Editorial Roundup: Iowa

Des Moines Register. Feb. 26, 2021.

Editorial: How many ill-advised ideas can Iowa GOP pack into one anti-vaccine bill? Too many

It was 1977 when the Iowa Legislature passed a bill requiring immunizations for schoolchildren. House File 163 helped ensure our youngest residents were protected against diseases including tetanus, pertussis and rubella.

The legislation was sponsored by Rep. Greg Cusack, a Democrat who served in the Iowa House from 1973 to 1981.

An editorial writer caught up with him this month at his current home in Oregon. He barely remembers the bill mandating vaccines for children in school.

That’s likely because it was not controversial. It passed 85 to 6 in the Iowa House. (Young Rep. Terry Branstad, R-Lake Mills, voted for it.) Not a single member of the Iowa Senate voted against it. Gov. Robert Ray signed it into law.

What Cusack does remember was a controversial amendment he introduced to his bill.

He had gone home for the weekend during the session and got talking to his neighbor, a chiropractic student. The man convinced him a “conscience clause” should be added, which would clear the way for school vaccine exemptions on moral, ethical or pretty much any grounds.

The chiropractor “was a very persuasive and sincere young man,” Cusack said. “I didn’t know beans.”

When he returned to the Statehouse the next week and introduced the conscience clause, he was immediately “razzed” and laughed at by both Republican and Democratic colleagues. A moral exemption to vaccines? They asked him what the heck he was thinking.

“This was a classic example of a young lawmaker, me, not knowing what I was doing,” he said of his 34-year-old self. Cusack does, however, value the fact that lawmakers listened to those with differing views - something he laments doesn’t happen much today.

In the end, the conscience clause was dead. Exemptions were allowed for medical and narrow religious reasons.

Lawmakers of both political parties understood that vaccines are effective at protecting health and that exemptions to them should be very limited. They had also seen firsthand the devastation caused by polio and the great success of a vaccine.

“We lawmakers respected facts back then,” Cusack said.

Flash forward to 2021.

Some members of today’s GOP-controlled Iowa Legislature seem intent on ignoring facts and clearing the way for people to avoid vaccinations.

Enter Senate File 193, which was recently advanced through subcommittee by Sens. Jim Carlin of Sioux City and Mark Costello of Imogene. It is jam-packed with wacky ideas that jeopardize public health, ideas that Carlin, in an unusual move, prompted a vaccine opponent to articulate at great length during a public hearing.

The legislation would broaden the state’s already broad religious exemption for school vaccines and expand it to include Iowans with “conscientiously held beliefs.” In other words, even more Iowa parents could cite bogus reasons to avoid immunizing kids.

It would completely reverse current law by allowing exemptions during emergencies and epidemics.

The bill would forbid Iowa employers from requiring employees to be vaccinated. This is the epitome of big government micromanaging private operations - courtesy of the political party that claims to oppose such intrusiveness.

It would require medical providers to get patients’ informed consent before their vaccination information could be reported to the state’s immunization registry. Patients could revoke their consent and have their information removed from the registry if they choose.

Where did this bizarre idea come from?

Carlin said he has concerns about whether businesses such as airlines could use information in the registry to refuse passengers who haven’t received a COVID-19 vaccine.

What is he talking about?

The state vaccine registry is accessible only to medical providers and patients themselves. It is an important tool to understand vaccination uptake in communities, particularly in the event of a disease outbreak.

The registry is also where pharmacists and others report first and second doses of COVID-19 vaccinations so the state (and ultimately the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) know how many shots have been administered.

This is not the time to make the state’s central vaccine reporting database less reliable.

However, this is a good time for lawmakers to listen to medical professionals, including Dr. Caitlin Pedati, the highest-profile doctor in Gov. Kim Reynolds’ administration.

She had plenty to say during that same Senate subcommittee meeting on Senate File 193.

“Vaccines are very important, they’re safe, they’re critical lifesaving tools, and I think there’s good data to show that when you increase things like exemptions, people do take advantage of them and it creates pockets of under-vaccinated or unvaccinated populations, which can lead to the spread of infectious disease like measles.”

Translation: You lawmakers are pursuing bad ideas.

Once upon a time, Iowa lawmakers respected science. They understood that the threat of communicable diseases is real and vaccines save lives. They dismissed the fringe.

How far this governing body has fallen.

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Dubuque Telegraph Herald. Feb. 26, 2021.

Editorial: Increased state aid still leaves some school districts, taxpayers short

After years of bare-bones increases in state supplemental aid, the 2.4% hike to come from the Iowa Legislature this year sounds pretty good at first blush. Though a tick smaller than Gov. Kim Reynolds’ original request for 2.5%, it’s still the biggest increase schools have seen in five years.

But like everything these days, you have to look at school aid through the lens of COVID-19 to see the real detrimental effects.

Yes, the increase in state aid amounts to $179 per pupil - a figure that district officials would have been thrilled with in some past years. But this year also brought a decline in enrollment for many school districts. Some 6,000 kids statewide stayed home from their public schools because of the risk of COVID-19. Now, schools - and taxpayers - are paying the price.

The Dubuque Community School District is one of 137 districts across the state whose funding allocation will fall below the threshold of 101% of current year’s costs even with that 2.4% increase. That means districts are allowed to make up the difference via property taxes. In the TH coverage area, Andrew, Bellevue, Easton Valley and Edgewood-Colesburg also fall below the threshold. So where state funding falls short, taxpayers must close the gap.

That’s particularly difficult in a year like this, when families have been hit hard by the impacts of COVID-19.

Senate Republicans have said they would consider other measures to help shore up the shortfalls. But a House of Representatives-passed measure links additional aid to the number of 100% in-person learning days schools offered.

Schools that used hybrid instruction will get less funding than those who held fully in-person learning.

That’s the wrong approach. School district officials across the state (and country) were doing their level best to figure out how to safely educate kids amid a pandemic. To penalize them next year for decisions made under the stress of COVID-19 - and which were supported by many public health officials - is out of line.

Lawmakers must seek ways to help schools recover from this anomaly of a school year.

The Dubuque County Board of Supervisors, on the other hand, weighed seriously the economic toll the pandemic has taken when they supported a proposed reduction to the tax levy for the upcoming fiscal year. The reduction would bring the overall tax levy on the county portion of tax bills from $9.57 per $1,000 of assessed value to $9.53 for the fiscal year starting on July 1. It would mark the fourth straight fiscal year in which the levy rate has been reduced.

With increases in property tax valuations, Dubuque County will take in $762,129 more tax revenue than last year, for a total of $36.3 million - though had supervisors not reduced the levy, the county could have seen an increase closer to $1 million.

County supervisors did the judicious thing. Just like most taxpayers, the county has to bear increased county expenses related to the pandemic. Supervisors deserve credit for striking a balance between citizens’ and county government’s needs when it comes to levying taxes.

Those interested in commenting on the budget process can join a public hearing March 8.

Dubuque County’s state lawmakers are back at it, fighting the good fight for citizens in a bipartisan manner when it comes to protections for residents and owners of mobile homes.

Iowa Sen. Carrie Koelker, R-Dyersville, introduced Senate File 403 last week, a bill that aims to protect tenants - most of whom own their mobile homes, just not the land beneath - from being evicted unfairly, requires proper notice of rent increases, restricts rent increases to one per year and more.

The bill mirrors exactly the language of Iowa House File 442, introduced earlier in the week, of which Iowa Rep. Shannon Lundgren, R-Peosta, is a sponsor.

It’s great to see renewed efforts to further this legislation. Last year, area lawmakers did everything right - coalescing bipartisan support, getting buy-in from stakeholders - and still couldn’t get legislation passed. Even when several residents of the Table Mound parks traveled to the state Capitol along with other manufactured-home residents and pleaded with lawmakers to move the measures forward, the measure inexplicably stalled.

We’re glad local lawmakers didn’t take “no” for an answer and are keeping up the press to support vulnerable Iowans. Hopefully, this year the change in law comes to fruition.

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Iowa City Press-Citizen. Feb. 22, 2021.

Editorial: Republican lawmakers must not succeed in deciding whose perspective counts in U.S. history

It’s been roughly nine months since our country tortured itself for weeks over how to properly respond to the repeated killing of innocent Black citizens and the destructive protests that ensued. In the midst of that tumultuous summer, some, including members of this board, criticized groups like Black Lives Matter and Iowa Freedom Riders for the property damage inflicted by their protests and called on them to seek change for racial injustice through education rather than demonstration. Curriculum produced by the Pulitzer Center, based on the essays, art and stories presented by the 2019 New York Times’ “1619 Project,” did just that. And, now, many statehouses across the country, including ours in Iowa, are responding to that effort with bills designed to subvert local school boards by prohibiting schools from teaching it.

To reject this opportunity to learn is to declare that we never really wanted to understand what African Americans were trying to tell us last summer or for hundreds of years.

Iowa House File 222, introduced by Rep. Skyler Wheeler of Orange City, specifically targets this curriculum and threatens to penalize any Iowa school that uses it or anything similar. On Tuesday, Feb. 9, the bill advanced out of its subcommittee, creating the possibility that it could be considered in committee and see light in the House. It would be difficult to overstate how shortsighted this bill is or how terribly it jeopardizes our national effort to understand the foundation of our racial divide.

For those who are not familiar with the 1619 Project, it is a collection of essays, poems, art and stories published in an August 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine. It was inspired by Waterloo, Iowa native, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who also penned the project’s unflinching opening essay. The issue was dedicated to showcasing African American historical events in their own words and images. While the 1619 Project was met with both praise and criticism (some merited, some not), it sought to center the perspective of African Americans in a narrative of U.S. history, rather than relegating such history to the margins of our history books. The material is at times gut-wrenching, but it is completely unvarnished and honest in its attempt to describe the lives of generations of Black people in the United States. It is meant to begin a discussion, to help us more fully embrace our history. Critical responses from the 1620 Project and the 1776 Report do nothing to dispel the fundamental truths detailed in the stories provided in the 1619 Project.

It’s not enough that our founding fathers had noble intentions and ideals. It’s one thing to draft a Constitution that declares freedom, justice and equality for all, and another entirely to ensure that those principles are guaranteed for all who live within their jurisdiction. From hallowed documents like the Mayflower Compact to the Gettysburg Address, we have told ourselves throughout our history that our nation is unique in our belief in individual freedoms, equality and self-determination. The principles that define and cloak us are indeed noble, but the reality is that the inalienable rights so many of us take for granted have never been universal in the United States and, even today, remain elusive for many of our citizens. Our inability to truly acknowledge and lament our failings as a nation continues to undercut our ability to honor and implement the principles upon which we declared our union.

It’s impossible to learn from a past that we are not allowed to see and hear. We can debate the perspectives offered in the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report. We can dispute the points made here. We can and we should. Banning ideas because they make us uncomfortable does not unify us or make us more secure. While learning about Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, we absolutely should learn about Sally Hemmings and James Fossett, the slaves who played significant roles in that historical story. We should learn why “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is considered the Black national anthem. We should tour the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana that today offers visitors an honest account of the lives of slaves who toiled there in earlier times. It’s important that we know that most enslaved people were in fact not well-fed or treated like family, as so many mainstream historical accounts would have us believe. And as we approach the 100th anniversary of the complete devastation of Greenwood, Oklahoma, at the hands of the white citizens of Tulsa, we should want to know what brought us to that tragic moment in our history.

We must move past the notion that discussions about racial injustice are a zero-sum game, and that acknowledging injustice and promoting opportunity for one people must come at the expense of another. We must acknowledge the sacrifice and contributions of those who were denied and ignored throughout history. We must not allow those who would stifle ideas and education to succeed. We must stop House Bill 122 in its tracks and not allow it to become law. In five years, we will celebrate 250 years of the United States of America. Let’s make sure that we arrive at that milestone with a renewed understanding of how we got here.

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