LONE TREE

A December snow has painted the ground surrounding the Iowa River in rural Lone Tree a gorgeous white.

The snow is so new and so untouched on this early winter afternoon that a strong blowing wind merely spreads the beauty from hill to hill and tree to tree.

Only tire tracks and a few footprints disturb the fallen snow outside the standalone home of Jon Green, a Lone Tree High School graduate and former Lone Tree mayor who is now a Johnson County Supervisor.

Inside, Green sits by a roaring fireplace. His dog, Roscoe, jumps up for attention and a quick pet of his head. Grey Cat, one of two cats, jumps onto a couch for the same treatment.

In the next room, a large kitchen that has a Norman Rockwell feeling to it, Eleanore, Green’s live-in partner, is beginning the preparation for the evening meal.

This is, in many ways, a rural America that only those in rural America see. Places like Lone Tree.

This past week in Iowa City, much of that changed for Green, a native of Cheyenne, Wyoming, whose signature identities are wearing a cowboy hat around town and growing a beard during these dark winter days. Thursday morning, a guy who provided tech support for Lone Tree High School’s athletic teams because the athletics part didn’t really work out for him, moved into the Chair seat on the Johnson County Board of Supervisors.

Politics & Tech

Green’s path to the center seat on the five-member board began with a special election in 2021, the same year he moved into his current home. A year later, he won a four-year term in the 2022 regular election.

But really, it began long before that, when he was press secretary for David Freudenthal, the former Democratic governor of Wyoming.

“I’ve always been interested in politics,” Green said. “That was going home for me.”

Certainly, it was home.

Just not Lone Tree home.

After moving with his parents from Wyoming to Iowa at age 5, after living in Nichols and Lone Tree and graduating from Lone Tree High School, after leaving school at the University of Iowa to become editor and chief news reporter for the weekly Lone Tree Reporter newspaper, Green wound up in Thermopolis, Wyoming, as a reporter for the Independent Record. Small town living and working. Thermopolis is a city of about 2,700, the same size as Kalona, located in central Wyoming, more than four hours northwest of Cheyenne. It is home to perhaps the world’s largest collection of hot springs that draws tourists all year long.

It is a place where the high school basketball team plays games in Montana and Nebraska, and where a conference game sometimes requires six hours of travel, an early dismissal of classes one day and a late start the next morning.

And that’s if a snowstorm doesn’t halt everything.

Green chuckles about high school fans here complaining about a trip to Mediapolis.

“Mediapolis is not a long haul compared to Thermopolis to Burns (Wyoming),” Green said.

While Green was in Thermopolis, he was covering a ribbon cutting at a distillery one day when he got into a conversation with one of Gov. Freudenthal’s staff members. Freudenthal was a native of Thermopolis. Soon, Green had a job offer. He became press secretary and doubled his newspaper salary.

The job lasted for just five months.

“Turns out,” Green said, “I’m just not very goddamn good at following other people’s direction and instructions and what not.”

What did follow were jobs as a digital editor and digital sales director, a radio show based on tech, a tech job at a Wyoming bank, and then a move back home to Lone Tree, financed by a tech job at Cambridge Investment Research in Fairfield.

An opening on the Johnson County Board of Supervisors provided a pathway for Green more than three years ago in a political side of a career that included serving as mayor of Lone Tree in 2018 and 2019 for an annual salary of $1,000. Johnson County Supervisors make almost 100 times that.

Green, a graduate of Morningside University, was endorsed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Five years before that, Green had helped canvass for Sanders in the 2016 Iowa Caucuses.

“I’ve always known I wanted to do something political,” Green said. “I had never really thought that much about being a county supervisor.”

It wasn’t about the money. Green makes less salary now than he did as an IT guy.

Johnson Countians have benefited from Green’s political passion, which has not existed without controversy among some Board members, including outgoing Supervisor Royceann Porter. He pushed hard for more than $3 million of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to help lower-income residents two years ago. He has played leading roles in the possibility of regional train service linking Iowa City with North Liberty, and also improvements in Johnson County’s emergency plans, particularly after a snowstorm crippled the area last January. The problem? The University of Iowa went on with a women’s basketball game at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in the midst of a blizzard.

The phone calls went something like this, Green said: “When are you going to plow so I can get to Carver?”

Amendments to the emergency plan were approved by the Board in December.

Green is hopeful that a proposal from Pennsylvania-based Pop-Up Metro results in regional train service.

“It’s gonna be a big lift,” he said. “My biggest concern is probably the university. Just because the past five to eight years, I’d say, the cities and county have done a better job working on stuff. But that muscle memory just doesn’t really exist at the university.”

And that’s politics.

Rural Living

Back home in rural Lone Tree, Green grabs some more logs for a fireplace needing fuel on a cold Iowa night.

Both of Green’s siblings live in metropolitan areas, including a brother who lives in a southern suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Green prefers his rural living and escaping the highways of a major city. He could toss a football from his house into the Iowa River, or across it perhaps to Washington County.

You won’t see a neighborhood subdivision.

Or a Hy-Vee.

You will see trees. Farms. And snow.

“It’s been a pretty big change, living out here,” he said.

“I just don’t spend as much time in Lone Tree. Being so busy with supervisor work, a lot of friendships kind of fall away. That hasn’t been fun. On the other hand, I love being out here. I love having the critters. Some space to play around.”

The property itself teases Green. He attended an Iowa Farms Union convention in Ames. When there isn’t politics, there are indeed other things.

“We don’t know what exactly,” Green said, “but we want to do something productive out here, whether that’s more sheep or more birds. Gardening.”

The Statehouse, perhaps?

Perhaps.

“One of the lessons to me, having been elected a supervisor, which I have said earlier is not something that I ever really considered that strongly, it’s probably best not to have a plan and just let whatever organic thing is going to happen … happen.”

Just like that Iowa snow.