Setting the I-JOBS record straight

Democratic nominee for governor Jack Hatch told the Downtown Rotary Club Monday that Cedar Rapids doesn't have a friend in the governor's office.

'This is a governor who has not been friendly to Cedar Rapids,” Hatch said.

Hatch, a state senator from Des Moines, has been a property developer in Cedar Rapids and has witnessed much of the city's effort to recover from the 2008 flood. So he's familiar with the long road that process has followed.

So we appreciate his appreciation for our local efforts. But we can't help but feel like Hatch is selling local voters short. Cedar Rapidians want the best governor for the entire state of Iowa, not just one who will deliver the goods locally. Whether a governor is friendly or not takes a back seat to whether he or she is an effective leader with a positive agenda for the future of the state.

Still, in one respect, Hatch is on to something.

Hatch is right to call out Terry Branstad on his repeated condemnation of the I-JOBS bonding program initiated by former Gov. Chet Culver. Branstad often condemns the program as a risky scheme that burdens Iowa families, created by 'big-debt Chet.”

Culver did blunder in selling I-JOBS to the Legisalture as a jobs program. In reality, it created far fewer jobs than Culver predicted.

But what it did do was help Cedar Rapids bounce back from one of the nation's worst natural disasters. I-JOBS dollars poured into the city, mostly to help rebuild or replace flooded public and cultural facilities. Without those dollars, it's likely that local property taxpayers would have picked up the slack.

Faced with massive damage, and at a time with very low interest rates, the state decided to issue bonds. They're being paid back using gambling tax proceeds, so the notion of Iowa families burdened with debt is false.

Branstad champions a pay-as-you-go approach to this kind of spending. Normally, that's prudent. But 2008 was not normal by any stretch of the imagination. Resources were needed, and bonding was a prudent, swift way to provide them.

Branstad, to his credit, signed legislation creating the Iowa Flood Mitigation Board, providing Cedar Rapids with $264 million in state sales tax proceeds over the next 20 years to build flood protection. Hatch, not surprisingly, overlooks that.

Flexibility, adaptability and creativity are critical to disaster recovery. We'd hope any governor, friendly or not, would understand that.

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