More State and area news from KJAN News Director Ric Hanson.

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Officials with Rural Community Solutions in Atlantic report a minimal-contact, drive-through voter registration event will be held in Atlantic, from 9-a.m. until Noon one week from this Saturday, in the parking lot of Iowa Western Community College. If you are currently not registered to vote, have never registered to vote, and/or will be 18 years of age on or before Election Day, Nov. 3rd, stop by the Voter registration drive on September 19th.

The completely non-partisan activity is coordinated by four Atlantic women: Kimberlee Spillers, Mary Loe, Jan Lunde, and Ellen Sokolowski.  The group says “We had not heard of anyone holding this type of event, so we decided to make it happen. We are grateful to Iowa Western Community College for giving us permission to use the parking lot. It’s location, visibility, easy access, and ability to be a one-way drive-thru, makes it the perfect place. Plus, being across the street from the very busy ‘Udderly Delicious’ ice cream stand should get some attention!”

Here are event details:
❖ “Register to Vote” signs will be placed on 7th and Walnut Streets to call attention to passing
traffic.
❖ Applicants are asked to drive into the northeast entrance to IWCC off Walnut Street.
❖ You will need your driver’s license or voter PIN number to complete the form.
❖ Masked volunteers will come to your car window and hand you a clipboard with a voter
registration form. You will be given a pen to use, or may use one of your own.
❖ If desired, an applicant may also complete an absentee ballot request form.
❖ Once completed, the registrant will return the form/s, clipboard, and pen to the volunteer.
❖ The applicant drives out through the southeast or south exits.
❖ The clipboards and pens will be wiped after each use and the volunteer will sanitize their hands
before helping the next applicant.

The group says with “National Voter Registration Day September 22nd, [the] event is perfectly placed. We have checked with the Cass County Auditor’s Office to ensure all is being done correctly. All completed forms will be turned into the auditor’s office immediately. We are very excited for this opportunity to help people register to cast their ballot for the candidates of their choosing. Voting is an honor for everyone in our country and we are proud to enable new applicants to take their place as fully registered voters.”

Please note: you will not be able to vote at this event; it is only to register people to vote. Voting ballots will be mailed from the Cass County Auditor’s office October 5th to people who have requested absentee ballots. Voters can stop in the auditor’s office to vote in person, beginning October 5th. For questions about the event, please email Kimberlee Spillers at  kim@ghorizons.com. For general voter registration questions, if you are unable to register September 19, or live outside Atlantic and want to register, please call the Cass County Auditor’s office at 712-243-4570. If you’d like to complete the form/s yourself, go to this link for the Iowa Secretary of State, https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/voterinformation/voterregistration.html.

When completed, drop off or mail to Cass County Auditor, 5 West 7th Street, Atlantic, Iowa 50022.

The area’s latest and/or top news stories at 7:06-a.m. From KJAN News Director Ric Hanson.

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(Radio Iowa) – The state is looking for another company to produce medical marijuana products. The manager of the program, Owen Parker, says state law allows for two licenses to produce medical marijuana products. “Iowa Relief was our second manufacturer — but they actually relinquished their license on June 2nd of this year and decided not to renew it for this next licensing period,” Parker says. MedPharm was the first company to acquire a license to manufacture, and Parker says they will continue to supply dispensaries. “Medpharm is currently a vertically integrated manufacturer — meaning they have a manufacturing facility and two dispensaries. And we have had no issues with maintaining supply to patients,” he says.

He says they hope to be able to select a second company in November. He says applicants need to submit a letter of intent to apply by October 9th and then have until October 23rd to work on their applications and submit a fee. Parker says it will take around one month to review applications and they hope to award the license on November 20th. The timeline would have the new medical marijuana business up and running by late next year. “We are hoping that that manufacturer would be up and running by July 21st of 2021,” according to Parker.

Parker is not sure what type of response they may get. He says the first request saw MedPharm as the only applicant and the second round they had six applicants. The medical cannabis program began selling products in Iowa on December 1st of 2018.

(Radio Iowa) – At least 15 of the Pizza Hut restaurants in Iowa have been closed, following the announcement in July that up to 300 locations around the country would be closing. The company that owns 20 percent of Pizza Hut franchises in the United States filed for bankruptcy this summer and announced it planned to sell all its Pizza Hut restaurants. That prompted the company that owns the Pizza Hut brand to strike a restructuring deal.

The majority of the Pizza Hut closures around the country are dine-in restaurants. The company has been emphasizing its carry-out and delivery business in recent years, and the pandemic accelerated that shift. Fifteen Iowa Pizza Hut restaurants linked on the company’s website carry the message that the location “has been permanently closed.”

One of two Pizza Huts in Dubuque has been closed. According to the website, the other Iowa Pizza Huts to close are in Boone, Dyersville, Eldridge, Grundy Center, Independence, Iowa Falls, Le Claire, Manchester, Maquoketa, Newton, Oelwein, Tipton, Urbandale and Vinton.

Stores in Atlantic, Carroll, Council Bluffs, Denison, Glenwood and Harlan remain open. For a list of stores go to https://locations.pizzahut.com/ia and click on the location to check the status.

Voters in the IKM-Manning School District went to the polls Tuesday and failed to approve a $19.2 million bond referendum that would have paid for an addition and upgrade, to create a K-12 center in Manning. Total votes from the combined counties amounted to 1,049-yes. There were 859 No votes (55% in favor to 45% opposed). The bond measure required 60% approval plus 1, in order to pass.

Shelby County Auditor/Elections Commissioner Mark Maxwell reports the voters in Shelby & Audubon Counties defeated the measure by a vote of 367 – No to 114- Yes. According to the latest information, unofficial results from Carroll County show voters approved the measure by a vote of 785-Yes to 71-No. The unofficial results from Crawford County show the measure failed by a vote 0f 421-No to 150-Yes.

Here is the latest Iowa news from The Associated Press at 3:30 a.m. CDT

UNDATED (AP) — State district court judges in Des Moines and Iowa City have declined to halt enforcement of a state requirement for schools to return students to classrooms. The judges Tuesday rejected arguments from two school districts and a teachers union that local officials could ignore the governor and educate students at home due to surging numbers of coronavirus cases in Iowa. In two separate rulings, a Polk County judge said Iowa law clearly establishes state control over the time schools must hold in-person instruction, and a Johnson County judge concluded the governor has broad emergency powers under the Iowa Constitution that local school boards do not have.

UNDATED (AP) — A state watchdog says an Iowa teenager who died of starvation in 2017 could have been saved if social workers and contractors had been more thorough when they investigated her living conditions. The Iowa state ombudsman released its findings Tuesday in the case of 16-year-old Sabrina Ray. She weighed just 56 pounds and was severely malnourished when authorities found her body at her home in Perry in May 2017. Ray’s adoptive parents, who parented foster kids, adopted four children and ran an in-home daycare, eventually received lengthy prison sentences for kidnapping and child endangerment.

DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) — A private eastern Iowa college has announced it will remove a statue of the school’s founder after officials there learned new details about his slave-owning past. The Telegraph Herald reports that Loras College will remove the statue of Bishop Mathias Loras from the Dubuque campus and place it in storage. Loras, the first Roman Catholic bishop of Dubuque, established the seminary in 1839 that would eventually become Loras College. Loras College President Jim Collins says school officials recently learned from a researcher that Loras bought an enslaved woman named Marie Louise while he was living in Mobile, Alabama, in 1836 and kept her as his slave until 1852, and hired her out to collect proceeds for various Iowa ministries.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The spread of the coronavirus continued at a rapid pace in Iowa over the Labor Day holiday as state data revealed increases in hospitalizations and rising numbers of patients treated for the virus in intensive care. The Iowa Department of Public Health reported there were 345 new confirmed cases, reflecting a smaller number due to no testing on Labor Day. Six more people died, increasing the total to 1,173. Numbers late last week and over the weekend, however, remained high with more than 1,000 new cases each day on Friday and Saturday. Over the past seven days the state averaged 750 new confirmed cases a day, an increase of 26% from the average two weeks earlier.

(Radio Iowa) — A 77-year-old state prison inmate has died of complications related to Covid-19. Richard Leroy Peters of Evansdale had been in prison since early 2014. He’d been committed on a special lifetime sentence after being found guilty of sexually abusing two girls when they were six and seven. He had a previous child sex abuse conviction in 1988. Peters died early Sunday afternoon in a prison hospice unit in Coralville. An Iowa Department of Corrections news release indicates Peters had multiple pre-existing medical conditions.

The Iowa Department of Corrections website indicates 74 inmates in the Medical and Classification Center in Coralville, 132 inmates in Mount Pleasant and one inmate at the prison in Newton have Covid. More than 600 inmates and 100 staffers who work in the state prison system have recovered from the virus.

Emergency personnel in Atlantic responded to a two-vehicle accident Tuesday afternoon, at 5th and Olive Streets. The collision between two pickups was reported at around 3:55-p.m. KJAN has learned three teens in a Chevy S-10 pickup suffered non-life threatening injuries and were checked-out at the Cass County Memorial Hospital. The truck was totaled in the crash.

Ric Hanson/photos

It’s unclear if there were injuries people to persons in the second pickup.

No further details are available at this time.