The former manager of Blue Earth American Legion Post 89 is scheduled to make his first court appearance on Monday, facing charges of theft and forgery.

On April 4^th, 2024, Blue Earth Police received a report of stolen property from the American Legion Post 89 in Blue Earth.  Officer Missy Felion met with Legion officers, who reported that a substantial amount of funds appeared to have been diverted from the bar cash tills prior to deposit.

Officers explained that the theft was discovered after a prolonged period of financial difficulty.  Officers further explained that employee and manager 51 year old Michael Dean Olivo was solely responsible for collecting cash and funds from the bar tills and depositing that money on a daily basis.

Post 89 asked its accountant to review till and deposit records.  A review of daily reports from each till, comparted to daily deposits prepared and made by Olivo, indicated that funds from the till were routinely not being deposited into the bank accounts.  Further, numerous daily reports included with the daily deposit records failed to include reports from both tills.

After careful review of the deposit statements and reports, it was revealed that between September 2022 and April 6^th, 2024, Olivo allegedly failed to deposit $40,742.30 of till funds into Post 89’s banking accounts and he failed to report any suspicious till activity.

Olivo faces a charge of theft of property, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years or $100,000 fine or both and forgery with a maximum sentence of 3 years or up to $5,000 fine or both.

A new state program is available for Iowa farmers whose farmland was damaged by flooding.  Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds says the USDA is offering loans and other programs to help farmers recover.  However, Reynolds says farmers she’s talked with have some concerns with the federal program’s higher interest rates and the loans didn’t offer some of the benefits that other loans would.

Reynolds says the state has launched a new program to alleviate those issues.  The Disaster Recovery Farm Program will buy down interest rates by reimbursing interest payments up to $50,000 over 12 months per household on commercial loans used to repair uninsured damage to property.

Farmers can apply for the program online at iowagrants.gov.  Reynolds announced the program at a news conference on Thursday where she announce several programs to help Iowans impacted by flooding and severe storms.

The Blue Earth Area School Board met Monday evening and at their meeting approved the miscellaneous pay rates for the 2024-25 school year.

One change is the rate substitute teachers will be paid.  Superintendent Mandy Fletcher says in 2021 the district implemented an incentive program, which was a sliding scale, giving teachers more pay, the more days the subbed in a month.

Fletcher says the scale they established wasn’t getting the results they had hoped for.  The district didn’t get any more substitutes and the different pay rates for the same sub cause lots of work and tracking in the office, so the decision was made to do away with the sliding scale.

The board approved that substitute teachers will now be paid $175 per day.