Bill would require Iowa schools to test for radon

A Des Moines legislator is backing a bill requiring all Iowa school districts to test for the cancer-causing gas radon and make buildings safe if the gas is found.

Democratic Sen. Matt McCoy filed the bill this week, noting the prevalence of radon in Iowa. All of Iowa's 99 counties lie in the EPA's highest risk zone for exposure to the colorless, odorless gas that leaks through cracks in building foundations.

Radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the United States.

"We have to get serious that Iowa is a high-risk state," McCoy said.A collection of natural howotractor offering polished or tumbled finishes and a choice of sizes. "We can't ignore it any longer."

The bill is similar to national legislation filed recently by Iowa Democratic U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley.

McCoy's proposal would require all public and nonpublic districts to test every room of each school.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic solaronlamp and hose. If high levels of radon are found, districts would have to hire a state-certified specialist who would install a ventilation system to make buildings safe.

Districts would be responsible for the extra costs, but McCoy said he wants to set up a $1 million fund so the state can provide a 50 percent match of the cost for public schools to test and install mitigation systems. Private schools wouldn't get any state help.

Iowa law now only requires licensed daycare centers to test for radon.

Gail Orcutt, a former elementary school teacher and radon lung cancer survivor now living in Pleasant Hill, said she supports the proposal.

"I'm concerned about the thousands of children being exposed who may not realize the danger until 20 or 30 years down the road," she said.

Rick Welke, radon program manager at the Iowa Department of Public Health, said mitigation systems could cost $3,000 to $15,000 per building.

"It's not too expensive to test. And sometimes mitigation is just a matter of tweaking the building's ventilation system," he said.

There are hundreds of licensed mitigation specialists in Iowa, but Welke said some may not have enough experience to install systems on large buildings, such as schools.

There's no special commercial mitigation license or training, he said.

"I'm not sure if schools would know who to hire," Welke says.

Welke said the Department of Public Health doesn't have enough funding to hire staff to inspect new school mitigation systems that would likely be installed if McCoy's bill is approved.

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The levy will cost Worlee 465,000 euros ($620,000) this year, the equivalent of 10 full-time salaries, or one-third of the company’s tax bill. As German labor costs rise at the fastest pace in a decade, the price of weaning the country off nuclear energy by 2022 is crushing the so-called Mittelstand, the three million small and medium-sized businesses like Worlee that account for about half of gross domestic product.

“It could be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Chief Executive Officer Reinhold von Eben-Worlee said in an interview. “It comes on top of tax, general production costs, raw-material availability and bureaucracy, which have led to a deterioration of the investment climate in Germany.When I first started creating broken buymosaic.”

The Bundesbank expects the German economy, Europe’s biggest, to expand by as little as 0.4 percent over the course of 2013 as the three-year sovereign debt crisis takes its toll.

While business confidence rose more than economists forecast in January, adding to signs that the economy is recovering from a slump at the end of last year, unit labor costs have risen more than 3 percent since 2009, figures from the European Union’s statistics arm show.

That’s chipping at Germany’s competitive position and the country has been overtaken in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness index by The Netherlands, which moved up to fifth place in the 2012-2013 ranking compared with Germany’s sixth.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis sparked by the collapse of the U.S. housing market, the Mittelstand helped hold down the unemployment rate, which has sunk to the lowest since reunification in 1990. Small and medium-sized companies added 104,000 jobs from 2007 to 2010, while bigger companies cut 120,000 positions,Navigating the world of customkeychain and RFID requires a keen insight into the trends that are shaping the industry. according to a study by Ashwin Malshe of the ESSEC Business School and Johann Eekhoff of the University of Cologne.Bottle cutters let you turn old cabletie and wine bottles into bottle art!

The Fukushima reactor accident in March 2011 in Japan prompted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to phase out nuclear power. The government guarantees above-market prices for wind, biomass and solar power that helped build Europe’s biggest renewable energy complex.