Reporters’ Roundtable

Kay Henderson

The 2025 legislative session has reached the official halfway point. Statehouse reporters are here with an update on the past nine weeks and what may be ahead. On this edition of Iowa Press.

 

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For decades, Iowa Press has brought you political leaders and newsmakers from across Iowa and beyond. Celebrating more than 50 years on statewide Iowa PBS, this is the Friday, March 14th edition of Iowa Press. Here is Kay Henderson.

 

Kay Henderson

The 2025 legislative session at Iowa began on January 13th. On January 14th, Governor Kim Reynolds laid out her agenda for lawmakers and presented a budget plan to them. Since then, legislators have been focused on policy bills rather than the budget. Although there's been a little bit of budget discussion this past week covering all of those discussions and more.

Our three reporters who are joining me here at the table today. Skyler Tallal is a reporter for the Sinclair television stations, four of them in Iowa. Stephen Gruber-Miller is a reporter for the Des Moines Register, and Erin Murphy is with the Gazette in Cedar Rapids. Okay, folks, just a general question to you. What is the biggest thing that's happened so far this legislative session? I'll begin with you, Erin.

 

Erin Murphy

The biggest thing is the number of bills that we saw. Yeah. Yeah. A huge pile of bills. it seemed anecdotally even busier than most sessions. So, Stephen and I both worked on this and pestered the poor, overworked folks at LSA and asked them. And there were 2031 bills introduced ahead of the first funnel deadline that we just passed a couple of weeks ago.

To put that in context, that is more than the entire full year sessions in four of the last six years. So, for the first half of this session, we've already surpassed previous years in the number of bills introduced. It's been a it was a relentless, schedule for those first, that first month or so of the session.

 

Kay Henderson

Skyler, what's your big takeaway so far?

 

Skylar Tallal

Well, to me, Governor Kim Reynolds didn't introduce anything that's been super controversial. You know, normally we've seen the changes to Iowa's education agencies in the past or those education savings accounts. And obviously, Democrats haven't been too on board with those proposals. But this year, you know, we've seen the cell phone bill, which would, you know, ban cell phones.

And at Iowa school districts, things like that. The energy bill, the child care, health care and then even money for cancer research. So nothing that, you know, Democrats are too, too concerned about.

 

Kay Henderson

Stephen, what strikes you as the big thing of the year?

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

The big story is the one thing they've actually passed, which is a bill removing gender identity as a protected class in the Iowa Civil Rights Act. So there were rumblings for several weeks rumors that this might be coming. And then Republicans acted very quickly and introduced the bill and had it on the governor's desk within a week.

 

Kay Henderson

So, Stephen, this is the only bill that has been signed into law so far. Tell us a little bit about it and what occurred.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah. So Iowa's Civil Rights Act protects people from discrimination in housing, public accommodations, education and other areas. And it protects people based on characteristics like race, sex, gender identity until this law passed. So, this takes gender identity out of the law.

And Republicans say there's other federal and, court precedent protections for transgender people. But of course, Democrats are saying this is literally taking protections out of the law. You're allowing discrimination to happen. So it takes gender identity out of the Civil Rights Act. It also requires birth certificates to designate somebody's sex at birth. Currently you can get your birth certificate changed if you transition in Iowa. That will no longer be the case. It will have to list your birth sex. And it makes a number of other changes to sort of definitions and state law for what is described as a man or woman.

 

Kay Henderson

Erin, when this was unveiled, the speaker of the House said they had to do this and also the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Stephen Holt, said they had to do this based on some looming court challenges.

 

Erin Murphy

To protect some laws that state House Republicans, as they put it, passed in recent years regarding bathrooms that transgender students can use in schools. Prohibiting transgender girls from playing in girls sports in the state. And, they referenced, a lawsuit that has arisen and, I believe it's Iowa City where a transgender student is. And the lawsuit claims the gender identity protections that were in Iowa Civil Rights Act as a…

 

Kay Henderson

The legal base.

 

Erin Murphy

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. And so that was the example that they listed of why we need this bill to remove gender IDs. So these other laws that we passed in recent years will uphold in the court. It also bears noting, as was highlighted many times during the debate, that Iowa becomes the literal first state in the country to remove a protected class from its civil rights code.

 

Kay Henderson

Skyler, you covered this. There were a lot of people at the Statehouse there.

 

Skylar Tallal

There were a ton, I think. I mean, I've only been here for years now, but it was probably the biggest protest I've covered. And there's been some, you know, really big issues up there. You know, there's just a lot of, you know, concern and worry from the trans community. I even, you know, talked to one - kind of back to your point about the definition changes - I talked to a trans man from Urbandale who said, you know, under this bill, I'm not technically my child's father anymore. And I have been for the last 14 years. So just changing like little things like that as well.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah. And big, big things for these people. These are huge deals. Right? There's people who are worried that their legal documents won't match, you know, their gender and things like that. So there's definitely, I mean, there was a woman who said that, who came and testified and said her baby girl, would be classified as intersex. And she doesn't know kind of how that will affect her documents going forward or as that as that child gets older too.

 

Erin Murphy

And to Skyler's point, for those of us who are a little long in the tooth, and I'm not looking at anybody in particular here at the table.

 

Kay Henderson

Hello.

 

Erin Murphy

But, she's absolutely right. And I had thought about that, too, about the size of the crowds and, and the and the protests that we saw at the Capitol. And I can only think of two examples that even remotely compare to what we saw this year. And that was, the abortion, fetal so-called fetal heartbeat bill. The session, special session in ‘23, and the collective bargaining bill changes way back to 2017. Okay. Only time I can remember crowds at the Capitol even remotely resembling what we saw earlier this year.

 

Kay Henderson

Moving on. School districts are required to develop a budget, have public hearings and then certify it. But they don't yet know what the legislature is going to give them. Skyler, let's brief our viewers.

 

Skylar Tallal

Yeah. So that per pupil funding, both chambers are still at odds with their proposals right now. And there's no timeline really on when it's going to get done and passed. The Senate and the governor, Senate Republicans and the governor are on the same page, proposing a 2% increase in that per pupil funding. House Republicans are proposing 2.25%.

Then they also have a couple of extra little pieces, like additional money for transportation, operational sharing, another one time cash of 22.6 million that they've kind of said, you know, will help with inflationary costs, those sorts of things. And then, of course, Democrats have, you know, proposed a higher increase of that 5%.

 

Kay Henderson

So does anyone think there are negotiations happening?

 

Erin Murphy

I don't. It's…

 

Skylar Tallal

It was hard to tell yesterday when Grassley, when speaker of the House Pat Grassley was talking about it.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

You never want to make a declarative statement without being sure. But yet there has not been movement on this for a few weeks now. Both the House and the Senate acted with relative urgency to get the bill out of their chamber by, they have actually a legal deadline of passing school funding within 30 days of the governor's budget presentation.

Well, that was back on Valentine's Day. So, they are well past that deadline now. But after passing it out of their own chamber, they have not come to that agreement between the chambers.

 

Erin Murphy

And what's sort of fascinating about it from our seats is that this Skylar laid out the numbers. They're not terribly far apart. I mean, we're talking about a pretty small number of millions of dollars, admittedly, but as a percentage of the bigger package and the budget as a whole, it's not a huge, gap that they're trying to close.

Skylar mentioned the extra little pieces the house introduced. I don't know if that's what's hanging it up, but it is kind of fascinating to see that this is sort of ground to a halt at the moment.

 

Kay Henderson

When the other thing is that extra piece that the House has proposed could be done elsewhere. If they wanted to give schools that money, they could do it in another bill in another fashion as they move forward. Speaking of moving forward, the leaders of the House and Senate, a bill, committees that deal with Ways and Means bills - Ways and Means means taxes - have recently proposed a property tax plan. What's in it?

 

Erin Murphy

All of our favorite topic to cover here. Super easy to understand and simple to explain, right.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

So why we gave it to you.

 

Erin Murphy

I think I was out of the room when that was decided. So a couple of years ago, as a backstory, state House Republicans passed a property tax relief bill. Still hearing a lot about it on the campaign trail from Iowa homeowners. So here they are again, trying with another shot. Basically, this one does a few top level things. Uses some state funding to try and cover the property tax, revenue that goes towards school districts or to ease that burden at the local level. Caps future property tax revenue growth by local communities. And phases out a rollback that was put in place that if we have nowhere near enough time to explain fully, look for all our stories online and you'll get more on that. They claim that it will save property tax payers 426 million over five years.

 

Kay Henderson

And most of that is the additional state share that will go toward local public school districts. And by spending about $400 million a year, that that will trickle down. And so schools will not be raising that in local property taxes or maybe even reducing local property taxes, as I sort of understand.

 

Erin Murphy

Yeah, that's exactly right. Much better and more clearly than I did. So the bill has been floated, and now we're waiting to hear that Senator Dan Dawson and Representative Kaufmann said. We want this to sort of marinate for a week or two, let people learn it and get their feelings on it. And we haven't had a subcommittee hearing on it yet. That will obviously be interesting to see how local governments feel about it. And tax interest groups feel about it. And we'll see whether that has a future this year.

 

Kay Henderson

One of the things that strikes me is that, you know, heading into this, people were sort of waiting to see if the governor might unveil a plan of her own on property taxes when she gave her big speech in January, she did not weigh in on this. And she didn't weigh in a couple of years ago when they passed the previous iteration of a property tax relief plan number one.

Number two, Stephen, it always seems to me that if legislators are going to cut taxes, they like to do it in an election year. This is not an election year.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

That's true. I'm sure this will not be the only time they talk about cutting taxes. But yeah, the chairs of the House and Senate ways and Means committees.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Senator Dan Dawson and Representative Bobby Kaufmann. I mean, they have been listening to people for the past two years about that previous property tax bill. And Senator Dawson told us that they've been having these conversations over that time period. They've been quite eager to kind of tackle this issue in the past. It's a complicated issue. So, I think that they've been hearing from folks for a long time on it.

And, we will see if that, if that listening process turns into positive reviews from those stakeholders.

 

Kay Henderson

Well, Stephen, you and I listened to the Revenue Estimating Conference meet this past week. And this was an important meeting in terms of setting the table for how much legislators can spend.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah. That's right. Okay. So the state budget, I'll give you a couple of numbers. Let's see if we can follow them. They're not going to be too bad. The trend is that with the 3.8% flat tax that took effect this year, state revenues are dropping. They're going to drop by about 600 million. The panel expects Iowa to take in about $8.5 billion in the upcoming fiscal year.

 

Kay Henderson

Which starts July 1st.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Starts July 1st. That's 400 million less than they're spending this year. One more number. Next year, Governor Reynolds is proposing to spend $9.4 billion, and that's about a $900 million gap between what we're going to take in and what we're going to spend. So she wants to make up the difference. And lawmakers, Republican lawmakers, want to make up the difference in that with the several billion dollars that are in the state’s end of year budget surplus and the Taxpayer Relief Fund.

 

Kay Henderson

It's $6.6 billion, right?

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah, there's a lot of money, because those accounts, because the big picture is Republicans have been spending well under what the state has taken in for several years in preparation, essentially, to cut these taxes. And their idea, and the panel is expecting a rebound of revenues in the third year to start going back up. And so their idea is they'll use this savings to cushion for those few years until, in theory, tax revenues increase again.

 

Kay Henderson

And what we're hearing from Democrats is what we used to hear from Republicans, right?

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah. Democrats and Republicans have flipped their positions here. Democrats are saying Republicans always talk about not using one-time money to fund ongoing expenses like the state budget. But, that's exactly what they're doing. And essentially, Speaker Grassley said yesterday, it's different if we have enough money saved up.

 

Kay Henderson

Let's turn our attention to some other policy issues that they're discussing. There are a couple of immigration related bills, Skyler.

 

Skylar Tallal

Yeah. And there have been a couple that have been introduced. Some are moving forward, some aren't. One of those would make local law enforcement comply with ICE. Specifically those detainer requests. This bill is moving forward. And if a law enforcement officer is found, you know, in violation, of not complying, then they could face a class D felony. So one thing we kind of we didn't hear a whole lot in that subcommittee, but one thing we did hear was from the sheriffs association, you know, talking about how steep of a penalty that is.

 

Erin Murphy

And we did say, I should note on that. We did hear from Representative Holt that he is looking at lowering that penalty and amendment.

 

Kay Henderson

When it comes up.

 

Erin Murphy

When it comes up on the floor.

 

Skylar Tallal

For sure. And then another one also moving forward is dealing with driver's licenses. So we kind of saw this issue brought up because of the past election dealing with citizenship statuses. So this bill would put an identification marker on a driver's license to identify if you are a U.S. citizen or if you are not a U.S. citizen. So essentially, you know, somebody, a poll worker could, you know, check your driver's license and know kind of right away if you're a citizen or not.

 

Erin Murphy

And that first bill came was inspired in no small part by a county sheriff in Iowa that,

 

Kay Henderson

Winnebago.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Winneshiek

 

Erin Murphy

Winneshiek County sheriff who had a social media post that effectively said, I, I don't have the resources or believe it's our duty. And so we won't be cooperating with some of these federal immigration.

 

Kay Henderson

The detainer requests.

 

Erin Murphy

For the detainers specifically.

 

Kay Henderson

Different than a warrant.

 

Erin Murphy

Right. Right.

 

Kay Henderson

He referenced warrants. Anyway, let's move on to the Higher Education Committee, a new committee in the Iowa House. Erin, they've had a big workload.

 

Erin Murphy

Wasted no time getting to work and putting out all kinds of ideas in the form of bill forms. So and we've talked about this with some of our guests on this show. But Representative Taylor Collins is the House Republican who's leading this committee that's now just focused on higher education, the Regents, the community colleges, and to a lesser degree, even the private colleges.

The themes we're hearing are similar to what we've heard in recent years from Republicans and conservatives trying to eliminate make sure diversity, equity, inclusion programs are eliminated in all the public universities. And even now trying to get at those at the private universities by using the Iowa Tuition Grant, which is a state funded grant that helps students go to private schools.

And so even getting at quote unquote DEI that way. Addressing curriculum and requirements. They want to create a school of intellectual freedom at the University of Iowa to make sure that conservative viewpoints are presented just as much as liberal viewpoints on college campuses. Proposed a tuition cap. So a lot of bills flying out of that committee.

And as Stephen was talking about before we hit the record button here today, it'll be interesting to see how much of an appetite the Senate Republicans have for this, because all the noise has been on the House side so far.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

That's right. There's no equivalent committee on the Senate side. So, the Senate doesn't like to pass as many bills as the House. So perhaps we'll see some of these ideas combined. Perhaps we'll see some dropped. We'll see how that negotiation process unfolds.

 

Kay Henderson

Speaking of the divide between the House and Senate. Last year, at the end of the session, the House passed a bill to raise legislators pay. Many of them were sort of undone by the fact that sort of an up and coming legislator from the Boone area was not seeking reelection because he said, I have a young family. I can't afford this job. I can't do this. I need to I need to support my family. I'm leaving. And so now we've seen another iteration of this proposal, Stephen.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah, yeah. And many people may not know. I mean, the legislature is a part time job. And so lawmakers make a salary of $25,000 a year. Now they get per diem expenses and they get some other things that increases that a bit. But the point, like you said, is for younger people, people with families, it can be hard to financially make it work.

So in the Senate this year, they have a pay increase that would raise it from 25,000 to 45,000 for lawmakers, more for leaders. And it would also raise pay for statewide elected officials. So the governor would go from 130,000 a year to 230,000 a year. the attorney general would go to 210,000 for most of the other statewide elected officials would go to 180 from just over 100,000 right now.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Now, those numbers may change as they're working on this. This is kind of a tough, tough vote for lawmakers to take right to raise their pay. And I should say none of the changes would take effect until 2027. So that puts the 2026 election between now and then.

 

Kay Henderson

So technically they're not raising their own pay.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Correct. They're raising the pay of a future governor, a future General Assembly. But, it still could be a tough vote to take.

 

Erin Murphy

And just real quick for a little bit of extra context on that, because it is I do kind of find a fascinating debate. And Stephen’s right there, they're considered technically part time. But that's more because of the length of period of time throughout the year that they work. Right? Like, they only work January through April, maybe May in a long year.

 

Erin Murphy

Right, right. But during session, I mean, they're at the Capitol for full time job hours, effectively. So you can't, it's not easy anyways, to hold a separate job while also being at the Capitol during session. So it is a fascinating debate to see unfold. And then, as Stephen noted, the political liabilities are clearly very real.

 

Kay Henderson

Well, and as you pointed out, I've been covering the legislature for a long time. So I am old enough to remember that they used to have a commission that would recommend salary levels for the statewide elected officials and for legislators, and then present that to legislators. And it was sort of, you know, up or down vote. They got rid of that. And the legislature's salary hasn't been raised in a couple of decades, right?

 

Erin Murphy

Yeah. And we've heard from one House Republican who I won't name because it wasn't clear whether he was speaking on the record. Basically said that like it’s his opinion is that is a much smarter way to do it, rather than asking those folks to take votes on their own salaries.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah, but it has been 20 years since they've raised pay and for lawmakers or statewide. So it could be a conversation worth having. But yeah, it's an interesting way to go about it. And, we will see what happens.

 

Kay Henderson

We've got about three minutes left. Quickly Erin, or Stephen, run us through a couple of interesting special elections.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah, that's right. So there have been two special elections this year so far. One in the Senate where a Democrat flipped a seat that was previously held by Chris Cournoyer, who's now the lieutenant governor. That was a district that President Trump won by over 20 points, and a Democrat flipped that seat. The other election happened just this week in House District 100 in southeast Iowa, and Republican Blaine Watkins held on to that seat that was left vacant after Representative Martin Graber passed away.

The Democrat in that seat came within three points of the Republican in a district that Trump won by something like 27 points. So Democrats are feeling good, like they're overperforming their numbers from 2024. And Republicans remind us that special election environments are very different. It's low turnout, and you don't know who's going to be motivated to show up.

 

Kay Henderson

Erin, let's talk about something that didn't happen in the Iowa Legislature. It happened in South Dakota.

 

Erin Murphy

Yeah. So, on the pipeline projects and the pipeline bills. And there are some bills again flying around the Iowa capitol. And the Iowa Senate showing a little more interest this year than they have in the past. Still not clear whether they'll actually pass a bill, but at least they're considering them. But, and this is in, there's, I was actually covering one of those meetings as advocates in the room were monitoring the debate in the South Dakota Senate, where they passed a bill, and it did eventually go to the governor to get signed into law that would ban the use of eminent domain for pipeline projects. Very simple. So that so pipeline companies couldn't get the government to force landowners to allow their land to be used for pipeline projects. That happened in South Dakota. That's a big hurdle now for those proposed projects, which are also proposed to come through Iowa.

 

Kay Henderson

One minute left. Stephen, 2026 is coming up. We're starting to see people talk like candidates, maybe think they're going to be a candidate.

 

Stephen Gruber-Miller

Yeah, we got we got the news this week that there are three Democrats considering running for Congress in the third district. Three state lawmakers who are Democrats. And what's striking to me about this conversation is that we're having it in March. Two years ago, we didn't have a Democratic candidate in the third district until the fall of that year before the election year. So this is a lot earlier in the cycle that people are having these conversations and being serious about this. And that tells me a couple of things. One, the Democrats might feel like the midterm environment could be favorable to them if there's a backlash against Donald Trump. And two, they need that time to get their infrastructure going and get ready.

 

Kay Henderson

Erin?

 

Erin Murphy

Yeah. And, and it'll be interesting to see, we've talked about will that field sort of settle or will there be a primary for the Democrats in some of these districts, which is there's always a debate over whether that's good or bad for the party. We asked state party woman chair, chairwoman Rita Hart about that here a couple of weeks ago. So I'll be interested to see how that the silent primary, quote unquote, plays out.

 

Kay Henderson

Well, you’re going to have to be silent now, because I'm going to say goodbye to our viewers for this edition of Iowa Press. Thanks for watching. For everyone here at Iowa PBS, have a good day.

 

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