(Glenwood, Iowa) – The Mills County Sheriff’s Office reports two recent arrests. At around 1:30-a.m. today (Thursday), 31-year-ol Shane Jamal Peterson, of Council Bluffs, was arrested following a traffic stop on I-29 at the 39 mile marker. Peterson was charged with Driving Under Suspension, with a $300 bond. And, at around 7:30-p.m. Tuesday, 58-year-old John Paul Scott, of Council Bluffs, was arrested on a warrant for Theft in the 2nd Degree. Bond was set at $5,000.

One person suffered suspected minor injuries during an accident Tuesday afternoon, in Mills County. The Sheriff’s Office said a 2009 Pontiac driven by 21-year-old Linley Chickering, of Malvern, was traveling east on Highway 34 and entering a construction zone. A 2007 GMC truck driven by 58-year-old Dennis Greene, of Malvern, was stopped on the highway, waiting for the construction pilot car. The Pontiac hit the rear of a trailer being pulled by the truck. Chickering was transported to the hospital.

(Atlantic, Iowa) – The Cass County Board of Supervisors, Thursday (today), received a request for ARPA (Covid relief) funds to purchase a new pickup for the Dive Team, which has eight certified members. Eric Steffensen appeared before the board to make the request for $50,000. He said their current truck is 20-years old. Their current one-ton, 4 wheel-drive truck is used to respond to water incidents in southwest and western Iowa, as well as for training dives. Because the County’s first-half ARPA funds are already spoken for, the Board agreed they would take action on passing a Resolution for the Dive Team when the second-round/second-half funding is received. That could take six-months or more.

Board Chair Steve Baier….

The Board did approve a request for $10,000 in ARPA funds from the Cass County Emergency Management Agency, for two portable radios. Baier explained why this request was approved and the Dive Team’s request, was not.

In other business, the Cass County Supervisors approved a 2022 ISAC HIPPA contract. Cass County Treasurer Tracey J. Marshall requested the Board approved of a person for the potential position of driver’s license examiner or some other purpose that was not made clear, at a rate of $20 per hour, since the candidate is making $40 per hour in her current position. The Board was adamant that the person should be hired at $18/hour. Supervisor Mark O’Brien…

Marshall told Baier and Board they are responsible for her office being short-handed and forced to close to train new staff.

The Supervisors approved a rate of $18/hour for the candidate, with the required 90-day probationary period and the other requirements. Cass County Engineer Trent Wolken reported a low bid for a box-culvert construction project from Gus Construction of Casey, was $443,631.64. The culvert will installed on Boston Road, about one-half mile east of Olive Street. The Board passed a Resolution authorizing awarding of the project. They tabled action on the Natural Resources Conservation Service request for a pipe replacement project on Crooked Creek, due to the fact their was only one bidder that met the deadline, but the total bid was much higher than the engineer’s estimate. Labor alone in the bid came in at nearly $22,500. The piping was an additional $23,000.

The Supervisors approved a three-year employment contract for Engineer Wolken. And, they approved a contract for a Secondary Roads Department employee.

(Radio Iowa) – The Sioux County Sheriff’s Office will be hosting a National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) Basic School Resource Officer training course this summer. Sioux County School Resource Officer Waylon Pollema is part of the Iowa S-R-O Association and he looks forward to the training. “They have an advanced course, they have an adolescent mental health class they’ve got a supervisor one. They just they offer a ton of school resource officer training the best in the nation,” according to Pollema. Sioux Center is considering adding an S-R-O and Pollema says that’s another reason he thought it would be good to have the training in the area. The course is a forty-hour block of instruction designed for law enforcement officers and school safety professionals working with school administrators. Pollema says role of an SRO has three directives.

“You’d have a uniformed officer with a marked vehicle in front of the school, you’re helping the safety and security crisis planning and policy and stuff like that helping the school administration,” Pollema says. The second is teacher & law related education which Pollema says is when officers come into the classroom and help in the class with whatever the teacher wants. Pollema says the third part of the triad is the most important, and his personal favorite, counseling students. With school shootings in the news recently, Pollema says S-R-Os play a role, but the majority of planning for serious situations like that start at the local level.

“Obviously, school resource officers are involved in the planning and stuff like that in the school building center there’s a component to that but that’s a whole other thing where you can probably have a whole other week’s training to train an officer to do that,” he says. Pollema says NASRO provides top-notch training in all three of those concepts. The training course will be held August 8th-12th at the new Sioux Center Community High School.