This blog has moved to www.gazetteonline.com. Click on the opinion tab to read my latest updates.

Hop on the bus, North Liberty!

That was my first thought when I saw recent survey results that showed most North Libertarians who responded said they would use public transit if they had the chance.

Eighty-eight of the 106 people who bothered to take the survey said they’d ride the bus if they could. They listed preferred destinations such as downtown Iowa City, the Coral Ridge Mall and University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

The problem is, only a tiny fraction of North Liberty residents bothered to fill out the survey, though the city tried its best to promote it — sending out news releases, hosting the survey on their Web site and leaving copies at places around town. They even sent a reminder in the city water bill.

“I do think that the lack of response tells us right now that while there are some folks who are very interested in transit, there are a lot who aren’t thinking about it,” North Liberty City Administrator Ryan Heiar told me this week.

They should.

Right now, the only fixed-route option from North Liberty is a weekday Coralville Transit bus that runs between the community center and downtown Iowa City.

Heiar told me that bus carries 30 to 50 people from North Liberty in the morning, and brings around half as many home after 5 p.m.

With the number of cars on the road, there ought to be more people who could ride the bus — saving energy, freeing up a little road room.

Sure, there are other ride-share options — like demand response services. And nothing is stopping commuters now from arranging their own car pools.

But it wouldn’t be difficult to add another bus connecting North Liberty with neighboring cities. The thing is, it only makes sense if there is enough demand.

That’s hard to determine when fewer than one percent of North Liberty residents fill out the survey.

Next month, city councilors are expected to discuss what to do next, or if they even want to pursue the idea.

Adding another Coralville route to North Liberty would cost the city somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000. The money’s going to have to come from somewhere, so that means councilors need a better idea about potential use before they start talking about next year’s budget this fall.

“Is it feasible? Yes,” Heiar said. “Is it affordable? I think that’s a question of opinion.”

So speak up, you would-be bus riders. This is your stop.

I’ve done my share of griping about alcohol abuse in Iowa City.

But I’m feeling optimistic after spending time on the phone this week with University of Iowa Provost Wallace Loh.

Sure, he said, students are going to drink. The UI shouldn’t condone it, but they do need to recognize that it’s a fact of life. He threw out several ideas that wouldn’t just hold students accountable for dangerous drinking, but would educate them about responsible drinking, too.

“It’s not about temperance or abstinence or the age 21 issue,” he told me. “It’s about student success and student safety.”

The issue is a real monster to try to wrap your head around: UI students drink more, and more often, then their peers at many other institutions.

Dangerous drinking (Loh doesn’t like the term “binge drinking”) leads to lower grade point averages, problems with health and safety and can be a nuisance for the community at large.

Iowa City has been wrestling with this downward drinking spiral for years. There have been too many stabs at this issue to count.

There was yet another push this spring with the formation of the Partnership for Alcohol Safety, a group that includes UI and city officials, business owners (including bars), community organizations, medical professionals, police and students.

But Loh, who co-chairs the committee with Iowa City Mayor Regenia Bailey, was quick to point out that this is no study group. He wants action.

“It’s trial and error, experiment,” he said. “Let’s do things — let’s stop studying it.”

“This problem has been studied to death,” he said.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of articles with recommendations. What there is very little of is people taking action.”

So the partnership focuses its energies on specific, concrete ideas for gradually changing the culture, he said. The UI is stepping up with police overtime on downtown patrol, beefing up alcohol safety education training for freshmen and offering even more intensive training to at-risk groups.

They plan better communication with parents and cooperation with bar owners. They’ll schedule more Friday classes and fund more alternative activities, he said.

Loh’s goal: fewer alcohol-related emergency room admissions. A drop in blood alcohol levels, reduced incidents of alcohol-related assaults, fewer dropouts and more.

It’s going to take time, he admits. And he’s not under the illusion that binge-drinking rate is going to shrink to zero.

In other words, he’s taking seriously the issue of dangerous drinking, but he’s doing it with a healthy dose of realism.

That might be just the attitude it takes to gradually turn this problem around.

We all should be concerned when social and cultural barriers discourage a victim from reporting physical abuse, or even from seeking help.

Because while abuse survivors must take the step toward help and away from their abusers, there’s a lot that communities can do to make those steps less difficult.

Every person’s experience is different, of course, but it can be especially difficult for African-American women to report abuse. That’s true even though black women — across the country and here at home — have a higher-than-average risk of being abused by an intimate partner.

In fact, intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for black women ages 15 to 45, according to the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work.

The leading cause? I double-checked that statistic. I checked it again.

“It’s never come to the forefront of the community like it should,” The Rev. Orlando Dial, of Bethel AME Church in Iowa City, told me. “We have to stand and say these things are wrong.”

Dial, who has served on domestic violence prevention boards in Iowa City and Waterloo, said that’s the only way women will feel safe reporting violence.

“You have to have compassion and sensitivity,” he said. “You can’t push somebody to do something before they’re ready to do it. They just need to know that you’re there to help.”

A number of culturally specific barriers can make black women reluctant to report abuse, Delaney Dixon said last week at an Iowa City forum. She’s the Domestic Violence Intervention Program Youth and Outreach Services director.

Black women might be reluctant to report because they worry it plays into racist stereotypes. “Do I air my dirty laundry?” Dixon said victims ask themselves. “Do I air my community’s dirty laundry?”

A second barrier is whether the victim trusts police or other agencies enough to report the violence.

In local focus groups, she said, black women’s chief concern was that they would lose their children if they called police.

Another major concern is that they’d lose their place to live.

These kinds of issues should be the least of any victims’ concerns when trying to get out of an abusive relationship. But these barriers can’t be torn down in an emergency.

We must inoculate our communities by building relationships.

Only then will victims feel they have someplace to turn in a crisis.

Eight weeks after planting our victory garden, we are happily munching the fruits of our labors.

Oh, we’re a long way from homesteading. The radishes, for example — planted too many, too late and too close together — have the shape and consistency of a No. 2 pencil.

But we’ve had our share of successes.

The corn was shoulder high on the Fourth of July, and that eerie stillness you feel is a coming storm of tomatoes. The lettuce was delicious and abundant, and the nightly addition of salad to our dinner plates has done us some good.

But that darn Michelle Obama upstaged me again.

At a recent White House event, kids harvested 73 pounds of lettuce, 12 pounds of peas and one cucumber from her South Lawn garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in the 1940s.

Obama said she wants to help those kids, and all of us, understand the connection between our eating habits and our health.

Not to be outdone, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has signed off on weekly summer gardening workshops at the People’s Garden outside USDA’s Washington headquarters.

But the kitchen garden can be only one strategy in the fight for better eating. Not everyone has the time, space or the inclination to grow vegetables.

That’s one reason slow food advocates are ramping up efforts to change the way we feed our kids at school. The Slow Food USA organization is pushing for meaningful changes to the National School Lunch Program, which sets the standards for school lunches eaten by more than 30 million children each school day.

Iowa City slow-food guru Chef Kurt Michael Friese, a member of the Slow Food USA’s national board of directors, told me he wants schools to serve fresh, local foods, to get rid of on-site vending machines and go one better than just offering a few healthier choices — serve healthier food across the board.

We teach our kids about nutrition in health class, he said, then march them down to the cafeteria where we feed them cheap meats, over-processed carbohydrates and corn syrup.

He’s got a good point.

Naysayers say it would cost too much to serve healthier lunches, but I’m with Friese. It’s a matter of priorities.

“If you can think of anything in the world more important for the health of our children, I’ll be happy to sit down and listen,” he said.

How much is it worth to you to raise a healthier generation of kids?

This Independence Day, I’ve been thinking about freedom and democracy, of course. But I’ve also been thinking about language, and about the act of thinking itself.

My friend Tina started it. That poor hostage to bureaucracy has been through more visioning sessions than any human should have to endure.

Which led her recently to ask me a funny, rhetorical question: How did the Founding Fathers set up this country’s framework without a mission statement, strategic goals, or a single MBA between them?

I laughed, then I thought, she’s right.

How did they drill down to those unalienable rights while maintaining targeted efficiencies?

How did they calibrate the brand to incentivize end users’ empowerment? What were their metrics? Who was their target?

The big three founding documents – The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights – are still powerful today because of their ideas, not their jargon.

They’re the products of study and reflection, of argument and debate. But most importantly, they’re the products of thought.

It took Thomas Jefferson more than two weeks to write the Declaration of Independence, an elegant document that not only still makes sense 233 years later, it can give you chills. He wrote:

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

And then he did, laying out colonists’ grievances against old King George III in simple, declarative sentences: He has refused … He has forbidden … He has dissolved … He has obstructed … He has plundered …

And when the founders presented the document to the colonists, they didn’t hire consultants. They didn’t take a poll or target the message. Those Colonial Empty Nesters, the Fast Track Families, the Young Influentials all received the same Declaration – the one we celebrate today.

And today, every market segment is blurred into one big American mass, eating hamburgers, planting lawn chairs along parade routes and celebrating those founding principles.

We hold these truths to be self-evident – it’s not the visioning that matters.

It’s the vision.

Is Iowa City going to join the growing ranks of urban chicken communities?

Early signs are favorable.

Poultry proponents expected to hand over at last night’s city council meeting more than 700 signatures petitioning council members to allow chickens inside the city limits.

They want council members to approve up to five backyard hens, no roosters, in residential areas.

I can’t tell you how council members responded — the meeting happened after this column was put to bed — but it’s safe to say they won’t dismiss the idea out of hand.

I saw council member Amy Correia at a Saturday screening of “Mad City Chickens” — a documentary about Madison, Wis., chicken owners who pushed the city to allow the fowl there several years ago.

“I wasn’t really sure before going, but the movie made me think it’s a definite possibility,” Correia later told me. She said she’ll bring up the idea to council.

About 35 people attended the screening — kids, gray hairs, long hairs and others — evidence that more than a few people around here are interested in raising their birds.

I’ve never owned chickens, but I’ve baby-sat them for a friend. They are no more a nuisance than other common urban animals. You could favorably compare them to some — no offense, dogs.

Iowa City Animal Services Director Misha Goodman also has been looking into the idea, checking with other cities that allow backyard chickens.

There are more than you might think. According to the folks over at City Chicken, the birds are allowed in Des Moines, Sioux City and a few other Iowa towns, along with dozens of farther-flung cities as big as New York, Chicago, Albuquerque, N.M., and Portland, Ore.

Goodman wouldn’t comment yet this week on what her recommendations to council might be. She and Correia reminded me that nothing in city government happens overnight. So I’ll try to contain my excitement.

But I hope council keeps an open mind.

It wasn’t unusual for people to have chickens in town before World War II. In these modern times, people are becoming increasingly interested in knowing where their food comes from.

Raising your eggs is a logical step toward local and sustainable eating. Advocates say those homegrown eggs taste better, too.

You can find out more from IC Friends of Urban Chickens at www.iowacityurbanchickens.ning.com

Across the country, hearts went out this week to the people of Parkersburg who lost a community leader, hero and friend.

Our hearts go out to Ed Thomas’ family, and to the Aplington-Parkersburg students who learned too early in life that good guys don’t always win.

Thomas wasn’t only a great football coach. He was a great man. His senseless murder, apparently by a former player, has shaken people who never even knew him.

Even worse is that the incident happened at the top of the town’s long, hard climb back up from last year’s devastating tornado — a recovery during which Thomas often led the way.

It defies explanation.

Most of us try to teach our kids good things will happen if they work hard and live an honorable life.

We teach them that, even though we know it’s not always true. Too often, circumstances are out of your hands.

Still, for as long as we can, we try to give them a world that is orderly and logical and fair — more or less. In Parkersburg, that simpler world was ripped away last week in a makeshift high school weight room, giving us one more reason to mourn.

The kids in Parkersburg will need extra support as they struggle in coming days and weeks to make sense of this violent and unexplainable loss.

Doubtless, it will take a long time for many to recover their sense of safety. Their faith in right and wrong.

But, like the coach told a New York Times reporter last fall: “You get beat up, battered, but you get back up off the ground.”

It’s no coincidence that people are using Thomas’ own words to comfort each other as they try to understand his death.

He was a man whose commitment, faith and ethics have inspired more people than he ever could have known.

He taught his players to be leaders, to support each other. “Do the right thing,” he would say. They listened, because he walked the walk.

Thomas knew the importance of being a role model, and this week there has been so much evidence of his influence.

You hear it in his family’s compassion for the family of the man accused in his murder.

You see it in the ways the community has come together in its grief.

You feel it when former students, colleagues, neighbors and friends describe how much he taught and how he inspired them.

Even in the face of this tragedy, you have to stop and wonder at a single man who made so much difference for so many.

It’s enough to make you believe in the good guys after all.

In Wednesday’s column, I wrote about developing a better product to meet the local demand for payday loans.

Those short-term, high-interest loans are widely used in Iowa, but they can send cash strapped families into a financial tailspin.

In Des Moines, Citizens for Community Improvement and Bankers Trust partnered this spring to offer small dollar loans to low- and mid-income borrowers with less than stellar credit. I wondered if someone would be willing to do the same here.

Well, first thing this morning I got an e-mail from Scott Shook, Director of Horizons Consumer Credit Counseling Service.

He said that agency is willing to take an active role on this issue and he’s talking with staff this week about what that will look like.

The service already offers budget counseling and financial literacy programs in Iowa City/Coralville and in Cedar Rapids, and has been helping families in need for 26 years.

Stay tuned — I’ll publish more details as those plans develop.

Payday lenders promise a quick fix for a cash emergency.

But those short-term, high-interest loans are the rope that hangs many already-strapped households with unmanageable debt.

In 2007, Iowans took out more than 900,000 in payday loans. Almost half the borrowers took out these “emergency” loans at least a dozen times.

Industry advocates say the loans’ popularity is proof they serve an important need. But the Consumer Federation of America has compiled research that shows payday loan users often are worse off than similarly situated people who don’t take out that kind of loan — more likely to suffer financial hardship, to lose a conventional bank account, to also become delinquent on credit cards or file for bankruptcy.

Iowa legislators have taken several stabs at tightening the rules, as many states have, by limiting the number of loans borrowers can hold or the fees lenders can charge.

But while regulating the suppliers is important, we also have to take seriously the demand.

Enter Bankers Trust and Citizens for Community Improvement in Des Moines. They worked together this spring to offer 40 small-dollar loans to low- and midincome borrowers with bad credit.

CCI community organizer Chris Neubert told me it was flooded with more than 600 calls for information after announcing the program.

CCI offered credit counseling and worked with more than 100 applicants to develop a budget — a document Bankers Trust underwriters took into consideration when checking applications.

Most borrowers had credit scores under 580 and many used the money to get out of the payday loan cycle, Neubert said.

“We were seeing people with four, five, six payday loans for $500,” he said.

The bank loaned a total of $50,000 at 12 percent interest for terms of one to three years — compared with payday lenders’ two-week loans at an annual interest rate of 300 percent or greater.

CCI is looking for more partners to offer more loans in Des Moines. But there is clearly a demand here in the Corridor, too.

There are 18 licensed delayed-deposit lenders in Cedar Rapids, 10 in Iowa City/Coralville and three in Marion, according to the Iowa Division of Banking.

I wonder if anyone is willing to take the ball and start a similar program here.

It seems like a great opportunity not only to help people get through their latest financial emergency but also help them gain some traction on the road to financial security.