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The 57 Americans who've been held in quarantine at a Nebraska National Guard camp are preparing to leave Thursday and are in good health, a federal health official said.
They landed at Omaha's Eppley Airfield on Feb. 7, having flown from the Wuhan region of China, the center of the COVID-19 outbreak.
They soon were bused to Camp Ashland southwest of Omaha, where they've been biding their time with daily health checks, staying in hotel-style rooms and having no contact with soldiers in training there. The evacuees include more than a dozen children.
Republican leaders in the Iowa House and Senate still have not come to an agreement on K-12 school funding, even after a deadline has come and gone to finish it in the first 30 days of the legislative session.
The Senate is proposing a 2.1 percent funding increase. The House calls for 2.5 percent, which matches what Governor Kim Reynolds requested. House Speaker Pat Grassley says the conversation will continue.
And our caucus feels pretty strongly about the proposal the governor laid out. So we’d like to be at least at those levels. That’s the feedback we’re getting from the caucus right now.
School advocates say the delay gives less time to prepare budgets and hold public hearings. Grassley says schools know enough now to be working ahead.
Cities and counties wouldn’t be allowed to ban housing voucher discrimination under a bill that advanced in an Iowa Senate committee today.
Vouchers are federal housing assistance for low-income families. Des Moines, Iowa City, and Marion already have ordinances banning landlords from refusing tenants based on their source of income.
Landlords could still use typical criteria like criminal history to deny potential tenants. Democratic Senator Herman Quirmbach (quirm-bock) says the bill is unacceptable because it allows landlords to discriminate against poor people.
