Now that the Iowa Legislative session is over, we are talking with our lawmakers to see what they thought about the session overall.

State Senator Jerry Behn says some of the highlights for him was having both the fetal heartbeat and energy bills become law, as well as passing tax reform to help reduce Iowan’s income taxes.

“And I think that’s a great way to make us competitive. Iowa has one of the highest personal income tax rates in the entire nation, and I believe it has the highest corporate tax rates in the entire nation. All of those are red flags when businesses and job creators look at Iowa as to whether or not they’re going to come. So when they do come, they come in spite of our high taxes and not because of our competitive system.”

As far as the next fiscal year’s budget, Behn says Governor Kim Reynolds has 30-days to review all bills that were passed from the legislature before she can sign them into law. Behn notes that she also has the right to either veto the entire bill or make line item vetos within each bill. The Republican from Boone believes they’ve budgeted appropriately so that lawmakers won’t have to make budget cuts in the middle of the year.

“(The) Revenue Estimating Conference (REC) obviously does their projections. The fact of the matter is from last year, it’s not that we didn’t have enough revenue, it’s that we spent more money than what they had projected. I think we’ve done a better job of being in line with those projections and I don’t anticipate that we’ll have this problem next year.”

The legislative session ended on May 5th.