Members of the Iowa House are scaling back the governor’s plan to consolidate or eliminate 111 state boards and commissions.
A bill that cleared a House subcommittee this morning only focuses on the elimination of 49 boards or commissions. “I didn’t feel like the committee or subcommittee had time to really look through, look at the mergers,” said Republican Representative Jane Bloomingdale of Northwood, chair of the House State Government Committee. “…I didn’t think it was fair to ask my committee to vote on something they didn’t have time to look at.”
A review committee met last fall and made recommendations about streamlining state boards and commissions, but Governor Reynolds’ bill to implement those changes wasn’t released until Monday. Bloomingdale said she reviewed the commission’s recommendations, developed a plan that focuses on the obvious changes and sent it to all of the members of her committee on Sunday.
“Everyone looked at it — Democrats and Republicans — and this was the list we came up with and said: ‘Let’s start here,’ and as we have time the rest of session we’ll look at adding to this, ” Bloomingdale said. “We’ll look at the merger recommendations. We’ll look at a couple of these that we didn’t eliminate that we can eliminate, but at this point this is the consensus.”
A Senate subcommittee will meet at noon today to review the governor’s bill which would eliminate or merge 43 percent of state boards and commissions.