Today the Iowa Utilities Board concluded months of hearings with Summit Carbon Solutions about a proposed pipeline that would run through Iowa.
The project is meant to capture co-2 emissions from 30 ethanol plants across five states.
Summit says so far, 75% of impacted landowners in Iowa have signed voluntary easements with the company.
However, many landowners along the proposed route still have not signed.
The Iowa Department of Health and Human Services says it plans to sell some of the land it owns at its five state-run facilities.
DHHS owns and operates two mental health institutions in Cherokee and Independence, the Boys State Training School in Eldora…as well as the Woodward and Glenwood Resource Centers.
Glenwood is slated to close next year.
DHHS Director Kelly Garcia says one reason for the move is to help address housing shortages in places like Cherokee.
"We had already been thinking about really making sure we're not holding on to land and parcels that we don't need to anymore, but but also being good stewards of the sale of that property."
Garcia says the department has wrapped up all of its land surveys and plans to put the land it wants to sell on the market soon.
Traffic fatalities in our state this year are more than 13 percent higher than the average number of fatalities over the last five years.
Highhway 20 from Lawton to Moville in Woodbury County is one of the six segments of roadways are among the most dangerous in the state, and it is now marked with yellow and white warning signs as a safety corridor.
The warning signs are posted on that segment of road and on segments of five other roads. The Iowa DOT is launching a pilot program, naming those six segments “Safety Corridors,” where motorists need to be particularly careful, and where law enforcement will step up patrols. https://bitly.ws/ZT89
A total of 312 people have died on Iowa’s roads so far this year, a rise from 286 on this date a year ago.
The other five Safety Corridors in Iowa are:
U.S. 6 from East of Council Bluffs to US 59 in Pottawattamie County
I-80 from County Road F-48 to Newton in Jasper County
Iowa 5 from Iowa 92 to the Monroe County line in Marion County
U.S. 218 from Mt. Pleasant to County Road J-20 (near Salem) in Henry County
Iowa 2 from Donnellson to U.S. 61 in Lee County
Other states have seen success by marking accident-prone roads as Safety Corridors.
The Board of Regents will hear a report from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion study group at its meeting next week on the UNI campus, according to Radio Iowa.
https://bitly.ws/ZTv9
The group made ten recommendations, including ensuring that employee performance is not evaluated based on an individual’s participation in DEI initiatives unless they specifically relate to an employee’s job.
They recommend that the universities should not require individuals to disclose their pronouns, as the group says this has intersected with politics and can make people feel uncomfortable.
The DEI review is required by a bill the governor signed into law in June. The Board of Regents will meet in Cedar Falls next Wednesday and Thursday.
