February 12, 2011
Budget, other concerns voiced by legislators
Horbach, Smith and Sodders talk about state issues
As action heats up with the Legislature three elected officials took some time out to listen to concerns from area residents at the legislative forum Friday at the Fisher Community Center.
Participating at the forum sponsored by the Marshalltown Chamber were Rep. Lance Horbach, R-Tama, Rep. Mark Smith, D-Marshalltown and Sen. Steve Sodders, D-State Center. All three said the state budget continues to be the main concern in Des Moines.
One of the issues brought up at the forum was the possibility of eliminating the bottle bill and its 5-cent payback and have cans and bottle picked up by curbside recycling.
Smith said the bottle bill has come up regularly during his time in office and it has always survived.
"To eliminate where we are at completely I have some grave concerns about that," Smith said.
Marshalltown Mayor Gene Beach said when he drives through Nebraska he can tell the impact the recycling bill has in Iowa as there is more litter on the roadways in our neighboring state to the west.
"I don't want them to get back to not having it," Beach said.
All three Marshall County Supervisors were in attendance and two of them asked why the state is giving them mandates then pulling the funding on those mandates. They say this forces them to be the "bad guys" by cutting programs locally.
"You are kind of balancing the books on the backs of the counties," said Supervisor Dave Thompson.
Sodders said they need to look at these mandates and Smith said this also has been a concern for several years.
One question to the legislators was why is there a budget deficit and cuts talked about with $900 million in cash reserves in the state. Horbach said there must be a funding stream in place for programs rather than dipping into reserves.
"There are ramifications to doing that," Horbach said.
Horbach also touched on the issue of zero allowable growth for school district funding. He said raising allowable growth would have to be passed on to the taxpayers.
"When we are raising allowable growth we are raising your property taxes and the supervisors get no vote," he said.
Sodders talked briefly about the proposed tax reform for industrial and commercial business property but said that it is still being discussed in the Senate.
"We're still working on our plan and it will probably be out the next couple of weeks," he said.
http://www.timesrepublican.com/page/content.detail/id/537261/Budget--other-concerns-voiced-by-legislators.html?nav=5005
