Gazette Daily News Briefing, June 15
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette Digital News Desk, and I’m here with your update for Thursday, June 15.
It will be hot again Thursday with a side of Canadian fire haze. According to the National Weather Service it will be mostly sunny in the Cedar Rapids area with a high near 91 degrees. The weather service is predicting widespread haze between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. On Thursday evening it will be partly cloudy, with a low of around 58 degrees.
After hearing from student representatives worried about the rising cost of higher education but aware of eroding state support, Iowa’s Board of Regents without discussion Wednesday approved across-the-system tuition and fee increases — including a 3.5-percent hike for all in-state undergraduates.
New tuition and fee rates for the next academic year starting Aug. 21 include varying increases for out-of-state students and those at the graduate level, depending on the campus.
Although regents for the upcoming budget year requested a $32 million increase in general fund appropriations from the state, lawmakers instead tied a combined $7.1 million increase to specific programs across the campuses: the UI College of Nursing; Iowa State’s Future Ready Workforce Program and UNI’s Educators for Iowa Program.
That continues a trend of Iowa’s generational disinvestment in higher ed.
After Iowa regents reviewed in closed session Tuesday the performance of their university presidents over the last year, they approved a range of pay increases and new compensation incentives Wednesday — including a raise for University of Iowa President Barbara Wilson.
Beginning July 1, Wilson will earn $700,000 a year — amounting to a $50,000 raise, the second such raise in two years, making her the highest-paid president across the three-campus regent university system. Iowa State University President Wendy Wintersteen’s salary will stay at $650,000 a year — although both she and Wilson received new deferred compensation incentives.
Regents also extended both presidents’ contracts.
Wilson, given a five-year contract when she started in 2021, now has a term of employment through June 30, 2028. Wintersteen, whose 2019 contract was set to expire this summer, received an extension through June 30, 2026.
University of Northern Iowa President Mark Nook — whose salary has remained static since his hire in 2016 at $357,110 — on Wednesday received his first raise of $15,000 a year, bringing his annual pay to $372,110. His current contract runs through 2025.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a letter urging Congress to overturn California’s law dictating the conditions of livestock that produce meat sold in the state, joining the chorus of Iowa Republicans calling the law disastrous for Iowa agriculture.
The letter was joined by nine other Republican governors, whose states together represent more than half the pork production in the country. Iowa leads the nation in pork production, raising about a third of the country’s hogs.
The governors called on Congress to pass the Exposing Agricultural Trade Suppression Act, a bill introduced in the last Congress that would ban states from imposing regulations on the production of agricultural products outside the state.
The bill targets California’s Proposition 12, an animal welfare law approved by California voters in 2018 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. The law regulates the conditions of calves raised for veal, laying hens and birthing sows whose products are sold in California.
Because California consumes a significant amount of the nation’s pork, agriculture groups warned the law would require farmers across the country to retrofit their operations to fit the requirements.
