Will Christie run, other Vilsack news; Principal gets its property taxes cut
Wait! A boring item that has nothing to do with politics!
For the second year in a row, the Principal Group has won a little-noted court fight to get its property taxes reduced. Earlier this month, a Polk County judge agreed with Principal that the assessments on five of its downtown properties were too high. The result: Principal’s tax bill was cut by $632,523, according to calculations made by Skinny’s Board of Calculating Complex Tax Issues.
The property tax in Des Moines is divided eight ways, but most of the dollars go to the school district and the city. The court ruling means the schools will collect $241,124 less than if Principal had lost the appeal of its assessment and the city will collect $240,269 less. Other hits: Polk County, $93,183; Broadlawns Hospital, $39,921; Area XI college, $7,653; the bus system, $6,072; the assessor’s office (the guys who make the assessment in the first place), $3,805; and the agricultural extension office, $496.
Still, before you start moaning about tax breaks for the rich, consider this: Even after the court order, Principal will pay $10,689,656 in property taxes on its five buildings downtown.
In 2007 and again in 2009, the assessor valued Principal’s largest building, the tower at 801 Grand Ave., at $70,863,000. Each time, Principal objected, but each time the Board of Assessment upheld the assessor. Each time, Principal went to court. In 2009, the court cut the assessment to $65,431,500; this year, the cut was even deeper, to $62,291,000. Principal also fought — and won in court — its assessments in 2003. ...
Now, the politics:
Democrats are all atwitter about the Vilsack news — but not the fact that ex-Gov Tom was in the news for three days when he too-hastily fired a woman he shouldn’t have fired at the Department of Agriculture and then had to apologize to everyone for being on this earth. No, the Democrats are atwitter by ex-First Lady Christie’s statement to Politico.com this month that “I’m just really interested” in running for office in Iowa. She didn’t exactly say when and for what, but it’s pretty clear she meant for Congress in 2012, when Iowa probably will lose a seat and have just four Congressional spots.
Her friends paint this picture: Leonard Boswell beats Brad Zaun this year to stay in Congress. But he makes this his last hurrah and retires in 2012. The redistricted state includes a central Iowa seat that includes Des Moines and the surrounding counties, including Story County. That makes Republican Tom Latham an incumbent with a strong base; he lives in Ames and represents the oddly shaped Fourth District, which includes most suburban counties — Warren, Madison, Dallas, Boone, Marshall and Story — but is primarily a rural district in north central and northeast Iowa. The Democrats would need a strong and popular candidate to run against the pretty strong and pretty popular Latham, the thinking goes. And who better than Christie Vilsack?
The problems: Democrats have been wanting Boswell to retire for years and years, but instead he just keeps running and winning. There’s no indication he plans to quit in two years. Also, the map hasn’t been redrawn yet, and no one knows if, indeed, there will be a central Iowa district. And, if Boswell does retire and a central Iowa district emerges, a dozen or so other Democrats have their eye on the seat — and have had for years — and aren’t likely to gallantly step aside for the former First Lady. Everyone is looking at the seat and no one knows what is going to happen, including with Leonard, a Boswell operative told Skinny last week. It’s known that Christie Vilsack looked hard at running against Sen. Chuck Grassley this year. She was coy about it, but friends say she had some polls taken and that while the polls said she’d be a stronger candidate than Roxanne Conlin — who is running — that Grassley still would win. And that scared her off. “I’m very competitive,” she told Politico. “If I’m going to run, I’m not just going to run to run — I’m going to run to win.”
Politico called her “a shrewd political mind.”
Other Vilsack news: Son Jess, an assistant Polk County attorney, is leaving to become an environmental lawyer for MidAmerican Energy. Son Doug, who lives in Colorado, was in Des Moines the other day raising money for his cause, a nonprofit group called Elephant Energy, which has nothing to do with Republicans. “In a nutshell, we work with rural communities in Namibia to distribute/market small-scale renewable energy technologies like solar-powered lanterns, solar cell phone chargers, solar radios, etc.,” he told would-be supporters. ...
This just in: Another East Coast politician has been visiting Iowa. New Hampshire state senator Amanda Merrill has made two trips here this summer. Oh, never mind. Further reporting finds she came to see her son, Sam Fuld, the fearless centerfielder for the Iowa Cubs. ...
The Des Moines Register noted that AFSCME came out for Chet Culver a few days ago but also noted that it didn’t seem to come with any money. Well, not quite. AFSCME has given $1,000,000 this year to the Democratic Governors Association. And the DGA has turned around and given $750,000 directly to the Culver campaign and $782,500 to “Iowans for Responsible Government,” a Rob Tully-run organization (with no website and a Centre Hall, Pa., mailing address) that’s buying lots of ads here — none of which makes Terry Branstad look very good. The DGA money coming into Iowa is far more than is being shipped to any other state. And the AFSCME money going into the DGA is far and away the group’s top source of financing. All that doesn’t seem to be a coincidence. (This year, the DGA has also spent $21,000 with Jeff Link’s political organization for polling and has given $16,000 to Jerry Crawford’s law firm for catering.)
Only five individual Iowans gave money to the DGA in the first half of this year — led by a $10,000 gift from Republican Jim Cownie. Casinos were the biggest givers from the state. Republican Gary Kirke’s Wild Rose Entertainment gave $30,000, Ameristar of Council Bluffs tossed in $5,000, and Terrible’s Lakeside Casino in Osceola (whose parent company is in bankruptcy proceedings) added $25,000. Why? Perhaps because the Republican platform wants to eliminate gambling in Iowa. Perhaps.
Givers to the DGA might like to know that besides supporting Culver and anti-Branstad ads and Link’s polling and Crawford’s fund-raisers, the organization in the first half also spent $91,615 at Churchill Downs in Louisville. Skinny hopes it was to place bets on the Derby horse owned in part by Kirke and Crawford. If it was used to bet Paddy O’Prado to show, it would have returned the DGA around $350,000. ...
Footnote: Noting that Attorney General Tom Miller told the governor he didn’t have enough goods on Alcoholic Beverage division administrator Lynn Walding (a former assistant attorney general) to fire him and also noting that Miller has said he has a conflict of interest in the probe into the political contributions of Fort Dodge gaming interests to Culver because the campaign is run by former assistant attorney general Donn Stanley, a guy e-mails: “How does [Miller] not have a conflict of interest in deciding whether his former employee can legally be removed from office for mismanagement?” CV
