The Iowa G-O-P has hosted the first of six party fundraisers billed as a “Legacy Tour” for outgoing Governor Kim Reynolds.
Reynolds, Iowa’s first female governor, was interviewed onstage in Cedar Rapids last night by Iowa Republican Party chairman Jeff Kaufmann. “I’m not trying to create a legacy, Jeff. That’s just not what I’m doing, so I never think of it from that perspetive,” Reynolds said. “I mean I am project driven.”
One of her projects has been tax policy — eliminating the state tax on retirement income, cutting Iowa’s corporate tax rate and reducing the individual income tax to a flat rate of 3.8%. “When we took office we had the sixth highest individual income tax rate in the country and now we have the sixth lowest and we did it in six years,” Reynolds said, as the crowd applauded,
The GOP hosted similar events in 2017 when then-Governor Terry Branstad was appointed U.S. Ambassador to China. The party’s other “Legacy Tour” events with Reynolds will be in Davenport, Dubuque, Clear Lake, Des Moines and Sioux Center. Reynolds took over as governor in May of 2017 and announced last spring that she would not seek re-election.
Last night, about three dozen protesters gathered in Cedar Rapids to criticize the governor’s record on issues like water quality and for diverting state tax dollars into accounts that cover tuition costs for nearly all the students in Iowa’s private K-12 schools.