WASHINGTON
At the end of the first week of Iowa’s 2025 legislative session, State Senator Dawn Driscoll and Representative Heather Hora spent time with constituents at their first legislative …
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WASHINGTON
At the end of the first week of Iowa’s 2025 legislative session, State Senator Dawn Driscoll and Representative Heather Hora spent time with constituents at their first legislative briefing of the year, held in Washington on Friday, Jan. 17. Although few bills have been introduced at this early date, the legislators shared their priorities for the session and reacted to Gov. Kim Reynold’s Condition of the State address, given days earlier. Those who attended were were given the opportunity to ask questions and voice their concerns.
Rep. Hora moves into a new position this session as she begins her second term in office, that of Assistant Majority Leader. “That puts me in a position where I meet with leadership and convey what the caucus is thinking, what we’re hearing back home, and drive the bills that are something that we feel, in the State of Iowa, that constituents are asking for,” she said. Additionally, she is the only House member on all three education committees, Education, Higher Education, and Education Budget.
“Number one priority for me in the House is the casino mortarium,” Hora said, adding that she hopes to have a bill run out of committee as soon as this week. “This is something that would cause Riverside to lose 200 jobs – 200 jobs in a county our size is big, and we have to take that very seriously.”
A new casino in Cedar Rapids “should not be able to go back and cannibalize those other casinos that bought-in in the very beginning and took that chance,” she said. “We also don’t want to make Iowa a Nevada or a South Dakota or any place like that where you can find a casino on every corner. We need to make our casinos destination casinos, which was the intent in the very beginning. I think we need to remind Racing and Gaming that that was our intent, and we intend to hold their feet to the fire.”
Also on the representative’s docket: property tax reform (“they’re working diligently to try to figure out the best way to cut property taxes without hurting the local government”), return to the traditional teaching of mathematics in schools (“there will be no more New Math”), and advancing nuclear energy (“the only true clean energy is nuclear energy, and it’s about time we focus on that”).
In the Senate, Sen. Driscoll will continue as chair of the Ag Committee, where “we don’t have anything major [in terms of legislation] coming out of ag this year,” but instead the focus will be on “making sure we can appropriate more money to foreign animal diseases for the State of Iowa,” she said. She joins the Commerce committee for the first time this year, and will continue on Workforce, State Government, Local Government, and Ways and Means committees, “so I have a heavy workload as far as committees go.”
Property tax reform will continue to be a priority for the Senate, and Driscoll will introduce a county supervisor bill for the third time, which would require a county like Johnson (“counties with a population of 125,000 or more, or those that host the main campus of a state board of regents institution”) to hold district-level elections for county supervisors, where each district has an equal population.
Community Concern: Education
When the floor was opened for questions and comments, community members voiced a range of concerns, from more protection for bicyclists on the roads (“the cycling community always seems to be mourning the death of someone who was killed”) to ease in assigning legal guardianship for those who need others to make medical decisions for them. However, two concerns dominated: education and, to a lesser extent, property tax reform.
Education continues to be a primary issue for community members, as it was in the previous year. In her Condition of the State address, Gov. Reynolds proposed a 2% increase to State Supplemental Aid (SSA), the per-pupil funding for the state’s public school system; in addition, her proposed budget includes a $96.6 million increase for the Educational Savings Account (ESA) program that provides funding for nonpublic education, should a family so choose. The governor also proposed expanding preschool services, which may help to make childcare more comprehensive and accessible, and she urged schools to adopt more limiting cellphone policies.
Those in attendance asked about these proposals. Ken Crawford, superintendent at Highland and WACO schools, said “I would love to see [SSA] at 3%” and repeated a request to revise the state-mandated school start date which makes for a “really odd year” that may go past Memorial Day. A Washington resident echoed this request for “increasing the funding for public schools, because we’ve been shorted as compared to inflation for many years now.”
Another Washington resident worried about school closings, such as Hills Elementary, which closed at the end of the 2023-24 school year to shore up the Iowa City school district’s budget. “Rural Iowa is losing out,” she said. “The voucher program is putting money in the wrong place.”
“What they’re doing with schools when they’re closed,” was also a concern voiced by another community member, who raised the issue of the trend toward four-day school weeks, as recently adopted by Highland and currently under consideration at Washington. He wondered if the shortened weeks impacted test scores, and whether that was something the legislature was looking into.
“We have talked about the four-day school week in Ed committee,” Hora said. “We are going to do a study, because we have mixed results, and there’s so much more to the four-day school week than just a four-day school week. . . We’re going to work with the Department of Education and some other school districts to . . . get some real facts behind it.”
She mentioned wanting to explore other options, including holding school year-round. She expects to introduce a bill, as “There’s just a whole lot of reasons to allow it. We’re not mandating anything, but we’re saying at least it would be a possibility for school districts to look at.”
In terms of property taxes, the legislators admitted state government needs to walk the line between “eliminating huge increases” on property taxes, as has happened in the past, and remaining “always mindful and worried about our rural areas” where property taxes fund essential services like public safety and snow removal.
Next briefing: Sen. Driscoll and Rep. Hora will return to Washington on Feb. 20 at 5:30 p.m. for their next legislative briefing at Washington City Council chambers, 215 E. Washington St., Washington. The 1-hour session is open to the public and includes a 20-minute update from the legislators followed by 30 minutes of comments/questions.