Des Moines County

Uh, I was up at our Louisa center, uh, and watched them in action at their food bank.

Um, but we serve Henry, Louisa, Des Moines, and Lee Counties.

Uh, and then we also serve WIC in Washington and Muscatine.

Um, so we are a pretty regional entity.

But we had the opportunity to sit through the House- Subcommittee session, and then from there, we went to the Senate subcommittee session.

We had ten people that were chosen to speak on behalf of Southeast Iowa.

So we're talking to folks from Des Moines, Lee, and Henry really is where we're from.

Again, there were about forty of us, so it was a really interesting session.

One of my favorite things to do when I go to the marina, I park on the furthest away parking spot they have for one reason: I love to walk through the parking lot and look at the license plates.

Are they Lee County, Des Moines County, Henry County, Van Buren County? Are they Illinois? Are they Missouri? What the hell is South Dakota doing there?

[laughs]

And so, so you walk through there, and then we walk in, my wife and I sit down, and she's like, "That table over there, I have never seen those people before in my life." We're in Fort Madison, Iowa.

Re-elect me, I'll bring it home to Mahaska County.

I'll bring it home to Des Moines County." And I'm rattling off some of the counties in her district.

Uh, but yeah, y- you know, that's the sort of thing that I would run.

Uh, again, I don't have those private polls, and who knows what the private polls are showing.

Uh, but most importantly, this is part of making life more affordable in Lee County.

As you know, uh, through previous trade agreements, uh, Lee County and, uh, Des Moines County, our river counties, have had businesses leave.

Uh, it's been, uh, a goal to bring more business and economic development, uh, to those areas.

And so this is, uh, six thousand jobs during construction, uh, and permanent jobs, about seventeen hundred permanent jobs paying over forty-nine dollars an hour.

And so instead of, uh, watching more jobs leave, uh, our southeast Iowa counties, uh, we're seeing, uh, construction or will be seeing a construction of a, a steel plant that will bring, uh, high-paying jobs to this area, so tremendously important, uh, for this area.

The other issue is that we have been, uh, working for the past several years on trying to get, uh, a larger natural gas pipeline there.

We have had four or five businesses, um, that have looked at Lee County or looked at Des Moines County, looked at southeast Iowa, and, uh, ended up not going there, not locating there because of energy demands.

And so this is something that we have been working on, and with this, uh, large facility, uh, to meet its energy demands, uh, I think this natural gas pipeline is gonna be one of the things that's an additional benefit.