Iowa House District 69 (redistricted in 2023) covers eastern Clinton County.
Incumbent Republican Representative Tom Determann is seeking re-election. He is facing Democrat Randy Meier, a retired detective commander of the Clinton Police Department.
WVIK interviewed Meier. WVIK reached out via email and phone multiple times to set up an interview with Rep. Determann, but we did not hear back. Listen to Meier's interview at the bottom of the page or read his answers transcribed below.
Introductions:
Randy Meier: Well, I live in Clinton, where I have lived since 1978. I grew up on a farm, a family century farm in Jackson County, which is just north of Clinton here. When I got out of high school, I joined the military, spent 3 years overseas with the Army in Germany. I returned right after the end of my military service, and I joined the Clinton Police Department in 1978. Served there for 33 years. I retired as the detective commander. It wasn't long after that, within a matter of months, that the Sheriff's Office made me an offer to join them as a civilian, where I've worked ever since. My job is the Director of Seniors Versus Crime. And my role there is to conduct outreach to the community, to educate the community about fraud and scams, and to mitigate the impact of fraud and scams on people in our community. And I'm married. I have 2 adult daughters who no longer live in Iowa, sad to say. Why did I choose to run? Well, I've always had an interest in civics, and I ran in 2024. I was defeated, and I decided that I wanted to try again. I, I have believed in public service for a long time. Obviously, my whole career has been in public service. I take that obligation to serve very, very much to heart. I've served like 48 years, and now I want to extend that service to a bigger constituency, to the people of this district.
Why should voters select you over your opponent?
Meier: Tom Determan. Okay. So we've been undergoing an experiment in the last 10 years in Iowa, with the basic premise being that if we lower taxes and do favors for the upper-income earners and big corporations that we can really robocharge our economy or turbocharge our economy. I don't think that's worked out so well for us. That experiment has been led by the Republicans in the state legislature, and they have failed us. Tom Determan is a part of that, and he's voted for every one of the things that they've put forward. I don't think that served our district well. In the meanwhile, we have serious problems that they've ignored or flat out denied exist. We have the 2nd highest cancer rate in the United States, one of the few that's still rising. Our water quality is terrible. It hasn't improved in 2013, despite— since 2013, despite a lot of putting a lot of money toward it. We have not improved it at all. And our wages hardly grow at all. Our economy is ranked as among the worst in the nation. And almost the worst thing they've done is underfunded public education. Public education is vital to our state. It's vital if we're going to have an engaged citizenry and a competent workforce, and they've underfunded it for the last 10 years or more. Rate of inflation's ran from 9% to 3.5%, 4%, and they funded it between 2% and 2.5% each year. That's not sustainable, and the effects are showing. When I was a youngster, and even when my kids were in school, we were so proud of the fact that Iowa had one of the best school systems in the nation. Now we are ranked 27th. We're not even in the top half. That's a serious deterioration. And I— that's a problem that they've ignored.
What specific policies are you wanting to introduce in the state legislature?
Meier: So we definitely need to do a lot more work on our water quality. What combination of incentives that requires is up for debate, but it definitely requires a greater emphasis and a greater willingness to monitor and find out what the results are. One of the things that the legislature did on the last day of session in this past session was they stripped funding for Iowa's only statewide water quality monitoring network. It was $300,000. That was the investment it was to make every year to keep this thing running. We had a network of 60 water sensors. They stripped out the funding for it. We don't even have that anymore. It's hard to know if you're making any progress on water quality when you refuse to have a real-time sensor network up and running. So, that's one of the— that's really low-hanging fruit, is to aggressively monitor our water and our environment to find out what is in this environment that's causing our cancer rate to go so high, if that is the case indeed. Those are two things that are of importance to me, is finding out why we have such a high cancer rate, what we can do to bring that rate down, and bring our water quality to something of— that's of a more healthy condition.
The cost of living is rising faster than wages, causing economic hardship for many Iowan families. What type of legislation would you support that could alleviate this strife?
Meier: So I have spent the last six months going from door to door in Clinton and talking to people. And I, one of the questions I ask them is, how much are you getting paid? And do you think it's fair? Is it able to support you? And even the people who have what we might consider good-paying jobs are stressed. You're right, they can't afford things. It's hard on everybody. One of the things that we need to look at is our minimum wage. Now, I know a lot of people don't work for the minimum wage, but it sets the floor. And it's $7.25 an hour right now. All the states that surround us, with the exception of Wisconsin, have a higher, sometimes a significantly higher minimum wage than we do. Minnesota is like $11.65 an hour. South Dakota is something in that ballpark. Nebraska, $15 an hour. Nebraska has that minimum wage because they were— they approved it in a statewide referendum. Illinois, at least $15 an hour. Here we are at $7.25 an hour. What makes us so— what makes us think that we— that's all the better we can do? I definitely want to work on increasing the minimum wage and seeing if we can push up wages generally. It's really difficult to combat inflation by talking down prices. I don't know that that's ever really worked well. It seems like once prices go up, it's really hard to bring them down with the exception of a few categories of things. So I think the emphasis needs to be on increasing wages.
And earlier this month, the legislature came back for a special session to pass financial incentives for a proposed steel plant in southeast Iowa. Explain why you would or wouldn't vote for the financial package.
Meier: So I would have asked some more questions. The first question I would ask is, is it real? This has all the marks, all the hallmarks of some kind of a last-minute surprise to maybe goose the election a little bit. It has a lot of questionable aspects to it. I honestly don't know where I would have landed on this. It's— I mean, there's no question that this type of development would be a large boon to everybody in the state, particularly in the southeast corner of the state where we're located. It would, it would spur growth. There's no question about that. But at what cost to the state? I am honestly torn on this. I hope it's real. Um, but I don't know if it is, and I don't know how I would have voted on it. I would have wanted a lot more input, that's for sure. I think this, this was a rush job. People were, you know, put on notice a few days ahead of time there was going to be this, and we conducted a day's worth of hearings on it, maybe. I certainly don't think we learned as much about it as we should have. So that type of process makes me uncomfortable.
What is your main message to voters ahead of the November 3rd election?
Meier: My message is that I have served this public in this community for 48 years. I've delivered that service using good judgment. I've delivered that service with integrity, and you can count on me to keep my performance at that level. I Promise— I don't like to say the word promise, but you can count on vigorous representation that's focused on the interests of the entire community and communication with the community. Feedback is always important. You can count on feedback from me. You can count on questions back to me, to the community. asking what they want me to do. It's not so much what my priorities are, it's what the priorities of the community are that would drive me. And that's how I would seek to work to engage voters at all levels all the time.
Early voting begins in Iowa on October 14. Election Day is November 3. Links to the Auditor's website for more election information: Clinton.
