Experience and hard work should add up to re-election

When I started on the council three and a half years ago, we were still in the middle of a pandemic. We were masking. We were separating. We were wondering what was going to come next for ourselves, our family, and our community.

That meant hitting the ground running when I was sworn into office in January of 2022. The job of a new counselor involved all the work of getting up to speed on the operations of a city of 75,000 people, and the task of joining in to make decisions about what Iowa City was going to look like next.

Together with each other, city staff, community partners, and community voices we made big decisions on how to live our values by using resources from programs like ARPA to not only return to normal, but to make things better.

I’m proud to have been a part of that, putting our resources and our values together to do things like provide emergency help to keep people in their homes, or in the case of the Forest View mobile home park, spend money to help those folks pay for relocation, first month’s rent, and a security deposit when the pandemic killed the project that would have provided them new homes.

We launched new services, like the fare-free bus service, which was a big success, and I am committed to keeping in Iowa City.

And we invested in building projects that will have a positive ripple effect for years to come in our community, projects like the $3 million Dream City renovation and a $1 million renovation of the Free Medical Clinic.

But now new challenges face our city and its residents. Challenges from our state and federal governments. Challenges that too often target the most vulnerable among us as they target our entire city.

I am running again to take my experience, the commitment to hard work I’ve demonstrated during my first term on the council, and to take our shared values, and use them to make the hard decisions necessary to protect ALL the people of our community. Not just to survive this current storm, but to thrive in spite of it.

And if the voters of Iowa City will have me for another term, I will keep doing this hard work — together with the rest of the council, city staff, and all of you.

Shawn Harmsen is a candidate for Iowa City Council District B.