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City elections were held statewide Tuesday, November 3. The unofficial results are printed below.

Harpers Ferry
Incumbent Mayor Jerry Valley won re-election in an uncontested race with 59 votes. Richard Smrcina won one of three open seats on the City Council with 63 votes, along with Betty Palmer (50) and Nancy Walleser (48).

Lansing
Incumbent Mayor Mike Brennan won re-election in an uncontested race with 117 votes. John Rethwisch received 92 write-in votes and Don Peters received 90 write-in votes to unseat incumbent Councilwoman Deb Volker, the only declared candidate, who received 60 votes. Public Measure A to increase the hotel/motel tax to seven percent passed with 95 votes in favor and 59 against.

by Bob Beach

by Brianne Eilers

Allamakee County Emergency Management Coordinator Chris Dahlstrom organized and led a “tabletop” railroad incident exercise at Veterans Memorial Hospital in Waukon Tuesday night, October 27. Representatives from the Iowa Department of Transportation; the Harpers Ferry, Waterville, Lansing, New Albin and Waukon Fire Departments; Veterans Memorial Hospital; the Allamakee County Sheriff’s Department; the Lansing Police Department; Canadian Pacific Railroad; and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources participated in the exercise. All of the participants were asked to provide input on how their organization would respond to an incident involving a train hauling petroleum colliding with a passenger vehicle, resulting in several fatalities and multiple injuries.

Voters in six cities within Allamakee County will be going to the polls Tuesday, November 3 to elect local government and other officials. Polls will be open in Harpers Ferry, Lansing, New Albin, Postville, Waterville and Waukon from 12 noon to 8 p.m. that Tuesday, with absentee voting also able to be done in person at the Allamakee County Auditor's Office in the Allamakee County Courthouse in Waukon now through 11 a.m. Tuesday, November 3.
While all six communities have governmental seats up for election, just three of those communities have races for those seats that are actually being contested by more declared candidates than there are seats available. The community of Harpers Ferry has four declared candidates vying for three City Council seats; New Albin has three declared candidates running to fill a vacancy in two City Council seats; and Waukon has a two-person declared race for Mayor and a three-person declared race for one At-Large City Council vacancy.

by Bob Beach

by Kelli Boylen

The Allamakee County Economic Development (ACED) Board of Directors announced Mike Ferring Construction of Waukon as the 2015 Cloy Kuhse Positive Impact Award winner at the ACED Annual Meeting hosted in Waterville Thursday, October 15. Mike Ferring Construction now joins the list of annual award recipients that also includes TASC of Waukon, Wuennecke’s Meat Market of New Albin, and Norplex-Micarta of Postville.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) reports that a pipe coupler on manure application equipment broke Monday, October 12, allowing manure to reach Clark Creek in northeast Allamakee County about a mile and a half above where the creek flows into the Upper Iowa River southwest of New Albin.
Krauskopf Pumping Service of Decorah was pumping liquid manure from Cyclone 1 hog confinement owned by David Weymiller of rural New Albin for land application on crop fields when the coupler break released an estimated 1,000 gallons of the manure, causing a fish kill in the creek.
“In less than an hour the landowner did a great job of damming the creek, preventing further damage downstream. We checked every place between the spill site and the Upper Iowa River for dead fish,” said Theresa Shay, technician at the DNR’s Decorah fish hatchery. “We only found two dead fish in the entire stretch - two white suckers, but we did see live sticklebacks and white suckers.”

by Bob Beach