Voters in Iowa’s Senate District 38 will choose between two Cedar Falls residents next week: Democrat incumbent Eric Giddens and his Republican challenger Dave Sires. The district covers parts of Black Hawk, Tama and northwest Benton counties.
Giddens, 50, is looking for his second full term in the Iowa Senate, which he treats as full-time work. He’s a former Cedar Falls public school teacher and served on the Cedar Falls school board. He’s also worked at the University of Northern Iowa’s Tallgrass Prairie Center and Center for Energy and Environmental Education, where he worked on sustainability programs. Giddens has held his seat in the Legislature since 2019.
IPR News has been reaching out to candidates in some key Statehouse races to ask them about their positions on important issues. Sires did not agree to an interview with IPR News before Election Day. Here is what Giddens had to say. His answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Jump to a specific topic:
- Top legislative priority
- Eliminating the income tax
- Abortion rights
- Fertility treatments and contraception
- Education Savings Accounts (ESAs)
- Growing the state's workforce
What is the most important thing the Legislature should do next session?
Giddens: Education is undoubtedly the focal point of a lot of the work that we've been doing recently, and it should be. Half of the state budget goes to education in one form or another.
It's one of the most important things that state government does. And I'll note that here in Senate District 38, we have the University of Northern Iowa, one of our three Regents’ universities. It's our flagship teacher education university as well.
We have great public schools. We have great private schools. And we also have one of Iowa's nine area education agencies located here in Cedar Falls that has been in the cross hairs in the past year, especially in this last legislative session. We have kind of a concentration of education right here in the Cedar Valley. It's a very, very important issue area for me.
Gov. Kim Reynolds has said it is her goal to eliminate the income tax in Iowa by the end of her current term. Do you support eliminating the income tax? How should the state adjust taxes to make up that revenue?
Giddens: I do not support the elimination of the income tax. Our state revenue is mostly made up of income tax and sales tax — a combination of income tax and sales tax — and I have seen no calculations that would responsibly, in my opinion, support the idea of eliminating the income tax. You'd have to make up that state revenue some other way, either through increases in sales tax through the addition of some other type of tax that we don't currently have, or just cutting lots and lots of spending.
In my opinion, we have lots of priorities that have not been funded in the last decade, including public education and other health and human services needs. I'd be in favor of tax cuts that help working families, but eliminating the state income tax is mostly going to benefit folks that are the highest income earners and very wealthy individuals.
In a 2023 special session, the Legislature passed — and the Iowa Supreme Court later upheld — new abortion restrictions. The law prohibits an abortion once the presence of cardiac activity is detected by ultrasound. That can happen as early as six weeks, when some people are still unaware of their pregnancy.
What action, if any, should the Legislature take to change Iowa’s abortion restrictions?
Giddens: I was very opposed to the six-week abortion ban that that the Legislature did last year in 2023. It’s my philosophical belief that those decisions need to be made between a woman and her health care provider.
I also have serious concerns about the state of maternal health care. In the state of Iowa, we have very large health care, maternal health care, deserts. In some parts of the state, women have to travel 60 miles to reach an OB/GYN. Many of our counties don't have OB/GYN at all.
We are 50th out of 50 states in the number of OB/GYNs per capita. It was very difficult for health care systems to hire OBGYN before this ban went into effect, and now it's all but impossible to hire new ones. So I have really serious concerns about the state of maternal health care here in Iowa with this new ban that's in effect, and I'd be all in favor of repealing what happened last year.
What, if anything, does the Legislature need to do to ensure access to fertility treatments or contraception?
Giddens: We need to do everything we can to ensure continued access to those treatments. And there are ideas floating around for things.
So-called “life at conception” bills would essentially eliminate options like contraception and access to in-vitro fertilization and would only make maternal health care problems worse here in Iowa.
We already have a population challenge in the state of Iowa. We're not really a growing state. We have, right now, a lot of job opportunities that are remaining vacant. We need to do all that we can to keep young, talented folks in the state of Iowa and attract new ones, if possible
A lack of access to maternal health care is a big problem when you're trying to keep talented young families here in the state of Iowa and trying to attract some new ones.
Next year, the state’s Education Savings Accounts that families can use to send students to private schools will be available to everyone regardless of income. Should there be a cap on what the state is willing to spend on ESAs?
Giddens: Absolutely. I was opposed to the Education Savings Accounts, the school voucher program.
From the start, it takes money away from our public schools and diverts it to unaccountable private schools. I'm not opposed to private schooling. I just feel like if you choose to take that option, you need to pay for it with your own money. Tax dollars should go to our public schools.
As the bill’s currently written, the program in place has an unlimited appropriation. And there's no income limitation for eligibility to receive those dollars. I think that it's wild that a program billed as one to help disadvantaged students can give state dollars to a family with lots of resources to send their students to private school.
And what we've learned is that most of the dollars that are going out are going to students who had already been paying to attend private schools. The money isn’t going to help students transfer from public schools over to a private school option that could potentially be better for them.
We need income limitations, and we need to cap the total number of dollars going out of the state coffers into this program.
Should the Legislature have a role in making sure private schools that get state funding don’t rapidly raise their tuition rates?
Giddens: I would be in favor of that as well. Unfortunately, I don't see any interest from my colleagues across the aisle to institute any kind of caps like that.
But that is another thing that we saw was as soon as the ESA program was put into place: lots of private schools across the state raised their tuition, many of them by an amount equal to the new vouchers that families are going to receive to send their students to these schools.
So did the family benefit? Or was it just a mechanism to increase support for the private schools themselves? I think that if they're going to accept students who have these vouchers, then there ought to be a limit to how much they could increase their tuition on these families.
What more should the Legislature do to grow and improve the state’s workforce?
Giddens: There are a number of programs that address workforce issues that I'm very supportive of through the Iowa Economic Development Authority, workforce development and our community colleges.
Young families want good, strong public schools. So that's one thing we need to continue to try to do, is fight for our public schools at a high level, investing in communities where people want to live. That's a role that the state can play through community attraction and tourism opportunities.
I'll also say affordable housing has become more and more of a problem. The state can play a role in trying to help develop more affordable housing across Iowa.
For our workforce, child care is also another big, big issue. I heard recently that many families are spending as much or more on child care as they are on their mortgages, and that's if they're even able to access child care. We have wait-lists all over the place, and so child care is a huge issue, and I think we need to do more to help increase opportunities for child care.
I also think that young folks are not interested in the many of the distractions that come out of the Statehouse these days that I would categorize as culture war issues. And a lot of those are outright discriminatory in nature. We just don’t need to be in that business. We need to cut that out and that will make the state a more welcoming and attractive place.
