(Creston,Iowa) – An accident Thursday afternoon, in Creston, caused $3,000 damage to a van, but no one was injured. Creston Police report a 2022 Dodge RAM pickup driven by 40-year-old Luis Miguel Huerta-Fernandez, of Hobbs, New Mexico,was pulling a trailer and traveling south on Cherry Street in Creston at around 4:05-p.m., Thursday, when a 2019 Chrysler Pacific van driven by 81-year-old Nellie Lou Loury, of Creston, began to back out of her driveway.

Huerta honked the horn to get Loury’s attention, and swerved out of the way, but when he came back into the correct lane, his trailer hit the van on the left front fender. The trailer wasn’t damaged. No citations were issued, but the Police report noted Loury failed to yield the right-of-way while exiting her driveway.

(Missouri Valley, Iowa/KETV) — Landowners near Missouri Valley want to know if their land and water are safe because they’re living on a former missile site. The Air Force scrapped the “Atlas D Missile Site 3” decades ago, but safety questions remain. All of the structures that had been in operation in the 1950’s and 60’s, were demolished in 1988. The area was sold for residential and ag use in 2006. But in 2013, a contaminant called “TCE**” was detected in residential wells.

The pandemic forced people in Missouri Valley to wait years to ask questions in person about the safety of their land, and water. On Thursday, the Army Corps of Engineers worked to provide them with some answers.

The Army Corps of Engineers says out of 140 drinking water wells tested 25 wells had levels of TCE. The Corps of Engineers said they wanted to assure the affected landowners and others, that they’re only trying to help, by cleaning the contamination up and fixing related issues. Engineers says they hope to have an effective plan on how to do so sometime in the next three-years, likely between 2025 and 2026.

With a final decision on a remedy sometime between 2026 and 2027. You can still submit your input HERE. The questionnaire site is available until Dec. 15^th.

**Trichloroethylene (TCE) is used as a solvent for degreasing metal parts during the manufacture of a variety of products. It can be found in consumer products, including some wood finishes, adhesives, paint removers, and stain removers. TCE can also be used in the manufacture of other chemicals. TCE that has been spilled or dumped on the ground can pollute soil and groundwater, where it may pollute private and public drinking water wells.

(Greenfield, Iowa) – Adair County Engineer Nick Kauffman, Wednesday morning, updated the County Board of Supervisors on recent Secondary Roads Department maintenance and activities. Kauffman said in Washington Township, the bridge Section 32 will have guard rails installed on Monday (Dec. 4^th), weather permitting. He said also their hydro-seeder was expected to have been delivered Wednesday afternoon. Hydroseeding is a technique that spreads a specialized grass “slurry” evenly over bare ground to grow grass and prevent soil erosion.

One of their new hires will start Monday, while another started on Thursday.

In other business, Supervisor Jodie Hoadley told the Board, and Kauffman, that the County had received a requested grant for the installation of fiber optics, which includes the Orient area.

The Adair County Board of Supervisor’s next meeting takes place 9-a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 6^th.

(Radio Iowa) – An ethanol industry group is accusing Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy of being hypocritical for supporting construction of an oil pipeline, but opposing carbon pipelines. Ramaswamy often recites what he calls the 10 “truths” on the campaign trail. One of them is that human flourishing requires fossil fuels and Ramaswamy has said construction of the Keystone X-L Pipeline for crude oil should resume.

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks to crowd at his Iowa campaign headquarters on Nov. 28, 2023. (RI photo)

This week, Ramaswamy criticized Governor Reynolds and other Republicans for not opposing the use of eminent domain to seize land for proposed pipeline to ship carbon out of ethanol plants. The Iowa Renewable Fuels Association says Ramaswamy’s playing a typical political game, not driven by principles. The group’s executive director says Ramaswamy is a hypocrite whose campaign is running on fumes.

At noon today (Friday), Ramaswamy and the Free Soil Coalition, a group that opposes the carbon pipelines, are holding an event in Des Moines.

(Des Moines, Iowa) – The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa, reports a central Iowa man entered a guilty plea, Wednesday, to a charge of wire fraud. According to public court documents, 47-year-old Zachary James Flaherty, of Clive, used his position as an insurance agent and annuity salesperson to defraud elderly individuals out of their retirement savings and other monies. Flaherty admitted to engaging in a scheme to defraud some of his insurance clients, specifically, that he intended to defraud some of his clients by making false statements to those clients to obtain financial benefits for himself to the detriment of his clients.

For example, Flaherty told one of the victims, referred to in court documents as Victim #10, that he would invest proceeds from the sale of her house on her behalf and for her benefit, even though Flaherty knew that his representations to Victim #10 were false. As a result of Flaherty’s false representations, Victim #10 wrote two checks, totaling $170,000, to a company Flaherty owned and/or operated. Flaherty used the proceeds of his fraudulent scheme to acquire various assets, including a boat and automobiles.

Flaherty is scheduled to be sentenced on April 12, 2024, and faces a potential sentence of up to twenty years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine the sentence Flaherty will receive after considering the United States Sentencing Guidelines and other sentencing factors.

United States Attorney Richard D. Westphal of the Southern District of Iowa made the announcement. The Iowa Insurance Division’s Fraud Bureau and the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the case, with assistance from the Des Moines Police Department, Clive Police Department, and the Iowa Department of Public Safety’s Division of Criminal Investigation.

(Davenport, Iowa) – A pursuit in eastern Iowa’s Scott County, Thursday night, resulted in a crash and two people injured. According to the Iowa State Patrol, a 1988 Suzuki motorcycle operated by 28-year-old Dayshaun Rias, of Davenport, was actively eluding law enforcement, when Rias failed to yield the right-of-way to a 2016 Dodge Dart, driven by 25-year-old Ryan Harris, of Davenport. The motorcycle and car collided at the intersection of W. 2nd and Gaines Streets, in Davenport, at around 10:20-p.m., Thursday.

Harris was not injured in the crash. Rias, and a passenger, 26-year-old Jessica Brady, of Davenport, were injured and transported by ambulance to Genesis East Hospital, in Davenport. The incident remains under investigation. The Patrol was assisted at the scene by Davenport Police, Fire and Medic personnel.

(Radio Iowa) – D-N-R State Deer Biologist, Jace Elliott, says the numbers from early hunts show the first firearm deer season that begins this Saturday should be comparable to previous years. “This year where we’re tracking along pretty closely with last year’s harvest to date,” he says. Nearly 30-thousand deer have been taken in the early seasons that include archery and youth hunts. The gun season has expanded from the original shotgun-only, to now include muzzleloaders, handguns ad, most recently, rifles. The gun seasons are always the most popular, with some 100-thousand hunters expected to take part. “These two seasons end up taking of about 50 percent of our deer harvest throughout all of our seasons, just in these two firearm seasons,” Elliott says. “So we definitely expect as long as weather cooperates to have a very successful season.”

He says hunters shouldn’t have trouble finding deer in most of the state. “Statewide, we’re at a stable to slightly increasing level and have been for the past several years. There’s of course areas in the state that we’re actively trying to recover populations, particularly far western, and northwestern Iowa,” Elliott says. “And then of course, there’s also areas where we’re working on reducing deer numbers to some degree, but for the most part, we’re very happy with population levels in Iowa.”

Elliott says there has been some concern about the E-H-D outbreak and the impact on the deer population in Iowa. He says there was a severe E-H-D outbreak, statewide this year, and particularly in the southeast region. “The message to hunters is that this disease can have severe local impacts, we’re talking about the property scale or the section scale,” he says, “but at a county level even though this was one of our more severe outbreaks, it does not seem that any particular county has been affected to the level that would require management intervention.”

Elliott says the counties that are hit hard with E-H-D but have ample deer populations to start with, tend to recover in just a matter of a few years. The first deer gun season starts Saturday (Dec. 2) and runs through Wednesday December 6th. The second deer gun season is December 9th through the 17th.

DES MOINES, Iowa — A non-profit group whose goal is to put an end to the sex trafficking of minors, gives Nebraska and Iowa an F for how the States handle prosecution of the crime. Shared Hope International handed out grades in six different categories. Iowa got a B- for how the state holds traffickers accountable and a C for having other options when it comes to victims testifying against traffickers. But in all other categories, the group claimed Iowa failed.

Nebraska did well in criminal provisions with a B but failed in four other categories including response to victims, tools for victims, and prevention and training. Shared hope said the lack of safe harbor laws plays a major factor in the grading. “Those laws are ones that protect survivors from being re-victimized in the criminal justice system and that also give victims access to services that can help them recover from that,” said Stephen Padre from the organization.

Almost every state surrounding Iowa also got an F in the report.

(Des Moines, Iowa) – The state-run Glenwood Resource Center for people with disabilities has allegedly failed to comply with all the requirements of a 2022 settlement agreement with the federal government. According to the Iowa Capital Dispatch, the agreement was intended to address claims by the U.S. Department of Justice that the state had violated the constitutional rights of Glenwood residents and exposed them to unreasonable harm. The DOJ alleged that harm stemmed from “uncontrolled and unsupervised experimentation” on residents, as well as inadequate physical and behavioral health care.

Glenwood is run by the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, the same state agency that’s charged with protecting the health and welfare of children and dependent adults in Iowa. The agency plans to close Glenwood by the end of 2024.

As part of DHHS’ 2022 settlement with the Justice Department, the agency agreed to implement a wide range of changes intended to improve the overall care and treatment received by the residents of Glenwood. The agreement includes a provision that has resulted in a court-approved monitoring team checking on conditions in the home to ensure the state’s compliance with the agreed-upon standards of care. In October, the monitoring team completed one such review and recently submitted to the court a written report of its findings.

The report indicates Glenwood has failed to meet numerous standards in two critical areas: the protection of residents who are being transitioned into community settings as Glenwood moves toward the planned shut-down in 2024, and the clinical and medical care that’s now being provided to residents, In the area of clinical and medical care, Glenwood was found to be in substantial compliance in only 15 of the 65 standards that were evaluated. In the area of discharge and transition planning, the home was judged to be in substantial compliance in only four of 34 standards.

To be considered in substantial compliance with one of the agreed-upon standards, the home had to meet those standards in only 80% of the cases that were reviewed.