Guy Morgan, Democratic Candidate House District #48, May 20, 2026

I'm visiting with one of the three Democratic candidates on our primary ballot for the House District 48 race. Of course, we've got Guy Morgan here today and new to campaigning. Let's start out and tell us a little bit about yourself, Guy. Sure. So, I was born in Ames. I grew up in a little town called Garden City, which is about 30 minutes north of Ames, less than 100 people, at a very small town vibe. However, I only lived there for a few years until my parents got divorced. Then I went and lived with my mother, who's a special needs teacher in Ames, and went to Ames High. And then I went to DMACC here in Boone. And then I went up to UNI for math and physics. So I'm a nerd. And I love statistics. I love learning about how things work. And along with that, I'm also someone who's incredibly passionate about the environment, about climate change, about trying to do something about water quality here. And that's a lot of why I ran is because I just saw not enough people standing up to really make meaningful change in the environmental space. I love a lot of the work that Food and Water Watch does, what the Iowa Environmental Council does, but we need more people actually in the House of Representatives making changes around it. That's the challenge, getting enough in there to do some things. But it sounds like even the other things, like all the stuff they've been going through and throwing out the numbers on property tax reform and things like that, you've been able to follow along pretty close on that as well. Oh yeah, I love reading bills. Well, that's what a lot of work goes into that. So as you've been going around, obviously, what kinds of things are they just saying, we need to have a good candidate to go up against the Republican incumbent? So what are they saying to you? Yeah, so a lot of what I'm seeing people see talk about, kind of complain about, right? Because that's one of the first things you ask is, you know, what's bothering you, right? Obviously the number one issue for a lot of people is Trump is the federal level. It's hard to kind of convince people, hey, no, no, no, let's talk about state issues instead. And they'll go for the big ones. Oh, yeah. They do. Oh, yeah. But when you're talking about state issues, it's a lot of cancer rate. It's a lot of water quality. It's a lot of education. It's a lot of just general affordability, right? Which is tied to it, you'd mentioned property taxes with the 2% cap, those just put into property taxes being a change there, which affects affordability, but hurts the county and city's ability to be able to budget. And so it's probably not a good thing in the long run, but potentially does help in the short run. We'll see how it all works out because yeah, it's a little hard to tell, a little hard to tell. I know. And since you probably have followed all the different things, yeah, okay, well, they did this, but they also did over here on the left, yeah, we got different things going on. Our big challenge is we've seen, let's go, I want to go with education first because education is a big chunk of where state money goes. Absolutely. We're starting to see the charter schools coming out. We're starting, you know, we've got the work now with the ESA's that are out there. Public schools are heaven. It's a hard time. Very hard time. Yes, absolutely. I mean, so this is actually a long-term trend. This is not necessarily new, right? Even in the nineties, when Iowa was one of the best states for education, at that point we had already cut our per student funding to be less than the national average. Now in the seventies and eighties, we were significantly above it. And because of the nature of how education works, where if you make a change tomorrow, it's going to take a while to actually take effect because you need a whole new set of pupils to come in. So you don't see your rewards right away. So a lot of the success of the nineties is typically attributed to the increased funding in the seventies and eighties, and then kind of the decline from there as our per pupil funding goes down compared to the national average really, really, really far to where we're at now, where it's really bad. This gets significantly worse when you introduce the voucher program, when you introduce ESA's, where you're now taking people from the schools. There's a lot of costs involved in schools that are not flexible per student, like the new school that we built the Ledges school here. The mortgage for that does not care how many people are actually in the school. So when people are pulled out of the school to go to more private schools, they're still stuck with that mortgage cost. That's not flexible. Those are kind of the problems with this shifting student count. I know Cedar Rapids in about last week or so announced that they're closing six schools because of reduced students, as well as converting three more from elementary schools to elementary middle school hybrids. And that's really, really sad to see how much it's kind of how quickly and how much it's falling apart. A lot of it is declining enrollment. So yeah, I mean, I constantly hear candidates saying, we need to stop the outflow. People are having fewer children. We are having declining enrollments, bottom line. Yeah. The population of Iowa is shrinking a little bit, but it's not shrinking very much, especially if you are looking at emigration of people that are leaving, because there's a lot of people that are my age that are just graduating from school and are leaving because there's better opportunity elsewhere or because they don't agree with the political nature of the state. And so they're looking for somewhere that's a little more friendly. This is something that happens. This is something that has to be addressed because it's really harmful to the long-term health of the state, making sure that we have the successful taxpayers here in paying taxes. Another aspect of education that needs to be addressed is not just the voucher program, but also SSA funding. For those that don't know, the SSA is the state money that gets assigned to the schools. Kim this year had a 2% increase in SSA funding. How did it? Oh, we increased our educational funding by a lot, guys. Congratulations. However, the part that isn't mentioned is that the ISCA, which is the teacher's union, has negotiation powers where they start with a 3% raise. They can negotiate up and down from there, but the average each year is 3%. So when you know your costs are going to go up 3% every single year, and that's just teacher salary, but that's 80% of what the SSA is. That's most of what the SSA is. Yeah, the state supplemental aid, yeah. Yep, absolutely. And so you know your costs are going to go up 3%, but you got a 2% raise. So every single student administrator across the state when she goes, oh, we got a 2% raise to education. Congratulations, guys. It's like, oh my God, we're down 1% this year. We're going to have to consider for a lowing a teacher, we're going to have to consider cutting a program, cutting a janitor, right? And every single year it gets worse and worse and worse. I am a member of CCI, the Citizens for Community Improvement, and they partner with a group called Public School Strong, and they advocate very heavily for a mandatory 5% increase to SSA every year. I know we used to in Iowa have a 4% increase. I think something like that is absolutely needed in order to be able to just get schools back to where they can actually consider hiring new teachers, because right now they can't even afford the teachers that they have. And they have a mandate on what starting pay can be. Yes, yes. We are 50th in the nation for starting teacher pay. So we've got, well, we've got all of that happening at the same time. But at the same time, their cost of operating. I mean, utilities are going up. Oh, yeah. I'm seeing budget amendments for schools because they had, I mean, their fuels, just the fuel. And we've seen that just in the last couple of weeks. Oh, yeah, buses and stuff. It all runs on fuel. Big challenges out there. And they do, we do travel a lot. We have a lot of open space. And it affects rural schools more than urban, right? Because you have a lot more busing. There's the, and that's the bigger, some of the big things. So on education side, you would love to see, as I say, traditionally a little bit higher, at least match the cost of inflation. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So that obviously teacher pay. That's another thing we'd like to see that continue to improve. But you only got so many dollars that you're getting. Of course. And now part of what the property tax thing was was take some of the saved dollars and apply towards property taxes. So schools don't have to ask for that. Yes. So in general, right, the state budget is a mess, right? So all these things cost money. And so saying, oh, I'd like to spend more and more and more money does not help in a state where we're already at $1.2 billion deficit, right? And we're very, very, very far behind on our spending versus our revenue. So that definitely needs to be addressed first, right? We need to be able to balance the budget first. And the ideal way to do that is to restore a lot of the income tax changes that have already happened, that the Republicans have already gone through in order to be able to restore the revenue of the state, which is why everywhere I go, I try and raise awareness about SJR 11 Senate Joint Resolution 11. This is a constitutional amendment that's going to be on the ballot in November. If it goes through, this will make it so it requires a supermajority for there to be any tax changes to earn any income tax. Income tax suggestions. Yes. Correct. Um, and so if that goes through the amount of options that you'll have available in order to balance a budget will be extremely limited, it'll mostly be cutting services. And so it does not necessarily matter who wins in November. If that goes through services, you're going to have to be cut. There's going to be cuts to education. There's going to be cuts to healthcare. There's going to be cuts to basically every single state. Well, a lot of the income tax is, is where education funding comes from. So, yeah, unless we go to, uh, consumer, yeah, it's going to be our sales tax. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a flat tax, which means it affects poor people more than it affects the rich people. And, and so if we boost sales tax out of control, we're going to be in really, really bad trouble. Okay. Uh, you mentioned cancer again, the, uh, cancer number two in cancer, not a, not a designation we want or really are seeking. Uh, again, uh, I know they did, uh, tax the vaping products. Is it? Sure. Uh, even their own people say, if you're designating $3 million of that to go towards pediatric, pediatric research, it's going to take a couple of years to get there because we just, it isn't going to raise that kind of money. They had off conflicting reports on how much they were going to get. Good idea. But how did we get caught in the first place? And it was then or federal or. So, so, so, so there is that those are issues. Unfortunately though, like the connection between cancer and nitrates level has been something that's been in Iowa for a huge amount of time, right? We've known that, that nitrate runoff in water has been incredibly bad for you since the forties, right? When they first discovered blue baby syndrome over in Iowa city. And at that time they did research into how bad is nitrates for the human body in general, and they discovered all these problems with pregnant women and stuff in nitrates, how it leads to early births and more birth complications. And then they did research and, okay, how does this affect actual fully grown human beings? And it's very scary. And that's when they first discovered that this connection to a whole battery of health issues, including colorectal cancers. And they started raising awareness about this in the eighties, right? When we were in the middle of the farm crisis and you have the front page of the Des Moines Register that agriculture runoff and drinking water is killing the islands, and they start spending a huge amount of money at Des Moines Waterworks. They have $14 million a day right now is operational costs when they're running. And it's just ridiculous, right? It's the most expensive water treatment plant in the world. And the problem becomes, what does everyone else do? We do not have Des Moines drinking water, right? We have our own water treatment plant, but, and they do a fine job. But as you get more and more rural, you're just left to dry. And it's very, very scary to me that there isn't good ways to address nitrates and water that we've known about it for a huge amount of time. And we've not addressed it. The fact that the federal EPA has been telling us for over 25 years that we have to address it through the Gulf epoxy task force and the IO nutrient reduction strategy, but we've basically failed to actually address any of those issues during that time. And then there's also the people have also come up to the legislatures in Des Moines and said, we need to address this through the I will amendment, right? In 2010, the I water and land legacy, where it was a constitutional amendment to put $200 million a year aside for water and land conservation. And still the legislatures in Des Moines, after all these people telling them, please address the water, please address the water, decided not to fund the program, decided not to ever have it go forward. And so it's just very, very shameful to me that we have this enormous history of P of not only the people, but the federal government and scientists and reporters trying to convince the, the legislatures in Des Moines to do anything about water quality and just nothing. You know, so on, on, on your side, I'm guessing because we do have the science on how we can make improvements. The question is, how do we make it acceptable and guess it? So, I mean, do we legislate it? Do we, does it need to be legislated? So it already kind of is, right? And so the island nutrient reduction strategy, which is the federal EPA guidelines for, I guess I'll go deeper into exactly what that is a little bit. So in 1997, the Gulf epoxy task force was created when they realized that there was the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which is an area hundreds of miles large, just off the coast of Louisiana, where there's just nothing living and they're like, what's going on? This is really bad. There's a lot of people that are losing money because of this. And they discovered that it was because of agricultural runoff coming out the Mississippi River. So they realized that they needed to change that. They made us that every single state that's on the Mississippi River Delta has to reduce nitrate runoff by 40% by 2030. This was started in the early 2000s, right, that they created this strategy and they decided that they would create an independent strategy for each state because every state's going to be a little bit different. Sure, right, as well as they'd work with the local governments. However, it becomes a big problem in Iowa, because Iowa is basically the only state where we created these guidelines for how to get there and then made them voluntary. Every other state, it's required, right? Where you have river buffers that are required, where you have cover crops that are required, where you have wetland restoration that's required. In Iowa, it's voluntary. You have to apply for the program and you'll be able to receive a federal grant in order to be able to help you meet these goals. So most other states have already met their required levels. At our current rate here in Iowa, we'll meet the required levels in 22,000 years. Like we are not even attempting. Not even making any progress. Yes, yes. I mean, there's been incremental gains, but not realistic gains, you know? And it's mostly just been a program that's been ignored, right? Things like, I know we're seeing more focus per watershed, things like that. Good way to attack it. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And get more buy-in out of the, out of the watersheds. And so I think you make these things mandatory, right? It's in no way is it blaming the farmers or anything because I think it's the same way as what you see for painters that were painting with lead paint, right? It is a government regulation issue. It is not, you would not blame the painters at that time, right? That's ridiculous. And so we need the regulation to get in there to have more cover crops, to have river buffers, to have all these collective systems, wetland restoration, just to be able to filter out the toxins, right? And this addresses a whole range of issues. This isn't just a nitrate issue, but this also helps address PFOS, microplastics, as well as antibiotic-resistant bacteria that we also have really bad in our water too. And cancer. Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. And then the drawdown for cancer. We got the whole, the whole work on there. I know I kind of had to go off in different directions on some of this, but you seem to enjoy talking about it. If people want to find out more about your campaign, obviously the decision is going to be on the Democratic ballot coming up in the primary. They have to pick one of the three candidates to face the Republican incumbent. How do they find out more about your campaign? I know you guys are doing a number of different things, but together. And I don't know if you're picking on each other or not, but again, how do they, how do they find out more about your campaign and more? So my name is Guy Morgan. My website is voteforyourguy.com. That's a good place to reach out to me, where I'm mostly there. I also have a Mondays of the Morgan, where every single Monday I have an event that I do at the public library. And so between five and six, as well as we alternate with cookouts too. So any of those two systems are good ways to get a hold of me. If you'd like to talk, also go out and vote already right now. You can do in-person voting at the auditor's office up to right now. Yeah, don't wait. Go catch them. Yeah. Thanks so much for visiting with us. All right.