(Radio Iowa) – The former owner of a northeast Iowa trucking company has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for failing to pay more than one-point-four MILLION dollars in taxes over a seven year period. Court records indicate 57-year-old Mark Warm of Jesup was in charge of issuing paychecks to Warm Trucking employees. Federal income taxes and contributions for Social Security were subtracted from those paychecks –but the taxes weren’t paid to the I-R-S.

An I-R-S agent based in St. Louis says Warm made a conscious decision to cheat his employees. In his plea agreement, Warm admitted he also failed to pay other taxes that Warm Trucking owed.

(Radio Iowa) – A bill just starting to navigate its way through the Iowa legislature would provide 200-thousand dollars in state tax money to support the commissioning of a Navy submarine bearing the state “She will be powered by a S9G reactor, which is a life-of-the-ship powerplant,” James said, “so she will represent this great state for the next three decades.” Once the U-S-S Iowa is in service, it will spend most of its time three stories below the surface of the world’s oceans. “We will make our own water. We will make our own air. The only limiting factor for us will be our ability to load food, so at some point we’ll have to come up (for provisions),” James said. “But the crew is extremely excited about representing the state and feels kinship.”

Some of the 135 crew members assigned to the U-S-S Iowa started visiting the state in 2019 and a few spent this past Thanksgiving in Iowa with host families. State Representative Todd Prichard of Charles City is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, however his dad and two uncles served in the Navy and Prichard notes this will be the fourth U.S. Navy vessel to be christened the U.S.S. Iowa. “This is a proud tradition for our state,” Prichard says, “and this is just a new way for us to continue that tradition of quiet service.”

This is the SSN 774, the USS Virginia. It’s sister submarine, the Iowa, is under construction.

Prichard was a member of the House subcommittee that gave initial approval to spending 200-thousand dollars in state money on the U.S.S. Iowa. Private fundraising is underway as well to raise more than twice that much. The state and private funds will being used to outfit the U-S-S Iowa with some Iowa-themed furnishings and support the formal ceremonies surrounding its launch later this year.

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Flood Center is unveiling a new tool to help Iowans living along the Missouri River prepare for flooding. Larry Weber, co-founder of the Iowa Flood Center, says the interactive map will give people who may be impacted by flooding the information they need in a times of crisis.  “If your home happens to be within the area that’s flooded, then with your mouse, you can just click by your house, and it’ll tell you the depth of water,” Weber says. “All of that is to help them to respond to floods to protect your property.”

The system is one part of a larger initiative to help impacted communities recover. Weber says the number one priority was making the technology accessible to everyone and the project took collaboration from the U-S Army Corps of Engineers, the National Weather Service and the University of Iowa-based Iowa Flood Center. “The Corps and the Weather Service and ourselves, we’re all flood experts, but but we can’t be there helping every individual homeowner and landowner, they need to help themselves,” Weber says, “but we can provide the tools to them that allow them to be able to do that.”

Weber says the flood prediction tool can also help them see how increasing the number of wetlands or watersheds in the area could stem flooding. The Iowa Flood Center started to develop the system after the damaging floods of 2019.

(Kendall Crawford, Iowa Public Radio)

(Atlantic/Griswold, Iowa) – The Atlantic Chamber Ambassadors were hosted by Michelle & Randy Roy, owners of Randy’s Computer, on Thursday, January 20th, 2022. The Ambassadors joined the couple in celebrating the opening of their new location in Atlantic.

Randy Roy was living in Southern California when a friend asked him for help reassembling a desktop computer. It was then he realized his passion for customer service and computer repair. That was 25 years ago and since then, Randy & his wife, Michelle, have had many generous people offer them opportunities that they just couldn’t pass up. Fast forward to November 2021, they opened their doors to a second location in Atlantic. Randy and Michelle have been overwhelmed by the amount of support they have received in the past few months. The couple is grateful and excited to become a part of Atlantic’s tight knit community and look forward to continuing to support other small businesses.

Photo courtesy the Atlantic Chamber of Commerce

Randy’s Computer specializes in computer sales and repair, hardware and software updates, backup solutions, computer education and training and more. The Atlantic location is open 8:00AM-5:00PM, except on Thursdays and Sundays. The Griswold location is open 8:00AM-5:00PM, except Thursdays and weekends.

Randy’s Computer is located at 513 Chestnut Street in Atlantic and also located at 511 Main Street in Griswold. For more information about Randy’s Computer, call 712-590-0083 or visit their website, www.randyscomputer.com

More area news from Ric Hanson.

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(Radio Iowa) – A young child was accidentally shot with a handgun in Storm Lake. Authorities were called to a Storm Lake residence around 7:30 Wednesday evening. A nine-year-old child had received a lower body gunshot wound. Police determined that another child in the home located an unsecured handgun and unintentionally discharged it, and it struck the nine-year-old. The nine-year-old was transported by ambulance to the hospital in Storm Lake for non-life threatening injuries. The incident remains under investigation.

The broadcast news at 7:06-a.m. from Ric Hanson.

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(Radio Iowa) – A couple of Iowa health experts say the increase in opioid deaths in the state is alarming — but they are confident things can turn around. University of Iowa professor of psychiatry and emergency medicine, Gerard Clancy says nearly 30 percent of their clinic and emergency room visits are now related to psychiatric and addiction needs. “There is an evolving epidemic within the pandemic — and that’s an epidemic of both mental disorders and substance use disorders. In part, dealing with the stress of the pandemic, but in part, because the treatment system has struggled with the weight of the pandemic as well,” Clancy says.

Clancy says one of the problems is opioids are now laced with highly-potent fentanyl. “The insurgent of fentanyl has made things much more complicated,” according to Clancy. “It’s important for people to understand that fentanyl is a different player. It is more dangerous. It is harder to work with as far as some of the treatment tools that we have.” But he says he is confident they can make progress and says mental and substance use disorders are treatable conditions, and he urges Iowans who are struggling to seek help. Alison Lynch is the director of the opioid addiction clinic at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. She says fentanyl is a serious issue.

“It’s made it much hard to resuscitate somebody if they do have an overdose. In the past, if someone had a heroin overdose we could use Narcan — and often one dose or maybe a couple of doses would work, ” she says. “And now that fentanyl is in the drug supply — it can take multiple doses of Narcan….and even then it can be really hard to get somebody out of that overdose,” Lynch says. But she says there are treatment options, and she encourages Iowans who are struggling to seek help.

“I can’t tell you how many success stories we have in our clinic. We have so many people who arrived and their substance abuse or their opioid use have become kind of chaotic and things have really gotten to a crisis point — and then they get started in treatment — and really quickly we can see a lot of progress,” she says. “They start feeling better and they are able to focus on setting some goals for themselves and really make a lot of progress pretty quickly in getting into recovery.”

The Iowa Department of Public Health estimates that fentanyl deaths rose from 31 percent of all overdoses in 2016 to 87 percent in 2021. The two spoke during an update on the opioid epidemic Thursday by Attorney General Tom Miller.

(Radio Iowa) – Advocates in Iowa are stunned over the decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C-M-S, to deny coverage for an entire class of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Lauren Livingston, spokeswoman for the Iowa Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, says the blanket decision has tremendous implications beyond the initial drug, Aduhelm. “They will require people who want to try out these treatments in the future to have to go through a clinical trial in order to receive the treatment,” Livingston says, “and the main problem is, this really restricts access to the majority of people.”

The draft decision says all future F-D-A-approved treatments in this class of drugs, regardless of clinical trial results and what the F-D-A recommends, will -not- be covered except in another clinical trial. “They’ve never made a decision to cover an entire class of drugs based on just one drug,” Livingston says, “and many people aren’t even near an institution that does clinical trials, so it makes it really hard for people to get access to these treatments.”

Aduhelm is showing promise in the treatment of early-stage Alzheimer’s and for others with mild cognitive impairment. For C-M-S to deny coverage, Livingston says, is putting concerns about money over the lives of patients.  “Biogen, the drug maker, originally had it priced at $56,000,” Livingston says. “They did get a lot of pushback from the Alzheimer’s Association and many others and they did cut the price to $28,000 a year, but that’s still far too expensive for the majority of people to be able to afford out-of-pocket without coverage.”

Many other drugs used in treating other afflictions are quite expensive and -are- covered by C-M-S, she notes. A statement from the national association’s CEO says: “People living with Alzheimer’s disease deserve the same access to therapies given to those living with other conditions like cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS. For those in the Administration to treat those with Alzheimer’s disease differently than those with other diseases is simply unacceptable.” About six-million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, including some 66-thousand Iowans.