Ralph Rosenberg of Ames is a retired attorney, former state legislator, former director of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, and former leader of statewide Iowa nonprofit organizations. He and Barbara Wheelock, also of Ames, signed this open letter on behalf of PRO Iowa 24, a group of concerned rural Iowans with progressive values from Greene, Guthrie, Boone, Story, and Dallas counties.
Now is a good time for the public to make their wishes known for 2024 state policies. Tell your legislators to act on behalf of all Iowans, create an economy that works for all Iowans, and use the government to protect the most vulnerable. Republicans can enact each and every one of these items on a bipartisan basis.
More than holiday wishes, these represent Iowa values and expectations. Please consider talking with your elected officials to advocate for one or more of the following.
1. Support public and rural education and by doing so, support rural communities. Governor Kim Reynolds can ask for increased dollars for public education. Despite Iowa needing to improve K-12 public school funding, the legislature allocated $107 million for this year alone to pay for private school vouchers. (The real cost of the “education savings accounts” will be higher.) The new program could result in a loss of $54 million in state aid to public schools from students leaving public districts. That would be particularly bad for rural schools and communities.
2. Protect our elderly and dependent Iowans in nursing care. Increase salaries of direct care staff. Increase the number of inspectors. Iowa ranks 49th in the nation for its ratio of inspectors to care facilities, according to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. Families for Better Care ranked Iowa nursing homes as 37th best in America; staffing shortages exist in 42 percent of Iowa nursing homes.
3. To save taxpayer dollars, the state should comply with the open records law. The Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled in April that an open records lawsuit against the governor could proceed, prompting the state to settle that and two other cases, forking over $174,108.75 in taxpayer funds to cover attorney fees. Also, from fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2023, the state spent more than $108 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned-money to settle lawsuit claims, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported in August.
4. Feed the estimated 376,000 hungry Iowans. Last year, Republican lawmakers approved and Reynolds signed a law restricting eligibility for the federal food assistance program known as SNAP. The law is likely to result in kicking Iowans off SNAP, which helps lower-income families afford more nutritional food, and, as a result, potentially. Right before Christmas, the state announced the governor turned her back on federal funding for summer food assistance for school aged children.
5. Tell your elected officials that decisions between a woman and her doctor should be exactly that, not involving legislators, bureaucrats or judges. Just to make sure, tell your legislators to propose laws protecting reproductive rights.
6. Invest in higher education before changing tax laws. Working-class Iowans need to see tuition stabilized and tuition assistance increased at our community colleges and universities. Any income tax breaks will not keep up with the tuition increases of $200 to $300 per year.
7. Spend surplus dollars on helping with child care, which already costs about $11,000 per child, per year. Without affordable and quality child care, Iowa families have to reduce working hours, or take part-time jobs, making it more difficult to make ends meet. Working Iowans would gladly accept increases in child care subsidies of $500 over the couple of hundred of dollars in one time tax cuts they may get under any tax plan. The governor did take steps on this last year and should be both praised and urged to do more.
8. Invest in achieving clean water as a step toward preventing cancer. Iowa has the second highest cancer rate in the country and was the only state where cancer cases were on the rise from 2015 to 2019.
9. Enact meaningful laws to reverse the foot-dragging on our ill-named Nutrient Reduction Strategy to address agricultural pollution. Re-fund the Leopold Center at Iowa State University to support demonstration projects on sustainable agriculture. Ask our federal delegation to support and expand these efforts.
After doing all of this, any new year’s resolution will be easy to honor.
Top photo is by Joseph Sohm, available via Shutterstock.
5 Comments
though the looking glass
lovely thoughts but would be a different world than this one
dirkiniowacity Wed 3 Jan 7:16 PM
maybe time to embrace common goods?
every year the Canadian Broadcasting Corp shares the Massey Lectures with the public and this year’s series offers us a helpful counter-framing (of collective action for collective goods) to the corporate-crony social darwinism we get from our elected officials:
https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor
“According to writer, filmmaker and political organizer Astra Taylor, insecurity is a “defining feature of our time.” Not only that, she argues our society is actually built to make us all feel insecure on purpose. In her series of Massey Lectures, which she delivered this fall across Canada, Taylor explores all the ways that different social institutions are both built on and perpetuate feelings of anxiety — from politics to education to policing.”
dirkiniowacity Wed 3 Jan 7:49 PM
Excellent wishes, good post
And thank you, Ralph Rosenberg, for your decades of dedicated work.
PrairieFan Wed 3 Jan 9:14 PM
continuing a conversation
1) granted these are wishes for a better Iowa, based on hope more than expectation. However, ” Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.”Vaclav Havel. 2) I believe most Iowans share in many of these wishes; it is valuable to publicly iterate; those with public megaphones have the greatest responsibility and opportunity to magnify our hopes and vision. 3) I agree with the commentator that our society has generalized anxiety and fear about the future. Trump benefits from growing discontent and chaos. I do think one antidote to fear and anxiety is to state what our values and vision are for Iowa.
iowaralph Thu 4 Jan 9:15 AM
thanks for the conversation, just replying to the particulars of the post
Astra Taylor’s analysis is useful in that she distinguishes between existential anxiety which is a fundamental aspect of being-human and manufactured anxiety which is the material results of political-economy and can only be overcome through collective action. I don’t really know how else to measure people’s’ interest in these matters other than the actions they do (and don’t take) so how many people actively support such goals (and how many of them are Iowa Republicans) and how many either are working against them or don’t really care enough (or see the actionable means to enact them) seem to be the best measure of what is or isn’t “More than holiday wishes, these represent Iowa values and expectations”, and whatever the mix clearly there isn’t much unanimity, Iowa Values seems to be a sort of honorific for things I (the speaker) am championing at best.
dirkiniowacity Thu 4 Jan 4:39 PM