Watching the storm roll in

We’re waiting on snowmageddon to dump on Storm Lake this morning after Thanksgiving. Forecasters hyperventilate. Plans are cancelled to gather with the extended family for supper in the happy din of a small gym. Our regrets. Iowa plays Nebraska. Hunker down.

Eight, 10 inches, heck maybe a foot or more could blow our way before Sunday. Look for a good multi-fool pileup at Ankeny. Winter will be upon us. Don the long johns until Easter.

The proverbial calm. Peer out the window. Those clouds are dark.

The legislature will convene next month. It should be awful. It’s the last dance for Gov. Kim Reynolds, who is not running for re-election. She vows to do something about property taxes as her swan song. She again implied further erosion of schools and everything else. I keep writing about it because she keeps talking about it. She is scary. Watch out for her medical reform with service hubs that cannot be healthy for Sac City or Pocahontas. And worse. Much damage can be done in a short time.

Legislators face a deficit of $1 billion that they are papering over with dwindling cash reserves.

This is the last hurrah before the November 2026 midterm elections. Republicans running things in Des Moines will have to get even more extreme to fire up a dispirited base. They have no idea what to do about property taxes rising by double digits annually. They punted last session and for now stutter and stammer and slide on thin ice.

This is one big reason Reynolds is bailing after nine years on a mission to drag Iowa backwards. She could see this fiscal train wreck coming, relentlessly cutting income taxes while the Republicans spend money like drunken socialists.

The billion-dollar problem is only going to get worse once the Grassleys set their minds to it. No telling how long it will take to dig out. Your knees know it’s coming. The governor is charting her agenda, which began in the wake of Terry Branstad with income tax cuts and gutting Medicaid, and will end with property tax cuts and gutting public education. She has already warned that schools eat up nearly half the property tax bill.

Meantime, the Iowa economy is listing. Net farm income is eroding. State revenues follow.

What a gift to State Auditor Rob Sand, the Democrat running for governor.

This is how the Branstad era ends.

"If you want everything to stay the same, then it's probably going to be very hard to reduce your property tax burden," Reynolds said to the Quad City Times as she popped out from one of her closed-door sessions selling her hokum to local business leaders. "Is there ways that we can provide centers of service?”

If you like even more rural consolidation and loss, Reynolds signals the way forward. Sorry, Ida Grove. Get on Hwy. 20 to Sioux City for that, if it isn’t drifting in too bad.

So far, they’re talking about a tax freeze. It usually turns to slush. Local officials can’t pay themselves enough, and the road lobby gets restless, and that freeze never stood a chance when Gov. Branstad tried it before. He, too, talked about reform but could only come up with slush and mediocrity.

Branstad did not face a structural deficit of $1 billion. That is beyond mediocre. It is a manure storm. That just doesn’t go away with a property tax freeze for senior citizens and veterans.

It demands fewer EMS crews, rural school attendance centers, small-town courthouses, and ultimately fewer people standing in the way of more corporate hogs.

"Do we need a huge fire station in every single town?” Reynolds asks.

Maybe not. Or a school. Or a library. A jail becomes a luxury for Sac City. Listen to her again: “If you're a small community and you don't want to change any of that, then it's going to be really hard for your property taxes to be reduced. That's why it's hard.”

Sac County buries its head in the snowbank with Kim Reynolds and Randy Feenstra while the school in Early closes.

What if the Lake City hospital can’t stand the strangling of Medicaid? Will Calhoun County understand it is the price of progress if the hospital is lost? What if it is not one of the governor’s health hubs? Fort Dodge will do, right?

This is the nest Republicans feathered. Year after year of income tax cuts. Where did the income go? Now, how do you prevent property tax increases in an election year? How do you avoid the pain when the rainy day funds run dry?

It is inevitable as a blizzard in Northwest Iowa. Comfort must be taken in the cold of winter that you will survive, and that this dark period of Iowa history will fade away in the squall. We look for that silver lining of change in the offing. Ben McCollum could win the Big Ten title, Iowa beat Nebraska in football, and the tuition won’t be so bad if you own a bank or inherited 1,000 acres. Wake us up when the sun comes out.