February 23, 2012

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Legislators seek assurances “tot mom” case can’t happen here

February 22, 2012 By

A bill to create tough new penalties for a parent who fails to report their child is missing has been tabled at the state capitol. However, a small group of Iowa legislators is asking the state attorney general’s office to issue a statement indicating a parent guilty of such conduct could and would be charged under current state law.

Representative Julian Garrett, a Republican from Indianola, says legislators want to reassure the public after a high-profile Florida case involving a young mother whose toddler was found dead inside a garbage bag.

“We don’t want to risk that kind of a case here in Iowa,” Garrett says.

The trial of Casey Anthony was televised nationally last summer. She’s the so-called “tot mom” who did not report that her nearly three-year-old daughter was missing and — after her own mother reported her grandchild had been missing for a month — claimed the toddler had been abducted by a nanny. A jury in Orlando acquitted Anthony of murder and Garrett suggests Iowans want some sort of reassurance that wouldn’t happen here.

“They saw what they thought was an injustice,” Garrett says. “There’s a big concern.”

Representative Jeff Kaufmann, a Republican from Wilton, says Iowans from “across the political spectrum” have contacted him about the case.

“In eight years, never did I receive more emails and contacts than on this issue,” Kaufmann says. “This was number one.”

Kaufmann sponsored a bill which would have allowed prosecutors to charge a parent who “recklessly” failed within a 24-hour period to make contact with or “verify the whereabouts” of a child under the age of 12. He tabled the bill, but expects the state attorney general to draft a statement suggesting parents who’re like Florida “tot mom” Casey Anthony would be prosecuted. Kaufmann wants that statement by mid-March, before the Iowa Legislature adjourns for the year and Kaufmann suggests he’ll push to pass his bill if he doesn’t get the right answers.

“I don’t want that gavel to fall unless we know from the experts across the spectrum that you feel that kids are safe from this kind of situation,” Kaufmann says.

Marty Ryan, a lobbyist for the Justice Reform Consortium, suggests there’s no way the state can guarantee kids are always safe.

“Is this about prevention or vindication?” Ryan says. “And the answer I received was both, but I don’t think it’s going to prevent anything. I can’t see how it will prevent anything.”

Ryan says the state already has laws which allow parents to be charged with child endangerment, neglect, abandonment and even hiding a corpse.

Filed Under: Crime & Courts, News, Politics & Government Tagged With: , ,

Government efficiency plan would reduce legislators’ pension pay-outs

February 22, 2012 By

House Republicans have crafted a “government efficiency” package that includes a ban on using food stamps to buy junk food.

Craig Schoenfeld, a lobbyist for Hy-Vee, suggests that would turn grocers into the food police. “Watching things go through and dictating consumer choice,” Schoenfeld says.

Lana Ross represents the statewide network of Community Action Agencies and she says while they encourage folks to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, those are often the most expensive items per serving in the store.

“When it comes down to dollars and cents, it’s going to cost more for them to purchase healthier foods,” Ross says.

Representative Peter Cownie, a Republican from West Des Moines who is the bill’s manager, admits there are some controversial items in the bill that may be removed, including the ban on using food stamps to buy junk food.

“This is my fourth year down here,” Cownie says. “I have learned that it’s always easier to say no than yes.”

Another proposal in the government efficiency bill would reduce pensions for legislators themselves. Legislators currently get to count their daily expense money as income when they calculate the pensions they’ll get from the Iowa Public Employees Retirement System or IPERS. Cownie says people in the private sector don’t get to count reimbursement for travel, food and other business expenses as income.

“It just doesn’t really pass the sniff test to go to IPERS for a legislator,” Cownie says.

Another section of the bill calls on state officials to sell off state-owned land in order to raise money for environmental initiatives. Mike Heller of the Iowa Conservation Alliance objects to the idea.

“There isn’t enough public land right now and selling it would be counter-productive,” Heller says.

Ironically, some of the money generated by selling state-owned land would be used for programs that see the state buy private land for conservation.

Other parts of the government-efficiency bill call upon state workers to make it a practice to print on both sides of a sheet of paper and to use email rather than the U.S. Postal Service when possible. The bill got an initial hearing in a subcommittee Tuesday.

Filed Under: News, Politics & Government Tagged With: , ,

Supreme Court hears arguments in Workforce Development item veto case

February 21, 2012 By

The Iowa Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday evening in Governor Terry Branstad’s appeal of a district court ruling that overturned his item veto of part of a bill that appropriated over eight million dollars to keep 36 Iowa Workforce Development offices open.

Richard Sapp presented the governor’s case and told the justices that the veto was legal because the governor created an alternative to the “brick and mortar” field offices. He says the definition of what constituted a field office was not clearly laid out by the legislature in the bill, and said a definition has been the test since the first challenge of the item veto.

 ”Since 1971 the legislature has been on notice of what it must write if it intends to make something a condition,” Sapp said. “There are numerous examples in this court’s jurisprudence since that first case that do the same thing, and the question is: Why didn’t they do that here? Why is there no conditioning language as to the field office section since they were clearly on notice? Could they not get enough votes in the legislature to make it an explicit condition? We don’t know.”

Mark Hedberg represented the group of legislators and union officials who challenged the governor’s veto. He said the issue was clearly defined.

“If we look at the definition section it says ‘for purposes of this section field offices and satellite offices it shall’…it’s not aspirational, it’s not may or whatever,” Hedberg said. “It says we have a product, this is what it shall consist of, this is how many we are going to make and here’s the money for it. When you take that out, and you’ve got virtual offices, you’ve distorted the whole section and what it was all about to begin with.

Justice Thomas Waterman asked Hedberg about the purpose of the item veto. “The intent of the framers of the item veto amendment was to give the governor more control over the budget than he’d have without it?,” Waterman asked Hedberg, who replied yes. “And wouldn’t you undermine that if you construed the item veto power so narrowly that he couldn’t strike out a policy provision that would tie his hands on ways to save money, ” Waterman asked.

Hedberg replied, “The item veto as I understand it was to prevent pork barrel politics is that fair enough? But I think in this case the governor vetoed the barrel and kept the pork for himself, that’s the problem. And I think that’s why you have got to veto the money. Because now you can take that $8.6-million and use it, distort it.”

Hedberg said in his summary that they are not trying to handcuff the governor’s use of the line item veto. “We’re not asking the governor to go through every line of a budget, we’re only asking to take a look at the ones you’re going to veto and when you veto it, you’d better make sure that it’s not a condition on an appropriation, which we believe this was, either a condition or restriction on that appropriation…and I think that’s all that’s required by our court system, not magic words not red lights, Hedberg said.

Sapp concluded his arguments by asking the justices to think about what their ruling would do to the item veto cases. “I keep thinking, haven’t we decided all the issues of the item veto amendment by now. Apparently not, and what the plaintiff’s proposing are going to take us backwards years and years because they have no good alternative test to give to a governor or to give to a court as to how you determine whether something is or is not a condition,” Sapp said.

The arguments were streamed lived on the court system website and there will be an archive of the arguments posted there too at: iowacourts.gov.

Filed Under: Crime & Courts, Featured Story, News, Politics & Government Tagged With: , , ,

Hike in Iowa’s minimum wage stalls

February 16, 2012 By

A bill to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour cleared an initial hurdle in the Democratically-controlled Iowa Senate, but it’s going no further.

Kraig Paulsen, a Republican from Hiawatha who is speaker of the Iowa House, says the GOP is opposed to the idea.

“If you’re interested in putting Iowans back to work, then you need to make it easier to be an employer in the state of Iowa, not harder,” Paulsen says.

Plus, the Democrat who’s chairman of the Senate Labor Committee doesn’t plan to bring the bill up for debate either. But Senator Tom Courtney, a Democrat from Burlington who’s the chief sponsor of the proposal, says he doesn’t see a downside to raising the minimum wage.

“Everybody that tells me this is bad is making a lot more money that $10 an hour,” Courtney says. “…I want to hear somebody that’s making $9 an hour saying, ‘You know, that’s just perfect. I don’t need it. It’s perfect,’” Courtney says. “You never hear that.”

The minimum wage today is $7.25 an hour. John Gilliland of the Iowa Association of Business and Industry says teenagers would be hardest hit if the minimum wage is hiked because businesses would scale back entry-level and temporary jobs.

“Ironically, every time that we’ve raised the minimum wage, we’ve actually seen job losses as a result of it,” Gilliland says.

The first bill former Democratic Governor Chet Culver signed into law was an increase in the state minimum wage. When Culver took office in 2007, the minimum wage was $5.15 an hour. Culver approved a two-step process of raising it to the current $7.25 an hour. Iowa’s minimum wage was higher than the nation’s until mid-2009 when congress approved a $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage.

Filed Under: Business, News, Politics & Government Tagged With: , , ,

Expanding Iowa’s “Safe Haven” Law

February 15, 2012 By

A legislator who’s a social worker has proposed expanding Iowa’s “safe haven” law to allow parents to leave a child who’s up to a year old at a hospital without fear of being prosecuted for abandoning their child.

Under current Iowa law, parents can anonymously give up babies who are less than 15 days old. Representative Mark Smith, a Democrat from Marshalltown, says expanding that time period is one way to help more “unwanted” children.

“If this offers the ability to be a distress signal and help parents who are having concerns access services, then I think it’s worth us expanding it to one year,” Smith says.

But Stephen Scott of Prevent Child Abuse Iowa warns the proposal could give parents who’ve abused their babies a way to escape prosecution.

“And (we) would also not want us to wind up with a six- or eight-month old who may have health problems, who may have had some history of abuse and is just left somewhere with no idea of what’s been going on,” Scott says.

Iowa established a “Safe Haven” law in 2001 and since then 14 mothers have taken their newborns to a hospital or clinic and surrendered their parental rights, leaving the baby behind for adoption. Rather than expand the law, Jodi Tomlonovic of the Family Planning Council of Iowa is among those urging legislators to set aside money to promote the law.

“It’s been around for a long time and it’s been amazing to me for the last few weeks talking to people who weren’t really aware of it,” Tomlonovic says, “…particularly younger people.” A spokesman for The Iowa Catholic Conference says his group is also interested in seeing the state spend some money to publicize the law.

Other lawmakers say making more Iowans aware of the “Safe Haven” law seems reasonable, but an expansion of the time period is worrisome, especially with what happened in Nebraska. In 2008 Nebraska passed a “safe haven” law that allowed parents to abandon their kids, without specifying an age range. Parents from around the country traveled to Nebraska and left children and even teenagers behind, some of whom were 17 years old. Nebraska policymakers quickly changed the law, allowing parents to leave behind babies who are no more than a month old.

Filed Under: News, Politics & Government Tagged With: , ,

Legislators talk about holding back third graders

February 14, 2012 By

The leader of a Florida non-profit group talked to legislators Monday about Florida’s program that holds back third graders who score the lowest on reading tests. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad’s education reform plan includes a similar proposal to hold back third graders who can’t read.

Mathew Ladner of the Foundation for Excellence in Education in Florida, spoke at a meeting called by the chair of the House Education Committee, and said it’s not an easy thing to implement. “When they retained 13% of students in Florida in 2002-2003, it was not fun. But this is a policy that has been proven to move the needle profoundly, especially for disadvantaged kids,” Ladner said.

Another advocate for the approach is Waterloo Schools superintendent Gary Norris, who worked in Florida from 2004 to 2008. Norris says teachers are working hard. But they haven’t, in his words, been “focused” enough.

“Boy when you talk about being a superintendent and know that you’re going to be sitting across the table from 13-percent of your parents telling them you’re going to be retaining their child, that brings about focus in a school district. Incredible focus, incredible adult behavior changes,” Norris said.

Ladner said retention can help motivate parents to take a more active role in their children’s education. “And that’s really crucial in my view, ” Ladner said, “I mean when you can tell parents (who) have not been involved in the education of their child, Little Johnny is going to be retained unless we see X….that’s a very powerful message.”

Representative Sharon Steckman, a Democrat and retired teacher from Mason City, said Iowa’s reading scores aren’t what they used to be, because the state is changing. “I think you need to look at the demographics of the state. It’s pretty amazing what our teachers have been able to do because, you know, our poverty rates have gone up,” Steckman said. “The school I taught at was years ago maybe 40-45 percent free and reduced lunch. It’s now getting close to 70%.”

Steckman asked Ladner whether retention is getting too much focus. “How can you give retention all that credit when you’ve put in place wonderful literacy programs…tons of money went into professional development? All those things to me would be the key more so than retention,” Steckman said. Ladner replied,”Let me be clear, I don’t attribute all these things to retention.”

But Ladner said he believes other reforms are more effective when students and parents know they could be held back if they don’t improve. Representative Jeremy Taylor, a Republican who is a high school teacher from Sioux City, says he generally supports retaining third graders who fail reading tests. But he says he also worries students who are held back to work on reading may fall behind in other areas like math.

Filed Under: Education, News, Politics & Government Tagged With: , , ,

University presidents make direct money pitch to legislators

February 9, 2012 By

Members of the Board of Regents and the presidents the state-supported universities made their pitch for state funding at the capitol Wednesday. Iowa State University President, Steven Leath, says they need money to deal with a combination of a growing student body and rising infrastructure costs.

“If we are going to continue to provide a quality education, we need funds just to keep up and give all the students, including these new students, the same quality education there predecessors had,” Leath said. Representative Ron Jorgenson, a Republican from Sioux City, said there’s a public relations issue about how the schools operate, and asked the presidents if they should bring in someone to do an outside evaluation.

“Do you think that would be a good idea to counter this perception that’s out there that you are too costly and too inefficient?, Jorgenson asked. University of Iowa President, Sally Mason, responded that she didn’t want to waste money to learn what she already knows. She says they have already had and outside review.

“It showed that we were a $6-billion asset to the state of Iowa, and yet people then turned to me and said ‘well I don’t believe that.’ So, tell me what would convince people of what we know we’re doing and were doing well,” Mason said. Mason says what they are doing well at is cutting costs– she says all three colleges have slashed administrative costs, while at the same time trying to maintain higher educational standards.

Filed Under: Education, News, Politics & Government Tagged With: , , ,
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