Blogs

Iowa taxpayers provided about $104 million last school year directly to parents choosing to send their K-12 children to private schools.

The price tag for these education savings accounts, or vouchers, is expected to climb to $294 million this school year as more families become eligible. During the 2025-2026 school year, when income eligibility standards are removed, the cost is expected to reach $344 million, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency estimates.

I am not here to debate the merits of this program. Others can do that.

But should be no room for debate over whether this use of tax money for education savings accounts should be subject to unfettered scrutiny by the state auditor’s office, any more than the auditor should have authority to examine the Iowa Judicial Branch’s mishandling of court fees paid by litigants, or the Iowa Department of Transportation’s lax inventory controls, or the University of Iowa’s 50-year lease of its utilities system, or any other use of state tax money.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird again tried to put herself in the national spotlight two weeks ago as leader of a group of Republican attorneys general who fixed their sights on Costco over the warehouse retailer’s DEI policies.

The state attorneys sent a stern warning letter telling the company, “We … urge Costco to end all unlawful discrimination imposed by the company through diversity, equity and inclusion (“DEI”) policies. … Costco should treat every person equally and based on their merit, rather than based on divisive and discriminatory DEI practices.”

The letter came about the same time as 98 percent of Costco’s shareholders voted *against* a proposal to cut the company’s DEI statements. The vote puts Costco executives in a tight spot of serving the wishes of shareholders or acquiescing to Bird and her friends.

I was in Eagle Grove last week. Like many travelers in Iowa, I stopped at Casey’s before leaving town.

Eagle Grove is a meatpacking community, and many jobs are held by Hispanic men and women. As I waited with my coffee in the check-out line, I was behind a Hispanic man whose hands showed his labors had taken a rougher toll than my life’s work at a computer has taken on mine.

A convenience store in the middle of America is not a place where one typically pauses to reflect on a church sermon given three days earlier at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

But I can’t be the only person nowadays who wonders whether people are listening to each other amid the chatter that constitutes our supposed national dialogue. Are our ears the most under-used part of our body?

Normally, what a pastor says from the pulpit rarely makes headlines. But at this time and place in our history, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Washington Diocese of the Episcopal Church was not just another pastor looking out over another flock when she addressed the interfaith prayer service to recognize the inauguration of a new president.

A public policy dispute over plans for about 1,000 miles of carbon dioxide pipeline across Iowa took a concerning turn last week. The pipeline company’s latest tactic demonstrates why Iowa should finally pass an anti-SLAPP statute that has been floating around the Legislature for a few years.

Iowa Capital Dispatch and the Des Moines Register reported that Summit Carbon Solutions, an Ames company founded by businessman Bruce Rastetter, sent letters to six opponents of its plans to use eminent domain authority to build the pipeline. With eminent domain, Summit could force landowners along the route to sell easements to the company so it could bury the proposed 2-foot-diameter pipe across their land.

The letters demand the recipients retract what Summit claims are false and defamatory statements the six critics have made and cease making similar comments in the future. The letters warn recipients their statements have “exposed you to significant legal liability.”

The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported the recipients are Steve King, the former congressman from Kiron; Jess Mazour of Des Moines, an official of the Sierra Club of Iowa; Barb Kalbach of Dexter and Tom Mohan of Cedar Rapids, both members of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement; Robert Nazario of Iowa Falls, like King, a member of the Free Soil Foundation, and Trent Loos, a Litchfield, Neb., farmer and podcaster.

The Summit project and the underlying eminent domain controversy are textbook examples of the kind of public policy issues the nation’s founders had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment in 1789. Freedom of speech was added to the Constitution to ensure people had the right in the new nation to offer their observations and opinions on important public policy matters.

I was asked to speak last week at the annual conference of the National Freedom of Information Coalition. My remarks boiled down to a simple message: The public needs more information *about* their governments, not more secrecy *from* their governments.

I explained a troubling trend I see worming its way through local governments in Iowa. This trend cuts at the heart of the public meeting law that has served our state and its citizens well for 50 years.

Open meetings of government boards, councils and commissions give the tax-paying public a seat from which they can monitor what government boards are doing — or not doing.

Last week, I bumped into an Appanoose County woman I have known for several years. She thanked me and the nonprofit organization I manage for shining the spotlight on the actions of Centerville Community School District leaders.

This mother told me I was responsible for her spending part of a recent evening listening to the recording of a closed meeting of the Centerville school board that had just been made public by order of a judge.

The purpose for the 2023 closed session supposedly was to discuss the job performance of Ryan Hodges, the guidance counselor at Centerville High School. But Hodges submitted his resignation two days before the meeting.

The Appanoose County mother was troubled by what she heard on the recording. It bothered her that school board members and Superintendent Mark Taylor did NOT talk about the actions of Hodges, who has been accused of predatory behavior toward a 17-year-old female student the school was responsible for protecting.

Instead, what the mom heard were board members and superintendent expressing more concern about how the findings by an outside investigator had leaked to the public, rather than Hodges’ sexual “grooming” of the girl. She heard school officials agreeing to make sure their public statements did not imply Hodges was forced to resign. She heard discussion about board members’ concerns about how the resignation would affect Hodges’ own children in elementary school.