Dan Dawson

So a lot of people who were for it were just like, we need to do whatever we can to bring this awesome development to our state.

On the flip side against it, specifically, I mean, Senator Dan Dawson gave quite the speech against it.

It kind of summed up pretty well what a lot of the opposition was.

A lot of people were worried that it was getting rushed.

Tax breaks didn't need to be rushed.

As the Iowa Senate debated a bill Friday that would permit the state to offer nearly $1.4 billion in tax credits to Masabi Metallic's Senator Dan Dawson, Republican of Council Bluffs, argued the measure would set a bad precedent.

Masabi Metallics has announced plans for a $15 billion steel plant in Lee County, though many details remain unrevealed.

It's a capstone project for Governor Kim Reynolds as she prepares to leave office in January.

And yet there was our legislature on Friday changing the rules to allow even larger tax credits.

Masabi will also get a big sales tax break and probably local property tax incentives.

Will the project harm the environment? Who cares? Democrats and Republicans stood on both sides of the issue, but Senator Dan Dawson, Republican of Council Bluffs, was the conscience of the legislature.

Iowa taxpayer received the best deal in this proposition? Absolutely no, said Dawson, about a deal negotiated by the governor's office that skipped the normal Iowa Economic Development Authority process.

So far from being a done deal.

And it did turn out to be, you know, they were portraying Iowa as still being in competition with Arkansas, which is one of the balloons that Dan Dawson poked on the Senate floor.

I'm making my remarks even shorter than this in the future.

Sorry about this.

I mean, what, what was the rush with this? I think the rush was to get it out of there before the election.

Yeah.

Oh, without it, it had to have been, right? Because they have 60 days from what Debbie Durham was saying to get this through, so they clearly have a number of weeks ahead, and there's skepticism, and we keep teasing Dan Dawson, and we'll talk a little more at length here coming up, but he was skeptical that Arkansas was really a true player for this, and that's really hard to know for us from the outside, but There did not seem to be any necessary reason that this had to get through Friday.

May I throw out one conspiracy theory to this? I am curious if we are going to see President Trump in Iowa in the coming week.

Six Senate Republicans voted against the bill, including the chairman of the chamber's tax policy committee, and did two House Republicans.

As the Ways and Means chair of this chamber, I in good conscience cannot support giving any single corporation and their financiers one point two billion dollars in refundable and transferable tax credits to what simply amounts to the largest giveaway, the largest corporate giveaway in the state of Iowa's history, Senator Dan Dawson of Council Bluffs said during a passionate speech on the Senate floor.

I choose conservatism, not corporatism.

From a precedent standpoint, I don't care about legacy.