(Radio Iowa) – Governor Kim Reynolds says there are a few bad actors in any industry, but she disagrees with a general assessment that the media and Iowa teachers are pursuing a sinister agenda. Senate President Jake Chapman, a fellow Republican, used the phrase “sinister agenda” during a speech in the senate last week. “It has become increasingly evident that we live in a world in which many, including our media, wish to confuse, misguide and deceive us, calling good evil and evil good,” Chapman said. “…The attack on our children is no longer hidden…We have some teachers who are disguising sexually obscene material as desired subject matter and profess it as artistic and literary in value.”

Reynolds says when parents raise concerns about X-rated books, her focus is to ensure administrators and school boards respond and, if they don’t, the state Board of Education will. The governor’s also distancing herself from Chapman’s remarks.  “I’m not going to take any ownership of that. I hope he just misspoke and he’ll correct that,” Reynolds says. “But I think everything that I say, that I’ve said and done — not just said, but done — should let teachers know how much I appreciate (them) and especially appreciate them being in the classroom when so many other teachers across this country did not.” Reynolds says there are individuals who hurt the reputation of many industries.  “There’s bad politicians. There’s bad cops — every sector,” she says. “There’s bad media people.”

But Reynolds says she isn’t accusing teachers of having a sinister agenda and points to her support of teacher leadership and compensation program and the thousand dollar retention bonus for teachers she just announced last week. “I’m the governor of the state of Iowa,” Reynolds says. “…I don’t hear anything in any of that that says I’m not grateful to the teachers.”

Reynolds made her remarks during an interview with Radio Iowa. Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls say Chapman’s hateful words should be disavowed by all Republicans. Wahls says the governor should pledge to veto Chapman’s proposal to charge teachers and teacher librarians with a felony if certain books are used in class or are in the school library.

(Villisca, Iowa) – No injuries were reported following a house fire early this (Wednesday) morning, in Villisca. According to reports, the Villisca fire fighters dispatched to the scene at 407 E. 6th Street at 12:10-a.m., arrived about five-minutes later, to find the home’s occupants had been evacuated, and smoke was emitting from the front door. The flames apparently began in the basement, where a space heater was located next to a bed.

The blaze spread within the walls into the first floor kitchen and living room. Crews quickly knocked down the basement flames and contained the remaining hot spots to the kitchen/living room walls. The flames were extinguished and clean-up operations wrapped-up by around 2-a.m.

The Red Cross was called to assist with four adults and one child of the home. Authorities say while a dollar amount of the damage was not immediately available, the house was still livable, with necessary repairs conducted. Assisting Villisca Fire were crews from Villisca Public Works, Villisca Power, Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, Villisca Ambulance, Red Oak Rescue, Alliant Energy, and the American Red Cross.

IOWA CITY – The Iowa Department of Corrections, today (Wednesday) said 84-year-old Donald Edward Lanphier was pronounced deceased due to natural causes at 4:46 pm on Sunday, January 16, 2022 at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. He was originally an inmate at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center in Coralville. Lanphier had been serving a 10 year Special Supervision Sentence 903B.2 (2005) from Mahaska County. His supervision began on December 10, 2020.

Another inmate, 65-year-old Charles Earl Thompson was pronounced deceased due to natural causes at 9:29 pm on Sunday, January 16, 2022 in a hospice room of the Iowa Medical and Classification Center where he had been housed due to chronic illness.  Thompson had been serving a 10-year maximum term for the crimes of Lascivious Acts with Child from Floyd County. His sentence began on February 22, 2021

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(Shenandoah, Iowa) – A traffic stop early this (Wednesday) morning in Shenandoah resulted two people being arrested on drug charges. The Shenandoah Police Dept. reports the Shenandoah K9 Unit conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle with an equipment violation, at around 12:17-a.m., in the 800 block of Highway 59. During the incident, the K9 “Remmi” was deployed and alerted to the odor of narcotics.

Following an investigation, a passenger in the vehicle, 35-year-old Tamara Herrera-Alberto, of Shenandoah, was arrested for: Possession of a Controlled Substance (PCS)/Methamphetamine, and Poss. of Paraphernalia. She arrested also, on a valid arrest warrant issued out of Mills County, for a Controlled Substance Violation & Failure to Affix a Drug Tax Stamp, and two valid warrants out of Douglas County, Nebraska, for PCS.  Herrera-Alberto was being held in the Page County Jail on a $31,300 bond.

A second passenger in the vehicle, 33-year-old Ramon Nelson, of Omaha, was arrested for Possession of Paraphernalia. Nelson was cited into court and released from custody. Fremont County Sheriff’s Deputies assisted Shenandoah Police during the traffic stop.

(Radio Iowa) – Western Iowa towns that were hit hard by the 2019 floods are still working toward recovery. Hamburg and Pacific Junction are awaiting levee certifications to move their communities forward. As Hamburg puts the finishing touches on one levee, Mayor Cathy Crain is already focusing on how the small town can build another one. She says getting Hamburg out of the floodplain could transform its future. Crain says, “If we could do that, you have entirely changed a town and a county because we would have far more possibilities.”

Both towns hope they can use some of the state’s allotted infrastructure funding to assist in recovery efforts. Crain estimates her town still has over 70 projects to complete. “What we’ve always said is we just wanted a fighting chance,” she says. “This is a fighting chance.” Pacific Junction Mayor Andy Young says the major obstacle is levee certification, something that needs to be complete before the town can use its emergency funding. “Hopefully, we’ll be moving forward so we can get our town back or a resemblance of it,” Young says, “but, we’re making, we’re making it.”

The towns are also looking at how they can protect their communities from future disaster, which means finding funding for more flood protection barriers.

(reporting by Kendall Crawford, Iowa Public Radio)

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Department of Natural Resources reports 36 positive chronic wasting disease tests from some five-thousand deer samples this hunting season. The D-N-R’s Tyler Harms oversees the deer management program. “We did add two new counties to our list of counties in which C-W-D has been detected in the wild. Those counties are Greene County in central Iowa, and then also Fremont County in southwest Iowa. So that brings our total number of counties to 12,” Harms says.

He says they will now do additional sample testing in Greene and Fremont County moving forward. Harms says they do with other counties that have had positive deer — and those tests give them an idea of the level of C-W-D.  “If you start looking at individual counties where we’ve had it — like Allamakee County for example where it was first detected in 2013 — we are looking at about a two percent prevalence rate, which is not unexpected it’s about right where we would expect,” according to Harms. “Our goal is just to continue to do what we can to keep that prevalence as low as possible.”

Harms says Iowa’s efforts to try and keep the disease in check are working. “What we’re seeing is that we are really holding our own. We know that this disease is going to continue to expand in counties where we have it. There’s still a lot to be learned about how to effectively manage the disease,” he says. “Based on what we can tell thus far and what we are seeing in the counties where we have the disease is not outside what we would expect to see in our review of counties in other states that have had the disease for much longer.”

Harms says the best thing you can do is to keep hunting and keep submitting samples for testing. “If you are hunting in counties where we have detected the disease — those voluntary samples from harvested animals are a huge, huge benefit to our monitoring effort,” Harms says. “Consider submitting a sample from your harvested animal. Certainly, in these new counties like Greene and Fremont, these hunter-submitted samples are going to be very important for our surveillance efforts moving forward.”

He says everyone can help by NOT putting out feed for deer. “Chronic wasting disease is spread via direct contact between individual animals — so we know that artificial congregation of animals in small areas around these bait sources is going to increase the risk,” he says. Harms says hunters should properly dispose of the deer carcasses to help prevent the spread of the disease.

Counties with positive deer and year detected – Allamakee: 72 (2013); Appanoose: 3 (2020); Clayton: 29 (2016); Decatur: 1 (2019); Dubuque: 3 (2018); Fayette: 2 (2019); Fremont: 1 (2021); Greene: 1 (2021); Jackson: 2 (2020); Wayne: 22 (2017); Winneshiek: 10 (2019); Woodbury: 2 (2019).

(Radio Iowa) – State data shows a record number of new businesses were launched in Iowa last year. Iowa law requires documents to be filed when a new business is formed in the state. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate’s office manages that online portal for business filings. “We’re seeing an upward trend. We have over 35,000 new businesses that were formed in 2021 alone and in the last three years it’s gone up, up and up,” Pate says. “And that’s in the middle of Covid and a downward economy.”

New business starts soared across the United States last year, to a record five-point-four million new business filings according to the Census Bureau. That’s a million more than 2020, which was also a record. Pate says as Iowa mirrors that upward trend, it shows creativity in the face of pandemic challenges. “Many of them, maybe, they have taken the attitude: ‘Well, I may as well start a business right now of my own because my employer that I had before Covid is not going to let me work,’ so they have to come up with a different plan and so they’ve stepped up and started their own businesses,” Pate says. “I think there are many of those kind of stories.”

Iowa businesses must file initial forms of organization with the state, then confirm twice a year that the business is still active. There are more than 260-thousand businesses operating in the state today. “We don’t have the software that would give us a hard and firm number, but I can tell you just from the sampling I’ve looked at it’s pretty consistent, obviously, with where the population is,” Pate says. “I mean you’re going to see more filings, more businesses in the larger counties, but we have seen growth in all the counties.”

Just over 25-thousand new businesses were started in Iowa in 2019. Nearly 27-thousand launched in 2020 and then there was a 30 percent jump in 2021, to more than 35-thousand new Iowa business starts last year.