The Rozenboom Report – February 19th, 2021

by Ken Rozenboom

At this point of the legislative session the focus of each standing committee is to narrow down their list of priorities, and move those bills to a final committee vote before the first funnel deadline, just two weeks away. This newsletter I will touch lightly on a number of different bills taking shape.

The Senate and the House came to an agreement on the K-12 education funding increase for next year, allocating an additional $49.4 million for the next fiscal year. This amount includes money for per pupil and transportation equity as well. Having passed both the House and the Senate, this legislation has moved on to the governor for her signature.

Another bill the Senate passed, SF 354, provides relief to those licensed for their job and working on continuing their education for their license. The bill allows those people to apply for an extension if they were unable to meet continuing education requirement deadlines due to an unforeseen financial or medical hardship. The Senate also passed SF 252, a bill that prohibits cities and counties from passing an ordinance requiring landlords to accept applicants who may be using federal housing choice vouchers.

The Ways and Means committee is working on Senate File 364, a bill that conforms state income tax code to the most recent federal tax change. It allows the deductibility of qualifying expenses for forgiven Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans for fiscal year filers. This deduction is already allowed under Iowa law for calendar year filers, but this would make it effective for both fiscal and calendar year filers.

Iowa’s “bottle bill” program has been around since 1979 when it was implemented as a way to control the amount of litter throw in into roadside ditches. This concept is still popular with the public because it is good for the environment, it helps keep Iowa clean, it promotes recycling, and it still helps buy uniforms for the local high school band. Every year there are attempts to update this policy, and every year those attempts fail.

This week I filed Senate File 368, which is a plan to preserve and modernize this popular concept, streamline the process, correct the imbalances that exist, and, after a year of battling a nasty virus, making the whole process healthier and safer for the public. My bill takes a new and unique approach to solving an old problem. There’s not enough room in this newsletter to provide the details now, but this bill passed out of sub-committee on Thursday and will move forward for discussion in the Senate Natural Resources and Environment committee next week.

This week the Senate introduced and advanced SF 389 out of the Commerce Committee to address fraud in Iowa’s public assistance programs. In 2019 Iowa was fined approximately $2 million by the US Department of Agriculture for a nearly 10% error rate in the administration of a welfare program. The goal of welfare programs is to provide assistance to those individuals meeting the required criteria.

The current process on identifying eligibility for welfare programs in Iowa is outdated, and significantly more efficient processes are available. An abundance of consumer data is readily available from federally regulated companies to confirm in real time if someone applying for public assistance is doing so properly. These organizations can check the assets, employment, residency, and citizenship in a matter of moments. Every individual improperly receiving benefits takes up resources intended for someone legitimately in need.

The United States Constitution specifically empowers state legislatures with authority over election law. The Iowa Senate takes that responsibility seriously and has made a number of changes over the last four years to improve the reliability and security of Iowa’s elections with common-sense reforms like requiring a voter identification at the polls, and a similar requirement for requesting an absentee ballot.

In 2020 several county auditors attempted to violate Iowa law and circumvent the security measures implemented on Iowa absentee ballot request forms. County auditors are directed to implement election law, not write the law. In response, the Iowa Senate advanced SSB 1199 this week to improve the administration of elections and ensure one set of consistent and fair election laws are in place across the state, regardless if the county is urban or rural, Republican or Democrat. This bill also prohibits ballot harvesting and changes the beginning of early voting from 29 days before an election to 18 days before an election.

Opponents of Iowa’s common-sense voting laws always play the vague “voter suppression” card any time we work on election law, but yet we continue to see record voter turnout. As your state senator I will continue to support election law that makes it easy to vote and difficult to cheat.

I always enjoy our weekend forums in the district, so I’m excited to have the first in-person forums Saturday in Albia at 8:30, and in Centerville at 10:00. Maybe I’ll see you there.