Woodbury County Considering Building New Jail
SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) – Woodbury County officials have been discussing plans for a new county jail and a bond issue to pay for it.
County board chairman Keith Radig told the Sioux City Journal on Thursday that it makes more sense to build a jail that could cost between $35 million and $50 million than pay $12 million to $14 million for repairs on the current, 234-bed facility. It opened in 1987.
Radig says a new jail with 300 to 440 beds would provide extra space to accept federal detainees. The county could contract with federal immigration officials and receive around 80 inmates a day on average. The resulting hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue could possibly eliminate the need to pay back construction debt with property taxes.
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Columbia Woman Charged With E-mail Fraud
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) – A woman from Colombia has been sentenced for her role in an email scheme that defrauded companies in Iowa and other states.
Prosecutors say Karina Henao was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids to 13 months in prison. Henao also was ordered to pay more than $297,000 in restitution.
She pleaded guilty in November to wire fraud. Prosecutors say she’d been living in Florida.
A court document says Henao admitted that from September through November 2017 she participated in a scheme to infiltrate or otherwise gain access to email systems in order to divert money from the businesses’ bank accounts.
Rural Bankers Concerned About Economy Due To Flooding
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) – A monthly survey of rural bankers in parts of 10 Plains and Western states shows about one of every five expects an increase in farm loan defaults stemming from last month’s devastating Midwest floods.
The Rural Mainstreet survey for April, released Thursday, shows the survey’s overall index dropping from 52.9 in March to 50 this month. Any score above 50 suggests a growing economy, while a score below 50 indicates a shrinking economy.
Creighton University economist Ernie Goss, who oversees the survey, says “43.8 percent of bank CEOs indicated that the recent floods were having a negative impact on their local economy.”
Bankers also noted that farm loans for April surged as the borrowing index climbed to 81.3, the highest recorded since the survey began in 2006.
Bankers from Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming were surveyed.
New Technology Used For Flood Control
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – An arsenal of new technology is being put to the test fighting floods this year as rivers inundate towns and farm fields across the central United States. Drones, supercomputers and sonar that scans deep under
water are helping to maintain flood control projects, and predicting just where rivers will roar out of their banks.
U.S. scientists said in their spring weather outlook that 13 million
people are at risk of major inundation from flooding, with another 41 million people are at risk of moderate flooding.
Forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are now able to monitor a vastly larger part of the nation’s river system with a new computer model.
Emergency officials also can simulate various scenarios, predicting what could happen if flooding washes away a levee or crashes through a dam.
