Shipley, Moore hold final legislative briefing of 2025

ily YMCA was the site of the second and final legislative coffee of 2025 with Iowa lawmakers Sen. Tom Shipley and Rep. Tom Moore.
Under his update, Moore said the Iowa House has started some modifications regarding SNAP funding.
“Health and Human Services passed a SNAP bill which puts some restrictions on candies and sugars and pop, and things that people with SNAP money can currently purchase. We’re moving that towards more healthy options for people, that SNAP requires a waiver from the federal government, and if we get that waiver, then the State of Iowa will appropriate another million dollars for Double Up SNAP Bucks, and Double Up SNAP Bucks is a program with even more healthy food and safety, with the emphasis on fruits and vegetables. So when that waiver is approved, hopefully, by the federal government, then we will appropriate another million dollars for Double Up Food Bucks,” Moore said.
Under his legislative update, Shipley said there had been bills regarding funding for libraries and bills modifying vaccines, and Shipley said he was opposed to making changes to either.
“The vaccine thing is confusing and so forth, and I also was very concerned when they started dabbling in that, what’s the next step? Is it animal vaccines? There are people out there who don’t want the mRNA stuff in animal vaccines. I’ve told leadership that if they’re starting to count votes ahead of time, just count me out on those two issues and I’m not going to support them,” commented Shipley.
Moore added a comment regarding vaccuinations, saying he was also opposed to bans or changes and felt it was the individual choice of Iowans.
“If it’s FDA approved or if it’s whatever coming out, and if you want to get the COVID vaccine, you get the COVID vaccine. If you don’t, don’t. That’s up to you. That’s your choice. Somebody had fines involved in the legislation, I thought that was incredibly dumb,” stated Moore. Shipley also said that a new property tax bill had just been dropped but he was still reviewing it.
“It’s 53 pages long and brand new. We have not had an opportunity to look at it, but it is going to be a big change in property taxes, theoretically, on how it’s done. On my side of the building, they have a pretty good understanding of how I’m concerned about how it will affect our rural counties and cities. Representative Moore is the same way. We’ve had some concerns last year with how it did things. Those concerns continue, so stay tuned on how all that’s going to work,” advised Shipley.
Larry Brandstetter asked about Senate File 445, and a companion bill that would create funds to support grants for child care centers and pay for school districts to transport students back and forth from child care and preschool. Brandstetter was seeking clarification on whether it was for non-profit or for-profit child care, or both. Moore said it was for any accredited childcare, though Moore said he had some concerns. “I was on that bill in the subcommittee and in committee in the House, and my biggest concerns were with Early Childhood Iowa and the things that were taking place, and the moving from our 34 local areas to nine regions. And I was a no on that bill until I sat down with the governor, with Director Snow from the Department of Education and Director Garcia from the Department of HHS. And we talked through that in that even though there’s going to be monies that are going to be shifting within that early childhood, there’s actually no monies going away. It’s just efficiencies in what department is moving that money. No programs are actually going to be lost. My biggest concern was the local directors, the local directors of which there might be 34 now going to nine region directors. Well, those 34 directors will still stay in place, and they still will be accountable for their locality,” Moore explained.
Moore added there was all kinds of research that supports the idea that the earlier we get kids engaged, especially the lower-income children, the more we get them engaged, the better off they are.
“That’s the crux of the importance of this bill. And I believe that we need to work in this direction, especially with the partnership between the schools and the private or the YMCAs or whatever daycares that are out there. That cooperation that takes place some places doesn’t take place everywhere. We’ve got to create that partnership between the two. If that childcare facility can provide the proper educational format for preschool for four-year-olds and five-year-olds, we need to foster that and just work on the transportation and the sharing of educational resources and teachers,” stated Moore.
Red Oak Library Director Kathi Most also spoke during the briefing. With the introduction of House File 284, which removed state funding from libraries that paid dues to state or national nonprofit organizations involved in government lobbying, such as the Iowa Library Association or the American Library Association, which Red Oak was a part of. Most said she felt like there was a recent wave of things happening in the legislature to dismantle libraries, and that the ALA and the ILA not only organizes what the library can do, and its activities, they are a support.
“They’re how we get our continuing education, they hold our events. So tying the money to any interaction with them, I mean, how far will the legislature go to shut it until we don’t have that support? We’re not dismantling police unions or fire unions, but there’s this pressure to change the standing of how libraries are organized or how they get support,” Most advised.
Most also commented on House File 274, which would repeal an exemption in Iowa’s obscenity law that protects “appropriate material for educational purposes in libraries and educational institutions.
We moved our tiny young adult collection upstairs so that the kids who felt very uncomfortable being in the adult department and looking at anything, they could have their own space. On the obscenity piece, a lot of our books talk about Hitler, they talk about war. They talk about what happens in war. There’s some obscenity in war,” Most commented. “I think children need to know a little bit about that. I think they need to know the history. I don’t know if I want people to wait until they’re 18, and I really don’t want to move their collection back downstairs again so that they’re reluctant to read, or instead of just reading what might have been designed for their age, suddenly they’re in the entire adult world again reading things that maybe they’re not ready for, or we purposefully market those in different age sectors so they’re not into those materials.”
Moore felt that they needed to have a line drawn, but they needed to be careful what the government started telling people as an individual what it has to allow or not allow for their child.
Shipley said he felt it was up to the local library board and that he was going to trust them to see what they want to do.
“That why I told them, I said I’m out of that, I’m just not going to have any part of that. Government does this too much, we have an issue here, and we’ve got to affect everybody, because we’ve got an issue here. That’s what happened two years ago, with the library bill that came up,” Shipley said. “I finally had to pitch a fit in committee, and say that we don’t need to do it because you’ve got a problem in Hardin County, one town. Finally, I guess, I don’t know if they thought it was right, but they thought it was worth not listening to me anymore.”
Red Oak city administrator Lisa Kotter also spoke during the event, and said that at a local government level, they don’t want the legislature telling them what to do when it came to taxes.
“We have one of the highest tax rates in the state. One of the things that we’ve looked at is, as the council in my first year of the budget, is why are we high? What we’ve learned is that the one line item in our budget that’s high is public safety, because here in Red Oak, we chose to do full-time fire and ambulance. As you know, EMS is not an essential service, but who wants to stand up and say, sorry, we don’t have an ambulance to come and pick you up when something’s not right? And so what’s transpired in Montgomery County is that our friends around the county who have tried to keep their taxes lower and are lower are essentially using our service and we’re going to places that we don’t get any sort of financial money from. And so we’re going to be having those difficult conversations. So one of the things I would say is please consider looking at EMS, number one, either being an essential service, because no one wants us not to have ambulances, or look at the dollars,” Kotter advised.
The other issue Kotter raised was over the floodplain, as half the city is under the floodplain. Kotter said a recent conversation with JEO Consulting Group put the city in a difficult position as the price tag to certify the levy was $300,000 and that was just engineering costs.
“If FEMA’s still here and they come and map, if we don’t beat them to certify our levy before they come and map it, we risk that the floodplain gets even bigger. They estimate $2 to $3 million to do the improvements that we need to do on the levy to certify it. They said that if we put in a pump and do the other things that we should do, that would be about $5 million, with another couple hundred thousand just to engineer it. Who would not want us to do that? But there is no room to pay for that. When I was on the other side of the state, people in your position would say, figure it out. People don’t want you to tax more. Well, nobody does, and we don’t want to do that. But I don’t know, as a local government official, helping elected officials do their job. Like, what do we do? Just let it go?” Kotter asked.
Shipley said he was a member of the Flood Mitigation Board and that there were some options for the city, a 50-50 grant and a 75-25 grant through Iowa Homeland Security.
Shipley also said that a bill passed out of committee limiting eminent domain usage for carbon pipelines but did not get voted on. He also made it clear he is not in favor of using eminent domain for the pipeline.
Shipley and Moore said they were available to answer anyone’s questions. Shipley can be reached at tom.shipley@legis.iowa.gov. He used people to list their town in emails to him. Moore can be reached at tom.moore@legis.iowa.gov.