(Spirit Lake)– Local legislators are sounding off on the recently completed session of the Iowa Legislature which concluded early Saturday. State Representative John Wills says there were a number of highlights, including passage of a bill addressing school safety…
“Allowing schools to choose whether they want to have armed employees or not. We did pass a second tax cut which would be the second largest tax cut in Iowa history. We did the biggest largest tax cut in history about two years ago. That was about 2.5 billion dollars and this one’s going to be about a billion dollars of additional, so we’re really trying to make Iowa more competitive. We passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which was another thing that will prevent the state of Iowa from telling citizens what it can do based on religion or so forth. It doesn’t limit any person, it just limits the government from what they can do.”
Wills says passage of a bill addressing illegal immigration in Iowa was also a highlight. He also talked about passage of a bill affecting area education agencies…
“We did have a pretty successful ability to stop some of the big changes that would have, really the House felt was maybe more detrimental to the AEA’s than helpful. We were able to save most of the critical parts of the AEA, area education agencies, and allow them to do a good job while at the same time making some significant changes to the area education agencies and protecting special education, that sort of thing, so.”
Wills says there were some disappointments, however. Among them he says was failure to pass a bill protecting landowner rights…
“We weren’t able to get that through the Senate and so that’s another thing that I’d say was a little bit disappointing. But overall we had a lot of good things that happened as well. Do you look for some of those things to maybe come back up here in the next session? Yeah, you know we operate two year sessions, every year we have a session, but two-year general assembly and so this is the second year so everything that was alive around this year is now dead, so next year we’ll have to re-do the bills and kind of come back at it with a fresh start and I think some of these issues that didn’t make it through this year will come back. There’s just a lot of dynamics this year that really just slowed some things down.”
He says debate over the AEA legislation was especially time consuming.
