(Atlantic, Iowa) – When the Cass County Board of Supervisors meet 9-a.m. Tuesday, April 19th, one of the topics up for discussion and/or possible action, is a proposal/request to have Cass County becoming a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary County. Supervisor’s Board Chair Steve Baier tells KJAN News the issue was brought up during the County Republican Forum held April 4th. Baier says “It was suggested at that time that they get language being used in other counties across the State. Phil Hetrick got the information, and [Supervisor] Mark O’Brien is managing” [the matter].

The Iowa Firearms Coalition says Iowa adopted “shall issue” Permits to Carry Weapons in 2010 and became a “constitutional carry” state in 2021, but is one of only six states that do not recognize Second Amendment rights in their constitutions. More than a dozen southwest Iowa county Boards of Supervisors have chosen to make their county’s a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary. A total of 36 out of 99 Iowa counties have made the same decision. Those that haven’t include Cass, Adair, Harrison, Shelby and Audubon Counties.

Iowa 2nd Amendment Sanctuary Counties (as of 4/15/22)

If approved, a Second Amendment sanctuary, also known as a gun sanctuary, would prohibit or impede the enforcement of certain gun control measures perceived as a violation of the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms – including universal gun background checks.

The movement for second amendment sanctuaries spread in 2018 following multiple high profile mass shootings, which advocates then called for more rigorous gun control laws.

Across the country, more than a thousand local governments have declared themselves second amendment sanctuaries, meaning they have no intent of following federal gun control measures. However, many critics agree second amendment sanctuaries will not hold up in court.

In other business, the Cass County Supervisors will discuss and/or act on: ARPA funding for daycare facilities; a Resolution for approval of the Cass County 5-year Construction Program, and a Resolution of ARPA disbursements.

They’ll receive a report from Cass County Engineer Trent Wolken with regard to Secondary Roads Department Activities, and other reports. The Cass County Supervisor’s meeting takes place in the Boardroom on the main floor of the Courthouse, in Atlantic.

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Supreme Court has reversed a district court ruling — and U.S. Senate candidate Abby Finkenauer’s name will be listed on the June Primary ballot. The Iowa Supreme Court has rejected the challenge two Republicans filed to three signatures on Finkenauer’s nominating petitions. The proper date was not listed on the signature lines. If the Supreme Court had ruled the three signatures were invalid, Finkenauer would not have had enough signatures to qualify for the Primary ballot.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court said just last year the legislature passed a law outlining the specific reasons for rejecting signatures on nominating petitions, but that law did not address missing or incorrect dates on the subject line.

Election officials must mail absentee ballots to overseas voters by April 23rd. The secretary of state’s office indicated Monday at 5 p.m. was the deadline for printing the ballots. If the Supreme Court’s decision had been delayed, the district court judge’s ruling would have prevented Finkenauer’s name from being listed on ballots. The Iowa Supreme Court justices just heard arguments from attorneys representing the two sides in this case on Wednesday.

U.S. Senate candidate Abby Finkenauer says today’s (Friday’s) unanimous decision from the Iowa Supreme Court shows she met every requirement to be on the Democratic Primary ballot. Finkenauer says the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision is a victory over an attack “orchestrated by Washington Republicans and allies of Senator Grassley.” Finkenauer is one of three Democrats vying for a spot on the General Election ballot to challenge Grassley’s bid for reelection.

Finkenauer says Washington elites tried to undermine the democratic process to save Grassley from having to face her in November. Alan Ostergren is the attorney who represented Republicans challenging three signatures on Finkenauer’s nominating petition. He says the only reason the issues were litigated is because Finkenauer barely turned in enough signatures.

Ostergren says the Iowa legislature needs to pass a law making it clear what must be on a nominating petition and what the consequences are for failing to have that information present.

(Radio Iowa) – The legislature has sent the governor a bill that gives local officials a shot at getting a temporary court order to immediately shut down bars that are the site of frequent fights and gunfire. The bill would let city and county attorneys sue a bar for creating a public safety nuisance and get a temporary injunction that would close the bar until after the conclusion of a trial. Representative Cindy Winckler, of Davenport, says the current process of revoking the state liquor license to get the bar closed takes too much time.  “Local control is important,” Winckler says.

Representative Ross Paustian, of Walcott, says over a two-year period, police were frequently called to a bar in downtown Davenport.  “I think it’s unconscionable to allow a business with more than 2000 calls for service to remain open,” Paustian says. “House File 2340 will help cities deal with this public safety problem.”

Davenport officials made four unsuccessful attempts to get state officials to yank the liquor license for Shenanigans Irish Pub in downtown Davenport. The bar closed at the end of 2019 after the landlord terminated the lease. If the governor approves the bill, cities and counties could seek to a temporary court order to shut down bars where there’s been an assault, illegal use of guns or at least three riots over the course of a year.

(Radio Iowa) – The chief operating officer of the group which now owns the Field of Dreams movie site says the plans they have announced for development there will not take away from the past and future memories. The Thursday announcement of an 80 million dollar investment by “Go the Distance Baseball” has generated a lot of comments. C-O-O Dan Evans says they plan to build nine new ballfields, dormitories for teams, a hotel, and other phased-in improvements. “The Field of Dreams is a great place. And people have had some grand plans through the years and for whatever reason, it just didn’t come to fruition,” he says. “We wanted to make sure we were in a place where we could make an announcement knowing that this was going to move not only to the finish line but in a situation where it would be I think the greatest baseball softball destination in North America.”

He says they waited to make the announcement until they had all the design, engineering studies, renditions with the architects, and the financing questions answered. “We wanted to make sure the property looks and acts the same. So whoever wants to come to see the Field of Dreams movie site is not going to see a movie site that is compromised,” he says. The site came back into the national spotlight after Major League baseball held a game at a field built near the site. Evans says the landscape allows them to build there without impacting the image that fans already know.

“If you’re on the Field of Dreams movie site if you had been in the Major League stadium this year for the game, or in August, upcoming, you would not be able to see the build,” according to Evans. “And that was absolutely an urgent thing for us. We didn’t want to do anything that altered the pristine image of the Field of Dreams. And we believe we’ve accomplished that.” Evans says they want to eventually have the field become the home of high school state championship games. “We would love to we would love to be the site of the finals for both the baseball and the softball, high school tournaments here in Iowa. We want to be Iowa’s epicenter of baseball and softball,” he says.

Evans says that fits in with what they want to accomplish. “You know, we’re pushing our cards, our chips into the middle of the table, simply because we think what is there, is there a better venue than ours will be in the future. We’d love to share our facility with the youth of Iowa. And we can’t think of a better venue than that one,” Evans says. He says all the fields will be surrounded by corn to bring the feeling from to the original field to them. “We want to make baseball and softball a vehicle for kids to improve their character, learn agriculture experience, rural Iowa, but also perhaps see the game as a way to progress through a university education,” he says. “And then what we have is we have a better society, we have better kids that are able to contribute more.”

He says nine baseball-softball fields to the north end of the property will be ready for play in the summer of 2023.

(Greenfield, Iowa) – Adair County Sheriff Jeff Vandewater, Friday (Today), reported on three arrests that took place this week. There were two arrests on Monday:

• At around 12-a.m., 42-year-old James Bernard Block, of Cumberland, was arrested in Adair on an Adair County warrant for Failure to Appear on a Theft in the 4th Degree charge (a Serious Misdemeanor). He was released Tuesday afternoon on a $1,000 cash or surety bond. Also arrested at the same time in Adair, was 42-year-old Brandon James Wilson, of Council Bluffs. He was wanted on an Adair County Felony warrant charging him with three counts of Burglary in the 3rd Degree. Wilson remains in the Adair County Jail on a $10,000 cash or surety bond.

At around 12-a.m. Tuesday, 30-year-old Bryan Dean Schultz, of Greenfield, was arrested in rural Greenfield on an Adair County warrant for Domestic Abuse Assault/2nd offense (an Aggravated Misdemeanor). He was later released on a $2,000 cash or surety bond.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Workforce Development says the labor force increased in March and the unemployment rate went down. The unemployment rate dropped two-tenths of a percent in March to three-point-three percent. I-W-D says the labor force increased by that same amount in March compared to February. The number of Iowans with a job was up by 10-thousand, which is more than 39-thousand more than one year ago. I-W-D says despite those positive numbers a different seasonally adjusted survey sent to employers shows 15-hundred jobs lost in March. The agency says this decline marked the first drop since August 2021 and was due to cutbacks in private service industries

(Radio Iowa) – The director of the Iowa Department of Human Services says state officials have visited with some Afghan families directly to confirm they are getting essential services like housing and food assistance. Kelly Garcia’s statement comes after a Des Moines Register investigation found some families living in extended-stay hotels in central Iowa were running out of food and could not contact their caseworkers. Garcia says her department is working directly with resettlement agencies. “We, I think, have broken open all of the challenges that they’re experiencing,” Garcia says, “and have…reestablished that connection of a direct line to us, so that we can problem solve for them.”

Governor Kim Reynolds says resettlement agencies, not the state, are directly responsible. “If they don’t share any information with us, we don’t know,” Reynolds says, “so that’s why my team proactively met with all the refugee resettlement agencies prior to one, very few, coming into the state so that we could say: ‘You have the information. You make the decisions, but we want to help.'” Reynolds says part of that help has come as state officials redirected emergency rent assistance from the 2020 pandemic relief package.

“We actually called the federal government and got the O.K. from them. There’s only one other state that has done that,” Reynolds says. “It’s working in Cedar Rapids. It’s working in Le Mars. We’ve had great outcomes with them working with the state.” About 900 Afghan refugees have been resettled in Iowa so far.

COUNCIL BLUFFS, IA – The U-S Attorney’s Officer for the Southern District of Iowa reports a man from Omaha, Nebraska, 22-year-old Humberto Felipe Mancinas, was sentenced today (Friday) in Council Bluffs federal court to 162 months (13-1/2 years) in prison, for Possession with Intent to Distribute Methamphetamine. His term of imprisonment will be followed by five years of supervised release. According to court documents, Mancinas pleaded guilty to the charge on October 22, 2021.

On March 12, 2021, Mancinas was stopped by law enforcement while driving in Fremont County, Iowa. During the traffic stop, a K-9 was deployed and indicated narcotics were in the vehicle. A search located approximately ten pounds of methamphetamine. Law enforcement then conducted a second search of a residence outside of Sidney, owned by a relative of Mancinas and where Mancinas had left just prior to the traffic stop, and located an additional seventeen pounds of methamphetamine.

United States Attorney Richard D. Westphal of the Southern District of Iowa made the announcement. The Fremont County Sheriff’s Office, Mills County Sheriff’s Office, Omaha Police Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations Transnational Organized Crime Task Force investigated the case. This case was prosecuted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa.