The Adair County Board of Supervisors will hold a Special Session Thursday morning. During the 9-a.m. CLOSED SESSION, the Board will discuss “Matters in Litigation.” No other details were provided.

DURANT, Iowa (AP) — A family owned German company is celebrating the opening of its new office and manufacturing plant in eastern Iowa. Group Schumacher’s new facility in Durant replaces the U.S. headquarters it has operated there since 1994. Schumacher’s Tim Chen told the Quad-City Times the more than $4 million project shows the Schumacher family is making an investment in North America.
The company makes agricultural equipment, importing from Germany about 70 percent of what it sells and building around 30 percent of its products in the United States. Chen says the company seeks the flexibility of more regional manufacturing by raising the percentage of U.S.-built goods.

Chen says the company has hired an additional half-dozen workers for the new facility so far, bringing the local total to around 36.

The Cass County Board of Supervisors, Wednesday (today), approved the re-appointment of Kenny Harrison, of Anita, to the Cass County Veterans Affairs Commission. The Board also set the date for a Public Hearing on a proposal to incur Non-Current Debt in an amount not to exceed $350,000, “for the purpose of paying the costs of certain urban renewal projects in the 2017 Cass County Agribusiness Urban Renewal Area,” which consists of using Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to pay the costs of constructing grey water management improvements and undertaking capital projects, for the construction of roads, bridges and culverts – pertaining to the Elite Octane Ethanol plant. The hearing takes place 8:30-a.m., Thursday, May 31st in the Supervisors Board Room at the Courthouse in Atlantic.

Cass County Auditor Dale Sunderman explained a change order for the Echo to Glacier road project and construction costs associated with the ethanol plant, necessitates additional funds that not expected to exceed $269,000, but money is built-in for any surprises/additional change orders.  He says since the costs weren’t built into the General Obligation bond loan, they will borrow from the Local Option Sales Tax [LOST] and pay it back over a period of years when the Tax Increment Financing payments to the County start coming in from the plant by 2021.)

The County does not have to pay tax on the LOST, and will receive $960,000 in tax per year for about 15 years, according to the agreement with Elite Octane. Those funds will be use to pay back the LOST fund.  In other business, the Board approved permits for Hansen Valley Oil and the 21st Century Co-op C-Store, to sell cigarettes, tobacco, alternative nicotine  or vapor products.

Coca-Cola Days 2018 will be held September 28th and 29th in Downtown Atlantic. The event is the second largest collectors’ show in the United States and includes a tailgate barbecue open to the public, a Show Swap & Sell, “On the Road with Coca-Cola Raffle” and many more activities for all ages.

Coca Cola Days 2018 T-shirt

This year’s feature theme is, “On the Road with Coca-Cola”. T-Shirts for the 2018 Coca-Cola Days Celebration are now available for $16 at the Atlantic Area Chamber of Commerce, 102 Chestnut Street, from 8 AM – 5 PM, Monday – Friday. T-shirts can be shipped for an additional fee.

For more information on Coca-Cola Days or a full list of activities, please visit www.cocacoladays.com, call the Atlantic Area Chamber of Commerce at 712-243-3017 or email chamber@atlanticiowa.com. 2018 Coca-Cola Days brochures are also available at the Chamber or local merchants.

As Iowans prepare to decorate the graves of their loved ones this Memorial Day, some cities are struggling with cemeteries that are running out of space. Iowa State University’s Carlton Basmajian is one of the few planners who studies cemetery use. “One thing that we’ve noticed just as I’ve working on this stuff as researcher for several years — is that a lot of communities don’t talk about it,” Basmajian says. “So the problem in a lot of places is running out of space. I mean, not every place of course, but that’s kind of the typical problem.” He’s an associate professor of community and regional planning, and says city leaders are the only ones who avoid the subject.

Basmajian says the public doesn’t really bring the issue of cemetery space up, so it is less visible than you might expect. Basmajian says part of the issue is the general discomfort people sometimes have with talking about death. But he says the issue of creating more cemetery space goes deeper than that. “It’s also a tricky land-use issue because you are talking about creating the case of a cemetery at least — whether it be for a full body burial or for scattering cremains or whatever — you’re talking about creating a relatively permanent use in the community. And depending on the circumstances, that would be land that would otherwise be valuable for development,” according to Basmajian. For rapidly expanding areas, giving up prime development ground to expand a cemetery isn’t an easy sell.

“So it’s kind of a double edge, I think there’s the creepiness factor, but there’s also the issue of allocating land to something that’s not going to be especially profitable for a very long time,” Basmajian says. Many cities have found their cemeteries that used to be on the edge of town are now surrounded by development and there is no room for expansion. That’s a concern for keeping those operations running. “‘With cemeteries the major generator of revenue is the cost of selling land and burying people. And if you don’t have land to sell…if the burial plots are all full, then you’ve run into kind of a financial issue too,” according to Basmajian. “You have this big plot of land that’s got to be managed, it’s got all this infrastructure in it which is fragile out in the weather all the time. And you don’t really have an easy revenue source to keep it up.”

He says most communities haven’t built a cemetery since the 1950s, so there’s been more than half a century of no expansion and no planning. Basmajian says as the baby boomers grow older, this is going to be a major issue in the next 30 years.

(Radio Iowa)