Government & Politics

According to the National Council on Aging, about one in 10 Americans aged 60 or older have suffered from at least one form of elder abuse. In Iowa, the Department of Human Services saw a 37 percent increase in dependent abuse reports from the first half of 2020 to the second half of 2021, with 5,800 cases.

Deidre DeJear, the likely Democratic candidate for Iowa governor, filed her nominating signatures Tuesday, officially making her the first Black woman in Iowa’s history to be the Democratic or Republican party candidate for governor

Also, Burlington Democrat Bob Krause has withdrawn from the race for his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate.

Recent testing by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources found “very low” levels of two types of industrial chemicals in Cedar Rapids’ public water supply, but the city reports that its water remains safe to drink.

Changes may be coming to Iowa’s recycling law, regardless of how beverage wholesalers and grocery stores feel about it, one state lawmaker Monday during a legislative hearing on the latest proposal in the seemingly annual effort to make changes to the state recycling law, more commonly known as the “bottle bill.”

Cedar Rapids is once again fighting against Iowa lawmakers’ attempts to regulate or ban the use of automated traffic enforcement cameras. Have the devices reduced collisions in the city?

North Liberty voters will elect a new council member on March 15 during a special election. The three candidates running are Robert Strickland, Samantha Gulick and Ashley Bermel.

Some have called expanding the bottle bill to include water and energy drinks, and double the deposit to a dime to increase the penny-per-can handling fee for redemption centers to 2 cents. Even that may not be enough to support redemption centers, especially in rural Iowa, according to Iowa State University economics professor Dermot Hayes, who has been analyzing the bottle bill for about 10 years.