Robins, Little Wall Solar, Gatherings

We began this Wednesday's program with a robin song to introduce Jennifer Knox and Tyler Harms, collaborators in the crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth. They reported on their live crowd-sourced poetry created by childen's classes. After listening to a few of the outstanding poems submitted for the robin, (the bird for May), we went up to Hamilton county for a celebration quite different from those we previewed last week in Story and Boone counties. Little Wall Lake Park near Jewell held its ribbon cutting as the first county park in Iowa to have a 100 percent offset of its electricity by producing its own power through a solar array. Brian Lammers, Hamilton County Conservation director, described the origins and development of the $300,000 project through partnerships with the Hamilton County Supervisors, Eagle Point Solar, Hamilton County Conservation Board and Alliant Energy. Larry Steffen, vice president of sales for Eagle Point Solar, the Dubuque-based company that financed, designed and built the array, was in our studio to clarify some of the technical details. We closed out the program by previewing the crowded calendar of this week's events in Nevada, capped off with a Mother's Day brunch at Gatherings, an event venue which occupies a large storefront on Main Street. We spoke with Stephanie Badger, Gatherings' General Manager.

Originally broadcast 05/10/2017
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