Homers and Gomers

Homers

GREENER ROAD: Linn County engineers opted to use a more environmentally friendly, less costly process as they repair county road W-45. Instead of removing and hauling away the old road base and surface, they are applying asphalt to bond with the existing concrete base and serve as a foundation for a new concrete overlay. Less energy is used in that process and it's twice as fast. Also, fly ash, a byproduct of coal-fired power plants, is used in the concrete, reducing the amount of cement needed.

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HALL OF FAMERS: Two area women are among four state residents to be inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame on Aug. 29. Linda Kerber of Iowa City in 1971 was the University of Iowa's first professor of women's history and is an authority on women's studies. Sister Mary McCauley of Postville helped support more than 400 immigrants after the May 2008 federal raid at the Agriprocessors plant.

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CONVERTED: Congratulations to Shueyville on converting its former high school into a new community center to be used for government, social and recreational events - and for preserving instead of demolishing a building with historic importance.

Gomers

FUZZY RECORD: Law enforcement agencies log information on all kinds of crimes and cases that a can be analyzed for trends or other purposes. One thing the Iowa Department of Public Safety doesn't formally track are shootings that involve police officers. At least four Iowans have died in such confrontations this year but the state doesn't know if that's unusual. Isn't this type of incident important enough to monitor?

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DEVASTATION: The numbers are numbing: $200 million in crop damage across 400,000 acres of farmland in the northeast Iowa counties of Winneshiek, Fayette, Delaware and Clayton, pummeled by the July 24 “mother of all hailstorms,” Dale Thoreson, Iowa State University farm specialist, told The Gazette. Those counties are among 23 for which the governor requested a federal disaster declaration.

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SQUEEZED: Iowa City is one of the state's few school districts with growing enrollment, but that growth, combined with state budget cuts and the recession, is proving difficult. District officials want to build a new high school by 2014 but financial difficulties forced $3.4 million in cuts from the coming year's budget and the possibility of $6.7 million more the following year.