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Your Capitol Voice: Stalemate takes legislature past planned end-of-session
by Bobby Kaufmann, State Representative · Op-Ed · May 07, 2015


Session is “officially” over! Sadly, session is far from actually being over.
May 1st was supposed to be the end of session. After May 1st legislators are no longer reimbursed for the expenses of traveling to and living in Des Moines. Many factors are contributing to the stalemate. Below I will highlight each one and offer my thoughts on how to fix them. Complaints without solutions are not particularly helpful. In addition, I want to remind everyone that this is a two-year session. If you had an issue or bill that was important to you and didn’t make it, not only could it appear in one of the final bills this year but it is also automatically eligible for next year.

Education – The lack of movement on Education funding is incredibly frustrating to me. I am truly angry about this situation and have expended a great deal of energy to find a solution in which both sides can move forward. Whenever you have a situation like this, you always have partisan critics trying to take advantage with partisan jabs and personal attacks, but I am in the business of governing and finding a solution so I ignore those who would try to take political advantage and work with members of both parties to find a solution.

The power now lies with a 10-member conference committee. The other 140 of us can and certainly do advocate, but ultimately we do not have a vote on that committee. Trying to think outside the box, I have been working with a bi-partisan group to float a proposal that would offer a historically rare three-year education funding compromise. Predictability is important for our schools and politics could be minimized. We have talked about a 2-2.5% base increase for not only this and next year but also the following. If more is available it could be added in future years. When the education budget was debated this week I broke with my party and voted for the 2.645% compromise. It ultimately failed but I wanted my vote to send a clear message that enough is enough. I cast this vote on behalf of all of you.

Budget – Another sticking pointy to adjournment is that House Republicans and Senate Democrats are $180 million dollars apart in terms of spending. The budget I support spends 99% of revenue and does not use one-time money. I have never voted for a budget that spends more than the state takes in and never will. The Governor and Senate Democrats’ budgets spend one-time money for ongoing expenses. I think this is a bad precedent – none of you would rely on birthday money to pay your electric bill. I think it is important the State keeps its cash reserves full in the event of another catastrophe such as the flood of 2008 or the pending bird flu situation.

Regents Funding – Working with a bipartisan group of legislators I led the charge last week to prevent civil war within the Regents and open-season poaching between the Universities, private colleges, and community colleges. I staunchly opposed Performance Based Funding because it punished the University of Iowa for its successes while being detrimental to our community colleges. The bill we passed did not include PBF, allocated an additional $4 million to UNI, and froze tuition at all three Universities for the third year in a row.

Prison – Finally we have good news on the prison. I have spent a session shining the bright light of the Oversight Committee onto this $170 million dollar project and we are finally getting answers. We have pushed and now a lot of the work is being completed using dollars already in the prison budget and fixes are being done by the contractors under warranty. A few issues remain but I am confident we have turned a corner. There is now a projected opening date of early fall.



You may contact Rep. Kaufmann at bobby.kaufmann@legis.iowa.gov, 515-281-3221 or 1527 330th St. Wilton, IA, 52778