Year in Review: Part 1
By CHAD DRURY – Ottumwa Courier, Iowa (TNS)
As the year 2024 comes to a close, here’s a look back on a year’s of news that appeared in the pages of the Ottumwa Courier. These headlines were curated by Courier staff, and come from reporting by the Courier and our news partners. Part 1 covers the first three months of 2024.
JANUARY
Region deals with generational winter storm
Ottumwa and nearby areas dug out from the largest eight-day span of snow in almost 50 years in the middle part of the opening month of the year. In the span of one week, Ottumwa had its snowiest January on record.
Ten inches of snow were dumped on Ottumwa from Jan. 8-9, which was followed by another snowstorm later that week.
Overall, Ottumwa received 27.1 inches inches of snow at the weather station at the Ottumwa Regional Airport from Jan. 6-13, which was almost a foot more snow than the previous week-long record, as 16 inches fell two different times — once from Dec. 1-8, 1977, and the other from Feb. 12-19, 1978.
The snowfall for the month also was the snowiest January on record for Ottumwa, with the previous record 21.1 inches in 2019.
City and Wapello County crews spent days helping residents get out of their driveways and onto roadways and streets. The county had to contract with several local landowners to clear snow because their equipment was superior to the county’s.
Yet, the rural areas of the county, where drifts can be taller than adults, have been where the snow presence has been felt most, not only on residents, but also those responsible for clearing 765 miles of two-lane road.
“They’ve been out from dawn until dusk, with the exception of last Friday when we pulled the plows for safety concerns and the blowing (snow),” Morgan said. “They’ve been trying to make headway.”
RAGBRAI officials select Ottumwa as overnight stop
Months of work in luring the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) paid off handsomely, when event officials designated Ottumwa as one of the overnight stops for the 51st running of the ride as the route takes a southern Iowa track.
Ottumwa will be the fifth stop on the ride, with bicyclists descending on the city July 25 from Knoxville, then heading out the next day to Mount Pleasant. But for Ottumwa, it was a long-time coming, something that is anticipated to be an economic boon in the millions, just as it was in 2016, the last time RAGBRAI rolled through.
“We’re not the same community that we were 10 years ago, and there’s been so much work physically in the community to make things look better, work better and be better,” Meet Ottumwa Executive Director Laura Carrell said. “This is an opportunity to showcase who we are, and as a community people need to know about.”
Meet Ottumwa worked with Greater Ottumwa Partners In Progress in crafting an application that would give officials a reason to make Ottumwa a stop, but highlighted many of the changes; the community continues to grow its diversity footprint, Main Street is completed, retail and hotels have opened.
In the end, it added up to something local entities have waited for for a long time.
Mike’s Pizza and Steakhouse passed down to family members
Mike Hasapis passed down his restaurant to his daughter, Theopoula Hasapis, and her fiancee, Shane Hochstetler, as they assumed ownership of the popular establishment on Northgate Street, with the idea of keeping many of Mike’s traditional offerings on the menu, and also with an eye to the future when it comes to offering more.
“We definitely have a couple ideas on our brain that we’d like to do, but at this moment, of course, we don’t want to do anything,” Hasapis said. “We want to make sure we can run the place the next year and present it just the way it is, and prove ourselves that we’re going to do the exact same thing that me and my father did.”
Both Hasapis and Hochstetler have been with the restaurant for years; Hochstetler has worked in just about every facet of the business over the last four years, but mainly serves as a pizza-maker, steak-griller, meat-cutter and everything else in the kitchen.
“I was actually going to be a nurse,” he said. “You know, I had my CNA and I was working at a nursing home, was getting ready to go to Indian Hills for nursing. And then the retirement talk started, and I started talking with Mike. And it was like, ‘All right, well, maybe I don’t do this and we do this instead.'”
Hochstetler said the transition for he and Hasapis has occurred “for the last few years, where we’ve been learning more behind the scenes of everything.”
“We’ve been learning how to do it all, from cutting our own steaks and all that stuff that Mike did,” he said. “We learned how to make all the homemade stuff, all the meat, sauces, all that kind of stuff.”
FEBRUARY
Ottumwa City Council votes to continue primary elections
Essentially three weeks after holding a work session in which almost every council member favored getting rid of the city’s primary system for elections, they did a 360-degree turn.
Council members wanted to hear more feedback from the public on the issue, despite consistently low-turnout primaries costing the city over $10,000 each time.
Council member Keith Caviness, who voted in favor of the reform, said it’s incumbent on citizens to vote. He also has pointed out that those who run in the primary usually are successful in the general election.
“What we’re doing (now) is spending another $10,000 to $12,000 to accomplish basically nothing. We’re not denying anybody the opportunity to vote, and we’re certainly not circumventing the system,” he said.
Ottumwa Radio Group, school district end broadcast partnership
After more than 50 years together, Ottumwa Radio group and the Ottumwa Community School District announced they are ending a broadcast agreement for OHS athletics.
The move was announced amid a flurry of confusion on social media about rumors of the split, but it was confirmed by the school district, as it entered a three-year live broadcast agreement with KIIC/Thunder Country and Mahaska Communications Group that added a live-streaming element to the broadcast.
The Bulldog Network was created between the entities, and has its own website at www.bulldogtnetwork.tv, and is found on smart TVs, Roku and some social media platforms outside of Facebook. Postseason events would then be on KIIC-Thunder Country 96.7 FM.
MARCH
Landowners take supervisor to task over cattle escapes
It’s been five years, and John Courtney and Chad Black have heard and seen enough.
The two Green Township landowners lamented to Wapello County supervisor Bryan Ziegler and the rest of the board about Ziegler’s cattle straying from his property, wandering onto theirs and blocking roadways.
It’s evidently not a new issue, and Center Township trustees John Burger and Jerry Angle served as fence viewers of property in the township in November. Fence line needs repaired, they told the board, but there has been miscommunication along the way to try to get it fixed. Burger and Angle served as fence viewers because of Ziegler’s conflict of interest with family members serving on the Green Township trustees board.
Ziegler was asked about his role with the situation of his cattle, and was reserved at first, saying “it’ll get taken care of soon.” However, in an email to The Courier following the March 12 meeting, he was more forceful.
“This should never have come up at this meeting. I have not seen the fence viewing report from fourth months ago and should have seen it within 30 days,” he said. “The reason that adjacent landowners have not pursued this is they know that it will cost them money to repair their fences.
“This is about to be over with as I have hired a contractor to remove the cows. I continue to fix some neighbors’ fences as they are not able to, but those neighbors weren’t at the meeting to speak.”
City hires O’Donnell as next finance director
Following a five-month vacancy, the City of Ottumwa hired Cole O’Donnell as the new finance director, following the resignation of Waseem Nisar in November and an interim finance director who had been working on a contractual basis.
O’Donnell had served as the city administrator in Keokuk since 2018, but was looking to return to a financial role.
“I wanted to become more focused on one aspect in city government and not have to be be a jack-of-all-trades,” O’Donnell said, reflecting on stops in which has served as a city clerk, finance director and administrator. “I’ve always been intimately involved with the finance part.”
O’Donnell has worked in cities the size of East Moline, Illinois (21,000), which is slightly smaller than Ottumwa, and communities like Renville, Minnesota (1,370). Regardless, the role of overseeing finances doesn’t really change.
“The same principles always. The only difference is sometimes the complexity. Certainly, Ottumwa’s budget is a lot more complex than Keokuk, or all the way back to Denver, Iowa,” he said. “There’s more departments, more functions.
“But, it’s still revenues and it’s still expenditures,” he said. “It’s how you manage both. I’m kind of a problem-solver. so when a budget comes together, it feels like you’ve completed a jigsaw puzzle. There’s a sense of accomplishment.”
Ground breaks on Southeast Iowa Sports Center
Amid a frigid morning, Brian Morgan announced the ground-breaking of a project that had been years in the making and survived multiple fits and starts.
On March 18, Morgan announced construction on the Southeast Iowa Sports Center was set to begin, aided by a $2.5 million Destination Iowa grant, as well as local funding with less than 3% of the $10 million building coming from taxpayers.
The indoor sports complex will have basketball courts, soccer fields, volleyball courts and softball and baseball fields.
County attorney resigns, assistant attorney takes reins
Wapello County Attorney Reuben Neff submitted his resignation to the county board of supervisors, moving on to private practice in Des Moines.
Neff, who was elected to the role in 2018 and then again in 2022, had been issued a disciplinary ruling from the Iowa Attorney Discipline Commission, which believed he created a hostile working environment in the office, including comments made about various judges.
In a follow-up email to The Courier, Neff explained his appeal of the ruling was not the reason for his resignation.
“Throughout my career, I sought to give voice to the voiceless,” he said in his letter to the supervisors. “Up until now, I spent my entire legal career serving the public’s interest. However, to better attend to my family’s needs, I accepted a position with a private firm.”
In the wake of his resignation, assistant county attorney Steviee Grove was appointed to replace Neff. Grove began serving in Neff’s office in 2020.
(c)2024 the Ottumwa Courier (Ottumwa, Iowa)
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