State Auditor Rob Sand ‘considering’ run for governor

Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand didn’t rule out running for governor at a town hall in Washington Thursday morning.

“I’m considering it,” Sand said in response to a question about seeking the office.

Sand’s 99-county tour this week brought him to Fairfield, Mt. Pleasant and Washington. Later Thursday, he had a Cedar Rapids visit scheduled. He said the trip was unrelated to his consideration of a gubernatorial run.

“We have actual clients in all 99 counties that we audit, so it makes more sense for me to be here than anyone else,” he said. “The two things aren’t related. Am I thinking about it? Yeah. But I’m out here today doing what I’ve been doing since we started, which is telling folks what we’re doing in the office and answering their questions.”

Sand voiced frustration with the state legislature during his remarks at Washington Central Park.

“We’re all human beings, we’re all trying, but what we should be doing is addressing problems,” Sand said. “What we’ve been doing for the last, I don’t know, 20 years, has been just very little. We don’t address problems because people in power either hold power over the other party or they hold power and try to avoid doing anything productive that the other side could look at and say that they did something good.”

Partisan gridlock was one of the auditor’s greatest concerns.

“It doesn’t have to be this way, it shouldn’t be this way, and it hasn’t always been this way,” Sand said. “Until we take the problem of partisanship more seriously, we’re going to continue to see government serving partisan interests instead of serving public interests.”

Sand expressed disappointment with increasingly common state preemption of lower governments.

“What I really think is important in terms of getting problems solved is the laboratory of democracy,” Sand said. “I encourage innovation at the local level, I think innovation is good because it helps us figure out which solutions are actually more effective.”

Washington Mayor Jaron Rosien said he agreed with Sand’s sentiment.

“It seems like the only thing consistent with home rule is that it has been consistently eaten away at,” Rosien said.

The Auditor’s Office won a state Supreme Court case in April requiring the University of Iowa, and by extension other institutions using public funds, to comply with subpoenas requesting private information for audits. Sand called the decision a win for transparency.

“In any big public institution there are people who don’t really feel like they need to answer any questions and don’t experience any accountability when they fail to answer questions,” he said. “We decided that our mindset was when we encounter that, we weren’t going to put up with it, we’re going to change it, and that’s what this supreme court decision said.”

Despite his commitment to transparency, Sand said he couldn’t comment on the investigation into the University’s utility decisions, saying his office had a strict policy against revealing details of its audits before releasing their official reports.

For the same reason, Sand said he didn’t know if state troopers recently stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border would be funded by Iowa’s taxpayers, but that the bill likely wouldn’t be covered by the host state.

“There’s a compact that lets governors request assistance from other governors,” he said. “The same law says that typically, the receiving state will pay, but that that payment can be forgiven if the sending state desires. The governor of Texas, in his request, said ‘We’re over our budget,’ which to me is an implication that they’re not going to pay for it.”