The
Graphic - Advocate WEDNESDAY
|JUNE 17, 2015|VOLUME 126| ISSUE 24
Rockwell City Office 712-297-7544 • advocate@iowatelecom.net - Lake City Office 712-464-3188 • lcgraphic@iowatelecom.net Busy week on the diamond for the Titans - See Page 11
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No presidential emergency declaration for May 10 tornado By Erin Sommers Graphic-Advocate Editor
Downtown Lake City is seen Friday. GRAPHIC-ADVOCATE PHOTO/ERIN SOMMERS
State development official gives Lake City Council mixed news By Erin Sommers Graphic-Advocate Editor
Lake City has a lot going for it, a state development official told the City Council and mayor earlier this month. Jim Thompson said he was impressed by the variety of businesses around the city’s square, the presence of a hospital and the well-kept quality of most of the neighborhoods. He also praised the city for its own office location. “I see government invested (in the square),” Thompson said. “If the city’s not committed to downtown, why would any business be?” His recommendations to city officials focused on bringing more business downtown, developing the upstairs of city buildings as apartments and finding more events to host on the square. Doing that brings more people to town. Lake City’s businesses are already doing a pretty good job of attracting shoppers, based on retail spending data Thompson provided. That information, based on information collected by retailers when people use credit and debit cards, showed Lake City residents will spend about $16 million annually in the retail trade and food and drink industries. Actual retail sales in Lake City totaled just more than $19 million, meaning people who don’t live in Lake City are spending nearly $3 million in the town. That surplus of spending came in the retail trade specifically. Lake City residents spent about $617,000 more on
food and drink purchases out of town than in town, he said. City Council members attributed some of the spending by nonresidents to Macke Motors, a successful car dealership that attracts buyers from a wide area. Those car buyers do come back to Lake City, one business owner said, and sometimes visit his shop while their vehicles are being serviced at Macke Motors. Not all of the demographic information Thompson brought to the meeting was good news. The city’s population is continuing a decades-long decline, and if business owners and city officials don’t do something to address it now, that’s not likely to change. The key isn’t necessarily attracting big employers or manufacturers to Lake City, he said. Instead, city and business officials should focus on making Lake City a great place to live. “Try to be a community people choose to live in,” he said. “You work where you have to. People choose where they live.” Thompson highlighted a few statistics that might signal cause for concern. The 2010 Census found 89 vacant homes in Lake City. Fifteen were for rent, five were for sale, eight were used seasonally or occasionally, two were sold but not yet occupied and five were for migrant workers, the Census said. That left 54 houses that were vacant for reasons not specified in the survey, Thompson said. Then he looked at that figure in conjunction with the rate of 51 percent of owner-occupied housing
being held with no mortgage. Thompson said that rate, while it could indicate a significant amount of wealth, is likelier a sign of homes being passed down from one generation to another. The recipients of those homes may live out of state and don’t intend to live in the homes, but also are not willing to sell them, Thompson said. “How long before a decision is made (about selling or renting such a house) impacts the community,” he said. “I’m not suggesting you lobby them to rent it or sell it … but it would be appropriate to have that discussion with someone trusted in the community. It has to be on your radar screen.” Council members and city officials aren’t the right people to have those discussions, generally, Thompson added, because town residents associate officials with their regulation-enforcing functions. He didn’t want people to think city officials were using their authority to require a home to be sold or rented. The advantage to selling the houses, he said, was it allows more people, particularly families, to move into town. He pointed to another Iowa town where developers built a handful of duplex houses. While families typically don’t move into duplexes, single people often do. Those single people vacated singlefamily homes, which allowed families a chance to move into town, Thompson said. The change in that town increased enrollment in the district by five students, a small number but the first increase
there for years. Thompson referred back to the census numbers for Lake City, which peaked in 1900 and have been dropping, with a few brief increases, ever since. “That’s why we have to convert some of those vacant homes,” he said. “There needs to be a call to action. It might be removing houses to create buildable lots.” That’s something city officials said they are already considering. Towns can also focus on converting the upstairs of downtown buildings into apartments. In other parts of the state, building owners are able to charge $500 to $1,000 a month in rent, typically to couples in their 50s, Thompson said. He reminded city council members that while they aren’t likely to be the ones funding the downtown improvements, they will be able to reap the benefits through increased tax revenues and increases in the sales taxes via more business at downtown shops. Per acre, Thompson said, downtown businesses are valued higher than even prime farmland. “You need to take one or two things out of this and figure out how to do it,” he said. He recommended asking business owners what they need, as well as analyzing city residents’ spending habits. “This community is not going to get better unless you engage (with everyone),” he said. “Our goal has got to be, how can we be better than yesterday?”
Calhoun County won’t get a presidential declaration of emergency for damage caused by the May 10 tornado, county Emergency Management Agency Director Steve O’Connor said Friday. “The dollars (in damage) were there (to meet the federal threshold) but they were insurable dollars,” O’Connor said. He, speaking at the Calhoun County Health Care Coalition meeting in Lake City, said he was disappointed the county would not get that declaration, because he was hoping to purchase emergency generators for future power outages. The good news, he added, was the county may end up eligible for mitigation funding yet, if the president declares a state of emergency because of the avian influenza outbreak across Iowa. In that case, O’Connor said he plans to find out whether that mitigation money can be used to buy generators. Calhoun County Emergency Medical Services Director Kerri Hull said the county has previously been awarded such declarations, for snow and ice storms, for example, and used the funding to build tornado rooms. Buying generators with money through an avian flu declaration should be possible, she added. O’Connor said he has been in contact with federal officials about the avian flu situation. Two Calhoun
County poultry farms, both near Manson, have been affected by the disease, which is spreading quickly across Iowa, the county’s top eggproducing state. “The feds are wanting to know what impact this is having on the food banks, unemployment,” O’Connor said. “In Wright County, there’s 600 employees. The supervisors (there) said it’s having a profound effect.” The Calhoun County farms only had a small number of employees. Those workers’ information was provided to state officials who are tracking the economic impact of the disease. Calhoun County is contributing to the efforts fighting the flu. Workers last week began grinding tree debris from last month’s tornado to be used as wood chips helping to biodegrade poultry carcasses. Coalition members also discussed the upcoming switch from the CodeRED emergency alert system to the Wireless Emergency Network System, which happens June 30. WENS and a related system, the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, offer some additional ways to notify county residents and visitors of impending inclement weather, O’Connor said. Another Iowa county has created a text-in, text-out system that allows county park users to join an alert list just while using the parks. The county posts signs at park entrances with the number to which to send the text, as well as which key words to use in the text.
Supervisors consider steps to slow avian flu spread By Erin Sommers Graphic-Advocate Editor
The Calhoun County attorney advised the Board of Supervisors not to adopt a resolution like the one Wright County officials did in the wake of the spread of the avian flu. The Wright County resolution declared a local state of emergency and called for the closure of many roads to prevent the spread of the highly pathogenic, or easily spread, virus. Tina Meth Farrington, in an email sent to the supervisors June 2, noted Gov. Terry Branstad subsequently declared a statewide state of emergency because of the avian flu outbreak, “so you already have the authority to close roads if necessary around bird sheds.” Sheriff Bill Davis raised the issue at the June 9 supervisors meeting. He said he will support whatever measures supervisors decide to enact. County Engineer Zac Andersen said Sac County officials have closed a number of roads, after several bird confinements were infected. “We had requests from three property owners (for the closures),”
Andersen said. “We tried to make it known it was closed. (County officials) were going to put some teeth into it.” He said he supported the idea of some kind of resolution laying out Calhoun County’s protective measures for bird confinements, but said he didn’t think the supervisors should copy Wright County’s wording verbatim. “It’s a different magnitude and a different situation” in Calhoun County, he added. Scientists and state officials are still trying to pin down how the virus spreads from one flock to another. Scientists say the situation may improve, at least temporarily, this summer, because the virus cannot survive outside of a host when the temperature exceeds 80 degrees. Supervisor Scott Jacobs said farmers and scientists are also concerned about the possibility of changes to the virus, which now mostly is infecting birds, although humans could also become sick. “This could mutate over to swine,” he said, adding that would be a bigger problem for Calhoun County than poultry.
Youth package 40,000 meals By Erin Sommers Graphic-Advocate Editor
A conversation led five Calhoun County students to organize a big meal-packaging mission. The students, all members of the EPIC Youth Group affiliated with the United Methodist Church and St. Paul’s Lutheran and Presbyterian Church in Rockwell City and St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lytton, decided to tackle the project in December. “It was just kind of like, ‘Hey, this sounds fun,’” Ryan Brown said last week, a few days before the group met with other volunteers at a Rockwell City church to put together 40,176 meals of rice and dried soy and vegetables to be distributed across Iowa, the United States and internationally. The program, Meals from the Heartland, is based in West Des Moines.
Groups can either go to the Meals from the Heartland site to package the food, or host their own event. The latter appealed to the EPIC students. “It’s a community event,” Allison Birks said. “Everyone can be together and have fun.” Brown agreed. “It’s a way for EPIC to get out into the community a little bit,” he said. The group raised about $4,000, mostly through special collections at their respective churches. The students applied for a grant from Meals from the Heartland, which matched their fundraising efforts if at least 80 percent of the volunteers who helped with the project were college age or younger. “These guys have done all of the work,” she added. Their goal was 200 volunteers.
The meals were packaged within a couple of hours. Meals from the Heartland brought the supplies to Rockwell City, where volunteers at 10 stations assembled bags with a proscribed amount of each ingredient. Volunteers closed the bags with a heat seal and boxed them up for Meals from the Heartland to take back to West Des Moines for distribution. Since 2008, the organization has packaged and sent out tens of millions of the meals, which are designed by nutritionists and are simple enough to be acceptable across many cultural food preferences, the organization’s website said. People receiving the meals need only add water and heat to prepare the food. Meth Farrington said even local food pantries in Calhoun County occasionally receive the meal packages.
Volunteers helped bag and box thousands of meals during an event last week in Rockwell City. PHOTO COURTESY TINA METH FARRINGTON