Legislative Democrats want to focus on jobs

Mike Gronstal

DES MOINES - Top Democrats in the House and Senate say they have a singular focus going into the legislative session that begins Monday.

“We have a three-point plan that we're going to start to working on immediately next week and that three-point plan is jobs, jobs, jobs,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said during a Statehouse news conference Thursday, joined by House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, D-Des Moines.

Gronstal controls a slim one-seat majority in the Senate, which is split 26-24 in favor of the Democrats. McCarthy is the Democratic leader in the House, where Republicans have a 60-40 edge.

“We're going to work on a tax break that targets small- and medium-sized businesses, that doesn't create a tax shift,” Gronstal said. “This is a tax break that targets Main Street, not Wall Street.”

Last year, the Senate and the House each approved property tax relief proposals that the other chamber didn't pick up.

On Thursday, Gronstal said he remained confident that a deal for commercial property tax relief could get worked out, but he wasn't saying which part of the Senate plan might be negotiable - if any.

He said the other two parts of the three-part jobs program include investing in education and job training and, third, work on specific legislation that has stalled in the House.

“Bills like brownfields legislation to bring land back into production and greenfields legislation, things like that,” he said.

McCarthy said he expects to have a “productive session” where Republicans and Democrats work together.

“One year ago today, we were facing the real possibility of having impeachment proceedings of Supreme Court justices in the House. At the start of the session, the first item on the agenda was the elimination of our public preschool system,” McCarthy said. “We moved from there to making it more difficult for people to vote and we moved from there to the total elimination of our collective bargaining system.”

He said that divisiveness hasn't been evident this time around.

He said Democrats “have had a seat at the table” in discussions with the governor and Republicans on property tax reform, mental-health reform and education reform.

Lawmakers are expected to take up all three topics during the session.