Candidate Profiles

Support for public education is one important issue for the state. It has been underfunded for a while and has been under attack the last few years. I would work at bringing back services that supported our education system and look at how to increase the funding to better keep up with inflation. Support for working families is important to people in many ways. One of the main ways is through making sure they have more money in their pocket. This can include looking at how workers can be paid fair wages for their job. We also need to find ways to help with items like property taxes, that keep going up. Instead of fully capping levies, which can also cause issues for the areas that need them, we should be funding those services better so the use of levies is not needed as much. Our state has also been keeping a large surplus in savings. We should look at that surplus and find solutions to give tax relief to our families. Health care and mental health services is an issue in rural areas. Access can be challenging. We need to look at solutions to expand access. Without solutions that look at physically adding more locations, the problem will not be resolved.

There are many areas of the state budget where funding could be increased. I say this knowing that there has been a large surplus kept the last few years, meaning there is room in our budget to make increases. Across the board, any area that increases state worker pay would be a necessary increase. They have taken the brunt of cuts for a while and need that relief in their paycheck. This comes with working to increase all pay, not just certain benchmarks of years worked, because that can cause issues and strife among employees with compression of pay scales. Our state prison system is currently underfunded, which has caused issues with not only staffing but safety. This would help attract more to the workforce to help with shortages. Our Department of Transportation should have more funding for their road projects so we can keep moving forward in replacing roads that are deteriorating. This is especially true now that vehicles at a higher weight limit are allowed on roads previously not allowed. It has caused more damage to roads, without a solution to fix them. The public education system needs more funding to combat years of a low percentage increase. The majority of a school's funding goes towards staffing and so this would also boost pay for all staff, while providing the ability to hang on to support that is desperately needed. In general I feel as though the state has not been keeping up with increases needed in most, if not all, departments, while hanging onto money in a surplus instead of using tax payer money for what it was intended to do.

For safety purposes I believe there should be laws around using hand-held mobile devices while driving.

The idea of pay is a larger issue in the state, as we need to look at what is a realistic minimum wage for staff. What is more likely going to keep staff in those areas is better pay and better training for staff. Better pay can work at keeping qualified people in those positions. Better training creates a safe work environment for staff and patients, along with giving staff the tools to feel successful in their job. Safety of the residents should be a key priority in this. Safety comes from having appropriate training and qualified consistent staffing. We should make sure as a legislature that that there is a committee of experts looking into nursing homes and making sure that training and safety is being implemented throughout. We don't want to look at raising costs for people in those facilities and adding pay or staffing can certainly do that. If the cost of nursing homes is going up at the expense of underfunding staff then we should be looking at what areas are going up drastically in cost and see what can be done with those areas.

There should be funding for cancer research, screenings and prevention programs for residents. Once you reach the point of the second highest in the nation, the very least we could be doing is work to research the cause of this in our state and see if we can find solutions to reduce our cancer rate. Our citizens deserve for us to take this seriously and find real solutions to keep them healthier.

We should be testing our waterways to check for quality as this testing has been reduced overtime. We should bring in people that can help work with farmers to find the best solutions for their fields that would improve their output, while also providing solutions that would reduce the amount of contaminants in our water supply. Having a prosperous farming community and having clean water are not two separate ideas.

One of the largest barriers to mental health services in this state is access. We have less and less access, especially in rural areas. Much of this has come from years past of reducing and closing facilities. We need to look at increasing access so there are more beds and ability to treat patients. We can look at the time it takes to find a location for a patient to see if this measure was helpful. It would also be useful to track the frequency of patients in locations to see if there is a correlation with access and if it increases or reduces frequency. Lately there was also a change in which some more administration and coordination comes from the state and out of the hands of counties. This was done to help with access, but based off talking with people in the area, this has hindered access as every decision and move takes more time. The quicker you can receive services, the better, and the ones in the county are the ones understanding the needs best for the county.

I do not feel it is the place of a politician to legislate medical decisions between a doctor and their patient. So, I feel it is an overstretch of our legislature with the passing of their current legislation on abortion. There should be access to whatever is needed to a patient on this topic, which would also include contraception and in vitro fertilization.

I am not in support of that bill as it aims to limit medical decisions between doctors and their patients. Though a sensitive issue, it is one that does not have a one-size-fits-all answer. There are too many factors at risk, which is why it is important to leave any medical decisions up to patients and their doctors.

To help with continual improvement of public education in Iowa, it is important to make sure that schools have the supports they need in place for this. This includes support systems like our AEA, good teachers in the classrooms, access to teaching staff for interventions, and good support staff. It comes down to funding for this, not only to have it, but to pay fairly for these roles so you can make sure that you have good, consistent people in those positions. Reduced funding over the years have reduced support systems in schools, making it more difficult to provide the best instruction and intervention. I think the legislature itself should not define certain standards or curriculum taught in the classroom. The decisions of standards and curriculum should come from our Department of Education working in hand with school personnel and research to determine what is best to be taught in the classroom.

A major factor in this is taking care of our state. The conditions of our small towns, roads, schools, etc. are all selling points in areas where companies are looking to come in and invest themselves, or for individuals to come in and move. If we don't take care of them, then it isn't attractive to those individuals. We need to be investing in ourselves and our state if we want others to focus on us. Especially in the small towns we should be looking at ways to incentivize new companies to start and grow in our areas. This should be in a way that benefits both the company and the community.