The $5,000 in this year’s budget will go towards the purchase of the rock and its transport from a Macedonia-area rock quarry to Oakland’s Chautauqua Park. The other $5,000 will help with the cost of labor and materials when Ray “Bubba” Sorensen, who founded the statewide project, comes to Oakland in 2017 to paint the 82-ton rock.

The project is part of a statewide effort to put a large “Freedom Rock” in each of Iowa’s 99 counties as a patriotic symbol. It began in 1997 when Sorensen painted a large rock with patriotic scenes near Greenfield. This Adair County “Freedom Rock” now attracts 14,000 people annually.

The Pott. County Supervisors, turning their attention to cost overrun issues with the proposed Veterans Affairs building in downtown Council Bluffs, made no specific decisions yet on how to handle the higher-than-anticipated costs for the facility. The supervisors recently learned that construction costs for the building, for which voters approved the sale of $1.5 million in bonds, has come in hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than expected.

Instead of seeking construction bids last fall when the project was ready to go, supervisors opted to wait until January under the assumption that contractors would need work and would offer a favorable bid. That assumption was dashed earlier this month when bids came in no lower than $700,000 above the $1.5 million price tag approved by county voters. Supervisor Justin Schultz, who is also a veteran, said he’s been reaching out to veterans to gain input on how to address the cost overrun, but he concedes they may have to start the process all over, again.