Marshalltown’s community college.
Medina says he received at least one letter that was far
nastier than the note that had kicked off everything. I
asked him if COVID and the current political climate had
made Iowa less nice. He said he and his employees don’t
talk politics in the restaurant for a reason.
“There’s people in Marshalltown with way different
points of view, and I respect everybody’s point of view,”
he says. “I have clientele here that have different party
affiliations than mine. They walk in with whatever gear or
whatever their shirt says, and I tell my employees, ‘We give
them the same five-star service as anybody else.’ ”Mayor Greer has found that type of neutral
ground increasingly hard to preserve. He laments how polit-
icized the pandemic has become in his city. He’s taken heat
over COVID—in emails, texts, and a whole lot of comments
lobbed at his mayoral Facebook page—from both sides.
“Half the people are mad as hell that school’s in session, the
other half are mad that it’s not. It’s been pretty ugly,” he says.
Three years in, Greer’s tenure has involved dealing with
one catastrophe after another in Marshalltown. One July
day in 2018 a tornado literally traveled down Main Street,felling the courthouse’s clock tower and ransacking the
historic district and downtown businesses, before damag-
ing a number of homes in one of Marshalltown’s low-
income neighborhoods. That made the derecho a surreal
and especially cruel sequel of sorts.
Much of the burden of responding to these disasters
has fallen on the shoulders of Kimberly Elder, emergency
management coordinator for Marshall County. She’s been
in her role since 2003, and every year, it seems, there are
more disasters and fewer resources to deal with them. For
much of 2020, she worked out of an office full of boxes.
Some of them are filled with PPE, the county’s stockpile
that she herself distributes to nursing homes and emer-
gency responders. Others are file boxes, brimming with
paperwork—the long tail of administrative business that
follows a disaster. Elder hasn’t had a vacation in more than
two years, and, as a one-woman shop, her biggest fear is
getting sick with COVID. Says Elder: “If I’m in the hospital,
like some of these people are, what are they going to do?”
Elder isn’t the only one mired in the process of recovery.
Some in the community have struggled more than oth-
ers to get timely relief from insurers and state agencies.
As Iowa cities go, Marshalltown is uniquely diverse, with
a population that is 30% Hispanic, according to recent
census data. Students in the Marshalltown school district
are native speakers of more than 40 different languages;
kindergartners in the district are 70% nonwhite. The
meatpacking plant helped give rise to this multicultural-
ism because its jobs have drawn different populations toThe backyard of a home in Cedar Rapids damaged by the
derecho. Designated as a “Tree City USA,” Cedar Rapids lost an
estimated 65% of its canopy in the storm.JOSEPH CRESS—IOWA CITY PRESS-CITIZEN/USA TODAY NETWORK/REUTERS