Editorials: Fare thee well

What a gorgeous Saturday in early May as Buena Vista University sent another class out into the world. Storm Lake was picture perfect. Most of these eager Beavers would like to burrow into a place like this, a small Iowa town where the living should be easy. We make it difficult.

BVU teaches teachers. The legislature wants to tell them just how to teach — lay off the Black stuff, don’t say gay, strike “climate” from the syllabus, stay away from what could prove divisive. Why work under those rules when you could move to Minnesota and make $10,000 more?

Most Storm Lake High School graduates are Latino. The governor and attorney general would like to see some documentation, please, because we don’t need more med school graduates from here.

Iowa has grown hostile to people who are different. The legislature passes laws that suggest we don’t really like gays. The attorney general insists that the county sheriff arrest immigrants for being Mexican. The governor earlier patrolled the Mexican border, as if the federal agents and the Texas Rangers weren’t up to the job.

Get this, cloistered Anglos: What little population growth Iowa has is from foreign-born residents. Without them, Rep. Randy Feenstra would lose his congressional district. Without them, Storm Lake is maybe half its size — and the White folk are not moving back to milk cows every morning. Sioux Center could not function as they would like it.

Face it, winter can be miserable. Our rivers are among the most polluted in America. Property taxes in Storm Lake are out of control. A bike trail around the lake? Get serious. You could build a hoghouse there. Not a lot of sizzle when you’re selling a cheap cut of steak. At least lay out the welcome mat for the cheap help.

What is the argument we are presenting to graduates for staying in Iowa? So you can earn less than any other Midwestern state? So you get can a fresh whiff of hydrogen sulfide in the morning? Because only Nebraska separates us from snow skiing in Colorado and clean lakes are less than 200 miles north?

If you don’t like the program of narrow minds behind close-set eyes you can just take it someplace else. That is the commencement message. Nearly half of our college graduates will. Doctors are already bailing for fear of practicing comprehensive care. The Drake student newspaper a couple years ago listed all the reasons that graduates couldn’t wait to hightail it out of Des Moines. Most of it had to do with Iowa going crazy zealot. If you are not in the fold they don’t really want you here. If you stay, keep it quiet or you could be deported.

We can’t afford that sort of attitude. Pretty cocky for a place that has corn and beans, corn and beans, plus pork and poultry and not a whole lot more. There isn’t much room there for an open mind. That is the entire problem with our brain drain.

Lousy managers

The Republicans running the legislature are not very good at it. Their per-diem expenses ran out at the end of April but they couldn’t agree among themselves on a budget or on a stinker of a property tax reform bill. The House does not agree on fiscal matters with the Senate and governor.

The session drags on.

People say they would like government to run like a business. We would not get too far if we, among family and friends, could not decide on what to put in the paper this week or next, so we just didn’t print one. That would suggest incompetence. Why should the suggestion not apply to our own legislators who, of the same party, cannot agree whether the table should be square or rectangular?

The property tax reform will not be a reform. It will be another shift to the sales tax to finance public education, eventually, if indirect. Drop the “reform” or pass it. Either way the result is the same: a fiscal mess that puts the burden on the blue-collar types who pay a disproportionate share of the sales tax.

There are also serious disagreements over eminent domain for pipelines. Sen. Lynn Evans, R-Aurelia, was among some senators holding up the budget over landowner rights. The ethanol industry is begging for the pipelines but Northwest Iowa landowners aren’t totally on board, obviously. Republicans have mangled the issue while Democrats happily let them.

That’s bad management. House Speaker Pat Grassley might like to run for governor representing The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight. He must be taking his cues from gramps, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Washington DC, where the Republicans can’t figure out how to give the wealthy a tax cut while sending our federal debt even higher.

Iowans are solid in their support for bad management. We continue to elect Republicans to local office who cannot manage property taxes, either. They blame the Republicans in Des Moines and then campaign for them.

Shooting the auditor

The midterm election cycle of mudslinging has started in earnest. Republican legislators are demanding straight and fast answers from State Auditor Rob Sand, a Democrat, about how $27 million intended for the judicial system got sent to the wrong accounts.

Note right here: Gov. Kim Reynolds is a Republican. She appointed the chief justice of the supreme court. She appointed the management office director, a former Republican legislator. The state treasurer is a Republican.

So shoot the auditor. That is what the House Oversight Committee tried to do last week, joined by other leading officials like House Speaker Pat Grassley, who might run for governor against Sand.

They thumped and growled that Sand should have done something more or sooner. He replied that he would have if anyone from the administration or the judicial branch had dialed him up.

The governor and chief justice should figure this out. They called in Sand a little late to the action.

It does illustrate a problem for Democrats. Sand has a lot of money but not a lot of verve. He should take on the governor and chief justice for not keeping track of our money. He should hammer Buena Vista County and the City of Storm Lake for mismanaging tax increment financing revenue, which is now the subject of expensive litigation because the principals are too dull to fix it without a referee. Sand should have been the referee. Legislators could have called him in when they first heard of shortchanging the judicial system. City and county officials should have demanded that Sand forensically audit how the TIF funds went missing and where they went. He should have asserted his authority because he knew the legislature would eventually strip him anyway.

It did strip him of his authority to investigate waste and fraud. And then it called him in to flog him for not exercising authority. There will be no end to this fraud on the electorate. If he had used his authority to its limits, Sand would be in a better position to assert himself. Look at President Trump: He never let the law put him at a political disadvantage, and exceeds his constitutional authority with impunity. Sand did not even test his limits before the Republicans stripped his office of investigative power.

Fortunately for Sand, misplacement of funds carries no discernible political consequences in Storm Lake and probably when it comes to the state judiciary. It does not excite the imagination like dumbing down public education or shaming certain classes of citizens does.

OF NOTE: Iowa Democrats are feeling their oats. One of their brightest young starts, State Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, D-West Des Moines, announced that she will run against Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Altoona, for the Third District seat in Congress. Trone Garriott flipped a Dallas County senate seat from red to blue in 2020, and flipped another red seat when she beat Senate President Jake Chapman following redistricting. The Democrats have targeted three of four Iowa congressional districts (not the Fourth). Trone Garriott might be their best bet, a Lutheran pastor who campaigns like Terry Branstad and knows how to exploit social media. It is a winnable seat for the minority Democrats. If she wins, Trone Garriott is likely to serve in the majority. As such, she could assure rural voters that a farm bill would get passed. Nunn and Friends are over two years late on a farm bill, and we are in the throes of a trade war with an avian flu pandemic in the making.