O'Malley attacks Iowa governor's water proposal.
A new proposal from Gov. Terry Branstad to pay for clean water projects with stage sales tax would only "shortfund" public education in the Iowa, Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O'Malley said Friday.
Iowa's Republican governor earlier this month detailed a plan to funnel an estimated $4.7 billion to statewide water improvement efforts by extending the 1-cent state sales tax that's used to fund infrastructure projects for K-12 schools. But the former Maryland governor pushed back against that proposal during a discussion on water quality with a small group at the Indian Creek Nature Center outside Cedar Rapids.
"That's unacceptable," O'Malley said. "We have to do both of these things at the same time. We have to be able to do several things at the same time, and the notion somehow that it's a tradeoff, that you can only adequately fund your schools or adequately clean up your rivers, I just wanted to say is absolutely false."
Some Iowa legislators, including Senate Majority Leader Michael Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, have similarly criticized the plan. Branstad, however, has called it among the "biggest and boldest initiatives" he's ever brought to lawmakers as a governor. Extending the sales tax for an additional 20 years would still ensure a funding increase to schools and preserve $21 billion for education, Branstad has said.
"It's too bad that desperate times call for desperate math from Gov. O'Malley," Branstad spokesperson Ben Hammes said on Friday.
The low-polling Democratic hopeful has regularly talked about water quality issues on the campaign trail, comparing Iowa's problems with nitrate runoff from farm fields to the pollution of the Chesapeake Bay he dealt with during his two terms as Maryland's governor. For instance, O'Malley's administration doubled a so-called "flush tax" to pay for improvements to wastewater treatment infrastructure that had been dumping nitrates into the bay and contributing to oxygen-sucking algae blooms.
"We helped a lot of little towns upgrade their wastewater treatment plants that otherwise would've been waiting years and years and years," he said during the Friday stop.
O'Malley also advocated increasing the state's use of stream buffers to decrease pollution. He spoke fondly about developing a love for the roughly 4,500-square mile bay as a child.
"My parents used to take me down to the eastern shore, and some of the happiest memories of my life were walking around the marshes and the streams with my binoculars," he said. "I was always bugging my dad for a new bird book."
"I'm starting to sound like Aldo Leopold now," O'Malley said at one point, referencing the famous conservationist who was born in Burlington.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2016/01/15/omalley-attacks-iowa-governors-water-proposal/78862974/
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