Democrats hold town hall in Washington

WASHINGTON — Democratic contenders for the Iowa Legislature held a town hall at the Washington Public Library last week, speaking with voters about a handful of the party’s talking points before taking questions submitted by audience members.

Organizers framed the event as a replacement to the typical Washington Chamber of Commerce-run candidate forum ahead of Election Day, which did not materialize this year. Chamber Executive Director Michelle Redlinger said the organization couldn’t find a viable date ahead of the early voting period when all four candidates were available, due to one candidate’s medical appointments, and harvest-season obligations for the Republican incumbents, who are both farmers.

Still, Democratic candidates Ed Chabal and Anna Banowsky said they were disappointed their opponents didn’t attend the event, despite receiving invitations.

“You need to be able to hear both sides of the issues, and unfortunately we did not have that tonight,” said Chabal, who is running for the state Senate. “It’s hard to address what my opponent has done because of just not being asked questions by the public. So my challenge to you would be to take some of the questions posed tonight, email them to our legislators, see if they will respond to you. That might be the only way for you to hear from them.”

The speakers found themselves sometimes preaching to the choir: the audience saw a handful of prominent local Democrat advocates, for the party, and a handful of observers showed up in blue campaign shirts emblazoned with the party nominees’ names.

Candidates answered questions in the first half of the event mostly about education-related topics like funding for private schools, AEA finance reform and whether school personnel should be armed in an effort to deter school shootings.

Both argued the state should ensure stable funding to education agencies, keep firearms out of classrooms in general, and reduce spending on Education Savings Accounts for private school tuition aid, in favor of more reliable public school funding.

“What we really need to do is look at repealing the AEA bill, and scaling back the voucher program if not eliminate it,” Chabal said. “That would certainly help take the pressure off the public schools in my opinion … what I’ve seen in the last two or three years has been very detrimental to the public schools, and I only see it getting worse.”

Other questions in the first half touched on affordable housing, which both said they hoped to incentivize, with another topic delving into health care issues.

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Banowsky, the Democratic state House candidate, said Iowa could reverse its shortage of health care workers by repealing a ban on most abortions after about six weeks. In response to a question about the availability of labor and delivery units in rural Iowa, she argued the state restriction complicated already difficult medical decisions with heightened liability.

“Whatever sort of maternal and women’s health you’re discussing, I think we have to talk about that, this isn’t currently a state where most practitioners feel comfortable working in,” she said. “We need to talk about finding incentives to bring people to rural Iowa where they’re most needed.

“It’s great that we’re close enough to Iowa City that someone theoretically could get there in time, but we can’t expect that they will get there in time. We need to make sure there are people in each county to practice the medicine that’s needed.”

In the second half of the event, candidates took written questions submitted by audience members, some of which were consolidated by the moderator.

Several questions submitted by the audience had a clear partisan slant, one of them asking if Iowa’s teachers would “ever get bargaining rights again,” and another bringing up both contenders’ recent endorsements from The Gazette’s editorial staff.

Answering one inquiry about recreational waters, Banowsky said Iowa lawmakers needed to do more to prevent water pollution. She proposed pushing for more university research on the subject, and a regional, evidence-driven approach to prevention.

“I was paying attention the whole summer about, when was Lake Darling going to be safe to swim?” she said. “That answer seems to be, ‘Never.’ Any time I would look at what waters are safe, almost every time it was, ‘Well, Lake Darling has E. coli.’ I’d like not to have E. coli, so I guess that’s one less place for me to enjoy.”

On another, about taxes, both prospective lawmakers said they disagreed with the state’s upcoming switch to a flat income tax. Banowsky said Iowa’s recent push for tax cuts had not effectively reduced the burden on residents, but merely diverted unpopular tax hikes to local governments.

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“I don’t think it’s fair to say that something is a tax cut just because you’re cutting it at one level,” she said. “It just seems that people are shuffling things from the state onto municipalities, and saying, ‘Well, we did our job, we cut your taxes.’ But I think when you look into things … for your average person, for probably most of us in this room, we’re just paying different taxes.”

On the flip side, another question asked how the Democrats would pay for their policy proposals. Chabal said that matter came down to simply using money the state brought in, rather than withholding it.

Iowa is expected to end the current fiscal year with a general fund surplus of $1.958 billion, according to one fiscal note from the Legislative Services Agency.

“We have to take a hard look at why we are building up surplus funds in the state,” he said. “We have over a billion dollars in our state surplus fund. Why do we need that money there? It is being collected, we need to make sure that the services we need to offer to our people are being funded, that just makes common sense.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com