During Monday night’s meeting, the Marshalltown city council heard a quarterly update from Marshalltown Police and Community Team (MPACT) Advocate Suzy Reed and a legislative update from newly-elected Sen. Kara Warme (R-Ames), who discussed several bills that have survived through the Funnel Week.

Reed stepped in for usual MPACT presenter David Hicks, the senior director of community engagement at YSS of Marshall County, and she briefly shared some numbers on calls for service and follow ups — 32 calls assisting 56 people so far this year, with 40 percent of them mental health or homelessness related along with 79 follow ups assisting 111 people, with half of them pertaining to mental health or homelessness.

She praised her partner Tiffany Beadle, the only other current MPACT advocate, for stepping up during a period when Reed was absent and only calling her once. Reed got emotional describing a recent “major event” involving dispatch, the Marshalltown Police Department (MPD) and the Marshalltown Fire Department (MFD), crediting Beadle for assisting in transporting people to the hospital and being there for the affected family.

“It was a very tragic situation, and our partnerships in the community — fire, PD, dispatch, YSS — all stepped in to make sure she was doing OK as well as myself. I wasn’t on the call, but I was there to hold up my partner when she needed it,” Reed said. “That partnership with the entire community and all those resources here is amazing to see.”

From there, she informed the council of another situation involving a college student at MCC not from the area needing help and the resources MPACT was able to provide. They also helped find housing for an individual who had been living in a hotel, and Reed said she and other representatives of the program recently spoke to the Kiwanis Club.

Additionally, Reed was part of an International Women’s Day panel at MCC on March 4, and Hicks is scheduled to speak at the sixth annual National Co-Responder Conference in Atlanta, Ga., this June. The findings of a recently completed study that will be released soon, she said, show MPACT is saving time and money for the MPD and facilitating a reduction in judicial involvement.

As she opened the floor up for questions, Mayor Joel Greer commented that a desire has been expressed to expand MPACT’s hours past midnight and asked for Reed’s perspective.

“There’s two of us. We would love to become 24 hours or even extend the hours if it’s not 24. We would love to, but Tiffany and I are a two-man team, and that’s not possible until we’re able to add more people to it,” she said. “We do what we can. We flex our schedule as best as we can to work with whatever is needed, but Tiffany and I are limited in what we can do.”

Greer recounted the night the MPACT co-responder program was first presented to the council with a request for $15,000, and Councilor Gary Thompson instead asked how much it would take to fund for a year. The answer was $125,000, and a motion to approve that amount passed unanimously.

“It’s working well,” Greer said.

“We love to hear that. I was first told that story when I was hired and I went and watched it on YouTube. And at that time, I was brand new. It was like ‘Cool, great, I’m glad this happened.’ I can go back and watch that video again and I cry,” Reed said. “I have so much faith and hope that MPACT is gonna continue to do great things and continue to grow, and I’m really happy to be a part of it.”

As she wrapped up and Greer noted that he usually doesn’t allow public comments on presentations or updates, Leigh Bauder asked if those in attendance could give Reed and MPACT a round of applause. He consented, and the claps rang out across the room.

“You know, I’ve been up here long enough that I expect the audience to know when I’m kidding or not. Some people don’t, so I got in trouble for suggesting… and actually, if somebody claps for something that is said negative, that is out of order and I’ll tell people to not do that. When it’s a feel good thing or somebody’s done something well, absolutely you can clap,” Greer said.

Warme talks funnel bills, property tax reform

Although she arrived a bit later than expected on her way back from Des Moines, Warme made her way to the council chambers and received a glowing introduction from Greer, who noted her father’s participation in the Top Gun Naval training program and Warme’s educational background as a student-athlete at Stanford University before moving to Story County with her husband. Warme, the chief development officer at YSS, now occupies the Senate seat once held by Greer’s father-in-law, the late John Soorholtz.

As she addressed the council, Warme said the legislature had debated 12 bills on the floor Monday and recalled visiting with some city of Marshalltown representatives during League of Cities Day the week prior. Now that more information is available on the long-discussed property tax reform package expected to move through the legislature this session, Warme offered to share her understanding of the goals of the bill while soliciting feedback and input from the council.

“We expect to spend the rest of the session on this, so (I) don’t think we’ll have a subcommittee even for a couple weeks. So (I) want you to take the time to go through it and either through the League of Cities or to me directly, offer that feedback of how you think it would impact Marshalltown,” she said. “What are (the) aspects you like of it? What are things you see as challenges for the unique situations you face here in Marshalltown?”

Warme recounted the experience of managing her first bill as a Senator related to banking and added that she serves on the Veterans Affairs committee and had supported a bill allowing veterans of the National Guard to serve on county commissions. She also worked on another bill with the Marshall County VA team of Kevin Huseboe and Shari Coughenour that would open up the training requirements for veteran service officers.

Other legislation she has worked on include increasing the personal needs allowance for nursing home residents on Medicaid, and Warme addressed a bill that would have made taking a minor to attend any show involving drag performers a felony. Marshalltown High School senior Landon Stanley, who frequently performs in drag as Lonika LaReese Knight, advocated against its passage.

“A lot of people raised concerns with that, and I raised my concerns with it in the Times-Republican. That bill was modified heavily and then passed with bipartisan support, showing the process at work,” Warme said.

The new language in the House bill, she added, only outlaws taking a minor to an “obscene” performance with a more specific definition and a misdemeanor penalty instead of a felony. Warme said she was unsure if it would be taken up in the Senate. School theater directors were particularly concerned about the implications of the legislation, and Warme noted that her first acting performance in school was portraying George Washington.

While she doesn’t serve on the local government committee, Warme said she thought of Marshalltown as it pertained to a bill providing more disaster relief at the state level. One bill that she heard plenty of feedback on — it ultimately didn’t survive the funnel — was Senate File 360, which would have banned gene-based vaccines in the state.

“This would be an example that any legislator can introduce any bill they choose. It doesn’t mean it has any sort of broad support. So this was one Senator who really feels strongly about the risks of these types of vaccines. I personally did not support that bill from the beginning. It took away too much choice from Iowa residents and their doctors,” Warme said.

She was also glad to see that a bill imposing an $855 fine for public camping, which critics have dubbed criminalizing homelessness, also died in the funnel.

“Putting them in debt $855 (is) probably not gonna help the situation and help them on that path to self sufficiency. We want to connect people to services (and) treat the underlying issues connected to homelessness,” she said.

She hoped to find “an Iowa solution” to the issue and added that the bill came from an out-of-state think tank. From there, she addressed the elephant in the room — property taxes — as the House and Senate consider legislation that would limit the amount of new revenue local taxing entities can collect each year.

Warme joked that at the local level, candidates frequently hear about the services residents want, but when running for state office, she heard “again and again” how people want to pay less taxes.

“I understand that we need a balance in this, right? But you are providing critical services that people want and that don’t come for free, and we have to find that balance because those amenities and quality of life things that we have in our community drive economic development as well, which creates that cycle and increases the taxes that you can collect,” Warme said.

The passage of House File 718 was a “first step” in overhauling the property tax system, controlling the growth of taxes collected, increasing transparency and urging local governments to budget responsibly and focus on “priority items.” Senate Study Bill 1208, which is currently under consideration, aims to make property taxes more predictable for local governments and businesses and bring relief to taxpayers, according to Warme.

The new bill phases out the rollback system for residential, commercial and industrial property over five years to make the system more concise and easier to understand. Eventually, taxable value will equal assessed value, and the Homestead tax credit will be phased out into an exemption going up to $25,000. The exemptions for military and senior citizens would also be increased, with the senior citizen exemption almost tripling.

A property tax freeze would also be implemented for those 70 and older who are at 300 percent or less of the federal poverty level. Regarding counties and cities, she said the goal is to move away from the current maximum levy rate system to a more “customized” rate based on a two percent revenue growth cap regardless of increases in assessments. After the five-year phase out, new growth would no longer count toward the cap beginning in FY31.

“That was something I heard a lot was that ‘Hey, if we’re building a new neighborhood, we certainly need to provide services there. That adds to the cost for the city, so the idea was to work the levy rates down first and then exclude growth,” Warme said. “I think we’ve already started to hear some feedback. Some folks might rather rip off the Band-Aid faster, get there sooner and be able to exclude growth, but you all might have a different feedback to that. And that’s why we have it out there.”

While city and county tax statements should look similar, school levies will drop from $5.40 to $2.70 per $1,000 of valuation with the state buying down a lot of it using other funds available and property tax relief dollars.

“Just to summarize, we’re moving towards taxing at full value. The hope is that that makes it easier for you all to plan two to five years ahead because you’re not waiting on rollbacks,” she said.

Councilor Mike Ladehoff asked Warme if modeling had been conducted on how each taxing entity and the taxpayers themselves would be impacted under the new system, and she said there had been some — but the release of the bill would prompt the Department of Management to provide more in-depth information. Nothing specific was available for Marshalltown at the present time.

Fellow Councilor Greg Nichols asked about which legislators were managing the bill, and Councilor Jeff Schneider, after thanking Warme for coming, suggested indexing the numbers to inflation and felt it would help Marshalltown to do so.

“Simplifying the taxes are great. Nobody understands how they work. You can’t explain it in half an hour, so I think that’s fine. But I like home rule. I know Iowa likes home rule from the federal government. It would be nice for the cities to have a little more autonomy so that our citizens can choose how they want to live,” Schneider said. “If they don’t like it, they can go somewhere else, so, I mean, that’s kind of the great experiment of America.”