Letter: Leaders’ priorities are misplaced

What the governor and the legislature are doing to Iowa is absolutely pathetic.

They don't adequately fund the K-12 school system (Cedar Rapids schools are faced with having to make $2.3 million in budget reductions); they don't fund the state universities (educational quality suffers and the regents are considering a tuition increase that will add to the burden of debt on our graduates); and they deal with improving water quality by filching money from other programs instead of passing the fraction-of-a-cent increase in the sales tax that the voters have approved.

Money for summer reading programs in 2017 and support for adequate staffing and hours for the State Historical Society in Iowa City? Forget it.

Now, in the April 13 Gazette, we learn that they won't properly fund our court system, one of the most basic pillars of a society ('Courts brace for new round of layoffs, furloughs”).

Yet the governor and the legislature shovel hundreds of millions of our dollars out the door for tax breaks for businesses and then plead wide-eyed poverty when it comes to funding vital state functions.

Who's going to want to stay in - let alone move to - a state with second-rate education, poor public services, water quality that ranks on a par with a sewer, and with fertilizer plants, confinement lots and slaughter houses? Are these our only future?

James Beranek

Cedar Rapids