Gazette Daily News Briefing, May 24
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Tuesday, May 24.
Tuesday will begin a trend of rainier weather that will continue through Thursday. According to the National Weather Service it will be mostly cloudy in the Cedar Rapids area, with a high near 68 degrees. The chance for rain will pick up to around 40 percent after 4 p.m. Tuesday and spike up to 90 percent overnight into Wednesday. It will be breezy late Tuesday as rain creeps its way closer, and the low temperature should be around 53 degrees.
A proposal by Gov. Kim Reynolds to shift taxpayer funding for public schools to scholarships for private school tuition assistance will not pass the Iowa Legislature this year, a top statehouse Republican said on Monday.
Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley, a Republican from New Hartford, told reporters Monday that there were not enough votes among the 60 House Republicans to get the 51 votes needed to pass the proposal in the 100-member House.
The legislative proposal had already passed the Republican-led Iowa Senate and Republican leaders had been holding up the session in hopes of reaching a compromise with House Republicans. The bulk of the holdouts among House Republicans were legislators in rural districts, where public school officials said the loss of students to private schools could be fiscally devastating.
It is the second consecutive year that Reynolds, a Republican, made the proposal, only to see it falter in the Republican-controlled Iowa House.
With Cedar Rapids casino backers on the cusp of applying again for a state license, the Iowa Legislature with scant notice Monday approved a moratorium on issuing any new approvals for casinos for two years.
The moratorium, a new topic that came up in what appears to be the last days of the 2022 legislative session, is part of House File 2497, a broader law on gaming and regulations. The bill was passed 35-11 in the Iowa Senate and later 60-23 in the Iowa House. The measure needs Gov. Kim Reynolds’ approval to become law.
If it becomes law, the hiatus would thwart Cedar Rapids’ third try for a casino until July 2024. State regulators previously denied a gaming license to Linn County in 2014 and 2017.
“It’s incredibly disappointing that this can happen seemingly in the dark of night without the city to even have the opportunity to respond,” Cedar Rapids Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell said after the vote.
Lawmakers who supported the change argued that Iowa’s gambling industry is at its saturation point and any other casinos would cannibalize the existing market.
A judge has set a hearing in July on a motion to move the trial of one of two Fairfield teens accused of killing a high school Spanish teacher with a baseball bat out of Jefferson County because of pretrial publicity and to suppress several pieces of evidence and his statements to police at trial.
A lawyer for Willard Noble Chaiden Miller, 16, says her client can’t get a fair and impartial jury in Jefferson County based on “extensive pretrial publicity.”
In the suppression motion by Miller’s lawyer, filed previously in March, the defense is asking the court to not allow the prosecution to submit evidence obtained during a search of Miller’s residence on Nov. 4 of last year, and his statements to police because his rights were violated.
In the motion, Miller’s lawyer argues that Miller’s mother signed a juvenile waiver when police asked to speak with her son about a missing person — Graber. Miller’s mother was told about vandalism at Graber’s home, not that it was regarding a homicide investigation or that Miller was a suspect. His lawyer argued that the subsequent police interrogation was thus tainted by the fact that Miller was not properly informed of his rights.
