Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

My family has called Davis County home for 185 years, all the way back to when William D. Evans and William Henson climbed down from their wagons in 1839 and 1840, a half-dozen years before Iowa became a state.

Evanses, Hensons, and their neighbors were on the town square in Bloomfield in 1877 when the cornerstone was nudged into place in the new county courthouse. Construction of the grand stone building with its soaring clock tower was a testament by those pioneers that this part of rural America, and the new county seat town, needed a home for local government and a fitting gathering space for meetings, speeches, elections and other civic events.

Voters demonstrated their faith in their local leaders when they authorized the building’s construction. The price tag came to about $60,000—the equivalent of about $2 million in today’s money.

Davis County courthouse, photographed around 1900

That courthouse is 148 years old this autumn. Davis County residents still go there to pay their taxes, get marriage licenses, record real estate deals, and make their way to the second-floor courtroom for trials and court hearings.

It is a tribute to successive generations of government officials that the picturesque building still serves the role our ancestors first envisioned in the years immediately after the end of the Civil War.

This commitment and loyalty is not unique to Davis County. You see this in places like Dubuque, Iowa City and Sioux City, too. No one has proposed—at least not seriously, and at least not lately—bulldozing the ornate Dubuque County Courthouse for a more “efficient” building, tearing down the distinguished Pentacrest buildings at the University of Iowa, or turning the eye-catching Woodbury County Courthouse in Sioux City into rubble.

But this commitment to long-term investment in government buildings hit a snag this year when the legislature voted to demolish the Henry A. Wallace Building northwest of the Iowa capitol. You may not recognize the building by its name. But you surely recognize the building by its signature design feature, a massive bank of gold-tinted windows that reflect the capitol on the other side of Grand Avenue.

(photo by Mike McCarville, Shutterstock)

The office building is only 47 years old. The reason the state plans to spend about $7 million to bulldoze the building is a reflection—a poor reflection—of an all-too-common practice in our nation these days. We have become a disposable society that places more stock in acquiring, rather than maintaining, and that includes buildings as well as consumer goods.

It is one thing if corporations opt for this newer-is-better-and-less-expensive thinking. But government officials, when they ignore upkeep and maintenance, risk alienating taxpayers who pay for the courthouses, schools, and office buildings.

State leaders from both political parties are guilty of this. They let Iowa taxpayers down in the name of saving money.

They ignored the Wallace building’s mounting issues, instead of dealing with them swiftly. The issues included heating and ventilation problems, air quality concerns, a leaky roof, and lead contamination left from when the Department of Public Safety’s indoor shooting range was there.

The Wallace building was completed in 1978 at a cost of $10.4 million. Factoring inflation, that is about $55 million in today’s dollars.

The nonpartisan Iowa Legislative Services Agency estimated it would cost $85 million to deal with the Wallace building’s maintenance issues and needed renovations. You could almost see the bulldozers approaching the building before the legislature’s demolition authorization earlier this year. 

In 2023, the state used federal COVID-19 pandemic relief funds to buy a vacant office building on the southwest side of Des Moines, about five miles from the Capitol. The Department of Natural Resources and Department of Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing moved there from the Wallace building soon after the purchase. The Department of Public Safety moved out of the Wallace building in 2007. This summer, the Department of Agriculture, the last Wallace tenant, moved to the Herbert Hoover Building southeast of the capitol.

State officials have not decided whether to sell the Wallace land and an adjacent parking ramp after the building is demolished or hang onto the site for its long-term strategic value, because of its proximity to the capitol.

By this time next year, all that will remain of the Wallace building will be memories and photographs of its window reflections.

Of course, there will also be questions lingering: have state officials learned any lessons from government’s failure to be a good steward of the taxpayers investment in the building through the decades?

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Top image: Iowa State Capitol reflection in the windows of the Henry A. Wallace Building at 502 E 9th Street in Des Moines, Iowa on July 29, 2021. Photo by Nagel Photography, available via Shutterstock.