Iowa City Truth and Reconciliation Commission asks for more time

IOWA CITY — Iowa City’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission will ask the city council next week to extend the commission’s timeline to June 30, 2025 to allow for more time to complete its final report and recommendations.

The commission, which was established in the fall of 2020 to foster community conversations and encourage restorative justice after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, was set to end Dec. 31, a deadline that had been twice extended.

The commission now estimates the final report, which it would like to have drafted by an outside consultant, will take about two months to complete.

The commission is suggesting June 30 as the deadline to allow time for input and review before the start of the city’s next fiscal year, on July 1, 2025. The commission, however, anticipates the final report and presentation to the council will be completed before June 30.

Council members will decide whether to grant the extension at its meeting Tuesday.

Monthly meetings?

If the council denies the extension, commissioners said they would compile the work that has been done, though it would be rushed.

“We have the raw material. … We are interested in quality work that they mandated us to do,” Commissioner Amos Kiche said at a previous TRC meeting.

In the commission’s ideal scenario, an extension would be granted, and the commission would likely meet monthly with the consultant to finish the report and recommendations.

Commissioners agree the recommendations shouldn’t be the end of their work.

“We do not want a solution where commissions of this nature or different nature are only set up when there is a crisis,” Kiche said.

Some of the preliminary ideas from the commission include having a city employee work on racial injustice issues and work more closely with nonprofits in the community.

What to include

The commission’s road to its final report has not been a smooth one.

Numerous commissioners have resigned, others wanted to be paid for their work, and discussions have been ongoing on the future of the commission.

Despite that, the current commissioners say they want to ensure that all the work done in past years is honored in the final report. But narrowing the focus has been a challenge.

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“The resolution (establishing the commission) was very big, it was very vague, and it led to us to spending a lot of time trying to figure out what direction to go down, what area to focus on, which was difficult, because if you just say racial injustice, there's so many areas,” said Chastity Dillard, chair of the commission.

The original resolution called for the final report to include a collection of community stories in various forms of media; recommendations on new social practices and celebrations encouraging community harmony; recommendations for institutional and policy reforms to combat systemic racism; measures to limit social disparities in power; and a recommendation on how the commission should continue.

“That framework can help us put together more recommendations and really tell our story of where we started, how we got here, why we are right here, and where we would like to envision ourselves in the future,” Dillard said. “This is an example for all the state of Iowa and any other communities that mirror us, or that would like to use us as some beacon of hope.”

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