Gazette Daily News Briefing, December 16
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Friday, December 16.
A little bit of Thursday's weather will bleed into Friday, with a chance for scattered snow showers during the day. According to the National Weather Service it will be cloudy in the Cedar Rapids area with a high near 30 degrees. The chance of snow during the day is 30 percent, then there will be a 20 percent chance Friday night into Saturday. The low will drop to 20 degrees Friday night.
State revenue is projected to fall slightly — although not by as much as previously feared — during the current state budget year, a state panel said Wednesday.
And revenue will increase only marginally — by just 0.1 percent — in the next state budget year, which begins July 1, the panel said.
The latest estimates were presented Wednesday by the state’s Revenue Estimating Conference, which meets quarterly to project state revenues.
The panel estimated state revenue will be just more than $9.62 billion fiscal 2023, the current state budget year that ends June 30. That would be a 1.9 percent drop from the previous budget year, not quite as steep as the 2.7 percent drop the panel estimated in October.
The panel’s annual December projections are used by the governor and state lawmakers to craft the next state budget. That work will begin in earnest when the 2023 session of the Iowa Legislature begins next month.
A small-town Iowa police chief has been indicted on federal charges that he abused his position to purchase more than two dozen machine guns.
According to the Associated Press, Adair Police Chief Brad Wendt, 46, and Robert Williams, 46, were both charged with making false statements to the ATF about whether the police department wanted to buy the machine guns. Adair, a town of fewer than 800 people, is 55 miles west of Des Moines.
Court documents say Wendt bought 10 machine guns for the police department and later sold several of them at a profit.
The two men are also accused of holding public machine gun shooting events where people paid for the chance to shoot one of the fully automatic weapons.
The nation’s largest Medicaid insurer will pay $44.4 million as part of a settlement to resolve claims the company fraudulently overbilled Iowa’s privatized Medicaid program for pharmacy benefits and services.
Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller announced the settlement Thursday with St. Louis-based Centene Corp., one of three for-profit companies that help manage the joint federal and state program that finances roughly $7 billion in health care coverage annually for roughly 805,000 low-income and disabled Iowans.
Centene, which operates as Iowa Total Care in the state, administers benefits to more than 350,000 Iowans through IA Health Link, Iowa’s Medicaid managed care program, and Iowa’s Children’s Health Insurance Program.
