Atlantic, IA — Officials with Cass Health in Atlantic report, beginning Monday, June 28, 2021, the Cass Health Main Entrance and Parking Lot A will be closed temporarily due to construction.
Crews will be replacing the driveway to the building, and the work is expected to continue through October. Cass Health Chief Financial Officer Abbey Stangl says “There’s never a great time to close your main parking lot and entrance, but we chose to do this work during the summer and early fall so that we could have it wrapped up prior to any inclement weather this winter.” Stangl says “The goal of this portion of construction is to improve our patients’ safety and ease of access into the building. While we hate to inconvenience anyone, the long-term gain will be worth it.”

While the parking lot and entrance are closed, all patients and visitors should use Emergency Drive to access parking lots B and C. Patients and visitors should use the Emergency entrance; PT, OT, Speech, and Radiology patients can use the Rehabilitation Services entrance. Free valet parking is available Monday through Friday from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm.

(Updated/Radio Iowa) – Residents in Coggin have been told to stay inside and lock their doors as authorities search for a suspect who seriously wounded a sheriff’s deputy during a convenience store robbery. A Linn County deputy responded to an alarm at the Casey’s on Highway 13 in Coggin at about 10:15 Sunday night and was shot several times. He was flown to the University of Iowa Hospitals for treatment. According to a news release from the Linn County Sheriff’s office, the suspect fled in a van, another deputy followed the van, the van crashed on the north edge of Coggin and the suspect started running.

Authorities describe the suspect as a black man in his 30s who weighs about 200 pounds and is somewhere between 5 foot 10 and 6 foot two. The Casey’s store where the incident occurred has reopened this (Monday) morning.

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is hoping to increase recycling across the state with a new “I Am a Recycler” campaign. The D-N-R’s Jennifer Wright says it has been ten years since there’s been an education campaign. “We haven’t been very good about consistently sort of marketing and educating our Iowa citizens. So, the I am a recycler campaign is a multi-year environmental education campaign that’s focused on the consistent recycling education, but also will address sustainable materials management,” Wright says.

She says the hope is to get more people to think of recycling as the natural thing to do. “We did some behavior change research. We want Iowans to not just recycle — we want them to become permanent recyclers,” Wright says. So that is the emphasis of this campaign.” Recycling has been around for 40 years — but Wright says it hasn’t hit its full potential yet. The research they did gave them a focus for this campaign. “That demographic was in the age range of the mid-20s to the mid-40s — which seems pretty big. And that demographic is on social media — so we’re looking at this from the sort of a social media perspective, and we are moving it into other multi-media approaches,” Wright says.

Wright says one of the biggest problems they find is the contamination of materials put into recycling bins. “I’ll use a pizza box for example. If it is a clean pizza box you can rip the top off if it doesn’t have any oil or grease or stuck on cheese,” she says. “And some, if they are saturated or dirty we certainly don’t want those in the recycling mix because they are contaminated.” Wright says that is also a key part of the message of the importance of recycling. “It’s about recycling right. Recycling the right things. And citizens of Iowa can go to their local landfill or material recovery facility and find out what is a recyclable material in their area,” Wright says.

The Iowa D-N-R will share information about recycling more and recycling right in the next six months. Wright says you can join in the campaign by snapping a selfie of how you recycle and post the pictures on social media with the tag @IowaDNR and the hashtag #IAmARecycler.