RED OAK, Iowa – Iowa Senator Joni Ernst today (Wednesday) announced that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former White House Press Secretary under President Donald Trump and the GOP nominee for governor of Arkansas, will join her as the headline guest for this year’s Roast & Ride. The event is scheduled for October 22, 2022 and will include a “Ruck March” for the first time ever.

Ernst, a Republican from Red Oak, says “Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a good friend and relentless fighter for our strong, conservative values. I am thrilled to have Sarah joining me, and so many Iowans, for this year’s Roast & Ride. We look forward to seeing you in October!”  Huckabee Sanders says “Joni Ernst is on the frontlines every day, pushing back against the radical policies of the far left in Washington, D.C., and I am excited to join my friend at her annual Roast & Ride this year. Iowans, like Arkansans, know that we need to elect strong conservatives in November who will defend our freedom and enact bold reforms.”

Sen. Joni Ernst on a “Roast and Ride.” (2016 file photo from Radio Iowa)

Tickets for Ernst’s 2022 Roast & Ride are available starting TODAY (Wednesday). Click HERE for more information. She held her first Roast & Ride in 2015. Over the years, the event has featured some of the biggest names in Iowa and national politics, including President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Ambassador Nikki Haley, Governor Mike Huckabee, Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Lindsey Graham, Governor Terry Branstad, and many others.

For more information or to purchase tickets for Joni’s Roast and Ride, click here.

(Radio Iowa) – The potential for wind energy is now severely limited in Woodbury County. The board of supervisors voted Tuesday night to increase the setback distance for wind turbines from 12-hundred-50 feet to 25-hundred. The change will prevent MidAmerican Energy from building the 90-plus wind turbines proposed in its Siouxland Wind Farm Project. County supervisor Justin Wright voted against the measure, calling it unfair to the nearly 60 residents already signed on to the project. “There’s a minority of constituents in Woodbury County that are on the opposing side of the issue,” Wright says, “but we are still going to strip a right away from a smaller group of Woodbury County taxpayers.”

Many residents showed up to the public hearing to support the amended ordinance, citing safety concerns. The majority of the board sided with the almost 900 residents that signed a petition supporting the change. Supervisor Matthew Ung says he understood their concerns about the potential disruption the turbines could pose to the county.  Ung says, “Good, bad or indifferent, the nuisance issues with turbines are exacerbated by the population density in Woodbury County compared to other areas with industrial wind farms that are widespread.”

Representatives from MidAmerican energy opposed the measure, as the new ordinance shrinks the buildable acres in the county from 177 to just one-point-seven.

(reporting by Kendall Crawford, Iowa Public Radio)

(Atlantic, Iowa) – The Atlantic School District’s Board of Education will hold a Special Meeting this evening at 5:30, in the High School Media Center. The Board will discuss and soon thereafter take action on approving their 2022-23 Strategic Plan and Board Goals. They’re expected to act on approving Contract Recommendations for:

• Daniel Towne, MS Paraeducator
• Loretta Barringer, PreSchool Bus Driver
• and Gerald Luddington, Substitute Car/Van Driver.

The Board will also act on a Sharing Agreement with Adair-Casey, for a School Business Official (SBO), and on approving a Change Order for the HS South Parking Lot Improvement Project. Their final order of business is a closed session for the annual evaluation of Superintendent Steve Barber.

(Radio Iowa) – The Insect Zoo at Iowa State University is hosting an open house this weekend for Iowans who love all things creepy and crawly. Ginny Mitchell, education program coordinator for the traveling insect zoo, says events on Saturday will include “Roach Racing” as well as a feature called “Painting with Maggots.” “We’re going to have over 125 living species of arthropods, so of course, these are things like insects, spiders, tarantulas, millipedes, scorpions, all sorts of fun things,” Mitchell says. “There’ll be lots of hands-on opportunities for the public to get up close and personal with these animals.”

There will be “touch bowls” into which visitors will be able to carefully stick their hands to find out what it feels like to have one of these multi-legged critters scurry across your fingers. “Rosie, our Chilean rose hair tarantula, is definitely a fan favorite. She’s probably the most popular animal we have,” Mitchell says. “Another really fantastic one is the jungle nymph walking stick. It looks nothing like a stick. It looks like a big green leaf. They’re native to Malaysia.” Of course, not every creature in the insect zoo is touch-friendly. “We’re also going to have a deathstalker scorpion which is the most venomous scorpion that we know of,” Mitchell says. “It’s native to the Middle East and Northern Africa.”

Chilean rose hair tarantula Rosie. (ISU photo)

That portion of the open house runs from 10 AM to 2 PM Saturday in the Advanced Teaching and Research Building on the I-S-U campus. The Entomology Graduate Student Organization is also hosting on an Insect Field Day where visitors can learn about common insects in Iowa, go collecting on campus, then learn to preserve what they collected. To register for that event, email “clcunn@iastate.edu”. On Saturday evening, another event will get underway at Carr Park in Ames where ultraviolet lights will be used to see what bugs may be in our own backyards.

“We’ll have white sheet set up with the black lights there and we’re going to attract all sorts of bug friends to those lights,” Mitchell says. “Now before it gets dark, we’re going to be taking the kids around and looking around to the park for bugs that we find during the day, and then we’ll see how many of those bugs come to the light at night.”

That event runs from 6 to 10 PM. Learn more about the zoo and the events here: https://www.facebook.com/ISUInsectZoo/

Police in Creston (Iowa), Tuesday evening, arrested 36-year-old Douglas Edward Woodward III, of Creston. He was taken into custody at around 4:45-p.m.,  in the 1100 block of Sunrise Drive, for Driving While Barred. Woodward was transported to the Union County Jail, where his bond was set at $2,000.

(Des Moines, Iowa) – A building on the Iowa State Fairgrounds was just north of the Youth Inn at the Iowa State Fairgrounds went up in flames around 2:30 a.m. today (Wednesday). According to Des Moines television stations KCCI and WOI, the building located at East 33rd and Dean was a warehouse. Trailers, but no livestock were stored inside.

Crews had the flames under control now and were working to find the cause for the blaze. The building is seriously damaged. Reports say the roof is gone, and the siding is charred and falling off, exposing the metal framing. No injuries have been reported.

Additional information is currently not available.

(Radio Iowa) – The start of school is an exciting time for students but it can be a confusing, stressful trial for our pets. Cassandra Johnson, animal enrichment supervisor at the Animal Rescue League of Iowa, says after a full summer of undivided attention from their kid companions, our animals will soon see their routine switch to hectic mornings and long, lonely days.  “It’s definitely a little bit of a struggle for our cats and dogs once everybody leaves,” Johnson says. “They’ve been there almost every single day if not every day for three months and it’s just like a quitting cold turkey.”

Cassandra Johnson. (ARL photo)

It’s important for pets to have time to themselves and Johnson says it can help to make back-to-school time less traumatic. “I’m very much one of those, even if it’s a puppy or an adult dog, that we start working on alone time,” Johnson says. “Whether that be productive alone time or just alone time with you physically, there in the house or outside of the home. Gradual is always better versus, you know, ‘Hey, I’ve been with you 24 hours a day for three months. I’m just going to suddenly do a 12-hour day or 10-hour day.'”

She suggests leaving a radio or T-V on in the house during the day, or even tuning in one of the dog- or cat-specific channels on cable.  “Most people, not everyone, when they’re home alone, there is some sort of background noise,” Johnson says. “Very rarely are we having complete and utter silence, so for some of our animals, it’s kind of off-putting.” Animals that are stressed may show symptoms like: depression, lethargy, destructive behavior, and a decrease in eating and drinking. She says simple things might help.

“If you have the ability in the morning, take the dog on quick walk, get some physical exercise in there,” Johnson says, “or even after you get home to kind of get an outlet there for them to decompress a little bit from you being gone.” In some cases, pet owners might consider hiring a petsitter to check in on the animals to ease their loneliness and make sure they’re okay.

(Radio Iowa) – The 9-8-8 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline launched in the middle of July and the volume of calls and texts from Iowans seeking assistance has grown significantly. Peggy Huppert is executive director of the Iowa chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “We thought it would take some time to build to a higher level. They were saying within six months or maybe a year we would expect to see a much higher volume of calls and texts,” Huppert says, “but it’s like this is just literally right off the bat.”

Two Iowa providers that had been handling calls and texts to a suicide prevention hotline began getting 9-8-8 contacts when the national number launched July 16th. Since then, the text service reports more than 535 Iowans have chatted via text with a counselor. According to the contractor handling phone calls, 56 of the people who dialed 9-8-8 from Iowa in July were at high risk of suicide.

“That is what we suspected is we would start getting calls that previously would have gone to 911 of someone in imminent danger or who has taken the pills or taken an action to end their life and then calls this number,” Huppert says. Huppert says 9-1-1 operators are trained to dispatch emergency personnel, while the staff on the 9-8-8 system are trained to provide counseling and assess what services the person may need.

“They are estimating 80-90% of calls and texts that come in, they’re going to be able to handle either on the phone or through texting and they’re not even going to have to send out mobile crisis response,” Huppert says. “That’s huge.” In the month of July, 9-8-8 counselors who received calls referred 325 Iowans to other mental health providers.

“The 988 counselors stay on with the caller or the texter until the situation is resolved,” Huppert says. “They stay on as long as is necessary and, in some cases, that might be hours.” Huppert says Iowa was better positioned than other states for the national launch of 9-8-8 service because CommUnity Crisis Services in Iowa City and Foundation 2 Crisis Services in Cedar Rapids had been handling suicide prevention hotline texts and phone calls.

(Radio Iowa) – An eastern Iowa trucking company has announced a 525 MILLION dollar transaction that will make it the nation’s eighth largest trucking fleet. Heartland Express is based in North Liberty. Contract Freighters Incorporated — or C-F-I — is based in Joplin, Missouri. Heartland Express is acquiring C-F-I’s logistics unit in Mexico as well as C-F-I’s truckload unit. C-F-I has facilities in Missouri, Michigan, Arkansas, Texas, Florida and Mexico. The addition of those six locations will give Heartland Express ownership of 30 terminals in the U.S. and Mexico.

After the acquisition is complete, Heartland will have 55-hundred semi tractors and nearly 18-thousand trailers in its fleet. However, C-F-I vehicles and terminals will continue to operate under the C-F-I brand and executive management.

Heartland Express began in 1955 as a hauler of Whirlpool washing machines. According to a news release from the company, adding C-F-I to its roster of companies means Heartland Express will have total assets of nearly two BILLION dollars and generate an estimated one-point-three BILLION dollars in annual revenue.

(Radio Iowa) – A Maurice, Iowa, native who has lived in Ukraine for more than 15 years, is back in the area to connect with her family and her mission supporters. Miranda Heytsi and her husband and their church in Tyachiv ministered to refugees fleeing the country when the Russian invasion started six months ago. “Hundreds of people kept passing through our community trying to escape in to go into different countries. Many came in and left because they just needed places to spend a couple of nights maybe get a meal or they went to the borders and had problems and they had to come back.

They needed a place to stay.” So we had many, many people,” she says. Now they work with refugees who stayed there. “Finding places for them to sleep, finding mattresses, finding bedding. We don’t have any places to rent in our town,” she says. “So pretty much even stores we had old stores we made them into places to live — put carpet down, mattresses on the floor. Then again it was in the winter, so we’ve got the whole issue of heating and water and food, clothing, hygiene, everything, everything that’s needed for life.” The church with 30 adult members is providing for some 200 refugees in their care.

Miranda Heytsi

“It was chaotic. It was like calling everybody that we can think of drive around town looking for any place we could think of for refugees. And you have to remember it’s not just us looking for refugees, a whole town looking for a place,” according to Heytsi. “So we’re overpacked. We were ten thousand people in our town and there were like four-thousand refugees with no additional infrastructure and then no preparation. Bam. So everybody had people living with them.”

Miranda Heytsi attended school in Sioux Center and Orange City and first traveled to Ukraine in 1999 while a college student. Miranda married her husband Vasya in 2006 and has lived in that country ever since.