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Governor declares 7 counties state disaster areas

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Flooding in Mason City.

The governor has approved disaster proclamations for seven counties in response to severe weather and flooding that started June 7th.

The proclamations allows the use of state resources to help with the recovery in Allamakee, Bremer, Chickasaw, Cerro Gordo, Floyd, Howard and Winneshiek counties. The governor’s office says the only request they’ve had for help thus far is for the activation of the Iowa Individual Assistance Grant and Disaster Case Management programs.

Those programs provide grants of up to $5,000 to residents who meet income guidelines. The money can be used for home or car repairs, replacement of clothing or food and temporary housing expenses. Applications for the grants are available through the Iowa Department of Human Services.

 

Murder warrant issued in 2015 shooting in Des Moines

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Alf Freddie Clark (file photo)

A murder warrant was issued today for a man being held in Arizona as a material witness in a central Iowa murder.

Des Moines police issued the first-degree murder warrant for Alf Freddie Clark who was arrested Friday in Tucson, Arizona on the previously issued material witness warrant. Clark is wanted in the death of 36-year-old Tacono Conner of Des Moines. Connor was found shot to death in the hallway of an apartment on December 27th of 2015.

A woman, 37-year-old Amy Stolki was also shot, but survived. Des Moines police say they are working on extraditing Clark back to Iowa. They have not released any of the details of the investigation that led to issuing the murder warrant.

 

Nevada woman dies in Boone County accident

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A woman died in an accident between a car and pickup Sunday in central Iowa’s Boone County.

The Iowa State Patrol reports a pickup driven by 24-year-old Jordan Ihel of Polk City failed to stop at an intersection of a Boone County E-57 and Highway 169 and struck a car driven by 27-year-old Phillip Fleming of Nevada.

A passenger in the car, 26-year-old Alyssa August of Nevada, died in the accident. Fleming was lifeflighted to a Des Moines hospital. His condition is not available. Ihel was not injured.

The State Patrol no charges have been filed at this time as they continue investigating the accident.

 

Special inspections check trucks for issues along Iowa’s major roadways

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Traffic on Interstate 80 near Des Moines.

This is the last day of a special program conducted by the DOT’s Office of Motor Vehicle Enforcement to check the big rigs that roll across Iowa’s highways. Sergeant Blake Wittrock says it’s an international event called “Roadcheck.”

“They’re checking brake components, cargo securement, equipment with the truck and the trailer of the vehicles, as well as the paperwork with the driver. So, it’s the complete inspection, the most comprehensive one that we do,” Wittrock says.

There is a special emphasis on making sure the drivers are following the regulations for the amount of time they can be on the road. That involves a check of what’s called the ELD.

“It’s electronic logging device. So it’s the electronic system that’ sin the truck that’s hooked into the engine components, the brains of the truck. They are going to be using that as their log book,” Wittrock says. “And it will record their hours, their mileage, different documents if you will for the trip.” Wittrock says the electronic devices make it easier for truckers to keep track of their driving — and makes it easier to check on them to be sure they follow the rules.

He says commercial drivers can drive 11 hours of driving with three hours to do other tasks in a day, and then at there is a 10 hours off duty in what’s known as the sleeper or rest period. Another part of the Roadcheck is to work with drivers to educate them on how to spot and report human trafficking.

“When we do our inspections or conduct our safety inspections we are advising them what to look for when they are out there because they are in the trucks stops, they are on the road and they see things that we don’t always get to see, and we just encourage their assistance,” according to Wittrock. Wittrock says drivers are willing to help out and he says it helps build a little camaraderie between the officers and truckers.

“When people get inspected they kind of think it’s a bad thing. We’re just looking for compliance,” Wittrock says, “then we can also ask them to help us and work together as a team to combat this issue that’s out there, that’s moving up and down the roadways every day.” Each driver will be given a Truckers Against Trafficking wallet card which provides them with the Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline 888-3737-888 and some guidelines on what information to report.

Wittrock says officers do routine checks of trucks every day, but this is a little more concentrated over a 72-hour period along the major highways.

 

Faulty water filter system put thousands in southern Iowa under boil order

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Around 20,000 people in southern Iowa are still without drinkable water after the filtration system at the Creston Water Treatment Plant failed.

Southern Iowa Rural Water Association General(SIRWA) general manager, Dan McIntosh, says a small problem turned big quickly. “We’ve been having some trouble with it, but we’ve been limping through and it finally quit. It’s the membrane system,” McIntosh says. “We just got to the point were we could not produce good quality safe water and we didn’t want to take that chance.”

 McIntosh says they are in the ninth year of what should be a ten year life expectancy and they had already talked to the company about replacing the membranes — but now have to do it quicker than expected. McIntosh is not sure when the new membranes will arrive. SIRWA owns 79% of the water plant and the city of Creston owns the rest. Water is pulled from two lakes and treated and sent out to customers or sold to water systems in other communities.

McIntosh says the water can be used for everything but drinking unless it is boiled. “Boil it for at least a minute first — let it cool — and then use it. Anything for human consumption they need to boil it just to be safe,” McIntosh explains. He says the new membranes will cost around one million dollars. McIntosh says they hope to be able to determine why the old membranes gave out.

“We’ve got several engineers looking into this to see what the problem was,” according to McIntosh. “That’s the problem I don’t know, is what caused these membranes degradate as fast as they did.” McIntosh says he won’t even speculate on when they can get the potable water back until he gets more information from the membrane company.

Here are the communities served by the water plant:

Adams County: Nodaway, Prescott and surrounding rural areas
Clarke County: urray and surrounding rural areas west of Interstate 35 Decatur County – Grand River and surrounding rural areas west of Interstate 35
Madison County: Macksburg and surrounding rural areas
Ringgold County: Beaconsfield, Benton, Delphos, Diagonal, Ellston, Kellerton, Maloy, Mt. Ayr, Redding, Sun Valley, Tingley, and rural areas
Taylor County: Bedford, Blockton, Conway, Clearfield, Gravity, Lenox, Sharpsburg, and surrounding rural areas
Union County: Afton, Arispe, Cromwell, Kent, Lorimor, Shannon City, Thayer and surrounding rural areas

(Photo from the SIRWA website)

 

Review confirms ghost-written cases by former Plymouth County judge

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The state Judicial Building.

A independent review has confirmed a former Plymouth County judge did use attorney proposals for his final orders in some cases without consulting the other side.

The Iowa Judicial Branch conducted the investigation after retired judge Edward Jacobson admitted that he directed one of the lawyers to write the final ruling in contested trials a couple hundred times without consulting the other attorney. The investigation found that Jacobson inappropriately resolved at least 13 cases in this way. Most of the cases involved family law, but some were civil cases.

Jacobson said he was under a time crunch to complete the cases and never believed “he was doing anything improper.” He said one-sided rulings from attorneys was acommon practice among other District three judges — although the investigators found this not to be the case. He also said it was a common when practiced law in South Dakota before moving to Iowa. The independent reviewers were not asked to determine if Jacobson violated any laws or court rules.

The Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court has mandated additional training for all Iowa judges following the revelations from Jacobson

Here’s the full report: Jacobson-Independent-Review-PDF

Four applications for second medical marijuana manufacturing license under review

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The process is underway to select a second company to produce medical marijuana products in the state.

The end of May was the deadline for companies to file the paperwork with the Department of Public Health requesting a license, and Deputy Director Sarah Reisetter says they had more interest than the first time around. She says they received a notice of intent to apply for manufacturing licenses from eight entities and four followed through with applications. That compares to nine companies which indicated they would apply the first time and just one which did apply and received a license.

Reisetter says the time crunch between when the law was passed and the requirement to implement it kept more companies from seeking the first license. “We got those regulations written as quickly as we possibly could — but due to the requirement to have somebody license by December first — we were only able to provide potential applicants with four weeks to put their applications together,” Reisetter says. “So I think that compressed timeline in the fall of 2017 — and actually I heard from some potential applicants — that that was a problem for them.”

The applicants are asked a variety of questions about how they intend to grow the marijuana and how they will produce the medical marijuana products. “What products they intend to produce, what they are going to require in terms of qualifications for their employees, how they are going to transport the material form their facility to the dispensaries and to the laboratories. What they are going to do for waste disposal, what their security plans are,” Reisetter explains. She says the law requires them to keep the names of the applicants for the license confidential until a license is awarded.

The proposals now are in the hands of a review board. “After they review the applications they will score the applications and they will make a recommendation to the department about who they think is the most qualified applicant,” according to Reisetter. The Health Department will then award the second license on July 1st.

She says the manufacturer will have one year to make the product available, which will be July 1st of 2019. “Now there is nothing that will prohibit them from bringing the product to the market earlier if they are able to do that,” Reisetter says, “but we did give them the same time frame to get up and running as our first licensed manufacturer.”

MedPharm Iowa was awarded the first license to produce medical marijuana products and they are required to have them ready by December 1st of this year. The state has also issued licenses to dispensaries in Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Windsor Heights, Waterloo and Davenport to sell the products.

 

Some Iowans looking for cemetery plots in smaller towns to save money

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A lot of people bargain hunt before making a purchase — and that hunt now includes shopping for a final resting place.

Iowa State University regional planning expert Carlton Basmajian discovered the phenomenon of “cemetery shopping” while doing a land use study for the city of Perry’s cemetery.

He says the operators of the cemetery have noticed people coming there from Des Moines looking for a cheaper burial plot. Basmajian says being laid to rest in a smaller town has its advantages.

“They told us they’re seeing people come up and say “well it is half the price to buy a plot and half the price to open a grave than it is in metro Des Moines’,” Basmajian says. He is associate professor of community and regional planning and says the metro areas of the state have seen land developed all around cemeteries, leaving them will less room to expand. And he says the cities only revenue to run the cemeteries comes from selling the plots and services associated with them.

Basmajian says smaller rural towns don’t have the same land use problems and can charge less. “So you have an outmigration — it’s crazy — of people seeking these cheaper cemeteries. And Perry is not that far from the metro, it’s in Dallas County,” Basmajian says. It’s around 40 miles from Des Moines to Perry. Basmajian says Perry has looked at how to handle those from out of town who want to be buried there to be sure their budget doesn’t get overstretched.

He says they looked at the city charging more for those who come in from the outside. It would still be cheaper for people coming in and would provide some more funds for upkeep of the gravestones. Basmajian says upkeep at cemeteries can get expensive — especially for gravestones.

“They degrade. They are affected by the freeze-thaw cycle, they get run over by cars, they get toppled by vandals,” Basmajian explains, “and in a lot of cases, especially the older graves, there’s nobody left in the family to even contact and say what do you want to do. So, the city is left trying to prop these things back up.” He says as the cemeteries fill up, there are more stones to take care of and less opportunities from selling new plots to pay for the upkeep.

 

Trunk of historic white oak tree on display

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The cross section of the white oak.

A piece of what was once living history dating back before Iowa was a state is now on display in the atrium of the Wallace State Office Building in Des Moines. State Forestor Jeff Goerndt says it’s a cross section of a white oak tree.

“It’s about 442 years old — so it’s really a piece of natural history that we are able to hold onto,” Goerndt says. The tree grew along the Des Moines River north of Hartford in northeast Warren County. It fell down around 10 years ago and the trunk was finally recovered and two cross sections were cut. Goerndt says the rings of the tree were examined to estimate its age.

He says they took a bore and got a core sample from the three that is used to count the rings of the tree. Goerndt says trees don’t often grow a lot of rings in the first years, so they add ten or 15 years to the estimated age. Goerndt says trees this old are rare and they usually survive because they are hard to get to.

“Either they couldn’t be farmed or couldn’t be cleared because of difficulty of access,” according to Goerndt. “Or they’re actually poor quality trees that weren’t any good for lumber, so they weren’t logged. But they are getting more and more rate in Iowa.” He says you can learn a lot by looking at the cross section of the tree.

“You can see things like drought periods where the rings are tighter together and the trees weren’t growing as fast. You can see things like maybe a fire if there is a dark band within a tree cross section and the tree might have been damaged by a wildfire. You can see where a piece of metal might have been driven into the tree a hundred years ago — there might be a stained spot,” Goerndt says. The state forester says the white oaks can live a long time, but there is one tree that could end up having more growth rings.

“The only species that’s know in Iowa to outlive white oaks is red cedar,” Goerndt says. “Especially up in northeast Iowa. Up in some of the bluff country up there, there are some red cedar that are know to exceed five to 600 years old,” Goerndt says. You can view the white oak cross section at the Wallace State Office Building weekdays from 8 A.M. to 4 p.m. The other cross section of this white oak is at the Science Center of Iowa.

(Photo courtesy of the Iowa DNR featuring: DNR Acting Director Bruce Trautman, DNR Urban Forestry Program Coordinator Gabriele Edwards, Science Center of Iowa’s Mark Runkel, Jon Runkel, Science Center of Iowa’s Mark Rouw, and DNR State Forester Jeff Goerndt)

 

Judge temporarily blocks new abortion law

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A Polk County judge issued an injunction to Iowa’s new abortion law in a court hearing this morning,

Lawyers for both sides agreed to the injunction temporarily blocking the implementation of the law during the short hearing. Planned Parenthood, the ACLU of Iowa and the Emma Goldman Clinic requested the injunction while their lawsuit seeking to overturn the law makes its way through the courts. The law which bans abortions when a heartbeat can be detected was scheduled to take effect July first.

The lawyer representing the state says he agreed to put the law on hold because they’ll be able to argue the “merits of the case” sooner. Planned Parenthood and the ACLU sued Governor Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Board of Medicine — saying the law violates the Iowa Constitution.

ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis says her team is satisfied since the state didn’t argue against the injunction.

“At the end of the day, that resolves the uncertainty so women in Iowa don’t have to live with the burden of that uncertainty of knowing whether or not they’ll have abortion rights come July first,” Bettis says. It could take several months for the courts to make a final decision about the constitutionality of the law.

(Katarina Sostoric of Iowa Public Radio also contributed to this story)