(Radio Iowa) – U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was in eastern Iowa Thursday, visiting two projects that have received federal grants from the infrastructure bill President Biden signed in 2021. The Eastern Iowa Airport got a $20 million grant. “The funding in this case is going to allow the team to complete a passenger terminal expansion that adds four addition passenger gates to accommodate more flights,” Buttigieg said, “improved accessibility for travelers with disabilities and more ways to fly to or from eastern Iowa with the kind of frequency that gives you more options and a good experience when you do so.”

Buttigieg, in an outdoor news conference in front of construction crews at the site, noted the Eastern Iowa Airport is located on Wright Brothers Boulevard, a reminder America ushered in the aviation age. “It’s appropriate, then, that Americans ought to have the best air travel in the world, but we’ve been slipping,” Buttigieg said. “We slipped as a country with decades of underinvestment.”

Buttigieg has been touring the country, visiting ports, bridges, bus stations and other sites that are getting infrastructure grants from the Biden Administration. Buttigieg’s second stop today is in Dubuque, at a pedestrian bridge over railroad tracks that will be a new path for walking and biking. “It’s going to make the roads safer and support jobs in that great downtown there,” Buttigieg said, “so in so many ways transportation is essential to the quality of life and economic strength and safety that we all depend on.”

Cedar Rapids Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell greats Buttigieg. (Buttigieg photo)

The Department of Transportation has so far awarded $93 million to Iowa projects being funded by the nearly two year old infrastructure law. Cities in the Cedar Rapids metro have made three unsuccessful applications to another US DOT program that awards grants to significant regional transportation projects. Cedar Rapids, Marion, Hiawatha, Robins and Linn County have been seeking federal funding for a four-lane road that would connect Interstate 380 to Highway 13. Buttigieg said his agency will work with applicants on grant requests. “Sometimes when they succeed it’s on the second, third or fourth or even more outing as they continue chiseling the project,” Buttigieg said. “…At the time I want to be transparent about just how competitive these programs are.” There were nearly 10,000 applicants for DOT RAISE grants last year and only 166 projects were approved for funding.

Buttigieg told the crowd gathered at the Eastern Iowa Airport this likely will be the busiest Memorial Day weekend for air travel since before the pandemic. Buttigieg said airlines could be grounded next month, though, if there’s no agreement to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling and federal workers in air traffic control and TSA checkpoints are furloughed. During a news conference at the airport, Buttigieg was asked about LGBTQ bills in the state legislature and he suggested Republican lawmakers have a priority problem. “Here we are in Cedar Rapids working on making life a little easier for airline passengers,” Buttigieg said, “and they’re over there in Des Moines working on making life a little harder for LGBTQ high schoolers.”

Buttigieg, who won the Iowa Democratic Party’s 2020 Caucuses, is the first openly gay candidate for president to win a state caucus or primary.

(Radio Iowa) – A University of Iowa study finds automobile insurance premiums dropped in other states after they legalized medical marijuana, suggesting that driving while high may not be as dangerous as driving drunk. Cameron Ellis, a U-I professor of finance, says they studied insurance data at the ZIP code level and found states that made medical marijuana legal between 2014 and 2019 saw premiums fall an average of 22-dollars per driver in the first year.

“In areas that had high levels of DUIs prior to medical cannabis legalization, rates fell at a much higher rate,” Ellis says, “because as bad as marijuana is for driving, alcohol is much worse, and so it’s sort of this reduction in DUIs that’s leading to the decline.” There are likely two explanations for this, he says, the first being that some of the people who were arrested for driving while impaired by alcohol simply changed their drug of choice — from alcohol to marijuana.

“But another potential one is that when you consume alcohol and marijuana together, you tend to do it at home,” Ellis says. “You don’t go smoke in a bar, you do it at home and so you’re just literally driving less while drinking, even if you’re not drinking less.” Opponents of the legalization of marijuana often argue that such a move would lead to an increase in motor vehicle accidents along with a rise in crash-related injuries and deaths. Ellis says the U-I study essentially debunks that idea, as the two drugs impair drivers in different ways.

“There’s this trope of someone’s like, ‘Oh, I’m a better driver while I’m drunk,’ but, no you’re not, but you’re really, really confident and that causes a lot of problems,” Ellis says, “whereas marijuana famously, you’re paranoid that there are cops everywhere, ‘I don’t want to get caught, I’m going to go exactly the speed limit’.” Those who are against legalizing marijuana, for recreational or medical uses, point to the harm already caused by people who drive under the influence of alcohol and argue legalizing another mind-altering chemical will lead to even more crashes, injuries and deaths.

Ellis argues that alcohol tends to make drivers more aggressive, while marijuana has a mellowing affect and makes drivers more aware of their inabilities, so they drive slower and take fewer risks. “That’s sort of the key thing of why driving while high is not nearly as dangerous as driving while drunk,” Ellis says, “though it is still very dangerous and very illegal.” The report found about 820-million dollars has been saved so far in crash-related health expenditures as a result of marijuana legalization.

Ellis says if medicinal marijuana was legalized nationally, another 320-million could be saved. The study was published by the journal Health Economics.

(Radio Iowa) – The U-S Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the Clean Waters Act in a ruling today (Thursday). The ruling overturned the E-P-A’s Waters of the United States or WOTUS rules introduced in the Obama Administration. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley signed onto a brief that urged the High Court to overturn the regulations.

Grassley issued a statement saying “thankfully, the Supreme Court saw through this federal overreach and unanimously determined that it violated the Clean Water Act.” He says after years of uncertainty, the decision is a victory for farmers, builders, landowners and common sense.

Senator Joni Ernst says in a statement that ‘the federal government has no authority to impose blanket jurisdiction over puddles, waters, and wetlands with vague, overreaching regulations.” She calls it a big win for Iowa.

(Radio Iowa) – Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is expanding its focus as we head into summer to remind people not to drink and drive while using boats and ATV’s. MADD regional director, Erin Payton, says the number of incidents off the highways has increased and they want to remind people about safety. “We just want to make sure that people are realizing that even though you’re not behind the wheel of a car, you are still operating a vehicle,” she says. MADD is working with the Iowa DNR to get the word out.

She says boats and ATV’s can pose different challenges than driving a car on a highway that is laid out flat and marked. “We know that if you’ve been on an ATV on a trail, there’s a lot of blind turns, there’s no stoplights on a trail, ” Payton says. “It’s the same thing with boating, you know, you can very easily get yourself in a situation that’s out of your control, sober, and then when you add, alcohol or drug impairment — that takes away your ability for quick reflexes for smart decision making.”

Payton says they are also stressing that your boat or ATV are in good shape. “We want to make sure that you’re trained, and you have appropriate safety gear. So if you’re on a boat, you’ve got a lifejacket, if you’re on an ATV, you’ve got helmets and goggles,” she says. “And we also want to make sure that people are limiting the time on these vehicles because, you know, fatigue does play a factor into it.” Payton says ATV’s and boats are seen as ways to have fun and that’s how alcohol can get involved, along with distractions. “Just like in a car, the more people in your car are more distracting. The more people on the boat is more distracting. And with the children on ATVs too, we want to stress that single rider ATVs should just be single rider ATVs,” Payton says. “There’s always that you want to have more fun. So you want to add someone onto your ATV. But if it’s only for one person, just stick with one person.”

She says adding alcohol to the mix is the worst thing you can do. “Here’s a great statistic — a recreational boat operator with a blood alcohol level at or above .10, has a fatality rate 10 times of a sober operator. So you know, even more so almost than driving a car. Because you do that more often right? Doing voting and ATVs while not being sober is a recipe for disaster,” Payton says. Payton says they want everyone to think about these things as we head into the summer driving, boating and ATV season.

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa D-N-R Fire Program has a new group trained and ready to fight wildfires across the country. Spokesman Ryan Schlater says there are some differences between fighting structure fires and wildfires. “Weather kind of plays a bigger role in wildland firefighting than in your typical structure fire. Rh, temperature, wind, and then of course, terrain as well. There’s a lot more terrain issues with fire running uphill,” he says. “There’s a lot of safety information that comes through the training that all these 35 people get.” Those who complete the training are emergency hires, part-time firefighters when the U-S Forest Service calls on them.

“Some of them are volunteer fire departments, some are full-time structure departments, some are students, some work for county conservation boards, others are just private individuals, who do you know, other jobs. A lot of them take vacations to do this, to go out on wildfires for us,” according to Schlater. He says they had been averaging 50 people a year in the program, but it dropped off during the pandemic and is now coming back. Schlater says one of the goals is to provide new recruits for the permanent fire crews. “We’ve had several who have left the state and gone on to full-time careers, you know with, with hot shots with engine crews on forests, the BLM out west, the Bureau of Land Management, I should say, and then other agencies, National Park Service, etc. So, yeah, it’s kind of a goal of ours to get people into the career field, eventually,” Schlater says.

He says the alert status is a little higher right now for the Iowa-trained firefighters as many of the full-timers are working up north. “A lot of federal partners within the Forest Service, the National Park Service, etcetera. They went to Canada to fight the Canadian wildfires that are up there,” he says. “You know, you’ll get that smoke here in Iowa a few days ago from those Canada wildfires coming down. And so they asked for help up there.” He says emergency hire firefighters aren’t able to go to Canada. Sclater says the wildfire season has started out slow after record amounts of snow and precipitation out west.

“Like California, for example had a lot of rain recently and so they’ve got a flush of water and flush of new growth,” Schlater says. “But the thing is that it seems to be cyclical. So right now the grass is growing big or it’s going to be growing big and then later on in the the summer it will dry out and so then there’s more fuel available for a wildfire later.”

The Iowa D-N-R Fire Program has been sending wildland firefighters to national incidents since 2006.

(Radio Iowa) – A special investigation by the State Auditor’s office has found the former city clerk of Eldridge improperly spent more than 76-thousand dollars of city money and there were no records for another 87-hundred dollars worth of transaction. Auditors reviewed more than four and a half years of financial records for the City of Eldridge when Denise Benson was city clerk and found she made more than 42-thousand dollars worth of purchases for herself with the city’s credit card. They found receipts for things like electronics, toys, clothes for adults and children, a sewing machine and a dog door. She also used the card to pay for an Amazon Prime membership.

A news release from the State Auditor’s office indicates Benson used more than 16-thousand dollars in city money to pay her own Capital One credit card bill. Benson had worked for the City of Eldridge since 1992 and had been city clerk for nearly 20 years when city officials began asked questions about credit card transactions last October and she was fired at the end of the month.

(DES MOINES, IA) – Officials with the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) have announced innovation funding for four startups through Iowa’s State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI). The companies are located in Ames, Des Moines and Solon. The SSBCI program invests in Iowa’s small businesses through federal assistance targeted at expanding access to capital that supports growth. The Innovation Fund, one of four areas established under the initiative, increases funding opportunities across Iowa’s innovation continuum to assist entrepreneurs through concept, launch and expansion.

1. Ames-based Distynct, Inc. provides a remote monitoring system that deploys reliable internet connectivity to rural areas and sensors that collect critical barn data to support precision livestock farming. The Distynct Smart Alarm, powered by the Connectivity Engine, replaces inefficient, antiquated alarm systems, decreasing labor time and costs and increasing safety and protection. The company was awarded a $250,000 Innovation Acceleration Launch Fund loan for key personnel and product refinement.
2. Headquartered in Ames, Haber Technologies, Inc. develops products through their Ag-Automations platform to help farmers dry, store and manage grain. Powered by proprietary technology, their products include the DRI-Stack system for in-bin drying, conditioning and monitoring and the Auto-Bin system for monitoring and managing bin fans. The company was awarded a $250,000 Innovation Acceleration Launch Fund loan for key personnel and market planning and entry activities.
3. A global provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications in Des Moines, Pitchly, Inc. offers customers the ability to access, search, edit and share data to fellow employees and connect the data to common work tasks. The software can significantly save employee time by generating reports with the most current version of data. The company was awarded a $1 million Innovation Acceleration Expansion Fund loan for key personnel and product refinement.
4. SwineTech, based in Solon, offers software and services for pork producers to improve operational efficiencies, employee engagement and pig care. PigFlow, their workforce management and point-of-care platform, accomplishes that by improving communication and organization while streamlining daily workflows and reinforcing compliance. The company was awarded a $250,000 Innovation Acceleration Launch Fund loan for key personnel, product refinement and market planning and entry activities.

Award recommendations for the SSBCI innovation funding are made by the SSBCI Review Committee to the IEDA executive director for approval. The committee met on May 16, 2023, to review eligible applications. Additional information on application process, deadlines and eligibility can be found at iowaeda.com/innovate.

(Radio Iowa) – Federal lawmakers have yet to reach a deal on lifting the debt ceiling, which could impact some Iowans’ health care. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns if lawmakers don’t come to an agreement, the U-S could be unable to pay its bills as soon as June 1st. Josephine Gittler, director of the National Health Law and Policy Resource Center at the University of Iowa College of Law, says this could impact federally-funded health programs like Medicare. “Because Medicare makes up so much of what hospitals and other health care providers receive for their services,” she says, “that they would then either not get the money that they’re owed, or they would have delays, possibly in payments.”

In addition to Medicare, Gittler says a federal government default could affect Iowans who rely on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act subsidized health plans. “In a worst case scenario, the system is at risk,” she says, “the whole healthcare system is at risk if it loses a major source of its funding for its infrastructure, so to speak.”

Gittler says it’s unclear what will happen if lawmakers don’t reach an agreement because the federal government has never defaulted on its debt before.

(reporting by Natalie Krebs, Iowa Public Radio)

(Glenwood, Iowa) – The Mills County Sheriff’s Office reports eight arrests took place from May 19th through the 25th. Those arrested include:

• On May 19th, 44-year-old Amy Marie Vance, of Council Bluffs. Vance was arrested on a warrant for Failure To Appear (FTA) on a Sentencing Order. She was being held in the Mills County Jail without bond.
• On the 21st, 23-year-old Ciarra Nicole Rainey, of Malvern, was arrested for OWI/1st offense. Bond was set at $1,000.
• There were three separate arrests in Mills County on Monday (May 22): 33-year-old Joseph Steven Tyler Harris, of Sidney, was arrested at the Mills County Courthouse on a Fremont County warrant. His bond was set at $10,0000; 59-year-old Joseph Ray Hedrick, of Council Bluffs, was arrested for Domestic Abuse. He was being held without bond in the Mills County Jail; and, 45-year-old Chad Michael Hill, of Red Oak, was arrested at the Montgomery County Jail, on a warrant for Failure to Appear.
• This past Tuesday (May 23), 38-year-old Joshua Dean Cooney, of Villisca, was arrested at the Mills County Sheriff’s Office, on a warrant for 2 counts of Possession of Controlled Substance (Bond: $7,000)
• On the 24th, 34-year-old Seth Ryan Peters, of Council Bluffs, was arrested at the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office, on a warrant for Harassment/1st Degree (No Bond).
• And, at around 1:40-a.m. today (Thursday, May 25), 41-year-old Bret David Hauptman, of Omaha, was arrested at the Mills County S/O on a warrant for FTA on a Driving While Barred charge (Bond: $5,000).

The Glenwood Police Department reports the arrest on Wednesday (May 24), of 39-year-old Aaron Hamner, of Milton, Iowa. Hamner was arrested for Driving Under Suspension. He posted a $300 bond, and was released.

Des Moines, Iowa — Police in Des Moines are investigating a shooting that happened late Tuesday night. The incident happened in the 1800 block of Arlington Avenue at around 11 p.m., Tuesday. Police say after an adult male suffered a gunshot wound to his upper torso, the man manage to walk to the 1400 block of 2nd Avenue. Officers and medics were dispatched to his location.  The victim, who is expected to survive, was not cooperating with police.