(Guthrie Center, Iowa) – The Guthrie County Sheriff’s Office reports there were no serious injuries following two separate, recent single-vehicle accidents. Authorities say a car driven by 38-year-old Jarrod D. Majors, of Jefferson, hit a patch of ice and left Wagon Road at around 2:50-a.m., Tuesday. The car entered the ditch and rolled over. Majors complained of pain or possible injury. He was checked-out by Medics and cleared. The Sheriff’s Office said there had been heavy rain and freezing in the area, which likely contributed to the crash. Damage to Majors’ 2015 Chevy Impala was estimated at $20,000 (A total loss).

The other accident in Guthrie County happened at around 6:10-p.m. on Dec. 28th. Authorities say a 2015 Ford Fusion driven by 79-year-old John H. Thomas, of Coon Rapids, was traveling north on Chestnut Road, when Thomas swerved to avoid a deer on the road. The car went out of control and into the ditch, where it struck a tree stump and came to rest. Damage was estimated at $8,000.

(Radio Iowa) – A new study finds more than 45-percent of seriously injured drivers in Iowa had at least one drug in their system. Tim Brown is the director of Drugged Driving Research at the National Advanced Driving Simulator at the University of Iowa. Brown says the study will help better direct messaging to prevent people from driving impaired, but it shows all drivers should be aware of other motorists around them. “Your best bet is to be defensive and be aware of what else is going on,” Brown says. “If you see a vehicle that’s behaving oddly, you want to give it space and you don’t want to be in that zone around it if something bad happens.”

The top drugs found in Iowa drivers were alcohol and cannabinoids — from products that come from cannabis plants. Brown says one alarming trend revealed in the study was the increase in prescription drugs found. “Many, many medications out there do great things for treating disease states,” Brown says, “but they’re not safe to drive with and I think people just forget that.”

The study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration screened people involved in traffic crashes for drugs at seven Level One trauma centers nationally, including the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. It tested seriously injured drivers for drugs from August 2020 to July 2021.

(reporting by Natalie Krebs, Iowa Public Radio)

(Radio Iowa) – Businesses have had to do some adjusting with increased costs and the continued tight labor market. The C-E-O of the Ankeny-based Casey’s convenience stores, Darren Rebellez, says they decided to focus on employee turnover. “What we’ve done is we’ve found some ways through a number of different tactics of just making the job of running our stores a little simpler,” he says, “and at the same time focus on some things that employees were telling us that they want to see.” Rebellez said during his recent quarterly report, that focus has led to the highest employee engagement scores they’ve ever had as a company.

“so what that’s done is it’s reduced our turnover. And so we’ve seen sequential improvement in turnover every single month this year. And as a result of that, our overtime hours are down and our training hours are down,” Rebellez said. So our overtime in the second quarter was down about 22 percent. And our training hours are down 25 percent.” He said that allowed then to avoid cutting back store hours due to a lack of staff.

“We were able to maintain the hours of operating the store and just operating it more effectively. And at the same time pull out what I call those non-productive hours that we were spending on on overtime and on incremental training because we were turning over people so much,” he said. Rebellez made his comments during the recent investor update.

(Radio Iowa) – December is traditionally a very busy, profitable month for retailers, but the latest economic survey for Iowa and eight other Midwestern states shows another dip in the business barometer for the final month of 2022. Creighton University economist Ernie Goss says the state and regional economies fell further below growth neutral, or 50 on the zero-to-100 scale, during December, pointing to higher recession risk for 2023.

“These are the lowest readings we’ve recorded since the pandemic, in other words, that’s May of 2020,” Goss says. “So, things are not looking good. The economy is very likely to slow down significantly in the first half of 2023 and certainly the second half of 2023, so it was not a good signal.” Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota are all seeing employment levels now that exceed pre-pandemic levels, but the survey shows Iowa has yet to hit that mark. Goss says the region is still lagging several thousand jobs, but hiring numbers did rise during December.

“Companies are still hiring. Job additions, employment additions are not, I won’t call it strong but it’s surprising the strength we’re seeing there when everything else is not good,” Goss says. “But when we asked about applicants for job openings in the company, 63% reported a shortage of applicants for any job openings they had.” The future outlook is far from glowing, Goss says, as the overall Business Conditions Index has fallen for seven of the past nine months. Plus, he says about 60-percent of supply managers surveyed expect the economy to slump into a recession in 2023.

“We’re talking about really the higher, higher probability of a recession,” Goss says. “I think the probability of a recession is now well above 50%. We’re going to see slow-to-no-to-negative growth. The housing sector’s already in a recession, manufacturing is likely to enter a minor recession.” According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Iowa’s current labor force participation rate is two percentage points lower than before the pandemic. Goss says that indicates more than 34-thousand Iowans remain out of the workforce, thus contributing to the state’s labor shortage.