July 1 is the beginning of the fiscal year and the date new laws take effect, unless otherwise stated. Iowa’s majority-Republican General Assembly this year passed more than 170 laws dealing with education, firearms, crime, health care, paid family leave and more. Here’s what goes into effect this week.
Republican Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley announced Friday he will seek re-election to the Iowa House, forgoing a run for governor in 2026.
The charges are the first after Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate in March claimed 277 Iowans without U.S. citizenship illegally voted or registered to vote in recent elections.
Rocky De Witt, a Republican who rose from relative obscurity a decade ago to a seat on the Woodbury County Board of Supervisors and then a seat in the Iowa Senate, has died following a battle with pancreatic cancer.
“Unfortunately, what we see happen too commonly across the state of Iowa happened in Conesville,” Iowa Auditor Rob Sand said at a Tuesday press conference. “The City Clerk who had the keys to the kingdom made off with taxpayer money.”
The groups claim the new state law would increase businesses’ health care costs by millions of dollars, and that it violates existing federal law and businesses’ free speech
Healthy Kids Iowa, announced by Gov. Kim Reynolds in May, uses federal funding to expand the summer meal sites program that the state ran last year. Instead of one box for the whole summer, qualifying families are being given one box per child, per month in June, July and August.
Also in the notebook, Iowa’s unemployment rate increased slightly in May
The building on Iowa Avenue, which opened in 1956, is home to books, newspapers, vital records, photographs and more artifacts, which are available to the general public for research.
Iowa will receive $37.8 million in opioid settlement funds after the state signed onto a settlement agreement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler Family, on Monday, resolving thousands of opioid lawsuits nationwide.
Gov. Kim Reynolds vetoed legislation last week that would have allowed doctors to prescribe synthetic psilocybin — the active component of "magic mushrooms" — in Iowa if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the substance.
Seventy legislators in the Iowa House signed a petition to override Gov. Kim Reynolds’ veto of eminent domain and property rights legislation, the House Speaker’s Office announced Tuesday. But a special session of the Iowa Legislature remains unlikely given the lack of interest from Republican leaders in the Iowa Senate.
During this year’s legislative session, the Iowa House of Representatives and the governor’s office used an Iowa-based AI-native program to help streamline the legislative process for evaluating and tracking bills, a first for the state.
Also in the Capitol Notebook, Iowa nonprofits have sent a letter to Sens. Ernst and Grassley warning of harmful provisions in Trump’s tax bill
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