Mahaska County Unemployment Drops To 5.7%

Miranda Johnson at Monday's Supervisor meeting

Oskaloosa, Iowa – The Supervisors finished out the year with several departments on the agenda, slated to give their most recent reports and Mahaska County Conservation Director Dave Sedivec was first up.

He reports that the sale of the Caldwell house hasn’t produced any leads to this point. The Conservation commission has been advertising in the local papers to find someone interested in purchasing and moving the house from the property, with a deadline of December 29th approaching to resolve the matter. Sedivec says that moving the home for use by the county is also an option.

The project at Hawthorne was on hold during deer hunting season for the safety of the operators of the machinery, but now that deer season is over, work will continue Sedivec stated.

The Supervisors also reappointed John White to the Conservation Board.

Iowa Economic Development Authority have redone a lot of things, according to MCARD Director Miranda Johnson, and she explained how money was distributed among the regions.

Opportunity Square was one of those projects that was funded by grants from the IEDA to help with projects, and with the changes at IEDA, this grant will be the last one for RFP for awhile. The proposal was for $40,000 and Miranda thinks that possibly $27,000 will be granted.

Miranda stated that the majority of the project will be possible with the assistance of south east Iowa manufactures. “I think we will because there’s employers right now are interested in the NCRC just because they can’t find the employees they need with the skill sets. We’ve heard about 3 or 4 different businesses in our region that need to hire, with all of them combined close to 500 jobs”, Johnson said of the ongoing project.

Ken Rozenboom said, “That’s remarkable. We hear about job problems but we don’t have enough people qualified to fill the jobs”.

The work of this will help to bring the community colleges and high schools and employers in the same direction to help fill those jobs in the future.

Johnson reported that the unemployment rate in Mahaska County is now 5.7%. The states average is at 6.0% while the national unemployment rate of 8.6%. This is a positive number that could have a different meaning in that workers have given up on finding work, and are no longer counted as unemployed, causing the decline in the unemployment rate.

Also on the agenda were appointments to the Pella Board of Adjustment, the Board of Health and two payroll changes. One payroll change was for the Recorder’s Office and the other was for Secondary Roads.

The last item voted on by the Supervisors didn’t appear on the agenda. The board passed with a vote of 2 to 1 with Greg Gordy being the no vote to allow use of County money for the Secondary Road Christmas party as had been tradition in the past.