Officials with Harlan Municipal Utilities (HMU) report an equipment failure at around 9:30-a.m. Sunday, resulted in an electrical outage to parts of the community. HMU CEO Ken Weber said a middle phase jumper on a junction pole along the 69Kv (kilovolt) main line feeding Harlan, failed and dropped into the lower phase line causing a partial power outage. HMU linemen and a crew from Northern Iowa Power Company (NIPCO) were able to affect a temporary workaround to restore power.

Weber said today (Monday), that they are working with line crews from NIPCO to repair the jumper. During the repair, they hope to determine the cause of the failure and fix it so it doesn’t happen again. Power was restored to all customers by around 11:45-a.m., Sunday. The partial power condition damaged some electronic equipment on the HMU telecom service. Telecom technicians worked until early Sunday evening to replace, repair and restore cable TV, Internet and Telephone Services.

PIONEER, Iowa (AP) — A tiny city in northern Iowa is edging toward unincorporating as its population dwindles, but first it must figure out how to spend its healthy reserve fund. The Messenger reports that Pioneer City Clerk Janet Berte recently met with the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to discuss the formal process of unincorporating. Berte says the last census found that the city had a population of 23. Officials say that the city soon won’t be able to meet the official requirements of being a city as its citizens age.

Berte says one obstacle to unincorporating is the city’s good financials. She says most cities unincorporated when they run out of money, but Pioneer has about $150,000. Berte says the City Council doesn’t have a set timeline for unincorporating.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A state audit says the legislature, governor and Iowa Department of Human Services have failed to follow a state law that requires full quarterly financial reports on the state’s privatized Medicaid program. Auditor Mary Mosiman says in an audit released Monday that the state officials and lawmakers should have established a method to estimate program cost savings when they moved from state-managed Medicaid to a system managed by for-profit health care companies in 2016.

The state released widely varied estimates of savings last year ranging from $47 million to $235 million in the $5 billion program that oversees the health care program for poor and disabled Iowans. Mosiman estimates the state saved $126 million in fiscal year 2018 compared to what it would have spent under state-managed care.

Sheriff’s officials in Union County say The Whistle Stop, in Lorimor, reported that at around 8:51-p.m. November 21st, someone came in to the store and paid for $51.05 worth of product with a counterfeit $100 bill. The subject had left the store before the money was tested. No other information was available.

(Radio Iowa) — Work continues on one of the largest and most expensive road construction projects in Iowa that was delayed by a contractor mistake. What’s called a “flyover bridge” is being built where Interstate 35 meets U-S Highway 30 on the east side of Ames. Iowa Department of Transportation engineer Scott Dockstader says they already had several nighttime shutdowns on the I-35 and work involving Highway 30 is next.”We still have to do work over Highway 30 and connect up to the other abutment so we’ll have multiple U-S 30 night closures and beam settings,” Dockstader says.

The current clover-leaf interchange between U-S 30 and I-35 in Ames will be retired once a new bridge is completed. Dockstader says the new bridge is expected to make thing safer for drivers. “With this flyover we’re able to eliminate a lot of that merging/diverging movement, so in the future we won’t have people getting off at high speed trying to find a gap with that traffic merging onto the interstate from that loop,” according to Dockstader.

Dockstader says the project appears to be on-pace for a mid-summer opening of the new flyover bridge. The new bridge was supposed to be completed by the end of this year — but the work was delayed after it was discovered the Minnesota contractor made mistakes with the elevation of the piers and the anchor bolts that go into the piers weren’t positioned properly.