Leopold: Rebuild Iowa’s small towns

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Someone could work at Facebook’s Altoona Data Center and live in Jefferson with a decent broadband infrastructure, Rich Leopold, a Democratic candidate for Iowa governor, told a gathering of Greene County residents Monday.

“Nobody’s talking about this at the statehouse,” Leopold said. “We’re talking about legalizing machine guns.”

Leopold painted the state’s Republican leadership — who control the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature — as kowtowing to special interests while letting Iowa’s small towns die on the vine.

He wants to oversee the rebuilding of rural Iowa, a goal that may at first seem at odds with his personal declaration as a “fiscal conservative.”

But as Leopold explained during an informal get-together at the Greene County Extension office, it can be done with a reshuffling of priorities.

“I probably don’t support giving away $150 million to an Egyptian fertilizer plant in Keokuk,” he said, adding, “Lee County still has the highest unemployment in the state.”

With a Facebook Live announcement Jan. 4, Leopold became the first to announce his candidacy for Iowa governor in 2018, a race virtually predetermined to be Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds’ to lose.

On Monday in Greene County — one of 30 counties he’s already visited when not working full-time as Polk County conservation director — Leopold portrayed Reynolds as a kind of Terry Branstad Mini-Me.

“She’s been standing behind him, metaphorically and physically, the whole time,” he said.

Leopold has so far largely taken his message to small towns — areas that continually deliver for the Republican Party, both nationally and in state races.

“Most people are Democrats whether they like it or not,” Leopold said, “and when they vote Republican, they vote against their own self-interests.”

His campaign tagline — “Going outside” — has a double meaning as both a political outsider and an ecologist.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” Leopold confessed. “I’m a scientist by trade.”

While he’s not on the hook to lobbyists, Leopold isn’t exactly Mr. Smith going to the Capitol, either.

Leopold served as director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources under Democratic Gov. Chet Culver, then served as a science adviser in the U.S. Department of the Interior under President Barack Obama.

Climate change, he said, is “not a belief system like Santa Claus.”

“It’s happening,” he said.

Iowa isn’t ready, or even getting ready, for what may come as the climate changes.

“We need to look at Cedar Rapids,” he said, citing recent floods.

When Leopold left state government in 2010, he said Iowa had a budget of $6 billion. He said Iowa today has a budget of $7.2 billion.

But like the weather, all is not as it seems.

“They’re gutting government from the inside,” he said of the Branstad-Reynolds administration, “and they’re giving money to corporate tax breaks.”

Rural Iowa, he said, is disproportionately bearing the brunt, from a lack of mental health services to the time it takes to have roads plowed in the winter.

He circled back to that nitrogen fertilizer facility in Lee County, owned by an international corporation, that has reaped millions in tax breaks.

“What if we took that money and invested it here?” he wondered.

Leopold, whose wife is a third-grade teacher, also hit on the fact that class sizes in Iowa are up and that the state is slipping in national education rankings, from among the top three or four under Culver to “now around 22.”

With Democrats everywhere talking about getting back in touch with rural America in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Leopold is clearly among the first to walk the walk.

“There’s a lot of silent rage going on in the rural areas,” he said.

He noted that the post-2008 economic recovery in Iowa has been mostly focused on urban counties.

Leopold said seven counties are doing well.

“There’s 92 that are not,” he said.

In regards to agriculture, Leopold isn’t prepared to throw out the state’s master matrix — the system used by the DNR in the siting of hog confinements — but said tweaks are needed, and he would reach out to the scientific community and the state’s commodity groups to get the matrix working.

“That tool is not performing like we thought it should,” he said.

A key to making things work, according to Leopold, is by toning down the rhetoric.

All civility is gone, he said.

He cited Branstad’s reaction to the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit against three upstream counties over nitrates in its drinking water.

“The first words from Terry Branstad? ‘The city of Des Moines has went to war with rural Iowa,’ ” Leopold explained. “That is not helpful, governor.

“That’s the way things get staged.”