Gazette Daily News Briefing, April 7
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette Digital News Desk, and I’m here with your update for Friday, April 7.
According to the National Weather Service it will be sunny Friday, with a high near 61 degrees. On Friday night the sky will be clear, with a low of around 38 degrees. A slight wind during the day will pick up just a bit during the evening.
The next two weeks are projected to bring above normal temperatures and precipitation to the upper Mississippi River basin, causing snowpacks in Minnesota and Wisconsin to melt.
Those conditions have created a 50 percent or higher chance that communities along the Mississippi River — from Dubuque to Burlington — will experience major flooding, according to the latest river flood risk briefing from the National Weather Service’s Quad Cities bureau.
“This is a little bit of that worst-case scenario that I’ve been warning about since February,” senior service hydrologist Matt Wilson told the Gazette. “We could see this being the start of a more severe spring flood season than we would have otherwise hoped for.
In Minnesota and Wisconsin, wetter than average conditions caused snowpacks to swell this winter to between 4 and 10-plus inches of snow water equivalent. They rank in the top 10 percent of snow events on historical record for the area — potentially even the top three, Wilson said.
Colder than normal temperatures have allowed those snowpacks to persist longer into the spring.
The Iowa Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next week over a request from Gov. Kim Reynolds to reinstate a law that would ban abortion after six weeks.
Reynolds, a Republican, launched the lawsuit last year, asking a district court to lift an injunction on a 2018 law that banned abortion after cardiac activity is detected in a fetus, usually around six weeks. The court denied the request in December, and Reynolds appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court.
Reynolds encouraged people gathered Thursday at an annual prayer breakfast in Des Moines to pray for the outcome of the case.
If reinstated, the law would block abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy, often before a woman is aware she is pregnant. Medical experts say the sound detected by an ultrasound in those early weeks is not a heartbeat — because the fetus’ heart is not fully formed — but instead electrical impulses.
Abortion is currently legal in Iowa up to 20 weeks.
A state board on Thursday awarded a combined $1.3 million toward efforts to revitalize Cedar Lake and renovate the African American Museum of Iowa, partially funding both projects.
The Iowa Economic Development Authority’s Enhance Iowa board gave $800,000 to the grassroots ConnectCR initiative’s Cedar Lake project, and $500,000 for the museum project Thursday. The awards come with a 90-day contingency of closing fundraising gaps.
The board previously rescinded ConnectCR’s initial $500,000 Community Attraction and Tourism grant but encouraged the city to reapply, so the city of Cedar Rapids did receive more money.
The city sought $1 million for the approximately $12.3 million project to transform the lake just north of downtown as part of ConnectCR.
The African American Museum of Iowa asked for $508,000 to go toward a portion of its nearly $5 million renovation project, which has closed the museum while the city builds a floodgate on 12th Avenue.
