Rob Sand Campaigns In Mills County During '100 Town Hall Tour'

Iowa State Auditor and Democratic candidate for governor Rob Sand made a campaign stop in Mills County last week as part of his “100 Town Hall Tour” across the state.

“Make Iowa not redder or bluer, but better and truer” was the theme of his message to his audience in Glenwood Wednesday afternoon.

In an interview with The Opinion-Tribune prior to his town hall, Sand said he’s shared a consistent common-sense message of bipartisanship with Iowans since announcing his candidacy and that messages continues to resonate.

“I think we are overdue to return to our Iowa tradition and heritage politically, which is divided government,” he said. “Nobody gets everything they want, but the stuff that gets done is the stuff that people from both parties say, ‘You know what, that actually makes more sense than what we’re doing now. A broken clock is right twice a day and I’m glad you contributed to this.’

“I think people appreciate it. It’s sort of common sense. I think it’s the way most of us live our lives and I think the fact that our political system doesn’t do that is evidence that it’s broken. It works great for a handful of people at the top, but most of the rest of us are sitting here thinking,’Hey man, we got real water quality problems, we got a cancer crisis, our education system is now bottom half and you guys are over there looking out for special interest groups.’”

Sand has been crisscrossing the state to meet with Iowans since winning the Democratic primary election in June. He stressed the importance of engagement with citizens, something he gained an appreciation for as a child attending town hall meetings hosted by U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley.

Sand, 43, addressed a variety of issues during his hour-long appearance, including Iowa’s economy, cancer rates and legislation that invites government waste, fraud and misuse of tax dollars.

“I’m running for governor because after we found a record amount of misspent money and Iowans worked together to re-elect me (state auditor), the folks in Des Moines said, ‘Hey, the folks in the auditor’s office are really doing their jobs, somebody better stop them’ and they passed a law to make it harder for us to find misspent tax dollars.”

Sand said thanks to legislation passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, there are eight categories of records the state auditor can no longer examine freely.

“They have used this to block us from auditing the board of parole, they have blocked us from auditing the educational board of examiners and they’ve used this to block us from auditing hundreds of millions of your tax dollars being spent on the school vouchers program two years in a row,” he said.

Sand said the restrictions were placed on the auditor’s office despite legislators being told by accounting experts it would be bad policy and open the door to waste.

“I want to abundantly clear, every single watch dog in America said this will lead to waste increase in Iowa,” he said. “Democrats, Republicans, every non-partisan, non-political organization like the American Institute of CPAs, who writes the standards for how audits are done in America every single year. They wrote a letter to our legislature saying, ‘We almost never weigh in on political questions or legislative questions, but this is a really bad idea. It will lead to an increase in waste, fraud and abuse.’

“That was the endorsement they needed to pass the bill. They wanted to be able to hide stuff from us, so now they are.”

When pressed later on the school voucher issue by a member of the audience, Sand said, ‘Everyone in the state of Iowa, including the people who want school choice, should be able to agree this law is an invitation to waste, fraud and abuse as currently written – plain and simple.”

Iowa is seeing a growing number of charter schools, a concept Sand doesn’t oppose.

“Generally speaking, I’m a supporter of charter schools,” he said. “I like the idea of experimentation and innovation and the idea of charter schools, which are public schools, is that you take some rules and you try to take these rules or those rules away and try a school like that and see what happens. We should do that because that’s how we find out what works and what doesn’t work, when we change things.

“Now, I do have concerns with charter schools that are non-profit up front, but behind the scenes run for profit by a different company. I have concerns about that because then our tax dollars are not necessarily going to educate kids. They are more likely to be lining somebody’s pockets.”

Sand was asked how he would address water quality and the state’s high cancer rate.

“We want to make sure that we are aimed in the right place before we deploy massive amounts of taxpayer resources to fix a problem,” he said. “Because if we aim at something that isn’t the problem, we are wasting all that money and we’re also failing the people around us who develop cancer because we aimed at the wrong place.

Sand said there are four major contributors to Iowa’s high cancer rates that should be addressed.

“We are No. 1 for alcohol consumption – binge drinking. Alcohol does cause cancer. We ought to be talking about that as a state,” he said. “No. 2, smoking. We smoke at a higher rate than average and we all know that smoking causes cancer. No. 3, radon. We’re one of the worst states, I think No. 1 for radon – six times the national average. It’s the second leading cause of lung cancer behind smoking.

“Water quality is tied to cancer. We do know nitrates at a certain point do cause cancer. There are experts who disagree about at what level you have to be exposed to it in order for it to be cancer causing, but we also know that in Iowa our readings are often well above even the highest estimate for what’s cancer causing, so we’ve got to do something.”

Sand said he has a plan to improve water quality that would be both impactful and achievable.

“I want to do the single biggest wetlands and grazing land restoration project that has ever been seen,” he said. “When you look at studies, there’s lots of things that we can do – buffer zone, we can do bioreactors, we can do cover crops. These are good things - we should want more of them, but a bioreactor has to get rebuilt every 10-20 years, which means we’re just putting more money into it. A wetland, if it’s well built doesn’t. A wetland also provides recreational opportunities for all of us – we can hunt, we can fish, we can float. We can just be out there and enjoy nature. If we can do that, it’s something that can have tremendous impact, but it’s also going to have a broad basis of support, because guess what? When I talk to people who also like to hunt and fish like I do, they go, ‘More wetlands, that’s a great idea.’”

Sand didn’t mention his opponent, Republican Zach Lahn, until the cancer issue was raised. Sand said Lahn has supported cuts to cancer research and has beliefs that would lead to a ban some of the most promising cancer treatments.

“He also supported cuts to rural hospitals, which means its going to be harder to get treatment if you have cancer in the first place,” said Sand. “All three of those things are moving us in the wrong direction and I don’t think those are the right answers.”

Sand’s town hall meeting in Glenwood came during a campaign swing through southwest Iowa, that also included stops in, Page, Fremont and Pottawattamie counties.