Editorials: Sharing the blame

It’s not fair to put the blame for ballooning property taxes solely on the Iowa Legislature and Gov. Kim Reynolds. They are responsible. So are local government officials who don’t know what they are doing. We are often reminded when we read another story about the city and county dragging on a lawsuit over tax increment financing revenues that were sent to the wrong places instead of to the City of Storm Lake.

The city never noticed it wasn’t getting the TIF funds. The county was supposed to send the funds to the city but instead sent the money hither and yon to the schools, to the county itself, to the community college, and perhaps the North Pole — we don’t know because the county is too mule stubborn and stupid to audit for it and find out.

The city is too careless and just like the county, so let’s hire a bunch of lawyers from Des Moines and sue each other until the money seeps out of the courthouse walls.

A judge ruled that the city can collect not much. So the city persists since they think they are playing with Monopoly money. The city believes it can still nick the county for $7.5 million. Roll the dice on more legal fees! Order up another motion to offend the judge. The county sneers at its own taxpayers who have the immediate misfortune of living in Storm Lake. The county may prevail in court, as it has so far, and prove that it has every right to throw your money to the four winds.

We the people keep all this incompetence and foolishness in place so it can perpetuate and replicate like a cancer on your wallet. You could throw the rascals out but that would require effort. So we lie there and let them bleed us.

Cuts to schools

The legislature declared that schools could get a 2% raise for next year. That suggests Storm Lake will have to cut about $500,000 in spending as costs will extend beyond the allowable growth, Supt. Stacey Cole said. She said she intends to spread the pain evenly as possible. Since the budget is mainly spent on paychecks, cuts will come to personnel.

Storm Lake is better off than most districts thanks to immigrant families of child-rearing age. Smaller rural districts with declining enrollment are in deeper trouble.

This is purely because the legislature intends it.

It cut income taxes repeatedly over the past decades under Governors Branstad and Reynolds. It created vouchers for K-12 private schools that divert revenue from public schools. As a result, the state budget will run a deficit of more than $1 billion for the second consecutive year. Restrained funding for public schools was inevitable. You cannot increase spending beyond your means, we learned at the School of Hard Knocks. Unless, that is, you can use ideology and religion to temporarily blind people into ignorance of the facts.

Diminished education is not necessarily the exclusive purview of the Storm Lake School Board or the Alta-Aurelia School Board. In this instance, the legislature calls the shots. School boards are left to cope, and put up with the parent complaints and building closures. This is how you go from first in the nation in education to mediocre — by serving the corporate class who demand tax cuts and live in Wichita or Arkansas. Pretty soon we will end up in Kansas, Toto, without knowing how to count beyond our toes.

Democratic disadvantage

Our friend Laura Belin of the blog Bleeding Heartland out of Des Moines added up the numbers and found that Iowa Democratic Party registrations lag Republican Party registrations by nearly 200,000. It has been a decade in the making, this structural disadvantage. It may take an even bigger political cyclone bomb than the Iran War for a Democrat to win statewide office. Belin has been dwelling on the topic for years, to her credit.

Meanwhile, readers of The New York Times might be surprised to learn from a column by prominent writer Matthew Yglesias that the Democratic brand is toxic in certain places (like Iowa) and the principal obstacle to flipping the Senate for a check on the White House. Congress has been a puppy dog in Trump’s lap as he runs roughshod over the Constitution and tilts the balance of power. 

Divided government is necessary for democracy at this hour for the state and nation.

Democrats in Iowa need to focus on issues that matter: world-class schools, clean air and water, strong and safe communities large and small, honesty and respect for the taxpayer. This is our tradition. Iowa voters are attracted to that agenda.

Rob Sand is trying to run for governor as an independent, although he seeks the Democratic nomination. He says, correctly, that the two-party system is not serving us. He speaks Lutheran, not agnostic. He is decidedly marketing his brand to independent and Republican voters who are nervous with putting the Christian Taliban in charge of Des Moines. He points out that he doesn’t cotton to boys playing girls sports, just to show that he ain’t “woke” and will not get bound up in cultural warfare. He made transparency his business in the auditor’s office such that the legislature tried to emasculate the authority of the office.

That might get a few Republican votes, but not a shift of 200,000.

Sand should run on a strong policy agenda that has been vetted by numerous polls and actual elections. He already says that private school vouchers are unsustainable. He wants to take Medicaid administration back from the insurance industry and restore it under state management to protect the poor and elderly. Good start.

Sand needs to come out more strongly for clean water and air. This is a top issue for voters, bigger than trans kids playing basketball. People are making connections between pollution and health hazards, specifically cancer but also including Parkinson’s Disease, MS and Lou Gehrig’s disease. We breathe a mist of herbicide floating on a manure particle, and drink a steady diet of nitrate. People are nervous and upset about it. Somebody needs to grab the bull by both horns and subdue it so farmers can prosper and we can relieve ourselves of certain anxiety. Sand has to be that person. It should be a central issue in the midterm elections, although agrichemical corporations would rather go unnoticed.

In the Senate race, Democrats Josh Turek and Zach Wahls should take care not to maul each other on the way to the nomination. Republican Ashley Hinson will have all the money and organization she needs to win. She has wrapped herself in MAGA, which could be her undoing with lost ag export markets and rising gasoline prices. Farmers are forced to live off disaster payments from Trump’s manufactured disasters. Stripped-down Medicaid payments caused the health clinic in Ottumwa to close and the Keokuk hospital to remain closed. Nursing homes all around us closed down. It grates on people.

Those are the issues that can make the Democratic brand less toxic.

A truck salesman once told us that you have to ask for the sale, or the vote. That starts with registration outreach, which simply does not exist by the nearly non-existent minority party in the Fourth Congressional District. Three Democrats are running for the congressional nomination, which should help registration. If the DC and Des Moines Democrats had their wits about them they would be sending an army of registration recruiters to spread out from Storm Lake. Obama did. That’s how he won Iowa twice. After he won, Organizing for America was not heard from again. It worked so well they didn’t need it until they wake up 10 years later 200,000 voters short.

You could elect a Democrat from Northwest Iowa not so long ago until the Democrats quit trying. They have the issues. They have somebody to run against for good cause. They need to show up and act like Buena Vista County is important. Ten more votes from Sioux County matters. They can win if they speak to the issues rural voters care about, and if they invest in rural organizing. If we don’t restore two-party government in Iowa, we can expect more of the same extremism.