Chief John Wiebold, Boone Police Department, Public Safety, May 14, 2026

On our program today, we're going to take some time, visit about public safety related things that we're joined today by Chief John Weebel. Good to have you here, Chief. Good morning. Well, here we are. It's springtime in Iowa, and we've got all kinds of things going, and one of the big ones coming up is going to be rag brie. Yeah, if you haven't heard, rag brie is coming up. You get the public safety part of it. One of the things we're going to talk about is the, again, the routes, safety routes and stuff. This time of year, you are getting a lot more two-wheeled traffic out there. I say just two-wheeled because scooters are probably one of the things I hear more people complaining about all the time. Yes. That has become a constant or a pretty regular complaint we're getting. Young people on scooters not stopping for stop signs or not caring about their own personal safety has been a problem. So what do we do? Just keep reminding folks, parents, and whatever? We'll enforce it if we catch it. If we see anybody just blow through a stop sign on a scooter or bicycle, even if you're on a two-wheeled vehicle, you still have to follow all the same street laws, traffic laws. But please remind your kids to please be careful and stop at those intersections because we really don't want to have a bad accident with one of those kids. You've had a couple. Last year, there were a couple of times where people had to get picked up in no helmets and stuff like that. Right. Rarely do we see kids on these scooters that are electric and can go 25 miles an hour. Rarely do we see them wear any kind of safety gear. And again, there's too many instances of them just blowing right through intersections and not looking. Please remind your kids to be careful on those things. Well, we've got that going on. Let me see. Oh, yeah. There's all two wheels because you've got motorcycles and everything else out there now too. Caution people. Caution. Yeah. And I know that one of the tasks you get is laying out how we're going to direct traffic through town. And one of the things you've already said before, and I saw that at a meeting or two where, you know, we're going to, we'll be closing streets, but we're going to try to stage it and time it so that people are going to be able to get around. But it is going to be inconvenient. Correct. We know this is going to be an inconvenience for the residents of Boone, and we're going to try and do everything in our power to limit that as much as we can while still making this safe for all the 20,000 plus riders that are coming in. So the route is coming from Ogden, as you know, so they're coming in old 30, which means they're going to connect right to West Mamie Eisenhower Avenue. So we're going to bring them right to Story Street and then south on Story to the south side of town where they're going to camp, and they're going to camp between DMACC and McCose Park are the two kind of main campgrounds for the riders. We plan, our hope is that to not close Mamie Eisenhower or Story Street until 9 a.m., we're going to be a little flexible on that. If a lot of bikes start showing up at 8.30, we may close it a little bit early, but we certainly want people to be able to get to work, get to where they need to be in the morning without causing too much traffic problems in town. And you will have, even when it's closed down, there will be crossovers. Certainly, they'll be manned. Yes, the main intersections will be manned. So your Marion Street, your Division Street, your Green Street, we will have either an officer there or a volunteer there to stop the bikes, allow traffic to go through. So you're going to have to work around that a little bit if you need to get across Mamie Eisenhower. I'm on that side of town, but there are going to be intersections that you can do that. So, and Mamie to the east should not be too bad. Correct. Everything east of Story Street on Mamie should be just fine. Okay. We hope. Let's not have any issues going over there. The other part is, we do have, well, we do have all of, with the traffic coming in, you do have all of the, just call them what their support vehicles, they are going to be coming in and that is going to be handled a little differently. You have a different route for them. Yes. So the support vehicles will come in on Highway 30, new Highway 30. They will go into the Speedway where they will be staged and we will tell them where they need to go based on which campground they are assigned or however Raghbri handles that. So that way, we're not blocking up all the streets in town. We're not backed up on 30 with all of these RVs and vehicles with trailers trying to find places. Try to keep them, get them off to a space and get to it. Yeah. Try to be as efficient as possible for both the Raghbri folks but also the public, I mean, our public, we don't want to inconvenience them any more than we have to. We'll still have a lot of traffic on 30, is it, I mean, just all day, every day. Yeah. Right. They think, Raghbri tells us that most of those support vehicles will be here by 11 o'clock in the morning. Okay. So they pack up, when their riders take off, they pack up and get right here. So hopefully before noon, all those vehicles are parked where they need to be and shouldn't be a traffic problem. In the evening, we do plan to open Mamie backup by 6.30 p.m. So a little later than most people are getting off of work, but Raghbri and the state patrol push everybody out of the previous town about 5 p.m. So if they're pushing people out of Ogden at 5 p.m., they should have no problem getting here by 6.30. So we're going to open all that back up other than the south part of town where we're going to, south part of Story Street where we're going to have the event. The other part is, of course, say roughly 20,000 bicycle riders. They're going to be all, they aren't going to just go to one place. I mean, they're going to go and take a look at other things. They're going to travel around other areas. You may take, if there's shuttle opportunities, and they'll use that advantage, but those are, again, areas where they could be showing up in your neighborhood. If you're even north of the tracks, I'm sorry. Absolutely. So there's a lot of the riders enjoy camping in people's backyards and they will reach out to people in these communities, whether they know them or not, and just get on a forum and ask for, hey, can I camp in your backyard tonight? So there will be bicycles all over town that day. I mean, if you think you're far away from the event, you're still probably going to have bicyclists in your area. You could have a neighbor that's going to have a couple of campers there. Absolutely. Very easy. Yep. So please just be patient that day. I know it's going to be an inconvenience for a lot of people, but let's show them how great Boone is and make these people want to come back outside of Rackbrite and spend some money in this community and come visit and do the rail explorers or whatever they want to do here. Let's show how great this community is. Some will go and take a look at it. I don't know what the railroad is going to be doing up there, but I'm pretty sure rail explorers already booked. Oh, I'm sure of that. But hopefully they'll want to come back because they'll come back later. Yeah, because hopefully we can show them a great time. Well, we'll get through all of that. Now, departing, it's a little different way out. You're not going to really be blocking off, maybe, but anybody headed to work east might encounter traffic. So yeah, so the route out will be Hancock Drive out to Corpuson Drive or Airport Road, as we most commonly call it. And then they'll go north on that to Mamie and then east out of town. So it'll be a lot less inconvenient, hopefully, for everybody on Wednesday morning when they leave. And again, we're going to open those roads right back up at 10 a.m. because everybody should be out of here by 10. Okay, well, I hope. Now, obviously, one of the things a lot of people ask, okay, what about down to the grocery store down on the south side of town? Because that's where a lot of that activity is, how are we going to negotiate getting down to Fairway, down to Walmart? So South Marshall will be open, although it will probably be pretty busy. If you can want to get to Walmart, if you can go around, we would recommend taking Airport Road 2 and then coming back in to Fairway to Walmart or whatever you need to do down there. Because while South Marshall is going to be open, it's probably going to be pretty congested. So and then probably departing, coming back the same way. You're going to have a lot of traffic, a lot of pedestrian and or bike traffic get down there. Correct. Plus RVs that are going to be coming in and getting staged and set up. Yeah. A lot of those I understand will be around like DMACC in that area. Yeah. But again, some of those people talk to friends that live in town and they may be all over town as well. Most of them should be centered around the DMACC area and hopefully down south. Well, there's a reason. We have challenges when we... This is not going to be the only one this year, folks. We'll have, obviously, 1st Street. There's expected to be construction on there. That's going to be a challenge to the... Even if it's going on while this is happening, it could be a challenge. I hope the timing is such that this doesn't happen at the same time. If it is, we will work around it and try and make it as positive for everybody as we can. So when they leave here, they're going to Gilbert. The idea is run them up Corporal Sned and Drive, give them a little hill to climb up there. That's right. To start the day and then send them out east on Old Highway 30. Correct. To the Overpass. That's right. They'll ride over the Overpass before they head over to 17 and north on 17, the 190th. Send them out that way. If you're planning any travel that day. That's right. Just keep it a... It's the same kind of thing because later on this summer, we're going to have a farm progress show. Correct. And we're going to be looking at the same kind of traffic-related things, especially on the south side of town. Right. Yeah. Farm progress show brings in a lot of people. As we always... A lot of traffic. Yes. A lot of traffic in and out each day. So those shelves. Fair Parade, that's going to be up even before. Got kind of the same route. 11th Street. That's been very popular since they moved it up there. It's really popular. They've got more trees. That's why. It is. It's definitely shadier. You know, the fair is always on a very hot time of year. So the trees along that route do make it nicer for the people watching. Makes it a lot more convenient. We don't have all of the backup down here at... I mean, that's a big crowd down there sometimes. Yes. I did want to hit on a couple of other things too. I know that school board this week did the school resource officer. Last year, one of the issues was, again, on the financing side of it, getting all of that worked out. The city kind of covered some of that. But a position you want to maintain, you want to keep. And I think the school district really wants to keep it too. Yes. We are lucky that we have such a great relationship with the school board here in Boone because there's a lot of departments that have lost their SRO. And we have a school board and a school district that wants to continue that relationship. And it's been great. It's both valuable to both of us. You know, having that officer in the school, he's able to build relationships with some of these kids that we would never be able to build otherwise. And so that's a great program. We're glad that we can continue it and look forward to that continued relationship. So I remember, and you told the council, I've been chief nine years. Nine months, I've had a full staff. Yeah. Correct. Out of nine years. Out of nine years. A total of nine months. And it wasn't a contiguous nine months. Well, I'm going to say, because just recently, we had civil service commission start the process again. You have some positions open and there is a process to go through just so people understand. We start civil service commission to get potential candidates. Correct. Yeah. So the first step is the civil service. When we do a, basically a basic background check, make sure they have valo license, make sure they're not felons, you know, the basic things that we have to do. And then we invite those people to test for us. And so there's a physical agility test and there's also a state mandated written test. If they pass both of those, then our civil service commission will bring them in for an interview. If they do well in that interview, then they get put on a civil service list that has to be approved by the council, but once, but I can't hire anybody outside of that list. So that is the process. We have another interview set up for a couple of weeks because we're, we don't have a deadline on this application process. We are going to keep taking applications until we fill the position. So we will probably have many civil service interviews and just kind of step them when we have a handful of applicants. We'll set that interview and then we'll just keep moving. Used to have a list easily, eight, 10 candidates. Now a lot of times it's hard to get three or four. Right. I mean, I'm old now. So when I, when I applied here in 2001, I think there was between 35 and 40 applicants for one position. Now we're lucky to get, you know, seven applicants and of those seven, maybe five qualify before we do any testing. So yeah, it's, it's a different world. I mean, it's not as many people want to get into law enforcement. And so it's just different. It's harder to find and get applicants. And I know that again, once you get them, you got so much training that you do, they, if they have to, if they're not certified already, they have to go to the academy. Right. And, and then once they come back, you still have more training. Yeah. So our internal training, we call field training. That's approximately five months, five to six months. On top of that, if they haven't been to the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, that is 16 weeks. So you know, if the hiring process takes two to three months and then they go to the academy for 16 weeks, then we have them on in our in-house field training. You know, it might be a year before we actually are able to fill a position on the road by themselves. So it's a long, arduous process. We don't just let them go. Correct. No, no. The other thing is, even with, you know, the, the hiring problems or the hiring struggles that everybody's facing, we refuse to lower our standards. So we are not going to hire anybody that, that would not have been hired 20 years ago. We keep our standards high and that's, you know, my pledge to the community. You just keep, try to keep the best quality people you can. Absolutely. On duty. You have one coming back from being active duty. That would be good to have him back. Came back. He is back in the United States safely. So we're very, very blessed about that. And there is a certain amount of time before he, he may get anxious and come and say, chief, I'm back. Yeah. We're hoping to have him back by rag, right? That's my goal. Anyway, that'd be good to have him back for that. That's going to be the busy one. The big thing is, folks, we are going to have a lot of activity that will be going on. I was going to say too, other things that are going to be showing up, farmers markets going to start to be back downtown on story. We've had, again, the street closures are going on with nights on the green and we'll have a lot of those things that are still coming up too. If people sign up, you know, like they signed up for the snow, but if they just go sign up for the Nixle announcements, then they would find out about those closures too. Correct. Know about those. Yeah. And that's a great opportunity to learn about what's going on in town, just getting those alerts. Whether it's alert for this road's closed for construction or this road's closed for a car repair. A sewer repair. Yeah. I mean, there's all, yeah. Yeah. You'll get all kinds of information. So please sign up. It's one of those easy to do. You can do it on the website. It's there right now. Even the new website will have that. I'm told. Yes. We'll keep updated on that. Back to Raghra again. One day it's going to be busy, hectic. Now the other part is, I know they were talking about closing other streets and Raghra really didn't want to do that because that generates the need for more people to be out there. You only have so many people and you're going to be able to hire only so many people to help with all this public safety. And the State Patrol has their floating contingent that just goes with Raghbra. Right. Right. Yeah. Thankfully for us and all of the overnight communities, the State Patrol does bring in, you know, up to 10 troopers to help with that. So that does help a lot. But it's still, we are spread all the way across town with an extra 20,000 plus bicyclists plus their support crew plus we got a band coming in that is pretty popular and is likely to bring in several thousand more people just to watch the free concert. So yeah, we're going to be spread then, but I can assure you we will have enough people to make sure everybody stays safe. Folks, if you're judging by the size of the crowd, they draw at the State Fair, yeah. We could double the people down on the south side of town and people will say, well, sheriff's deputies can help. Well, they're busy watching a lot of the county roads and helping Ogden because the same amount of people are going through Ogden. That's right. You know, they have two officers, so there will be a lot of deputies needed down there. We got it. We got to get them all the way from Perry to Boone. That's right. That's our goal. Do it. Do it safely. Again, there will be more information that'll be coming out to keep updated folks as we get closer about which streets are going to be closed. Timing will be, obviously, one of those things. We know it's going to be inconvenient, but you're trying to at least give folks some flexibility. Absolutely. And we're going to be putting some information out on our Facebook page, so if you don't follow us on Facebook, please do. We will start putting the route information out and where you can cross safely and we'll have all those maps out there. Okay. And it is that time of the year. Once again, be watching for people on two-wheeled vehicles of all sizes and just stay safe. Use your traffic signals. Use your turn signals. Pay attention to where you're at. Thanks for coming in and joining us today. Thanks for having me.