30 year old Brandon Patrick Dellwo of Shakopee, was sentenced to 48 months in prison yesterday after pleading guilty in April, to one count each of Criminal Vehicular Homicide and Criminal Vehicular Operation in connection with the death of 29 year old Kacy Merseal of Des Moines. Last August, Dellwo was driving his SUV eastbound in the westbound lane of Hwy 19 when he struck a volkswagen driven by Merseal. Her passenger was taken to Northfield Hospital with non life-threatening injuries. The pair were heading home to Iowa from a Bruno Mars concert. Rice County Attorney John Fossum said Dellwo’s blood/alcohol level was .27. That’s more than three times
the legal limit. In addition to the 4 years for Criminal Vehicular Homicide, Dellwo received a sentence of 13 months to be served concurrently for the injuries to Merseal’s passenger. He was also ordered to pay restitution for the family of the victims, and a $30,000 fine. Merseal was supposed to have been married last Saturday. Dellwo media release
Nfld Hosp. CEO discusses healthcare pricing
State Legislators had more inaction than action. An area that was disappointing to Northfield Hospital and Clinics CEO, Steve Underdahl, was not enough action on opioid addiction and care. There was legislation proposed but Governor Dayton vetoed the monster bill. He said, “that’s a little disappointing because this is just such a catastrophically difficult issue that’s affecting the whole country”. There’s a bill that passed around pricing transparency. What does a procedure cost? Underdahl said, “Unfortunately that’s kind of a complicated question because it depends on what insurance you have and what version of that insurance you have”. Underdahl said this is a good bill that will give exposure to the issue of the cost of healthcare. The bill requires a good faith estimate within 10 business days. He added, “this gives us a little bit of relief from prohibitions from health insurance companies that say you can’t talk about our proprietary arrangements with you”. Additionally, the top 25 most frequently billed processes will be posted for patients to shop around.
Nfld City staff to Action Plans with target dates
Northfield Council had an update on their strategic plan “action plan”. Staff got an overall favorable review from Council but the format is not complete. Administrator Martig said they got new software which will make it more efficient to keep track of the strategic action plans, especially from a Staff’s standpoint. For July, Staff will focus on getting the items on the strategic list updated and add target action dates. He said they’ll have “quantatative metrics”. For example, “if we want to see new growth in the community, we want to fill in the blanks on what is the taxable value we want to see in new growth in the community as goals to try and hold ourselves accountable and actually working toward quantifiable results”. This will be an ongoing process. Council also started looking at their budget. Martig said there are 5 new goals for this years budget process focusing on those strategic priorities. They’re trying to get a jump start on what is the City’s debt, what are the personnel expenses and, “we want to work on engaging the Council more so we’re going to be using surveying tools with council to see where they’re standing on the issues to get a more direct feedback on some things”. All that information would be made public. We’ll be hearing more on the budget as Martig wants to keep the community better informed.
