Roland Mayor Kurtis Bower is seeking the Republican nomination for Iowa House District 55, bringing a background in military service and local leadership to the race.
Bower is a veteran of the Iraq War, having served in the 101st Airborne Division. He currently serves as mayor of Roland and is the founder and CEO of Reforging Families, an Iowa-based nonprofit focused on family court reform and promoting equal shared parenting.
He says his campaign is driven by concerns about the direction things are heading at the Statehouse, with the June primary now less than a month away.
“Lobbying down there for the last several years, I found that many of the status quo still continued to exist with property taxes seemed to be a big deal,” Bower says. “But part of my problem is when the voters themselves don’t show up to the budget workshops at city council meetings or the county board of supervisors meetings, but yet for some reason when you would go to the state legislature, these legislators said, ‘hey, you know, we’re hearing from people on property taxes,’ and if saving money is a big deal, there’s ways to do it without cutting the revenue. It’s a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”
Bower points to property rights as a key issue in rural Iowa, particularly when it comes to proposed carbon capture pipelines.
“I have been working with other lobbyists that have attempted to basically bridge this gap between the House and the Senate on allowing the pipeline to go in, but using voluntary easements without the use of eminent domain,” Bower says. “That’s garnered a lot of blowback. But at the same time, if we’re going to say no eminent domain, there are landowners who have the right to put it on their land as well. So we have to respect both sides of the property rights group where if there’s no eminent domain, then what we’re gonna do is we’re going to allow these owners that wanna engage in voluntary easements to do so. That’s my belief.”
The campaign comes in an open-seat race following the decision by current State Representative Shannon Latham not to seek reelection.
Iowa House District 55 includes all of Franklin and Hamilton counties and parts of Wright and Story counties. Bower faces Beau Klaver of Kamrar for the Republican nomination in the June primary. Democrat Cynthia Paschen is running unopposed.
Photo provided by Kurtis Bower
Full interview below
