State Senator Jesse Green, Legislative Review-Session Wrap-up from the Senate, May 08, 2026

Visiting with State Senator Jesse Green and Senator, thanks for recovering coming in. Boy, last Friday when we visited, headed into the weekend and you were pretty sure we were going to get done over the weekend and I said all nighter and well a little bit longer than an all nighter but got the session done. Yeah, I'm caught up in sleep now but it lasted about probably 12 hours longer and I thought it would. Last year we got out six in the morning and then this year we went beyond that 12 hours so but a lot of important topics that we need to make sure we're done correctly and so however long it takes to get it done right. So let's go back kind of take a look at what do you look at as highlights of the session and again I know there were things that you specifically wanted to work on and some were successful some you know are going to take a little more work. Yeah so from my standpoint I think the property tax bill was definitely the biggest highlight. Every year we talk about property taxes, we've done some tweaks over the last six years and you know I think this is kind of the culmination of a lot of those efforts and you know at the beginning of the session I wasn't sure if the House and the Senate would be able to come to an agreement because they were completely far apart in their philosophy. The House had more of a philosophy of two percent hard cap on all revenues with local government and then the Senate had more of a soft cap which we identified that was like our number one thing is that we wanted to make sure that local governments had uncapped levies for the things that are outside their control like insurance pensions and some of those those items but so at the end of the day they were able to come to a compromise and you know they were able to blend kind of a combination of the two and at the end of the day there's going to be over four billion dollars of savings in the next six years but we're going to wait a year for this implementation to make sure that local governments are able to look at this and and see how they can work with us and then maybe potentially if we need some last weeks next session we can come in and do that but so we know it's like city and county school's a little different but I know you took some steps to alleviate some of the property taxes on the school side yeah so on the school side they are exempt from the two percent cap at the big change that's going to happen there is that we take a portion of the save dollars the save penny that they get for infrastructure and we're going to take a portion of that and buy down the 540 levy and provide a property tax relief through that mechanism and and so the schools will definitely be impacted by that I heard some complaints from some of my superintendents but at the end of the day you know schools represent 50 percent of your property tax bill it's pretty hard to have property tax reform without tweaking something within that formula yeah so yeah I'm guessing a lot of them were saying that's what we're doing for our that's what we're using for our building improvements and things like that a lot of infrastructure for for a lot of the save money I think yeah certainly and and so but but overall I think at the end of the day they're still happy that we didn't cap cap them like the house initially wanted but okay so property tax is a little while to see that workout I know on the senate side you had some people that wanted to go back to 2013 and totally redo the multifamily thing and it's a little phased in it will be different and I remember when it went into effect I think yes there was some reimbursement that were coming to some of the taxing entities and the thing is is what how long do we keep doing that that sort of thing with the senate's original proposal we we certainly multi residential properties we're going to see a property tax increase and I think when you took a 30 000 foot view of the senate's proposal we had a lot of relief for senior citizens and I think the overall conclusion is that when you're talking property taxes you shouldn't carve out a specific group of people like that and so in the in the latest version multi res is going to be left harmless with that new proposal but we took out the senior citizen portion okay of that so that's how we were able to do that but the other tax thing that happened on the last day session was the two-thirds majority to raise income taxes is a constitutional amendment that will go on the ballot this November I think that's really important and I'm kind of surprised it took to the last day of session to get that out but when I talked to to citizens the vast majority believe that it should be harder to raise income taxes than than all other taxes and so at the end of the day the voters will get to vote on that this November so I was pretty excited about that I remember when they start doing the flat tax and we're talking about and then you had a lot of people that wanted just to eliminate the income tax I know you had reservations there let's not go too far too fast yeah I mean I'm obviously with my philosophy and worldview I'm a consumption tax mindset so whether it's sales whether it's the gas tax those are the levers that I want to pull when it comes to funding our government but income taxes I think is is one of those things that will help attract people to our state you know we got rid of the retirement income tax and we've seen some of the effects of that and I don't believe the income tax is the healthiest way to fund our state government but of course the reason the sales tax hasn't gone up is because the I will provision which the next next time the sales tax goes up I will be enacted which is two-thirds of a penny of that next penny that goes up personally I think Iowans have spoken on that and I have accepted it in my my philosophy and worldview that that's something that we need to do and so if we do get into budgetary issues in the next four years that'll be my stance is that maybe we should take a look at that but I suppose this is going to be a shift into the budgetary side of things but a lot of people are afraid of this billion dollar deficit spending but the reality is we still have over four billion dollars in reserves and certainly if the next four years go by and our revenues don't increase or our economy doesn't grow we'll certainly be looking at needing to do some changes and so maybe if if that worst case scenario happens maybe we should take a look at the sales tax so budget wise all together I know because you worked on a lot of different things we touched on that last last time we visited too on the education one but felt overall the way the budget came together pretty good with with everything yeah I was really happy with my budget I chair the education budget so that's everything outside of state supplemental aid so community colleges regions and other smaller programs are within that budget and so overall our budget increased 1.4 percent but my particular budget they gave me 1 percent to work with so within that 1 percent increase I had about 10.4 million of new dollars to spend and so I wanted to be as careful of how I spent those dollars as I could be and be very targeted with that so from the constituents and and my superintendents and teachers and different people that I've talked to I knew that K through 12 public education was definitely where I wanted to put that focus within my budget and so you saw that take place with I was able to renew the reorganization incentives that helps schools with whole grade sharing and and help schools find efficiencies within different schools to share teachers and and maybe potentially look at reorganizing so ACGC school is in my district they've been a whole grade sharing for quite a few years now they specifically wanted this and they're ready to reorganize and so this is about the three million new dollars that I was able to carve out within my budget to go towards this program and the vast majority of that's going to go to ACGC so I was proud to be able to bring some money back home to my district that way I was also able to create a new line item for dyslexia training for teachers it's about three hundred thousand dollars but there's this provides an avenue for teachers to get their certification on how to help teach kids a struggle with dyslexia on on reading and so that was a positive win I was able to expand the teacher loan forgiveness program a little bit last year we were able to expand that by 40 percent this year my number one goal was to tailor that to focus on rural schools first and put a priority on that so I was able to put some language change there and then the last big item within that budget was it seems like every year everybody favors the community colleges more than the regents it serves more students it's got a wider footprint in the state of Iowa and so we were able to give them some extra money is about a 1.5 percent increase in their their budget so DMACC should be happy with that well they all wanted they all want more always want more but you only had so many done I know leadership says here's what you get to work with yep so you did what you could and you had already mentioned that did some things for like at Iowa State freed up some of the restrictions on their on their buckets of funds that can be used in different things gives them a little more flexibility yeah of the of the regents Iowa State should be very happy with what happened this year even though we didn't give them an increase in funding there's about 50 million dollars that were sitting in buckets specific buckets that they couldn't use for any other purposes we got rid of those line items so technically we freed up 53 million dollars for them to now spend however they want so so actually they were probably really happy out of the three regions yep some of the other things that came up that I felt pretty good I mean there was a lot of things right at the end but all session long you were working on different things as well yeah I when it comes to education side of things personally I was really proud that we were able to do some concurrent enrollment changes that came from Ogden school superintendent and a couple other school superintendents and we have a great concurrent enrollment program where high school students can take some college classes at no expense but you're seeing a big increase of kids that are failing out or not taking those classes seriously and so the superintendents wanted more authority to be able to charge that student tuition or and also pick the modality of how that student can take those classes so I was really proud to get those two bills across finish line to make sure that superintendents can hold kids accountable for those those types of choices another education bill that I was able to floor manage was the american heart association has been asking for money to help establish cardiac arrest plans for schools and and to try to identify how many schools actually do have a plan when it comes to that and also how many AED devices are in each building and so they wanted a half million dollars they've been asking for that for three years and and honestly I just don't know where they're coming up with that number and I just thought they're kind of pulling a number out of the air so I filed a bill and was able to get across finish line that directs a department education to collect data on how many schools have an AED device you know in case a student has a heart issue or a teacher or a teacher yeah and also how many schools actually have a plan to address that lastly in the education side of things that that was on my table was we passed a civic seal program to reward students and acknowledge students that have excelled in civics education and so it's a pretty easy one to do on the health and human services side I think the biggest thing that I saw was we increase the vape tax so we have one of the lowest vape taxes in in the midwest and so just by increasing that by a nickel that's going to pay for our pediatric cancer research which was three million dollars and the remaining fifteen million dollars that should be raised with that tax is going to go to help fund that Medicaid gap that exists here in the state of Iowa that was somewhat controversial with some some Republicans but at the end of the day I thought that was a very common sense that tax increase I think the one thing is yeah the first three million so at least I mean legislative services said well they didn't buy everything that the vape people were saying that it's going to be this much I have no idea how many people are doing vaping but the bottom line is what's the question is it going to be three million is it going to be 18 million yeah and well when you walk into a gas station you can see that the vape products are in the zins and it's taking over the market and and some of that is good I mean it's better than than you know smoking cigarettes or or or the old June tobacco but so this nickel wasn't necessarily some want to go a lot higher to try to you know prevent or you know smoking and stuff all together but so this was kind of a compromise to recognize that we do need a taxes more and to help fund some of this in a pediatric cancer is we've got to start yeah it just needs to be done so again those are some of the things that you just need to do it because it's a right thing to do other things that came up for you there probably the most controversial bill that I ran that it was a let's see I think it was 15 different divisions in this bill but it's a charter school bill as the governor's a charter school bill and there's a lot of different components to this it dealt with the homeschooling dealt with charter school teachers making sure that they qualify for IPERS making sure that charter school students can can play sports if their charter school doesn't compete but it surprised a lot of people that within two years we have 10 new charter schools in Iowa about 1200 students go to school in charter schools and that might not sound like a lot but in two years that's quite a change in my mind and honestly I think when I look at other states that charter schools are going to be the future of education in Iowa because there's a lot more flexibility in how schools can operate under that format and and I've always said that you know government doesn't do a good job of innovating it's usually the private sector that does a good job innovating and that's why I've always been a school choice proponent is to to kind of free up that and and invest in that private infrastructure but I'm so excited about what charter schools can do to to be able to innovate and I've seen so many success stories with that and so the last categorical that doesn't follow a child into another public school is the teacher salary supplement and so this this allows that dollar amount to follow a child into a charter school and and you know that's if it was designed to support a public school student I think it's common sense that that should follow a public school student and so there's a lot of pushback from the teachers union on that which which is kind of surprising to me when when charter school teachers are public school teachers but they have to and also charter schools have to accept every student they can't turn away any students so um the other component to that that that cost some heat was the the homeschool provision a lot of people are surprised that with independent private instruction homeschool students where they are completely off the grid and don't want anything to do with the government there are some regulations in place that you can only teach so many students in a homeschool environment and also you couldn't pay an instructor tuition uh to teacher students and and I thought that was unnecessary uh regulation on homeschool parents and so uh in in this bill uh I was able to strike that um that language at home

at that part yeah and again that was one that the governor wanted uh wanted to wanted someone to lead it through and it was you yeah that was one of her top priorities of the year and I was really honored uh to work with her and and it helped me grow as a legislator because when you're dealing with 15 different divisions of a bill uh that's pretty nerve wracking to get up on the senate floor knowing that they can attack you on 15 15 different things and you really got to prepare for them well and I that's what I did as I remember asking you before you started doing that uh before you hit the floor with it just a lot of homework yeah it took it takes a lot of a lot of work to go through those yep all right a couple other things you have well probably one one bill that the governor might not like is the governor's powers bill and we waited till this year because this is her last year in office and we didn't want to offend her or upset her but but after covid I think most of iowans regardless of party thought maybe the governor executive branch has too much power when it comes to emergencies and so was it right looking back that a governor has the ability to shut churches down or force vaccinations or or shut businesses down and and so um uh in this bill we we corrected that uh the one thing at the house in the senate didn't agree to in this was the senate wanted to have a continuing resolution to where if the house in the senate passed a budget and the governor vetoes it that it automatically if there's no resolution it automatically goes to the the previous year's budget and so um a lot of people thought that this was not necessary or it might even create a more unhealthy environment if you if you have a democrat governor and republican legislature or vice versa but um i think a lot of other states have this and it works well and um i think it would prevent kind of that dc style politics that happens when when things shut down yeah yeah so uh that was kind of an interesting bill that uh was a last minute bill when we cross a finish line okay gotta ask you a minute domain here we thought in the beginning it was going to be probably one of the first but there's definitely still some okay deep ground deep trenches out there between the sides certainly so uh i i've got a list here on my piece of paper of disappointments for the year and that's one of my four disappointments and and the reality is is uh there's this idea in the senate uh where many people believe that if we did something on the imminent domain portion of the carbon pipeline that we would get sued and so um that lawsuit could be up to 1.2 billion dollars and and you talk to 10 if you talk to 10 different attorneys you're going to get five that say that we win a lawsuit and five that say that we would lose a lawsuit so um now i i i believe that if we did something i don't believe that we would lose a lawsuit but then again i'm not an attorney so what do i know but um but i i i understand and i can sympathize with that perspective um there's consequences for waiting this long to pass a bill if we would have passed a bill four years ago we wouldn't be worried about a lawsuit um we wouldn't be changing the rules in the middle of the game so um i tried to come up with a compromise where um the senate half the senate wanted to just broaden the corridor and not limit imminent domain so if you broaden the notice corridor that allows summit to go have other negotiations with other landowners that might want to enter into an agreement with them uh but um the anti pipeline crowd wanted zero imminent domain if we did that well it was just three years ago at the house passed out a 90 threshold voluntary threshold level before imminent domain could be even be thought about and i was just like well why not use that why can't that be the compromise and and the unfortunate thing is emotions take over and you had these two camps that didn't want to move and so we couldn't we couldn't get consensus so uh so anyway and then the last question is uh what would the governor and governor support yeah nobody knows what the governor is supporting so um i'm pretty sure if we just ban them in a domain for carbon pipelines facing a potential 1.2 billion dollar lawsuit my guess is is that the governor would veto that so what's the point of going down that route again too all right but we didn't get it we didn't get everything blocked at the end with that so that was good everybody let it just okay we're just going to leave it late you know i was wondering if if a budget was going to get blocked and i was kind of nervous like what's what are we going to walk into but i want to thank all my colleagues that had different opinions that we we respected each other and and we had a healthy internal debate and and we um were pretty civil about it but um other disappointments other disappointments is uh i i lost on my cratum ban uh bill i had 25 votes i couldn't find a 26 vote um that's pretty frustrating uh but uh nevertheless um i respect the process and i couldn't find 26 votes i gave a good argument to ban it uh a lot of states are banning it whether it's red states or blue states cratum is an opioid that is causing a lot of deaths because a lot of people think it's safe and natural and it's not um a lot of asian countries are banning it quite a few european countries are banning it and so some say we should just regulate it but the problem with regulating is that you can't tell the difference between the synthetic version and the natural version and so um it sounds good to regulate it but but you can't do it in practice and it also costs money to regulate it yeah so uh i told them if we can't just flat out ban it i'm just going to back off on this bill and we'll wait till next year um last the last thing on my disappointments was uh the legislative salary it's going to shock people that support this but uh the reality is is that uh uh states that are similar to us have about 15 thousand dollars more in salary and usually have staff and so uh we haven't done anything with salary since 2007 and one thing i've noticed is that there's a lot of young legislators that have families that cannot um balance their work and life um in this in this atmosphere and uh i i believe if government is supposed to reflect its citizens and get working age people into the government we need to reflect that with our our salaries and our our staff one of the two and so uh the house was definitely for this they passed it out a couple years ago uh but the in the senate we couldn't find 26 votes to do that but uh we might take this up next year keep working out again a lot of things uh come back after all in all call it a pretty successful session oh certainly there's there's so many wins and and we we just brush the surface but i know we're running out of time but um we we introduce hydrogen regulation um this is something that's i'm going what did i know hydrogen i didn't know we drilled for hydrogen so we have like the second largest potentially the second largest reservoir of hydrogen in the world and so there we have no regulations on this so um how do we handle this how do landowners get paid and and because when you think of owning land you own your section of land all the way down to the core of the earth and so hydrogen obviously if you find a pool of hydrogen it crosses many different property owners and so we establish rules uh with this where uh no no landowner is going to have to accept a well or or you know there there's going to be a proper communication in place and it takes 25 of the landowners that cover a pool to agree to um research this and if if a company finds hydrogen they have to pay all all the landowners in that pool and so uh i think it was a great bill that that and i'm excited to see what what happens in the future with that um but uh and lastly the water i want to finish on this uh the water quality um we had a huge success with this and and everybody wants uh good water and and uh quality water so we freed up um at the end of session 30 million new dollars to go towards infrastructure and practices uh we found some money that in different programs that were not being utilized so we just kind of repurposed those dollars uh you know down in Des Moines they 20 of the population lives in Des Moines and that treatment center down there needs to be expanded so we we provided them with a a low interest uh loan to help double their capacity in the next couple years and then the rest of the money is going to go towards practices so i think uh that was a great bipartisan bill to kind of finish the session out got a lot of those practices they're encouraging right here in the Beaver Creek Waters so that's the one of the new ones uh seeing a lot of activity now too yeah state center to jesse green on our program today thank you so much for joining us always a pleasure thank you