Vander Plaats ready to put government on chopping block

Vander Plaats spoke Monday to about a dozen people at the Le Mars Pizza Ranch during a tour hitting all 99 of Iowa's counties. [Click to enlarge]

Vander Plaats spoke Monday to about a dozen people at the Le Mars Pizza Ranch during a tour hitting all 99 of Iowa's counties.

Iowa ranks in the top 10 in the nation for business and industry property taxes.

The state should cut back property taxes by finding efficiencies in the government, he said.

"We need to take a look and say, 'Can we streamline agencies and departments, can we better utilize technology?'" Vander Plaats said. "Zero-based budgeting. What programs work."

Vander Plaats said he would bring with him a team of executives to help streamline Iowa's government.

The state needs a reality check in terms of government employee pay, he said.

"Iowa ranks No. 1 in the wage disparity between the state government employee and the private sector employee," Vander Plaats said. "If you have a private sector job, if you got a comparable job with the state government, it would pay you on average 46 percent more than the private sector."

Jobs that can be outsourced to private industries for a better rate should be, he claimed.

Cutting back government should extend to Iowa's business sector, Vander Plaats said.

Iowa, he said, is ranked 49th in the country for new business startups and 46th in the nation for a hospitable business environment.

"In order to open up Iowa for business, it's not rocket science," Vander Plaats said. "We need a competitive tax structure, we need a friendly regulatory structure, and we need a governor who's willing to market the state as a right-to-work state versus a union shop state."

When asked about what he would do to help bring jobs back to northwest Iowa after the closing of the John Morrell plant in Sioux City, Vander Plaats said the state needs to shift its focus away from only trying to attract giant companies.

"I'd like to be the governor that would have 1,000 businesses add two to four jobs and get your growth from small business development than get your growth from one big kahuna," he said. "Our government has become two much involved in the private enterprise, picking winners and losers."

If Iowa's current tax credit incentives were halved, Iowa could eliminate the corporate income tax, he added.

Vander Plaats proposed pulling back the state government's hands from education by shifting control back to the local districts.

"We've grown a bureaucracy at the expense of the classroom," he said. "Our cost has gone up and our results have gone down."

Local districts should have the ability to make more decisions, like whether they want to pay math and science teachers more, Vander Plaats said.

The government has too much presence in schools, he added.

"We need to understand that it is the parents' right, the parents' responsibility and the parents' privilege to raise, nurture and educate their children," Vander Plaats said. "Not the government's."

Both No Child Left Behind and the Iowa Core Curriculum should be eliminated in Iowa, he said.

The state should set student performance standards and expectations to be reached, not create curriculum defining how to reach those expectations, Vander Plaats explained.

He also plans to appoint a private school and home school representative to the Iowa Board of Education.

Having good private schools in the area makes the public schools better, he said.

When questioned about same-sex marriage, Vander Plaats said on his first day as governor he would write an executive order halting same-sex marriage in Iowa until Iowans could vote on it.

"What the Supreme Court did on April 3, they can't do. They legislated from the bench," he said, explaining that the court can only void a law, not enact a new law.

Vander Plaats, a Sioux City businessman, faces several contenders in the June 8 primary seeking the Republican nomination in his run for governor.