’s fingerprint.

Some manufacturers even have started branding headstones with the small black and white bar code boxes — known as QR, or quick response, codes — that let smartphone users snap a picture of the icon and connect to the Internet to learn more about a person’s life.

“I think it’s a neat concept of how we are trying to focus more on the life of the person than the death,” Teahen said.

No families have asked Teahen to embed a QR code on a headstone so far. But, Teahen said, he’s been seeing the “smart memorials” frequently in trade journals, and the family of Aaron Eilerts, 14, of Eagle Grove, who was killed during a 2008 tornado at the Little Sioux Boy Scout camp, recently added a QR code to the boy’s headstone.

Officials at Watts Vault & Monument Co., which has warehouses in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, said they’re willing to order a headstone with a “smart memorial” box for anyone who asks.

“It’s becoming more popular,” said Julie Watts, secretary for Watts Memorial. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you see them everywhere. It’s just a matter of time.”

Mackenna Matson, 9, of Cedar Rapids, great-granddaughter of Geraldine and Robert Zach, helps dig a hole for the urn at the burial of Robert Zach at Dupont Cemetery on Sept. 18, 2011, in Monroe Township. The ashes of Geraldine and Robert were mixed together in the urn, which was built by son Doug Zach from wood from a stereo cabinet that had been made by Robert. (Photo by Doug Zach)

Jacob Wittrock, owner and funeral director of Stewart Baxter Funeral and Memorial Services in Cedar Rapids, said his business is seeing more unique requests, like a family that lined up special cars outside a service for a man who was an auto aficionado in life.

“People are more apt to ask for that type of thing now, whereas 15 to 20 year ago, the funeral home might not have been as accommodating,” he said.

Geraldine Zach’s children knew they didn’t want to go the traditional route when the Cedar Rapids woman died May 9 at age 80.

“It was very personal,” said her daughter, Sandy Brown, 46, of Cedar Rapids, who wrote her mother’s entire service and delivered the eulogy.

Zach had been involved in church for years but became less active after having a stroke.

“So having a minister from that church give the service seemed cold,” Brown said.

When Brown’s father, Robert Zach, died a few months later on Aug. 13 at age 85, Brown said, the family again made it personal.

“I felt like it was more of a celebration of who they were,” Brown said. “It was not just a funeral service that I could check off my list of things I’ve done.”

Before the Zachs died, Brown said, she had them answer questions about their lives in a journal and on video. The journal and video were displayed during the visitation, Brown said.

“It was not just a church service,” she said.

The burial was unique as well. The husband and wife were cremated, and they had their ashes mixed and placed in a box that family members decorated with magic markers.

Dean Zach of Central City (from left), Sandy Brown of Cedar Rapids, Doug Zach of Cedar Rapids and Sue Elsom of Moline, Ill., gather at the gravesite of their parents, Robert and Geraldine Zach, at Dupont Cemetery in rural Swisher on Dec. 14. (Liz Martin/The Gazette)

Even traditional families mourning loved ones are doing more these days to personalize memorial services.

Bev Kotowske, whose father, Gerald “Jerry” Ramm, 86, of Cedar Rapids, died Dec. 5, said he was a conventional Catholic and they didn’t want to veer too far from memorial norms.

But, she said, they did sprinkle in a few personal touches with photos, a video and a balloon release at the graveside service. Kotowske, 56, of Cedar Rapids, said she thinks more people are personalizing memorials today to familiarize younger generations with family members who they didn’t get to know well.

““Families aren’t as connected as they were, so this does that, and it’s important,” she said.

A sign for Premier Developers sits on an available lot on the 1000 block of 10th Street NW in Cedar Rapids. A city program that combines free lots with homebuyer incentives is desgined to fill in emply lots in area of the city that were flooded in 2008. (Cliff Jette/The Gazette)

How appealing is a big smile with a bunch of missing teeth?

That, said City Council member Pat Shey, is what the flood-hit core neighborhoods here likely would resemble for years without some gap-filling help from City Hall.

That help has begun to arrive, 3 1/2 years after the city’s historic 2008 flood, as construction has started on the first of dozens and perhaps 200 or more new homes that are slated to be built with public subsidies on vacant lots where flood-damaged homes once stood.

The city’s infill home-building program — called ROOTS for Rebuilding Ownership Opportunities Together — has $11.1 million in federal disaster funds to help provide an attractive 25 percent discount on the sale price of a new home to homebuyers who meet affordable-housing income guidelines. The sale price also is lower than it would be because the city is providing each home a free lot.

In trade, the buyers agree to move into new homes in the old neighborhoods where the property values have dropped and where the ability for property values to stabilize and grow remains an unknown. The buyers also agree to stay in their newly purchased homes for five years to enjoy the full sale-price subsidy, which will average about $30,000 per home.

“If I was younger, I’d be all over something like this,” Shey said. “It’s a heck of a deal.”

Valerie Vaage, a 27-year-old administrative assistant at a local medical clinic, and her partner, Chad Hale, 31, a laid-off wind-energy technician now attending school full time, are among buyers of the first new homes now going in the city’s flood-impacted neighborhoods.

Vaage said she feels particularly fortunate to be building at 1030 10th St. NW because the site is about the farthest from the river as any of the lots on which the new homes will be built. All the lots are outside the 100-year flood plain and outside the construction zone set aside for the city’s new flood-protection system, but Vaage’s new house is on the edge of the 500-year flood plain, she said.

Her decision to invest in a new home on 10th Street NW came with some pause because Vaage didn’t find the neighborhood three blocks from Ellis Boulevard NW all that appealing what with some of the homes torn down and a scattering of vacant lots. But the lot next to the one on which her new home is going up also is getting a new home as are two others in the block.

“That kind of brought me some peace of mind,” she said. At the same time, she said she also she supports the idea of rebuilding a neighborhood.

“I felt I could contribute to that just by building a home there, and I really liked that,” Vaage said.

Caleb Mason, housing redevelopment analyst for the city of Cedar Rapids, reports that there are a handful of new homes in the early stages of construction as part of the ROOTS initiative.

About 18 approved builders — including four non-profit groups — have been awarded 126 vacant or soon-to-be vacant lots, most in northwest Cedar Rapids, some in southwest Cedar Rapids and a few in southeast Cedar Rapids neighborhoods.

Zac Grigg of Winthrop, with Delaney Concrete Contracto,r lays rebar on insulated tarps to keep the ground warm in preparation for pouring the concrete foundation of a home at 1712 Hamilton St. SW in Cedar Rapids. The house being built is part of the ROOTS program. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

The funding should support the construction of 200 to 215 new homes, Mason said, though some of the builders, including Kyle Skogman and Jim Sattler, say the funding will support the building of more than 300 new homes.

Skogman and Sattler suggest that the housing market in the older, flood-impacted neighborhoods might not be able to attract 300 new buyers, but the City Council’s Development Committee wants to focus on the core neighborhoods, Shey said.

The ROOTs program is the third round of federal disaster funding that has provided subsidies to income-qualified buyers who have purchased more than 400 residential units, nearly all in developments closer to the periphery of the city. In the program’s first two rounds, the city’s buyout program of flood-damaged homes had not progressed far enough to have lots available. Now the city has those lots to help replace affordable housing lost in the 2008 flood.

A few vocal City Hall critics have questioned the idea of giving away lots that the city has acquired through the federal buyout program, though the federal government supports such a program if it achieves what the city’s Mason calls a “national objective.”

He said ROOTS does that in two ways — by providing affordable housing to those with low-to-moderate incomes; and by addressing “slum and blight.”

All the new owners must have household incomes at or below 100 percent of the area’s median income and 51 percent must have household incomes at 80 percent of below the area’s median income. At the same time, builders must submit itemized prices and limit their profit margins to 15 percent of cost.

Builders like Skogman, Sattler and Bob Vancura, president of Premier Developers in Marion, doubt much new building would take place in the flood-impacted neighborhoods that the city wants to revitalize without the incentives.

“If you don’t have some incentive to get people back down there and to invest, you wouldn’t see much activity there,” said Sattler. “It’s just a fact of life.”

Dustin Haigh, an employee of Maher Bros. Transfer & Storage, helps unload a truck of books and equipment for the University of Iowa's Art Building West on Wednesday in Iowa City. The building has (Nikole Hanna/The Gazette)

The Art Library website perhaps best expresses the collective feeling of University of Iowa School of Art and Art History faculty, staff and students who are moving back into Art Building West for the spring semester, more than three years after it was knocked out of commission by the 2008 flood.

“Yippee!” the library site declares about the move back into the Steven Holl-designed building on Riverside Drive.

“Which is basically the whole feeling,” Art Librarian Rijn Templeton said this week while tidying her Art West office. “We figured we’d have a little fun during the move.”

Numerous UI facilities reopened in the months immediately following the June 2008 flood when building repairs could be made in shorter time, including Mayflower Residence Hall, the Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building and the English-Philosophy Building.

But the reopening of Art West for spring semester marks completion of the first major campus building that was “really put out of commission” by the flood, Senior Vice President for Finance Doug True said. Movers this week stacked boxes in faculty offices and lined books on the Art Library shelves. The building will hold classes this spring semester, starting Jan. 17, for the first time since the flood.

Art Building West is located on the Unversity of Iowa campus on Riverside Drive in Iowa City. (Cliff Jette/The Gazette)

“In some ways it is bigger than a new building opening because it’s sort of an old friend and you’re meeting again, going to a class reunion,” True said. “And it is a stunning building. A lot of us have forgotten what a great building it is.”

Final cost of the Art West repair came to $14.2 million, under the $14.8 million estimate due to lower construction bids, True said.

Much of that cost covered the “invisible” flood wall. The removable, 900-foot flood wall around the building is designed to be built in two to three days but can go up quicker and is based on concepts used in many European cities, True said. UI officials expect to use similar invisible flood walls to protect the Iowa Memorial Union and Iowa Advanced Technology Labs on the other side of the Iowa River.

Total damage, recovery and mitigation costs at the UI from the flood could hit almost $1 billion, much of which will be covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and insurance.

The three major building replacement projects after the flood — Hancher Auditorium, the School of Music and the Studio Arts building — are all in the design phase and have been for months. It’s possible designs for those new buildings will be unveiled soon, within a few months, True said, but it’s not yet known if designs will go to the state Board of Regents for the February meeting.

At Art West, a moving truck parked outside this week was proof that life will return to normal in that building in a few weeks.

The art history faculty offices and art history classes will be back in Art West, as will classes in graphic design and some in photography and painting. The Art Library also returns from its temporary home at the Main Library. Nothing should be noticeably different at Art West since the flood, when water filled about 4 feet on the main level.

Justin McNeal spends the day piling the shelves full of books at the Art Building West the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City. (Nikole Hanna/The Gazette)

“They’re pretty much trying to put it back the way it was,” Pat Arkema, administrator for the School of Art and Art History said.

The art history faculty was housed temporarily at Seashore hall and many of the studio classes displaced from Art West were held at the Studio Arts facility, in the former Menards on Highway 1. Some studio programs will remain at Studio Arts while a new building is constructed near Art West. That new Studio Art building is slated for completion in April 2016.

A Cambus shuttle will ferry students on the 10-minute trip between Art West and the Studio Arts building on Highway 1 West, where many of the studio art classes will remain.

Many current art students had never been in Art West, which was only about 2 years old when the flood hit, so it was fun to see reactions at an open house held last month, Robert Bork, associate professor and head of the art history division, said.

“They couldn’t believe it because they’ve gotten used to us kind of being the gypsy department,” he said.

Being back in the building means having the Art Library and its 135,000 book collection within steps again, Bork said. It also means seeing colleagues and students from graphic design, photography and painting in the hallways rather than being scattered around campus, he said.

“I think probably the biggest thing is it’s going to be a home where faculty and students will all feel that we belong as a place,” Bork said.