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Iowa legislature gets good marks
Iowa Farm Bureau president Craig Hill says he’s pleased with the increased conservation funding and property taxpayer protections that were approved in the 2014 Iowa legislative session.
And Hill says an increase in funding for the Agricultural Experiment Station at Iowa State University was also very welcome.
“We were able to attain about 1.7 million in additional funding—not quite the goal we had hoped for, but a six percent increase, the first increase in six years,” Hill says. “So we’re very happy to get that.”
But Hill says Farm Bureau is disappointed that statewide calls to improve Iowa’s roads and bridges, once again, went unanswered.
“We are in different degrees of disrepair across the state in regards to our roads and our bridges,” he says. “It’s a problem that need resolution and it’s going to take funding. We don’t have adequate funding to maintain what we have currently.”
For the past several years, Farm Bureau and other ag groups have pushed for an increase in the state fuel tax to fund infrastructure repairs. The lack of a funding plan, Hill says, will continue to bring increased bonding, property taxes and mounting debt to repair the state’s deteriorating infrastructure.
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