Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand (D) answered questions from constituents in a town hall at Brookside Park in Ames, including punishments for stealing from taxpayers and school vouchers Thursday morning as part of his “100 Town Halls Tour.”
Sand jokingly said he was the hardest-working elected official in Iowa because he planned a town hall in all 100 county seat constituencies rather than a 99-county tour because Lee County has two county seats (Fort Madison and Keokuk).
When asked about prison time for stealing from taxpayers, Sand said he favored sentencing those who steal “around five figures” from taxpayers to prison but not “locking people up and throwing away the key.”
“I’m asking the legislature to do this since I got elected the first time, which is to make it so that it’s a mandatory prison sentence if you steal a large amount of money from taxpayers,” Sand said. “I think it should be a large amount of money from anybody, [but] we started with just from taxpayers because we figured that would be the thing that would be the most impossible to be opposed.”
Sand added that there are people “far out on the left” who want to abolish prisons and disagree with him, but the reasoning he attributed for the legislation not becoming law was party politics.
“There is no dispute as to why the Legislature has been unwilling to do this,” Sand said. “It’s because I wear a blue hat, or I have a ‘D’ behind my name or however you want to talk about it. I am a registered Democrat, and lawmaking in our state is run entirely by Republicans.”
Sand is the only statewide elected official in Iowa who is a Democrat, but he said he does not believe “all the problems in your life would be solved” if only Democrats served alongside him.
“I invite you to visit any state run entirely by Democrats. There you will find problems, right?” Sand said. “The fundamental problem is that when we have a system that really doesn’t incentivize the solving of problems by the people who are actually elected, then the problems don’t get solved.”
During this year’s session of the Iowa Legislature, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a bill limiting the records the State Auditor’s office can force people to provide, which Sand said was going to make it “a lot easier” to get away with embezzlement and fraud.
“There are now some records that are off-limits from the auditor’s office, which if you think about it [is] quite a great playbook for someone who wants to steal money, right?” Sand said. “‘Where can I steal money? Oh, look, here’s documents that the auditor can’t look at—how convenient.’”
Sand was also critical of the school vouchers bill, which was also signed during the last legislative session, describing accountability in the bill as the “Wild West” and said it was a “black hole” for taxpayer dollars. The law outlines punishments for misuse of funds for parents, but the only expenditure private schools cannot use with the public funds is rebates to parents.
“If you are employed as the principal of your for-profit, private school, and you get a salary, but you also have a policy that all the public dollars you get you put in your pocket as profit and keep there, that is now legal,” Sand said. “Let me be abundantly clear what I’m talking about—there is no obligation that private schools spend this money on educating children.”
When addressing someone at the town hall who worked in the public school system, Sand added if public schools had done what is now legal to do in private schools, he would be arguing about whether or not the employee should go to prison.
“Once you pay that money, as tuition—and let’s be abundantly clear, the vast, vast majority of this money is just going to get paid as tuition—once it gets paid as tuition, there’s only one rule, no rebates,” Sand said. “I actually went to legislators. I thought this was an error.”
The vouchers bill does not require public meetings, a public directory or an annual public audit that are required of public schools that also receive public funds.
“If you want public dollars, the public should have a right to know what’s happening,” Sand said. “Now under this law, they don’t. This blows my mind. I can’t believe that there’s that little oversight and people thought that it was a good idea.”
Sand concluded by discussing the Public Innovations and Efficiencies (PIE) program, which helps little entities save money.
“We have a PIE contest every year where we award those who are the highest performing cities, counties or school districts of their size,” Sand said. “We also collect ideas [so if] a local public servant came up with an idea and saved a bunch of money, we add that to the list and spread it across the state next year.”
Sand said the “very Republican state” of Mississippi has copied the program because it is effective at saving money.
According to Sand, the Story County participants this year are Cambridge, Maxwell, Roland, Nevada, Ames Community School District, Colo–NESCO Community School District and Story County itself.
