The Iowa Regents Transparency Taskforce has set their first public hearing for 6pm Wednesday, April 17 in Johnston, Clear Lake, Webster City, Algona, Marshalltown, Newton, Knoxville, and Osceola, and Iowa CCI members will be there in force to demand an end to corporate corruption at the Board of Regents and more accountability and transparency in decision-making.
Iowa Regent leaders Craig Lang and Bruce Rastetter have faced enormous public criticism in recent months because of a series of controversial decisions that have put the interests of big-moneyed corporate agribusiness groups ahead of the interests of everyday Iowans. As a result, the Iowa Senate refused to confirm Lang for a second 6-year appointment to the board, and he will no longer serve as of April 30. The Iowa Senate has also passed the Regents Accountability and Transparency Act by a 49-1 margin.
Iowa CCI members and our allies have led this grassroots good government campaign since the beginning, and now is the time to continue to push our “put people first” priorities. Here are some talking points and more information and the location of each meeting this week.
- Say your name, where you’re from, and that you’re a proud member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement.
- Governor Branstad, Regent President Craig Lang, and Regent Pro-Tem Bruce Rastetter have twisted the role of Iowa’s public universities to serve corporate greed rather than the common good.
- Rastetter tried to use Iowa State University to back a corporate landgrab in Tanzania by his own company, AgriSol, and that he falsified a financial disclosure statement to do it.
- The Board of Regents refused to enforce their own ethics policy and kicked citizens out of their meeting rather than allow time for public comment.
- The Regents hired Rastetter’s personal public relations director to be the new ISU lobbyist without conducting a public job search or following their own diversity-in-hiring guidelines. This kind of revolving-door action should not be allowed.
- Lang and Rastetter closed down Price Labs at the University of Northern Iowa without allowing the time and space for a full public debate on the proposal first.
- Lang and Rastetter infringed on academic freedom by preventing the Tom Harkin Institute of Public Policy from conducting free and open agriculture research. This was done to protect powerful corporate ag interests and resulted in Harkin pulling nearly 40 years of congressional papers from ISU, which is truly a terrible loss for Iowa.
- Rastetter worked with a corporate ag lobbyist to try and silence a University of Iowa professor from speaking out against industry practices that threaten Iowa’s water quality.
- These kinds of actions by public officials is not acceptable. We will not sit idly by while corporations take over what few public institutions remain accessible to everyday people in this state.
- There we need to 1) remove Rastetter from the board 2) develop a clear ethics complaint process to enforce the Regents ethics policy and put it in writing 3) mandate public comment at all Regents meetings 4) require additional public hearings four times a year in all four congressional districts 5) end the revolving door between public institutions and private corporations.
Here is the full location information for each hearing this week.
Transparency Task Force origination site:
Johnston High School, Room 226, 6501 NW 62nd Avenue, Johnston, Iowa
Other available ICN sites:
- Clear Lake High School, ICN Classroom, 125 N. 20th Street, Clear Lake, Iowa
- Webster City High School, Room 19, 1001 Lynx Avenue, Webster City, Iowa
- Algona Bishop Garrigan High School, ICN Classroom, 1224 N. McCoy Street, Algona, Iowa
- Marshalltown High School, Room 173, 1602 S. 2nd Avenue, Marshalltown, Iowa
- Newton Senior High School, Room 104, 800 E. 4th Street S, Newton, Iowa
- Knoxville High School, ICN Classroom, 1811 W. Madison, Knoxville, Iowa
- Osceola-Clarke Community High School, ICN Classroom, 800 N. Jackson, Osceola, Iowa