The Iowa Supreme Court on March 16 said Iowa Governor Terry Branstad's item-veto of a bill intended to keep Iowa Workforce Development (IWD) field offices open was unconstitutional.

"Simply stated, the legislature appropriated funds to IWD with strings attached, and our constitution does not permit the governor to cut the strings and spend the money differently," said the opinion authored by Justice Thomas Waterman, who was appointed by Branstad in February 2011.

However, it does not appear that the ruling would lead to the re-opening of the 36 field offices, which helped unemployed Iowans find jobs, write résumés, and prepare for interviews.

Faced with the temptation of handling thousands of dollars, an increasing number of city clerks in small-town Iowa have used taxpayer money to buy items including alcohol, laptop computers, gas grills, pumpkin pies, cat litter, and self-improvement books.

"To me, it's just very frustrating," said Carrie Kirchhoff, city clerk of the 433-resident town of Lewis in southwest Iowa. "It makes the rest of us clerks look bad that really try to do a good job for our cities. And then it gets the citizens all worked up, too. How do they go on in the same community and hold their head up? It's unreal."

The number of fraud cases in Iowa cities with populations of fewer than 700 has grown from seven cases from 2000 through 2005 to 32 cases from 2006 through 2011, said State Auditor David Vaudt.

When the public and private sector are combined, Iowa was fourth in the nation last year in a ranking of states most likely to have losses from major embezzlement cases, according to a study by Massachusetts-based risk-management company Marquet International.

A bill expected to be taken up the legislature's Government Oversight Committee aims to clamp down on the fraud through increased audits and oversight.

??The gap between the promises Iowa has made for public employees' retirement benefits and the money set aside to pay for them has grown to $5.7 billion - a 1,643-percent increase over 11 years, State Auditor David Vaudt said Monday.

"We had just a $327-million liability at the end of 2000. That has now grown to $5.7 billion, and that's equal almost to one year's general-fund budget," Vaudt said. "We're going to need substantial resources in the future to improve the funded status of this particular plan."

A report last year by State Budget Solutions, a national not-for-profit advocating for fundamental reform of state budgets, pegs Iowa's unfunded liability as even larger - $21.3 billion as of last March.

City and county officials expressed frustration and a sense of helplessness January 24 over the lack of money to repair crumbling roads and bridges.

The local-government leaders argued strenuously at a Transportation Day 2012 event at the Wallace State Office Building that it's time for the state to increase the gas tax to upgrade infrastructure. But Republican Governor Terry Branstad insisted the state must first show taxpayers it's being efficient with money it already has.

Keokuk County Supervisor Mike Hadley said his county will have to close five bridges this year - including bridges that connect rural and agricultural areas to market towns - because they're in such disrepair. He said rural America can't grow if it doesn't maintain its infrastructure.

"We can't cut any more pencils and paper clips," Hadley told the governor. "This has gone on too long. We have to act. Nobody wants to do this, but we have to ... . We can't continue to just close down our infrastructure, because it never reopens."