Gazette Daily News Briefing, November 19 and November 20
Welcome to the weekend!
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Saturday, November 19 and Sunday, November 20.
This may be the first forecast in awhile where they’ve brought out the word blustery. According to the National Weather Service, there will be a slight chance for flurries Saturday morning, but besides that it will be sunny most of the day. But it will also be cold, with a high of 22 degrees dropping down to a windchill of 0 degrees with blustery 15 to 25 winds. On Saturday night it will be mostly clear, with the winds calming a bit, and a low of 10 degrees. On Sunday the temperatures will get up to 35 degrees, again with sunny skies, and again with wind that will probably make it feel a lot colder. On Sunday night it will be mostly clear, with a low of around 26 degrees.
Iowa will still have one statewide Democrat in office after Republican state auditor candidate Todd Halbur conceded the race Friday to Democratic incumbent Auditor Rob Sand.
Halbur said he was dropping his request for a recount because he did not have sufficient resources to file the requests in all 99 counties, and he claimed the Republican Party of Iowa would not help support a statewide recount.
Sand led the race by 2,893 votes out of nearly 1.2 million cast in the election — a margin of just 0.24 percent — according to the latest unofficial results reported by the Iowa Secretary of State’s office.
Because the victory margin is less than 1 percent, Halbur by state law could request a recount without being required to post a bond, with Iowa counties picking up the cost.
Halbur, though, would still have to physically file paperwork with each county auditor in the state within three days after the county canvass and recruit designees in all 99 counties to serve on recount boards.
“They have to have the flexibility to do a hand count for days and be flexible for 18 total days to get the recount done,” Halbur said in a statement provided to The Gazette. “My campaign does not have the staff or infrastructure to get that coordinated on a statewide basis in that short amount of time.
In less than three days this week, seven people — five of them children — have died in Iowa house fires, a fatality rate not seen in the state in at least 16 years, data shows.
Four children died Wednesday in a fire in Mason City. A retired couple died Thursday in a fire in northeast Cedar Rapids. And a fire early Friday in Onslow claimed another child.
The Mason City fire was blamed on a faulty power strip. The cause of the Cedar Rapids and Onslow fires remained under investigation, though officials believe the Onslow fire started in the kitchen.
Structure fires do tend to pick up this time of year, said Ron Humphrey, the special agent in charge for the Iowa Fire Marshal’s Office, because as the temperature drops, people start using different kinds of heat-generating appliances that can sometimes become fire hazards — like space heaters, furnaces and fireplaces.
“I can’t say that that’s any of the causes for these recent fires, but fires in general this time of year, we seem to get more because … people are starting to turn on their furnaces,” Humphrey said.
Data compiled by the State Fire Marshal’s Office dating to 2006 shows there has never been such a high fire fatality rate in such a short period of time in those 16 years. In December 2017 — four days before Christmas — two fires on the same day claimed six people, including a family of five in Davenport.
In a bid to rally support for Cedar Rapids’ third try at a casino once the state’s moratorium on new gaming licenses expires in 2024, Linn County gaming interests have begun to bankroll the political campaigns of key state leaders and perhaps boost their influence in the Statehouse.
The Cedar Rapids Development Group PAC — the political action committee formed by backers of a potential Cedar Rapids casino — contributed $47,750 to Republican and Democratic candidates in the filing period that ended Oct. 14, just weeks before the Nov. 8 midterm elections, according to the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board.
The Cedar Rapids Development Group is a subsidiary of Peninsula Pacific made up of mostly local investors. The group has an agreement with the city of Cedar Rapids guaranteeing the city’s exclusive support through the gaming license application process until 2029.
The PAC formed after Iowa lawmakers earlier this year put the brakes on Cedar Rapids’ third try at securing a gaming license from the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission.
Have a good weekend everyone.
