Police in Shenandoah, Thursday,arrested 35-year old Alfred Mutchler, of Shenandoah. Mutchler was taken into custody at around Noon Thursday, following a brief foot pursuit.  He was wanted for Failure To Appear in court. Mutchler faces an additional charge of interference with official acts for leading police on the chase. Alfred was transported to the Page County Jail where he was being held on $300 bond.

A traffic stop at around 11:45-p.m. Thursday in Shenandoah resulted in the arrest of a man on drug charges. According to Shenandoah Police, 18-year old Brandon Taylor, of Shenandoah, was charged with Possession of a Controlled Substance and Possession of Drug Paraphernalia. Taylor was transported to the police department, where he was able to post $1,000 bond through a bondsman and was given an initial court appearance date.

Shenandoah Police initiated the traffic stop on a vehicle at the 200 block of Ferguson Road. After an investigation and the deployment of K9 “Argo,” Taylor, was taken into custody on the charges mentioned.

A Democrat who’s a 42-year-old veteran of the Iraq War has formed an “exploratory committee” — his first step toward officially launching a campaign for governor. Todd Prichard of Charles City is currently in his fifth year as a state representative. “I’m discouraged with the focus of our legislative agenda and the Republican leadership right now,” Prichard says, “and I think we need to find a new direction.”

Prichard says his goal as governor would be to help more “regular Iowans” land in the middle class. “I don’t think that the Branstad Administration and, therefore, Kim Reynolds have addressed the real issues that are affecting Iowans across the state in rural areas and urban areas and that’s really the issue of the family budget and pocketbook issues,” Prichard says.

Prichard points to Branstad’s 2010 campaign promise to raise the average income of Iowans by 25 percent. “That hasn’t happened,” Prichard says. “I’ve never seen an administration fight so hard for low-paying jobs and I think we can do better.”

Prichard is a small town attorney who also had a career in the military. That means his bio is similar to successful statewide candidates like former Governor Tom Vilsack, who was an attorney in Mount Pleasant, and U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa National Guard veteran. Prichard is pitching himself as someone who can provide “fresh” leadership for the state.

“I have over 21 years in the Army as an Army officer. I’ve been overseas four times,” Prichard says. “The last time I was the company commander of approximately 200 soldiers with the Iowa National Guard in Iraq and that definitely gives you leadership experience and the experience of taking care of people in tough situations.”

Prichard has assembled a team of advisors with statewide campaign experience and secured the services of key consultants who worked on President Obama’s successful campaigns in Iowa in 2008 and 2012. A few other Democrats have expressed an interest in running for governor, so Prichard would most likely face a Democratic Primary in June of 2018. Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds will soon take over as governor once her Republican colleague Terry Branstad leaves to serve as U.S. Ambassador to China. Reynolds has already raised more than a million dollars for a race for governor and has signaled she intends to ask next year’s voters to elect her to a four-year term.

(Radio Iowa)

The Nationwide Foundation announced a gift of one-and-a-half million dollars Thursday to the capital campaign of the Food Bank of Iowa. Michelle Book is the president of the Food Bank, which serves 55 counties in the state. “This is a big game changer, it’s a jump starter. It is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for our effort. Nationwide doesn’t do something like this every day — but when they do something like this for the Food Bank of Iowa, the community will stop and stand up and look around to says ‘hey what’s going on here, this is something worth doing,'” Book says.

The organization moved into an old beer distributing warehouse in Des Moines in 1999 and Book says they need to renovate the office and warehouse space. “The HVAC system is outdated, the lights don’t work most significantly, we have a warehouse that is configured to move a half a million pounds of food a month. We move a million pounds of food a month,” Book says.

The project will cost eight-point-one million dollars and the capital campaign is trying to raise seven million. “With this gift and others, including a small amount of savings that the Food Bank of Iowa had to put toward the project, we are halfway toward our goal,” according to Book. Nationwide vice president, Jeff Rommel, is also a board member for the Food Bank of Iowa. “We really appreciate the great work that the Food Bank does across Iowa for hungry Iowans and are really excited to be partners with them for this initiative,” Rommel says.

He says this is the largest gift the Nationwide Foundation has ever made in central Iowa and he says they feel it will have a great impact. He says one in five children across the state and one in eight Iowans as a whole are still “food insecure.”

The staff of the food bank will move out of their offices at the end of the month an into temporary offices as Nationwide while the work begins on the office portion of the project. Book says they will begin work on renovating the warehouse portion of the project in July. She says that will be done in phases so it does not interrupt the food distribution and could take a year to complete.

(Radio Iowa)

BOONE, Iowa (AP) – State agents are helping local officers investigate the deaths of two people whose bodies were found inside a home in Boone. The Boone Police Department says someone called around 10 p.m. Wednesday to report a dead person. Officers found the second body after entering the home.

Authorities haven’t released the names of the two people or said how the two died. Autopsies have been ordered. Neighbors say a woman and her son lived in the home.