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ISU student sees the world in summer of research

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Chanel Vidal measured structural patterns and sedimentary features in the Deccan Traps in India

Classes started Monday at most of Iowa’s colleges and universities and it’s unlikely any student had a more adventurous summer than Iowa State University sophomore Chanel Vidal.

The geology major from Iowa City spent one week on a research vessel on the Atlantic Ocean traveling Barbados, six weeks studying in India, and another few weeks gathering gas samples from an active volcano on the Canary Islands.

“Being able to be out on the ocean in India, obviously for my cruise, and in Spain kind of gave me an idea of what earth is really like,” Vidal said. “Seventy-percent of earth is covered by water, so it just kind of gave me a more realistic perspective of what I’m dealing with , with earth, when I’m studying geology.” Vidal studied three different fields of geology over the course of this summer.

In the Canary Islands, Vidal and her peers hiked Mount Teide, an active volcano, collecting gas samples to study carbon dioxide emissions.

“I am so much more excited to be in my degree program now because I see that I have so many opportunities, different fields I could go into, different places I could travel, and cool people I can meet through my field. So, it just reaffirmed my passion for geology,” Vidal said.

Following her time in Ames, Vidal hopes to eventually land a job with NASA – combining her loves of working on a team and exploring the mysteries of geology and space.

“The ultimate dream is to be an astronaut because that is the epitome of studying space, geology, and working in teams. But, if I can be part of any planetary geology research or any kind of research with NASA, I will be so happy,” Vidal said.

Read more about Vidal’s whirlwind summer here:

https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2018/08/20/chanel-vidal

(Photos courtesy of Chanel Vidal)

 

IRS reminding you again to review your paycheck witholding

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The Internal Revenue Service is again asking you to make sure the right amount of taxes are being taken out of your paycheck.

IRS spokesman, Chris Miller, says it’s important to look at the numbers now. “Time is running out for taxpayers to do a paycheck checkup. To check their withholding yet this year — to make sure the right amount of tax is being withheld from their paycheck for their situation,” Miller says. Miller says if you find a problem, there are still a few months to adjust your withholding amount to fix it.

“Doing a paycheck checkup now is going to help those taxpayers avoid a potential unwelcome surprise at tax time,” according to Miller. “And that could be an unexpected tax bill and a penalty. Or it could be a refund that’s unnecessarily large.”   He says it’s better for you to not get a big refund, because you can use that money throughout the year.

Miller says they made an earlier push for everyone to check their withholding after the new tax law went into effect. “The new tax law will change the way many of us calculate our taxes. And it also has changed the amount of tax our employers are withholding from our paychecks,” Miller explains. He says those with more complicated tax returns are the ones who most need to check their withholding.

Miller says that includes two-income households, those with two or more jobs at a time, those who have had a job only part of the year, those who claim the child tax credit or itemize deductions in 2017 are all some who may see differences. Miller says they know that many people haven’t looked at their withholding since the tax law changed. He says it is easy to do.

“Just go to our website www.irs.gov and click on the link to do a paycheck checkup, or search for the withholding calculator,” Miller says. “You will need last year’s tax return, and a copy of your most recent pay stub.” Miller says there are still several months left to allow you to adjust your withholding and make up for any imbalance. But he says if you wait — you could run out of time to make a correction that would make a difference.

Two-year-old who shot himself at Clive hotel expected to be released from hospital

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Police have released the names of the parents of a child who shot himself at a hotel in a Des Moines suburb this weekend.

Clive police say the parents of the two-year-old are 29-year-old Jonathan Hauser and 28-year-old Kylie Harvey of Council Bluffs. The investigation determined the child found a .45 caliber handgun in a piece of luggage and shot himself through the upper chest and neck Sunday morning. Police say the child’s condition is improving and he is expected to be released from the hospital soon.

Clive police say Hauser, the boy’s father,  has a permit to carry the gun from Pottawattamie County. Detectives are working with the Department of Human Services and the Polk County Attorney and say they will make a determination on any charges once the instigation is complete.

 

State unemployment rate now tied for second lowest nationwide

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Iowa Workforce Development employment numbers.

Iowa’s unemployment dropped down to 2.6% in July. Iowa Workforce Development spokesman, Cory Kelly, says that’s down from 2.7% in June.

“That puts Iowa tied with North Dakota for second lowest unemployment rate in the country — and an 18-year low — we haven’t seen this since July of 2000,” according to Kelly. “So, we’re sitting in an interesting spot here.”

Kelly says it is hard to tell if the rate has hit as low as it can go.

“Number one in the nation is Hawaii. They are sitting at two-point-one percent, so clearly environments can go lower than we are now. We’ll just have to see how it all shakes out,” Kelly says. The number of working Iowans is estimated to have increased by 5,200 in July. Manufacturing led the way in new jobs.

“Thirteen-hundred over the month, following another moderate gain of 900 jobs in June,” Kelly says of the manufacturing sector. “Also the financial activity sector added 600 jobs in June and continues to expand its footprint in the Iowa economy.” The construction industry had a small gain if 300 jobs — but is was the sixth consecutive month the industry added jobs.

The negative side of the job market is in retail “We saw retail shed the most jobs in July — down 3,000 — and was responsible for all the losses in trade and transportation,” Kelly says. Kelly says retail has been trending down in jobs since the start of the year as store closings were announced across the state.

“We expect that to continue, or it may continue as online sales continue to gain in popularity around the nation,” Kelly says. The state unemployment rate in July of last year was 3.1%. The U.S. unemployment rate was 3.9% percent in July.

 

School districts still looking for teachers as the opening day bell nears

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Thousands of kids will soon be heading back to school with their backpacks and school supplies — but some school districts are still scrambling to find teachers for some classes.

Teacher preparation consultant, Larry Bice, with the Iowa Department of Education says it is hard to nail down the exact number of teachers still needed. He does know there are key areas that have shortages. “For instance, physics, family and consumer science, agriculture education, those things like that, we have a good handle on how many job postings there are and how many people there are finishing programs. And so we can determine a relative shortage — a numerical shortage — for those content fields,” Bice says.

He says many of the districts still looking for teachers are smaller. “We’ve got a lot of communities that have 300, 400 people who live in those communities and it is really hard to get a teach, especially a new teacher, to move to those communities. That one though, we just don’t have a good handle on the data yet,” Bice says.

Bice says they know based on a federal measuring stick that the special education teaching jobs have been hard to fill for many years. “If we break it down into certain areas, things like teachers of visually impaired students, teachers of hearing impaired students are always at the top, we don’t even make them in Iowa,” Bice says. “But then the other special education licenses that we have — we always have a shortage of those.”

Bice says the job postings give some idea of how many openings there are, but he says you can’t get an exact count from them. He says that’s not the best way to track, because if a teacher retires at one school and then someone leaves to take that spot, that school has to advertise for a new teacher, and if a teacher leaves a third school to fill the spot at the second, then it can look like there are more job postings than there are positions.

Also adding to the shortage is a drop in new teachers entering the market. “I can tell you that the number of teachers that we produce in the state of Iowa has dropped over the last ten years — specifically over the last four or five years,” Bice says. “But that’s also a national trend. We just don’t produce as many teachers as we used to.” What happens if classes are ready to start and they don’t have enough teachers?

“They either don’t offer the course — which is horrible — or there are options. And one option that we have in Iowa is Iowa Learning Online, which is run through the Department of Ed, but they don’t teach it. You can take certain courses online,” Bice says. For some of the larger districts, teachers move around to different classrooms.

“Special education teachers, music teachers, often will teach in two or even three different buildings on different days,” he says. “So there are lots of ways that principals and superintendents are trying to meet the needs of their students within this shortage of teachers.” In some of the worst cases, schools get special licenses for teachers to fill a subject need.

“Let’s say a person is teaching math and has been working on getting a physics endorsement but has only 75 percent of the course work finished. That person can get an emergency license to teach physics,” Bice says. “It’s a conditional license and the condition is that the person has a year or two years to finish that course work and keep that license.”

Bice says Iowa is above the national average in retaining approximately 70% of its teachers in a five-year period. The national average is around 50%.

 

Rainfall pattern leaves state green on the top, brown on the bottom

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The first half of August hasn’t produced enough rainfall to help the area of the state that’s suffering the most from dry conditions.

DNR Hydrology Resources Coordinator, Tim Hall, keeps an eye on the midwest drought monitor, which put out a new report today. “Things are creeping a little bit drier and a little bit worse on the drought monitor,” Hall says. “Not a whole lot of change — but the change that was is on the drier side. So, it’s not getting any better yet.”

The water situation is dramatically different from the top of the state where lawns are green and growing — to the bottom of the state — where the grass is brown and crunchy. “It’s a very, very sharp diving line that almost runs right along I-80 between areas that are way below normal for the first two weeks of August, and areas that are way above normal,” Hall says. “So, it’s really a north-south wet-dry pattern that we’ve been in for quite awhile here.”

The drought map shows extreme to moderate drought conditions in south-central and southeast Iowa. Hall says there haven’t been many changes in that area of the state. “Those folks down there in southeast Iowa have been dealing with below normal precipitation for probably two years now,” according to Hall. “You go back 12 months and there are areas down there that are 15 or more inches below normal for the last 12 months. So, it’s an ongoing issue for them.” Hall says the positive side of the drought in that area is their drinking water supplies haven’t suffered.

“Fortunately in many places in southern Iowa individuals get their drinking water through rural water systems which pull out of some of the lakes. So, we haven’t seen a lot of drinking water shortages across that part of the state,” Hall says. “So, on a drinking water side it’s okay. On an agricultural side — clearly those folks could use a lot of rain.” Hall says we are unfortunately getting into the time of the crop development where it may be too late for rain to help in that area. He says the drinking water situation would be a lot different if the northern part of the state was dry.

“The part of the state that’s the most vulnerable to shallow groundwater issues is the northwest part of the state, and fortunately they’ve had pretty healthy rainfall this year,” Hall explains. “Had the corners of the state been flip-flopped — instead of dryness in southeast Iowa, if it had been dryness in northwest Iowa — I think the situation would be much more critical than it is now.”

Hall says that’s no consolation to the farmers in the southern part of the state who need rain. He says they will continue to watch the water situation, as precipitation always drops off as we head into the fall months, and that could make things worse.

 

State plan for Volkswagen settlement will upgrade or replace engines in vehicles

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The state has completed its plan for spending millions of dollars from the settlement with Volkswagen after the company rigged some vehicles to show they were emitting less pollution into the air.

The funds were approved in 2016 and the DOT’s Angela Poole says Iowa has been getting input and spent several months putting together a plan. “In the settlement Volkswagen was required to put $2.9 billion into an environmental mitigation trust. And out of that trust, Iowa is going to receive 21 million dollars,” Poole says. “And we can’t just spend it on anything we’d like — they actually have 21 mitigation actions.”

Iowa’s plan includes upgrading or replacing a wide variety of vehicles with engines that release less nitrous oxide (NOx) into the environment. School and transit buses are one category in the plan. “Looking at older diesel engines and replacing the engines or the actual vehicle itself,” Poole says.

Other parts of the plan would target delivery trucks, train locomotives, fork lifts and even tug boats that operate on Iowa rivers. “We actually have some strong interest in helping replace those (tugboat) engines,” Poole says. “They are very expensive, so this opens up an opportunity for those operators.” Poole says the money will be awarded in a competitive grant system, and they recipients will also be required to provide some funding.

“We’re going to put out a request for applications, most likely later this fall,” according to Poole. “We are going to have three funding cycles. We’re going to have ten years to spend the money — so the first year we are going to start asking for applications this fall and we are only going to spend a third of the money.” She says they will then spend one third of the remaining money in each of the other two more cycles. There is no requirement for the amount of emissions they must reduce when spending the money — but Poole says they will be placing some priorities when scoring the grant applications.

“We’re going to look at counties that have higher NOx emission measurements based on the E-P-A’s national emissions inventory. We’ll score projects higher if they are in counties where we had an excess of those VW vehicles So, if there is a county that had more of those vehicles in there, then we are going to mitigate what those vehicles did within that county,” she explains. “We are also going to be looking at vulnerable populations — people that are located within more industrialized urban areas.” Poole says they will combine this money with some other similar programs and they are excited about the wide range of vehicles and areas where they can help reduce emissions.

“It’s going to be fun to see how this all plays out,” Poole says. Poole says the guidelines allow a percentage of the money to be spent in administering the program, but they have decided to not use that and put all the money toward the mitigation programs. You can find out more about the program by going to the Iowa’s Volkswagen settlement website at: www.iowadot.gov/vwsettlement.

 

Transportation Commission cuts out rules governing traffic cameras

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Speed cameras in Cedar Rapids.

The Department of Transportation rules governing speed cameras that led to a lawsuit against the state are now off the books.

DOT Director of Traffic and Safety Steve Gent says the Transportation Commission took action at its meeting Tuesday. “The commission approved rescinding the automated traffic enforcement rules that the DOT worked with the Iowa Legislature to get in place to provide some oversight on the automated cameras around the state,” Gent says.

TheDOT  had ordered some cameras turned off under the rules issued in 2015. The Iowa Supreme Court ruled on April 27th of this year that the doesn’t have the authority to stop cities from using traffic cameras along interstates. Gent says the commission took action to comply with the ruling.

“This is really just the paperwork of trying to rescind those rules once we got that ruling,” he says. The said the traffic cameras rules were designed to ensure the highways were safe — and that goal hasn’t changed.

“Going forward we’ll gladly work with any city or county that wants to put automated enforcement cameras out on the primary highway system,” Gent says. “Certainly they’ll be some minor things…we’ll make sure the roadway is safe, make sure when they are implementing a system putting devices on a system that they are using proper traffic control. Some of those general things to keep everybody safe.”

He says the cameras that hange over the roadway don’t create much concern after they are installed because they don’t move. The moveable cameras raise more safety concerns. “It’s either a vehicle with a camera in it or a trailer. But we’ll accommodate either type of those,” Gent says. Gent says any change in the regulation of the cameras is now up to lawmakers to decide.

“That is totally up to legislators. The Iowa DOT, we are always available to answer questions — but we will absolutely not take any proposals to the legislature,” according to Gent. Iowa Lawmakers have tried for several years to pass a ban or other types of regulation on the traffic cameras without any success.

 

Waterloo men accused of illegally hunting deer

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Two Black Hawk County men are facing 14 charges for allegedly taking two deer out of season.

Iowa Department of Natural Resources conservation officer, Dakota Drish, says Waterloo police called him after officers found the men on the east side of the city. “They were on routine patrol and noticed a car that was illegally parked along side the road if you will. And the vehicle was running and they got out to investigate — and that’s when they noticed the illegal activity,” Drish says.

Thirty-one-year-old Paul Lu and 19-year-old Kyaw Wahny, both of Waterloo were found to have two male deer. They are each charged with: shooting firearm over water, highway or railroad right-of-way; hunting deer without a valid license; hunting without a valid hunting license; hunting without paying the habitat fee; taking deer out of season; taking deer with a prohibited rifle. They were also both given a warning for using an automobile and artificial light to hunt deer.

Drish says it was 1:26 in the morning and they believe the two men used flashlights to spot and shoot the deer in the dark. “We run into this quite often as the fall nears. They’ll use flashlights where the deer or raccoon or any other type of animal — their eyes light up and basically glow in the dark — and these subjects are able to harvest these animals illegally after the legal shooting hours and outside the season that way,” according to Drish. He credits the Waterloo officers with seeing the possible violation and calling him.

“It helps us tremendously when you have other agencies that are diligent when they run upon these types of cases and contact us and are able to work with these types of investigations,” Drish says. “So, the Waterloo Police Department did a phenomenal job in this case in particular.”

The antlers on the deer were still in velvet, which means that they had not fully completed their development.  Drish says the DNR is asking each man to pay $4,000 in restitution based on the size of the deer antlers. “On a deer that’s under 150 inches like this — the maximum that the state could be reimbursed is $10,000,” Drish explains. The men face other charges in the case of $2,244 dollars.

The two men are scheduled to appear in court today (Wednesday).

 

New website and advice on what to look for in search for Mollie Tibbetts

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Investigators in the disappearance of Mollie Tibbetts of Brooklyn gave an update on the search for the missing University of Iowa student today.

Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation assistant director Mitch Mortvedt asked again for any information people may have in the case and says they have a new website where you can go if you know something. “It is possible that Mollie came into contact with someone who has caused her harm. This person may not be a member of our community — but likely has some familiarity with the area,” Mortvedt says.

Mortvedt asks anyone with any information to go to the website: findingmollie.iowa.gov to leave a tip. He also today asked everyone to be on the lookout for someone who may’ve started acting different on July 18th — the day Tibbetts was last seen. He says there are several things to look for. “Change in normal routine. Which might include missing school, work or routine engagements without plausible explanation,” Mortvedt says. “A vehicle unexpectedly taken to a repair shop or sold or disposed of. Unexpected or intensive cleaning of a vehicle, possibly at an unusual time of day or night. Unexplained lack of contact or inability to get in touch with someone you knew on the evening of July 18th into the morning of July 19th.”

Mortvedt says if you notice any of these things, you should report them. “We invite you to visit the site findingmollie.iowa.gov. “We hope that the visual aids placed up here today and on the webpage will take you back to Wednesday July 18th,” according to Mortvedt. ” We hope the locations highlighted will jog your memories and hope you to recall important details about that day.”
DCI Special Agent Richard Rahn took questions and was asked about the locations they have highlighted.

“No specific reasons for those certain areas, but we are hoping that people will look at the map — again — to help jog their memory, basically,” Rahn says. Rahn says they have not ruled anything out and he says they are still characterizing Tibbetts; disappearance as a missing persons case. He says the number of tips coming in has not dropped off since they started the investigation.

“I can tell you that the investigative team has received in excess of 15-hundred…tips and that continues to climb. I can tell you that as an investigative team we’ve conducted over 500-plus interviews in this investigation thus far. I can tell you also that the Crimstoppers have gotten the reward up to I think $366,414,” Rahn says. Rahn again declined to talk about anything more specific to the investigation — such as the people they have interviewed or what they think may’ve happened.

“We want to keep the investigation — protect the integrity of it. And so it is not something that we do with the DCI. We just don’t provide the information on the investigation as it is ongoing,”Rahn explains. “And so, that’s why we emphasize if they think they know something, certainly provide it to us,” Rhan says.

Rahn says it continues to be a joint investigation with state, local and federal officers and they will continue working with the same goal of finding Tibbetts.