In yesterday’s Clinton Herald, there was a story about the county unemployment rate surging from 6.6 percent in December, 2011 to 7.3 percent in January, 2012. That’s a big jump! Especially because the rest of the Iowa Workforce Department press release article states that the unemployment rate statewide fell two tenths from 5.6 to...
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I’ll expand on this later but in the meantime, there is a public forum today at the Eagle Point Lodge on the future of planning in the City of Clinton. There will be a number of breakout sessions and members of the public are encouraged to attend. Begins at 4:30. More in the Herald....
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So, let’s say we have a business in town; one of the city’s largest employers. In recent years they have spent tens of millions of dollars in improvements to their other facilities in town to make many of them state-of-the-art. But the company headquarters is located in an architectural landmark in the old downtown....
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According to the Chronicle of Higher Education a recent Department of Education audit found: Ashford University failed to return more than a million dollars in federal aid awarded to students who later withdrew, and may have violated a federal ban on incentive compensation for college recruiters, an audit released on Monday by the Education...
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The New York Times has posted an interactive map of the 2010 Census data that encompasses every census tract in America. If you are a certain kind of geek (raises hand) then this is going to cost you a couple of hours of productivity. Naturally, I zoomed right into Clinton, IA.
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Back in the glory days of the daily newspaper getting a scoop meant beating the competition by half-a-day or possibly by a full day. With newspaper boys screaming, “Extra!” on every corner, a good scoop meant thousands of additional newspaper sales. Thus, being first with a story had a huge bottom-line impact. Back in...
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Although I now proudly call Clinton home, I lived in Chicago for almost 11 years. It was the longest time I ever spent in one town in my life. (We moved around a bit when I was a kid.) And so, when people ask me where “I’m from” I ususally say, “I grew up...
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I’ll have some thoughts on this soon. But in the meantime, if you missed it on PBS, you should watch this. Ashford University is mentioned in here.
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If one wants to look for a model for Clinton to follow in pursuing economic development, one need only look 50 miles north to Dubuque. Dubuque, which in 1990 had 46,000 people employed in the city by the end of 2009 had grown that to 54,500. Moody’s ranked Dubuque the 22nd city in the...
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Over at Google4Clinton I’ll be posting a series on why the Google Fiber for Community initiative is important. Part 1 is A Brief History of the Internet, ’cause how can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. During the period of explosive growth in the Dot-Com era right through...
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