The State of Iowa has been offering a variety of grants and tax breaks to reward out-of-state companies that expand in Iowa for decades, but Lahn says Iowa’s economic development programs should be reserved for Iowans.
“I think it’s far better to invest in companies that are grown here, that will have a faithful presence here and will be dedicated to our communities and I really don’t believe these publicly traded companies and large companies from other states have that best interest in mind,” Lahn said during taping of this week’s “Iowa Press” program which airs on Iowa PBS.
Lahn would no longer allow the state’s research and development tax credits to be awarded to an out-of-state company. Lahn would even consider new tax credits for Iowa farmers who change the way they apply nitrogen fertilizer. “There’s no farmer that I know that wants to spend more money on inputs and when you talk about losing up to 30% of your input to wash out, if we had — and we do have — better ways to do this that we could incentivize, by applying it deeper into the soil.”
Lahn also has argued data centers should not get property tax exemptions. He proposes a property tax rate for data centers that’s five times the rate for industrial property. “These are hundred billion dollar multi-national companies. They do not need a handout from the people of Iowa,” Lahn said.
Lahn, from the moment he launched his campaign in early November, has been suggesting Iowa could set up different levels of taxation on property, so out-of-state owners would pay a higher rate. “Ron DeSantis has talked about it in Florida. The governor of Montana has actually done it. They’ve raised property taxes on second homes by 70 percent and reduced property taxes for primary residences by 30 percent,” Lahn said. “We have ways we can do this. The first way I’d look at is a new category of property — investment farmland that gives exemptions to families that are actually farming it directly, but also targets those out of state funds and investors that are here to extract wealth from our state.”
Last year, Iowa GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann criticized Rob Sand, the lone Democrat running for governor, when he suggested something similar, Kaufmann said it’s unconstitutional for states to discriminate against other citizens in commerce, property or taxation. Last November, Sand said Iowa property taxes for out-of-state people and businesses should be higher than the property taxes Iowans pay, a few days after Lahn first began raising the issue.