DES MOINES, Iowa —(KCCI) – Willie Nelson is coming back to Water Works Park in Des Moines. The country music legend announced this week that the Willie Nelson and Family tour will return to Lauridsen Amphitheater for a show on May 25, just about a month after he turns 91. Nelson and Family drew thousands to Water Works Park last summer, as well. Tickets go on sale Friday.

Rock band Cake is also playing at Lauridsen Amphitheater this year. Tickets are on sale now for their show on May 11.

(Shenandoah, Iowa) – Police in Shenandoah, Wednesday, issued a report providing some details on 10 arrests that occurred between Jan. 2nd and the 10th. According to the report:

There were two arrests January 10th: 27-year-old Zachary Aaron Thomas, of Shenandoah, was arrested on a valid Page County warrant issued on an original charge of Driving While Barred; And, 36-year-old Heather Autumn Shaw, of Farragut, was arrested for Unlawful Possession of Prescription Drugs, and for being a person Ineligible to Carry Weapons.

Three people were arrested January 9th in Shenandoah: 36-year-old Charles Franklin Liles the 4th, 35-year-old Tyler Buck Carnes, and 34-year-old Kayla Dawn Gardner, all of Shenandoah, were arrested on Disorderly Conduct charges.

On January 6th, 49-year-old Jason Lee O’Neil, of Shenandoah, was arrested for OWI/1st offense.

Shenandoah Police arrested 63-year-old Bobby Dean Franks, Jr., of Shenandoah, on Jan. 5th, for Violation of a No Contact Order.

Two people were arrested in Shenandoah on Jan. 4th: 36-year-old Sammantha Josephine Wheatley, of Shenandoah, was arrested for Attempted Murder and Willful Injury-Bodily Injury; And, 38-year-old Karl James Shade III, of Shenandoah, was arrested for Possession of Paraphernalia, Poss. of a Controlled Substance/2nd offense, and Unlawful Poss. of Prescription Drugs.

On Jan. 2nd, Shenandoah Police arrested 45-year-old Tammy Ann Livingston, of Shenandoah, for Theft in the 3rd Degree.

(Radio Iowa) – Officials with the Iowa Donor Network says they saw great numbers for 2023. Network spokeswoman Heather Butterfield says during the past year, 123 “donor heroes” in Iowa gifted a remarkable 350 organs for transplant. She says a record was also set last year with an “unprecedented” one-thousand-27 tissue donors, each of whom enhanced the lives of 50 to 300 people. Butterfield says they’ve seen a 40percent increase in organ donors since 2019 and a 21% increase in organs transplanted. She says it shows the incredible commitment that Iowans have to saving lives.

(Radio Iowa) – The spokesman for the state’s largest utility company says the heavy winds that accompanied the storms last week helped create an electric generation record. MidAmerican spokesman, Geoff Greenwood, says the company’s turbines did a lot of turning.”Those steady high winds that we had throughout the week really, really made wind energy fare really well,” he says. “We cranked out a lot of wind energy, and in fact on Friday we said a peak daytime record for wind energy output here in our state.”

Greenwood says the company’s turbines produced 158-thousand megawatt hours of wind energy, which he says is at least the amount of energy MidAmerican customers would use in a day. He says they can make adjustments on the turbines if the winds become too strong. “Depends on the equipment and the manufacturer. So each has a different tolerance. But if it does ever get to that point, we will turn the wind turbine blades to reduce the resistance against the wind and it causes them to slow down a little bit so we can control them if they get too high, but we didn’t get to that point,” he says.

Greenwood says icy conditions can be a problem for the turbines.”We’ve got sensors on our wind turbines if they do have an ice build up then we will shut them down or the system shuts itself down so that turbine will stop turning if it senses an imbalance due to ice,” Greenwood says. There were bitterly cold temperatures and Greenwood says their turbines have winter packages to deal with that. “Not to say that we don’t have an occasional problem with a wind turbine as you do with any piece of mechanical equipment but by and large last week our wind energy really really performed,” he says.

Greenwood says turbines are rated to work in temperatures down to 22 below zero, and could possibly work below that. Most Iowans heat with natural gas, and he says usage was up with the subzero temperatures. “Interestingly we didn’t set any natural gas records it was very cold but it was not a peak record that we set,” Greenwood says. He says customers may see a higher heating bill than normal for the month, but that depends on how the temperatures play out the rest of the month.

(Radio Iowa)  – Iowa Republican Party officials say just over 110-thousand Iowans participated in Monday night’s Caucuses. Party chairman Jeff Kaufmann says it happened when some areas of the state had a wind chill of negative 30 degrees. “We’ve shown the world we can have a personalized grassroots event and we can have absolute election integrity and we can do it all in wind chills that would probably send a whole lot of citizens in a whole lot of states under the covers,” Kaufmann says.

About 15 percent of registered Republicans voted — the lowest turn-out for the Iowa Caucuses in 24 years. “Before the 186,000 record that was set in 2016 on a, well, it would be a balmy evening compared to Monday, we were looking at numbers in 2012 and 2008 that were very similar to this,” Kaufmann says. About 120-thousand people voted in the 2008 Iowa Republican Party Caucuses. which Mike Huckabee won. In 2012, when Rick Santorum won, there were about 122-thousand participants.

Kaufmann says it was a breach of faith for major media outlets to announce Trump was the projected winner of THIS YEAR’S Caucuses before the vast majority of participants had cast their straw poll vote.  “We are certainly showing our displeasure. I’m certainly cautioning the Nevada chair because they’ve got a caucus coming and that’s something that should not occur,” Kaufmann says. “That’s something that should not happen again.”

The Iowa Caucuses are run by the party, not state or county government officials. Kaufmann and other Iowa G-O-P officials raised more than 800-thousand dollars for the operation of this year’s Caucuses.

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Hunger Coalition is calling on the legislature to take action and accept additional federal food assistance for low-income Iowa kids. The program would provide an extra 120-dollars of food aid over the summer for 240-thousand Iowa kids who qualify for free or reduced price school lunches. Governor Kim Reynolds announced last month that Iowa won’t accept the federal money because of administrative costs to the state and because the program does not address the childhood obesity epidemic.

Mandi Remington of Iowa City says she barely makes enough money to support her three kids on her own, and the pandemic version of this program helped her a lot.  “We find ourselves stretching food at the end of the month, and that pandemic EBT made a really big difference in that in allowing us to continue have fresh foods rather than just struggling with what we could throw together out of cans,” she says.

The Iowa Hunger Coalition held a rally at the state capitol Wednesday and has launched a petition drive to encourage Republican leaders to take action.

(Atlantic, Iowa) – The City Council in Atlantic held a very short meeting Wednesday evening, during which they passed two resolutions. The first was “Approving the transfer of funds for the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2023-24.”  In his agenda notes, City Administrator John Lund said the City Clerk (Barb Barrick) makes budgeted transfers and Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) allocations on a quarterly basis. The money is allocated to various funds and recommended by the City auditor’s to be approved by resolution.

A breakdown of the funds is shown below:

The second Resolution approved by the Atlantic City Council was with regard to”Resetting the salary for Police Sergeants effective January 1, 2024 through June 30, 2024.” On January 4th, the City’s Personnel and Finance Committee met to discuss new business. It was decided at that time, to increase the Sergeant pay based on the recent MOU (Memorandum Of Understanding) regarding longevity for patrol officers. The resolution proposes compensation for a Sergeant to be $35.90 per hour/$73,989.90 annually.
Speaking of police officers, Atlantic Police Chief Devin Hogue provided a report on P-D activities. He said officers: responded to 639 Calls for service; Conducted 94 traffic stops; issued 32 citations; issued 15 written warnings; conducted 20 arrests; filed 39 charges; completed 23 incident reports, and covered 10 accidents.

In her written report to the Council that was included in Council members’ packets, Atlantic Public Library Director Michelle Andersen mentioned the Friends of the Library held their annual meeting and approved giving the library $4,600. The funds will be used for summer programming, other programming, the Community Shred Day in April, sponsoring of the Imagination Library, and other purposes.

Michelle said the elevator project should begin before February. Schumacher Elevator estimates it will take about one and a-half weeks to complete the installation, once work gets underway. The Atlantic Public Library received a $20,000 grant from the American Library Association (ALA) to modernize the elevator. The cost of the library second floor updates is covered by grants amounting to $28,500 (combined USDA and Cass County Community Foundation grants), and private donations from the library’s gift account.

Andersen reported the Library had “Major computer issues” in December. The issues essentially boiled down to expired client licenses. Another reason was the age of the servers, which are more than five-years old. Andersen said she is looking into replacing the servers later this year. She said also, in the past couple of months, the library received memorial gifts from Janeille Kenworthy, Judy Overton and Carol Hensley, as well as a $3,834.35 disbursement from the Frederick Hansen Trust. The Atlantic Public Library has also received State funds for the fiscal year amounting to $5,353.39, and County funds of $30,700.

At the conclusion of regular business, the Atlantic City Council entered into a Closed Session pertaining to personnel matter, where that individual requested the closed session.