An Iowa lawmaker is looking back on the disappointments and successes of the recently completed Legislative Session.

District 24 Senator Jesse Green says some of the bills that he found that were unsatisfying from the session is the use of eminent domain with carbon capture pipelines, not banning Kratom and legislative salaries not seeing an increase. He explains that the chambers remain too divided on how eminent domain should be handled with respect to carbon capture pipelines. 

As for his bill to ban Kratom, Green notes that he couldn’t secure the last vote he needed for the legislation to pass, due to the majority wanting to regulate the substance, instead of banning it. He points out that law enforcement has said they can’t determine what the synthetic version of Kratom is and the natural substance. 

He talks about the last time the legislative salaries were increased was in 2007 and he describes why he felt their pay needed to have a raise.

“And so what I’m starting to see is that there’s a lot of young legislators that have families that are just really struggling to balance the work-life balance. And if we want government to reflect its people I think we need to do something with this.” 

Green details one major success was passing one of the governor’s priority bills and it was recently signed into law on school choice, particularly with charter schools and homeschooled students. He highlights allowing teacher salary supplements to follow the student, as charter school teachers are public educators and they can’t reject any students that apply. He believes that the future of education is through charter schools, as ten have been created within the last decade. 

“They are given so much flexibility and I think the education landscape, we need to innovate in education, and I believe that charter schools can do that within our public realm. It’s estimated that there will be about 28 charter schools by the year 2028.” 

Green adds that the other main success from the session is passing the limitations of the governor’s powers when it comes to times of emergencies when the governor can’t shut down certain services and establishments.