DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – The Obama campaign is planning parties to celebrate the opening of offices and phone banks in Iowa. Celebrations are scheduled for Tuesday at offices in Cedar Rapids and Sioux City. Organizing for America Iowa spokesman John Kraus said Monday that celebrations are being planned for other Iowa offices this week. They are in Council Bluffs, Davenport, Des Moines, Dubuque, Iowa City and Waterloo.

The Iowa’s Top Workplaces program, partnering with The Des Moines Register, recognized 70 companies across the state as top places to work in Iowa.  117 companies participated in categories of large, mid sized and small sized companies, based on their number of employees. Results were printed yesterday in the Des Moines Register in a special section called Iowa’s Top Workplaces.  Placings were determined by confidential surveys completed last spring by a company’s employees across thirteen categories such as Leadership, Direction, Meaningfulness, Ethics, Opportunities, and Work/Life Flexibility.

CASS Incorporated placed 5^th in the Small Size Company Employers: 50-149 employees– and they placed first over all companies and all categories in the category of Meaningfulness of employment.   Glenda Farrier, CEO, said “CASS Incorporated is honored to be recognized as one of Iowa’s top workplaces, particularly in the area of meaningful work.  Our mission is to Enrich Lives, but what we’ve found is that in carrying out this mission for the people we serve, our lives as employees are enriched as well.” 

CASS Incorporated’s company profile for the Top Workplace program is available online at: http://www.topworkplaces.com/company_survey/cass-incorporated_iowa/desmoinesregister_11

Releases of water from upstream dams on the Missouri River are being dropped again, as the U-S Army Corps of Engineers enters the final stage of ending the summer-long flooding. Kim Thomas, chief of the Corps’ Readiness Branch in Omaha, says holding water releases steady the past several weeks allowed pressure on levees to stabilize, reducing underseepage and sand boils.

“At the start of the operational pause, we still had a tremendous amount of boils going on and every day that we’ve held at this pause, we’ve seen less and less of those boils,” Thomas says. “That’s another sign this pause was a good thing for the levees, to let them equalize.” Releases at Gavins Point Dam at Yankton, South Dakota, totaled 160-thousand cubic feet per second earlier this year — more than a million gallons per second. The Corps slowly dropped releases to 90-thousand C-F-S, then held at that level for three weeks. Last night (Sunday), the releases were cut back again. Jody Farhat, chief of the Corps of Engineers’ Missouri River Basin Management Office, says the tactic kept releases stable for a reason.

Farhat says, “The pause was primarily to allow the water pressure in the levees and the embankment just downstream of Gavins Point Dam, that whole Lake Yankton area, to allow the water pressure in those levees to stabilize.” It was feared some levees might collapse without the force of the water against them, but she says thankfully, that didn’t happen.

“The levees have not failed us as the water pressure went off them and Lake Yankton is still there,” Farhat says, “so I think we achieved the overall objective.” The Corps plans to drop releases by five-thousand cubic feet per second every other day until they reach 40-thousand C-F-S on October 6th, about one-quarter of what it was during the worst of the flooding.

(Radio Iowa)