Sen. Joni Ernst takes bus tour of Kalona

KALONA — United States Sen. Joni Ernst paid a visit to Kalona Wednesday afternoon, where she took an abridged bus tour with prominent community members.

The senator said she was in town to observe its residential construction initiatives, including student-built housing projects, ongoing work at the Southtown Subdivision and expansion efforts at the Pleasantview retirement community.

“A lot of different communities are doing different projects different ways,” Ernst said. “This is a really aggressive community when it comes to that, so it’s good to see … rural housing needs are everywhere. You go to any community and they’ll say, ‘We have aging housing stock, we need to figure out how to solve this,’ so it’s really important.”

Ernst said she’d seen a handful of towns experimenting with 3D-printed housing and a “pocket community” in Maquoketa, as well as a former school building converted into condominiums in Des Moines.

Kalona’s methods were impressive, according to Ernst.

“I’m so glad to see some of the opportunities for housing that you have here,” she said. “Every community has challenges. It’s the ones that will survive that figure out how to take the challenges and make them opportunities.”

During a question-and-answer session with employees at Slabach Enterprises, Ernst discussed infrastructure funding, a hot topic for the maker of trailers used in fiber-optic broadband cable-laying.

Responding to a question from KCTC CEO Casey Peck, Ernst said she was hesitant to commit federal dollars for broadband installation, given inaccurate maps of underserved areas and recent high-budget bills like the American Rescue Plan Act.

Instead, she said federal efforts should focus on deregulation for smaller broadband providers.

“The best course of action right now that we can take … without necessarily a lot of dollars attached to it, is working on rules and regulations that make it a lot easier to get some of that installed in your communities,” she said.

“A lot of the battle that some of our smaller telecommunications companies — your rural co-ops, whatever they might be — a lot of the challenges that they are faced with are excessive regulations coming from the federal government. Reporting requirements and so forth, the same as a big (provider.) Only, the small, rural telephone companies don’t have the same number of staff to do all these reports.”

In one of the session’s last questions, Kalona Mayor Mark Robe asked about gun control, another timely topic given the March 27 private school shooting in Tennessee, which killed six people.

“I don’t want that to happen in my town,” Robe said. “How do we make it so somebody that is under the care of a psychiatric doctor can’t go buy a gun?”

Ernst said she was a “big Second Amendment person,” criticizing red flag laws and calls to ban certain classes of firearms. She said the better solution came through use of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS.)

Specifically, she called on states to allow inclusion of certain juvenile criminal records in federal firearm background checks.

“What we see with a number of these shootings is that many of them had engaged in activities as a juvenile which — if they had committed those same activities as an adult — would prohibit them from obtaining weapons,” Ernst said. “But they’re masked, because they are juveniles.”

The senator was adamant, however, about not requiring states to take such efforts from the top-down.

In a follow-up interview, Ernst said she was open to looking at more federal incentives for such initiatives, but that status quo policies from the Safer Communities Act were already significant.

“Even states like Iowa … are able to tap into certain grant programs,” she said. “And Iowa to-date has applied for and received $10.9 million to assist with justice programs and mental health funding. So I think there are avenues and incentives already for states to engage in a number of ways I really hope will end some of the crises we see.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com