SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) – A Sioux City manufacturing company is planning a $1.2 million expansion project. The Sioux City Journal reports Rocklin Manufacturing plans to apply for state tax incentives to help pay for the project. The city council plans to vote Monday (today) on whether to support Rocklin’s application for state aid.

Rocklin says it wants $176,648 in withholding tax credits and $41,070 in investment tax credits and $48,996 in sales tax refunds. The company that makes tools for manufacturing has three buildings on its campus, but two of which need renovations before they can be used.

AMES, Iowa (AP) – Iowa State University President Steven Leath damaged a private plane in a hard landing in 2014, 11 months before he banged up a university aircraft in remarkably similar fashion. Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the open records law show that Leath was flying in gusty conditions on Aug. 11, 2014, and “landed hard” in a crosswind, causing propeller damage. A university spokeswoman declined to say where the incident occurred or whose plane Leath was flying.

Two months later, Leath was cleared to fly the university’s $498,000 Cirrus SR22 single-engine plane. Leath damaged that plane in a hard landing in July 2015 in Bloomington, Illinois, while he and his wife were flying home from a North Carolina vacation. He has also blamed that incident on windy conditions.

The commander on some of the crew of the U-S-S Sioux City visited the ship’s namesake city this past weekend as part of Veterans Day activities. The U-S-S Sioux City is one of the new Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) designed to be used closer to the shoreline for things like mine detection, anti-submarine warfare and surface warfare. Commander Shockey Snyder talked at the Siouxland Chamber luncheon about other uses for the ship.

U.S.S. Sioux City side launch after christening Jan. 30th, 2016.

He says it might also be used for humanitarian missions, search and rescue, counter narcotics in the Caribbean and support to special operations. Snyder says the ship will be commissioned at a yet to be determined location in the fall of 2017. He says this time the Navy will have to break from the tradition of where it hosts the commissioning.

“Starting with the U-S-S Yorktown…if it’s possible to go to the namesake city, that’s where we like to commission the ships. I am sorry we can’t bring the ship here,” Snyder said, “we can’t get up the river.”

The ship is currently undergoing systems testing. A spokesman for the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce says a local committee is being formed to help plan the event.

(Radio Iowa)

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Iowa officials say state-run care facilities don’t inform residents or their families when convicted sex offenders are placed in the facilities, saying doing so would violate state law even though the information is listed on a state website. The Des Moines Register reports that Gov. Terry Branstad backed a 2012 bill that would have required care facilities to notify residents and their families when a convicted sex offender was moving in.

The proposed bill, which was not passed, came in the wake of an alleged assault in 2011 in Pomeroy. A convicted sex offender was accused of molesting a 95-year-old woman in a nursing home.