(Atlantic, Iowa) – The Trevor Frederickson Memorial Fund has donated a set of 3D shooting targets to the Atlantic Community Schools’ archery program.  The program which continues to grow each year offers students in 6^th through 12^th grade the opportunity to shoot at both bullseye and 3D tournaments.  This year the Atlantic High School became the State Champions and several students from both the middle school and high school division will be traveling to Salt Lake City, UT at the end of April to compete in the NASP Western Nationals.

Frederickson Fund spokesperson Melanie Petty (Trevor’s mom), said “We look forward to watching this group continue to grow in the sport for years to come.”

Pictured: Grant Petty and Coach Clint Roland (Photo & info. courtesy Melanie Petty)

(Johnston, Iowa) – Two law enforcement officers from Cass County are set to graduate Friday morning from the 46th DPS (Dept. of Public Safety) Basic Academy. The ceremony for recruits takes place in Johnston. According to Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Alex Dinkla, for the past 10-weeks, the 17 recruits – including Dustin Gelner and Tyler Shiels, from Cass County – have completed courses on the laws of arrest, search and seizure, defensive tactics, arrest techniques, precision driving, firearms, emergency management services, criminal law, human relations, physical fitness, human trafficking, motor vehicle law and many other law enforcement-related courses.

Following graduation, Dustin Gelner, a former Atlantic Police Officer, and Tyler Shiels, formerly with the Cass County Sheriff’s Department, will both become members of the Iowa State Patrol.

Guests speaker for the ceremony is IDPS Commissioner Stephen K. Bayens. The event is open to family members of the recruits.

(Radio Iowa) – There are some students at Iowa State University who can actually say beer is helping them get their degree. I-S-U professor Robert Brown has been brewing beer on his own for years and was approached by the Center for Crops Utilization Research to develop a class on the subject.  “So I scrambled working with the folks that approve courses at Iowa State and got it approved last November, and here we are teaching it,” Brown says. He got help from an I-S-U Alum who donated brewing equipment his company makes to get them going, and the crop center found space for the brewing lab.

“The students get a lecture once a week, and then they spend the whole afternoon in the laboratory,” Brown says. “And they are introduced to different kinds of equipment appropriate to whether it’s home brewing they are interested — or to look at commercial brewing of beer.” He admits some people question a beer brewing course on campus — but he says there’s a lot to it. “The course is called the science and practice of brewing. And I put science first because the students are asked to reach back to what they learned their freshman and sophomore years in chemistry and biology and microbiology, and things that they learned — especially those who are engineers — to heat transfer, thermal dynamics, and apply that to the brewing of the beers,” according to Brown.

Robert C. Brown (left) works alongside Jessica Brown (no relation) while brewing their Capsaicin Sour ale. (2021 photo via ISU Engineering News)

He says you can’t just throw the ingredients together and expect to get a good beer. It takes some time. “Working out how much grain and how much water to work into it,” he says. “So it really is for many of them I think a culmination of their studies at the university — whether it was food science or mechanical engineering.” Brown says the industry has changed so much in the last several years and there’s more happening now as well. “There’s talk about hard seltzers for example and non-alcoholic beers, so there’s a revolution that’s technology driven,” he says.

Brown says the talk also centers on whether to brew large batches of beer you can market nationwide, or focus on smaller batches to be sold locally. Students in the class do have to be 21. Brown says he takes a team approach to the brewing process. There are five students assigned to each of the four identical brew stations, and sometimes they are trying to determine if one brew was better than the other with the same recipe.

He started the brewing class in January and says the batches of beer have been improving.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa farmers could inadvertently find new markets for their commodities because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Chad Hart, an agricultural economist with Iowa State University, explains….”If Russia and Ukraine aren’t able to export, that means the rest of the world is searching for another place to buy grain from,” Hart says, “and it tends to drive actually more sales for us here out of the U.S.”

When Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1980, then-President Jimmy Carter imposed a grain embargo on Russia. Hart doubts the effectiveness of a similar embargo today. “Global markets have changed quite a bit since then and we won’t see the same impacts with the same policy moves,” Hart says, “given how time has changed agriculture over the last 40-some years.”

Agricultural exports from Russia and Ukraine have ground to a halt and the invasion is going to have certain impact on what Ukrainian farmers can produce this year. “On the wheat side, I would say the planting is already done, so it’s impacting the crop that was planted last fall that would be growing later on this spring, they plant a lot of winter wheat,” Hart says. “The corn that they would produce would be planted here when we plant our crops coming up in the next month or two and it’s that planting that is most in jeopardy.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24th, so it’s already been a little over a month.

(Radio Iowa) – A northwest Iowa man was killed in a two-vehicle accident on Monday afternoon. The Iowa State Patrol reports that at about 2:30 p.m., 71-year-old Curtis Brownmiller of Spencer was driving a 2017 Nissan westbound on Highway 18, east of Hull when he struck the back of a truck driven by 43-year-old Jeffrey Ver Hoef of Hull, which was stopped and waiting for traffic to clear before turning left.

Brownmiller was taken to the Sioux Center Health Hospital by ambulance, where he died from his injuries.

(Radio Iowa) – A woman who lived on the Meskwaki settlement near Tama died Monday after being attacked by a pack of dogs. The fatal attack took place in the area of Springs Road, which is a little more than a mile southeast of the Meskwaki Casino and south of U-S Highway 30, near the Iowa River. Details of the incident and the identity of the person who died have not yet been released.

All of the dogs suspected to have been involved in the incident have been killed, according to the Meskwaki Nation Police Department.

(Red Oak, Iowa) – A man from Mills County was arrested Monday evening, in Montgomery County. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office reports 38-year-old Garret Horgdal, of Henderson, was arrested at around 6:15-p.m., on an active Mills County warrant for Violation of Probation, on an original charge of Stalking/Harassment in the 1st Degree, and Harassment in the 2nd Degree. He was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $10,000 bond.

(Radio Iowa) – A bill introduced in the Iowa House would give developers planning to expand a large sports complex in eastern Iowa five million dollars in state tax breaks. Representative Gary Mohr, a Republican from Bettendorf, says the T-B-K Bank Sports complex is located right beside Interstate 80 at a Bettendorf exit. “It’s got indoor soccer fields, volleyball, outdoor baseball and softball. It’s been hugely successful. It attracts over a million people a year from seven states in the Midwest for competitive youth sports games,” Mohr says. “There’s a two-story bowling alley. It’s a wonderful addition to the Quad Cities.”

Developers have announced plans to spend 75 million dollars to build more baseball and softball fields to accommodate more tournaments, as well as a three-story indoor golf complex and an Olympic-sized swimming pool  “We’re so looking for the state sales tax rebate program that was so successful the first time we did this to match is on the new development,” Mohr says, “as the private investment is doubling the size of the facility.”

The rebate Mohr’s bill proposes would let the owners keep the sales taxes charged on purchases at the facility. Legislators approved a similar rebate for the existing sports complex and Mohr says hotels, restaurants and other businesses were built nearby to accommodate the crowds. “They leave a lot of dollars in the state of Iowa. (For)some of them, it’s the first time they get to Iowa, so it’s a huge attraction for our state,” Mohr says. “Iowa needs a sports (complex) like this and we’re thrilled they’re going to double the size of it.”

Legislators previously allowed the Bettendorf facility to keep two-and-a-half million dollars in sales tax rebate. Prospect Meadows in Marion — with nine outdoor baseball fields — got a two-and-a-half million dollar tax break, too.

(Radio Iowa) A state panel will meet later this (Tuesday) morning to review challenges to the nominating forms for EIGHT candidates for primary elections in June, including an incumbent who’s seeking an 11th term in office.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and five other candidates face challenges based on the signatures on their nominating petitions. The State Objection Panel is being asked to decide whether some of the people who signed the documents actually live in the areas where candidates had to collect signatures. The attorney general is one of the three members of the review panel, so it’s likely the lieutenant governor will take his place when Miller’s case is reviewed. In 2018, a Republican running for governor was booted from the ballot after several duplicate signatures were found. That left the final tally of nominating signatures short of what was required.

The nominating papers Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Abby Finkenauer and Mike Franken submitted are being challenged, plus an objection has been filed over the forms submitted by a Republican candidate who hopes to run against Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks in the June Primary. A Democrat from the Ankeny area has filed a challenge of Senate Republican Leader Jack Whitver’s paperwork for the primary, saying Whitver hasn’t listed the address of the home he intends to move into.

A spokesman for Whitver says there are no legal grounds for the complaint. He pointed to Iowa law, which requires candidates to establish a residence in the district they intend to represent 60 days before the GENERAL Election, not the June Primary. State Representative Jeff Shipley of Fairfield, a Republican, had the signatures of 53 people on his nominating petitions. Fifty signatures are required and a prominent Republican attorney has filed a challenge to some of those signatures.

hipley is planning to run for reelection in a new district — where he’d face another G-O-P incumbent. Finally, the State Objection Panel has been asked to decide whether a Democrat in northwest Iowa has lived in Iowa long enough to run for office.

(Radio Iowa) – A House committee has approved a plan to hike the pay for providing in-home care for Iowans with disabilities. The move comes as a federal review is expected to call for moving residents with disabilities out of state institutions in Glenwood and Woodward — and into home and community-based settings. Republican Representative Joel Fry of Osceola says the House G-O-P budget plan sets aside more than 14-and-a-half million dollars for that effort.

“I’m hopeful that that shows a genuine intent on the legislature to the federal government that we are serious about getting individuals into the communities well cared for,” Fry says, “and making sure the services exist in the communities for them.”

Representative John Forbes, a Democrat from Urbandale, says under this plan, it appears direct care workers could be paid about three dollars an hour more. “It gets them up in the $16, maybe $17 an hour range in some cases,” Forbes says.

But while Forbes and other Democrats say they support the pay increase for direct care workers, but they voted against the more than two billion dollar budget plan for the state’s public health and human services agencies. Democrats object to a COVID-related proposal added to the budget bill. It would let Iowa doctors prescribe a medication primarily used to treat parasites as an experimental treatment for patients on a ventilator or who are terminally ill.

Some Republican legislators say they’ve heard from family members who tried unsuccessfully to get ivermectin for loved ones hospitalized with COVID. A recent study found early use of the drug by high risk hospital patients with COVID did not stop them from being seriously ill.