Update From the House for District 80 – March 4th, 2021

by Rep. Holly Brink

Hello Friends,

The Iowa Legislature is about halfway through the 2021 Legislative Session, and we are moving right along. The end of this week marks the end of the “first funnel” so only bills that have passed out of their originating committee in the House or the Senate will still be up for consideration. All other legislation can be revisited next year or included in amendments on bills that passed committee.

For this reason, committees have been putting in overtime to move legislation all week. Myself and all my other colleagues found ourselves working hours past sunset to ensure that important legislation survived the week and retained their chance at becoming law this year.
HSB 240

This week in education I managed HSB 240 through subcommittee and passage by the full House Education Committee. HSB 240 contains part of the Governor’s K-12 proposal that passed the Senate earlier in the session. Parts of the bill that I am especially proud of are the doubling of the Tuition and Textbook Tax credit, and the changing of transfer rules regarding varsity athletics.

Taxpayers who have one or more dependents attending Kindergarten through 12th grade in an accredited Iowa school may take a credit for each dependent for amounts paid for tuition and textbooks. Currently the law states this applies to 25% of the first $1,000 spent but this bill raises that to 25% of the first $2,000.

The bill also changes the amount of time a student must sit out of varsity sports after open-enrolling into a new district from 90 school days to 90 calendar days. This is a smart change that ensures consistency across sports. As myself and any other parent of a high school athlete can tell you, sports do not take the same breaks that school does so it is important to measure calendar days instead of school days.

HF 233

I chaired HF 233 which is the Iowa Economic Development Authority’s (IEDA) priority list for the year. It lowers caps on certain programs with IEDA, creates a statewide tourism marketing campaign fund, provides for a manufacturing 4.0 program and creates an energy infrastructure revolving loan program.

HF 233 is important to keep Iowa moving!
March 2nd Government Oversight Hearing

This week, the Government Oversight Committee had representatives of the University of Iowa and the College of Dentistry back to testify and update the Committee on the continued issues that we have been discussing this session in regards to the First Amendment and the University’s policies. The meeting was almost a month from the last time Dean Johnson was in front of the committee to answer questions about First Amendment issues on campus. At that meeting it was requested that the College of Dentistry come back to explain to the Committee how they are making administrative and rule changes to address the problems.

University of Iowa officials provided a list of changes that the school was making or had made:

Expulsion will no longer be listed as a potential outcome when being referred to the professionalism committee (CAPP)
The referral will include much clearer language to students
The CAPP committee will include members who are not a part of the dental school to remove bias
Overall policies are being reviewed with input from all student groups and changes will continue to be made
The politically biased “perspectives” seminars in the dental school are cancelled
The University of Iowa as a whole is conducting a campus wide review of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to ensure compliance with the 1st Amendment

Similar to the Board of Regents free speech recommendations last week, I am happy that there is progress being made and our universities should use this as a start towards taking the 1st amendment seriously.
Government Oversight Preview

On March 9th at 8:45 AM leaders from the Ames schools will be attending Government Oversight to discuss their curriculum. I have discussed in previous newsletters, not only was the curriculum biased, the curriculum was rushed through over the objections of many parents. Parents were given less than two weeks to review the material, which when downloaded is over 8 GB of PDFs, word documents, and videos.

Ames leaders will have had over twice the amount of time that they gave Ames parents to prepare for the committee so they should be prepared to answer the questions that the committee has. The committee can be watched live at https://www.legis.iowa.gov/committees/meetings/meetingsListComm?groupID=589&ga=89.

I appreciate hearing from many of you this week. If there are any topic that you would like to discuss let me know, my contact information is below. Thank you for letting me represent you.

Holly Brink
State Representative, Iowa District 80
(641)295-7111
Holly.brink@legis.iowa.gov