(Council Bluffs, Iowa) – The Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office says a woman from Oakland was arrested Tuesday night, following a reported disturbance at a residence in the 400 block of S. Chautauqua, in Oakland. A Deputy made contact with a man who he had made contact with the night before, during a verbal disturbance. Authorities say 27-year-old Amanda Wheeler, of Oakland, was arrested for Domestic Abuse Assault on the parent of a child, and two counts of Child Endangerment with Substantial Risk. She remained held in the Pott. County Jail Wednesday (4/27), on a $2,300 bond.

And, 37-year-old Jonathan Keith Brown, of Council Bluffs, was arrested Tuesday afternoon, on a warrant for Probation Violation. He was taken into custody at the Sheriff’s Office after turning himself-in, and was booked into the Pott. County Jail.

(Radio Iowa) – Anytime you see or hear about a ground-breaking or a grand opening, do you ever wonder where those golden shovels or giant scissors for ribbon-cuttings come from? They were likely purchased through a central Iowa company whose founder is being named the Iowa Small Business Person of the Year by the U-S Small Business Administration. Kimberly Baeth  is president and owner of Golden Openings of Urbandale. “We are a preferred vendor for the White House. We do things for Oprah, Disney, Fortune 500 companies, colleges, universities — those are some of our main repeat customers,” Baeth says. “We grew 32% every year for 24 years. Last year we did 84%, phenomenal growth.”

The company was founded in 1991 as a one-stop-shop for ceremonial products for grand openings, ribbon cuttings and ground-breaking events. Over 25 years, Golden Openings has helped tens of thousands of businesses open their doors and make an impact in their communities. Before venturing off on her own, Baeth was working for a chamber of commerce when a new business asked for help with a ribbon cutting ceremony, but there were no giant scissors to be found. “I had my dad make a pair of wood scissors with razor blades that met and then our chamber phones started ringing off the hook. We couldn’t keep them in stock,” Baeth says. “We had Target wanting a pair of red and white ones. We had General Mills wanting a pair with all their logos and their cereals on it. Other chambers were calling to borrow them and they were dangerous. You could get cut, it just was crazy, but the demand was so high so I knew this could be a business.”

Owner Kimberly Baeth

While the Iowa business offers some 20-thousand ceremony-related products, things like balloons, banners, red carpets, shovels and hard hats, those specialty scissors remain one of the top sellers. “Now, there’s probably over 100 different kinds of scissors between gold, chrome,” Baeth says. “The smallest ones are six-inch. We have plastic ones that don’t cut for prisons and preschoolers, all the way up to the world’s largest scissors and they’re called 40-inch world’s largest scissors. Different colored handles, you can customize them.”

Golden Openings has 14 employees and has done business on every continent on the globe but one, and Baeth says she’s working to change that by supplying the ribbon and scissors for a marathon foot race on Antarctica. Baeth will represent Iowa at National Small Business Week activities next week.

(Radio Iowa) – The Glenwood Resource Center’s closure in 2024 will leave a large gap in that southwest Iowa community. The facility for people with intellectual disabilities is Mills County’s largest employer. Glenwood Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Rachel Reis says the community is beginning to have conversations on how to shift.  Reis says, “This may be a transition and a growth period for our county to kind of look at things a little differently, and to set ourselves up differently so we’re not so dependent on one large employer.”

Reis estimates more than 500 Glenwood-area residents’ jobs will be impacted. The center for people with severe intellectual disabilities has been in Glenwood for over 150 years. Mayor Ron Kohn (CONE) says he believes its closure could lead to many of its families and employees looking to new communities for support and jobs. “The possibility of a similar job opening up is not very likely,” Mayor Kohn says, “and so that presents a serious challenging environment for them to decide what their future is going to hold.”

Kohn says the community is already working to see what will take the care center’s place. He says it could be an opportunity for the town to grow and diversify. The state announced the plan to close the facility earlier this month after a U-S Department of Justice investigation found residents in the facility were subject to harmful experimentation and poor medical care.

(Creston, Iowa) – Officials with the Creston Police Department today (Wednesday), said 34-year-old Corry Donal Johnston, of Creston, was arrested April 20th at around 10-p.m., at the Ringgold County Sheriff’s Office. Johnston was taken into custody on an Adams County warrant, Union County warrants for:

Corry Donal Johnston (Ringgold Co. S/O photo)

Possession of Controlled Substance/2nd Offense – Methamphetamine; Driving while Barred; Possession of Drug Paraphernalia; Eluding-Speed in excess of 25mph over limit, and Participating in a felony or result in serious injury 2nd offense; and on Ringgold County warrants for:

• Dominion/Control of a firearm by a felon.
• Possession of Burglary tools
• Possession of a controlled substance/2nd offense
• Driving While Barred
• Providing False Identification information
• Poss. of Drug Paraphernalia, and
• Failure to Display a registration plate.

His bond in Ringgold County was set at $11,300. His cash/surety bond on the Union County charges was set at $9,300.  The Ringgold County Sheriff’s Office says a Deputy made contact with Johnston at the Casey’s General Store in Mount Ayr, and took him into custody.

(Radio Iowa) – The University of Northern Iowa’s gerontology program now has an entire house near campus where they can run a dementia simulation. Gerontology professor Elaine Eshbaugh says she has never heard of another simulation with the entire house — though there are some portable simulations. “So it might be like you have a briefcase with some gear and you take it to a nursing home, or a conference room and you allow people to use that gear and do tasks,” Eshbaugh says. “That’s wonderful. It’s especially wonderful because you can take at different places and, you know, expose different people to dementia simulation. This is really different because it’s a home-like environment.” She says the environment is key in teaching about the lives of dementia patients.

“What most people don’t realize is that four out of five people living with dementia — they live in the community just like you and I do. They live in a house, they live in an apartment, they live with friends or family or by themselves,” she explains, “So, this is a realistic portrait of what it’s like to have dementia.” Eshbaugh says those who go through the house are given gloves, glasses, and headphones to simulate having dementia. “The headphones are specially designed to stimulate your auditory senses and how they might interpret sound if you have dementia, and we simulate the vision changes that might occur that actually are changes in the brain,” according to Eshbaugh. “So what happens is your brain becomes less able to accurately digest the information that you’re receiving through your senses.”

Eshbaugh says it shows what friends, family members, and patients with dementia deal with every day. “You know when we say this is your house you’ve lived for 20 years, and the people who come in are like ‘wait I’ve never seen this house before,’ and then we say hey exactly that’s kind of the point. Because I have people with dementia who wake up every morning in a space that is unfamiliar to them even though they might have lived there for 30 years,” she says. Eshbaugh says they have nurses and doctors go through the house along with family and friends. She wants to see even more people who may come into contact with someone dealing with dementia go through it too.

“We’re talking about hairstylists, we’re talking about people who work at the grocery store, and we love to allow those people to experience what it’s like to have dementia. Because we think when someone comes in and is a customer and wants service they can be just a little bit more patient and a little bit more dementia friendly,” Eshbaugh says. Up to four guests may go through each 45-minute session. Eshbaugh said the sessions are continuously full, bringing in 30 to 40 people each week.

She says she originally was hoping to just get two dorm rooms to use for the simulation, so this has worked out great to have the full house.

(Red Oak, Iowa) – A man from Bellevue, NE, was arrested late Tuesday night in Red Oak, following a traffic stop. According to Red Oak Police, the traffic stop on a vehicle for a traffic infraction, was conducted near Highway 34 and Avenue G, at around 11:23-p.m. Upon further investigation, it was determined that 20-year-old Carlos Rodriguez-Gonzalez, was wanted on active ATF warrants out of Nebraska, for weapon offenses (Sale or transfer of a firearm to prohibited person) & Fugitive From Justice.

He was transported to the Montgomery County Jail and held without bond while awaiting extradition to Nebraska. Officers with the Red Oak P-D were assisted by deputies with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department, as well as the Montgomery County Communications Center.

(Red Oak, Iowa) — Sheriff’s deputies in Montgomery County, Tuesday afteroon, arrested a man from Council Bluffs. Christopher Brown was taken into custody at around 4:45-p.m., on active Montgomery County Warrant charging him with a Violation of Probation on an  original, Class-D Felony charge of second degree theft.

Brown was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on bond amounting to $20,000.

(Radio Iowa) – Republicans in the Iowa House and Senate have agreed to reduce the maximum duration of state unemployment benefits by about 39 percent. In January, Governor Kim Reynolds called on lawmakers to make the cut from 26 to 16 weeks — along with a one-week delay in delivering a person’s first unemployment check. Senator Jason Schultz of Schleswig says he and other Senate Republicans supported that one-week delay, but House Republicans would only vote to cut the number of weeks a person is eligible for unemployment.

“You take the vast amount of win that you can,” Schultz says. “You don’t always get everything that you want and we just decided that we would let the House have this one.” Businesses pay a per employee tax into a state trust fund that pays out unemployment benefits. Schultz says the reduction in how long someone may receive unemployment benefits should lead to a cut in that tax rate and leave businesses with more money to pay workers and hire new ones.

“Iowans who are unemployed, I believe they’re going to get into a job faster,” Schultz says. “The closer you are to the job market, from just being recently laid off, the more employable you are, with the mindset to get back into the workforce.” Laid off workers in most states are eligible for up to 26 weeks of unemployment compensation. The governor is indicating she’ll sign the bill to have Iowa join nine other states that offer a shorter duration in jobless benefits. The legislation also requires unemployed workers to more quickly accept a job offer that pays less — or lose benefits altogether.

“I just think we need to be doing everything we can to encourage people to stay in the workforce and stay in the game,” Reynolds says, “and so we’re going to look at everything we can to bolster that.” Democrats say Iowa’s Republican-controlled government is stooping to a new low that treats workers like public enemies and takes away earned unemployment benefits from those who lose a job through no fault of their own.

(Radio Iowa) – Meals from the Heartland has sponsored a “Unite for Ukraine” event to produce an estimated 300-thousand packaged meals. Several legislators, the governor and her staff and other members of the general public took shifts at HyVee’s conference center in West Des Moines over the past two days, standing along assembly lines to scoop up ingredients into bags. Meals from the Heartland executive director Greg DeHaai says hundreds of volunteers joined the effort.

“As you may heard, recently it’s been reported as many as five million Ukrainians have fled the country. This is about equivalent to the states of Nebraska and Iowa having their people flee those states,” he says, “not to mention the people in the country of Ukraine impacted by the ability to have their basic needs met.” After the war started, DeHaai says his organization started getting questions about how to help Ukraine, but couldn’t figure out the logistics.

“Fortunately, prayers were answered when Governor Reynolds and her staff were able to arrange for the air cargo freight of 24 pallats through the Ukrainian Consolate in Chicago,” DeHaair says. “I’m also happy to anounce that Fort Dodge based Decker (Truck Line) will be transporting the meals…at their expense to Chicago…They’ll be flown into Poland and into Ukraine on May 7.” HyVee donated 50-thousand dollars to cover the cost of the ingredients for “Taco Mac” and “Hearty Pack” meals.

“Taco Mac is a taco-flavored mac and cheese. It ‘s fortified with vitamins and soy protein,” DeHaair says, “and then our Hearty Pack is a rice-based meal that has vitamins and soy protein and dehydrated vegetables in it.” DeHaai spoke at a news conference yesterday (Tuesday) — you can hear the scooping in the background as volunteers filled the meal bags. Each box of 36 meal bags includes a note of encouragement, from Iowa to Ukraine.

(Radio Iowa) – This is Soil and Water Conservation Week in Iowa, with the theme this year, “Healthy Soil, Healthy Life.” Lynn Knutson is with the Hamilton County Soil and Water Conservation Service.  “Iowa Soil and Water Conservation Week is an opportunity to recognize the important conservation work that has been placed on the Iowa landscape,” Knutson says, “and bring attention to the ongoing work by farmers, landowners and residents to protect the state’s soil and water resources.”

Knutson says there are all sorts of services being offered to Iowans to help them conserve our soil and water. “Farmers can apply to receive some cost-share funding for things like cover crops, strip till, no till, grass waterways, buffer strips,” he says. “The USDA actually approves the work orders that meets the standards and then us as commissioners approve the work that meets the priorities for our county that have been set.”

There are soil and water conservation offices in all 99 Iowa counties. Iowa leads the nation in the continuous conservation reserve program buffer initiative with more than 600,000 acres. Statewide, there are more than 60 active watershed and water quality projects.