The 2020 Iowa legislative session has officially come to an end. While it was anything but typical due to the interruption caused by COVID-19, one thing that didn’t change was that the last legislation passed was the budget for the next fiscal year.

State Representative Chris Hagenow, (R) District 19, says the Legislature approved a “status quo” budget, which carries forward the amount of spending from the previous year. He’s proud to say they didn’t cut any money from the budget, and were also able to make good on their promise of 2.3% allowable growth to the K-12 public school system. Hagenow credits the fiscal management of the last several years as the reason they were able to pass such a budget in an uncertain economic landscape.

“Almost any Iowan would understand, these are very difficult times, economically and otherwise. But because of how strong the leadership has been on the budget over the last several years, we did not have to go cut budgets. We had not overextended ourselves, and the State of Iowa is in very strong fiscal shape. Our revenues have gone down. They have declined and we’re watching that, but we got an updated revenue estimate which reduced what we thought we were going to have for the next year. But we are still able to continue the current obligations.”

To learn more about this and other legislative topics, listen to today’s and tomorrow’s Perry Fareway Let’s Talk Dallas County programs on air and at RaccoonValleyRadio.com.