Voters in the Des Moines suburb of Johnston and in parts of Urbandale and Saylorville have the choice to elect Republican Rep. Eddie Andrews or his Democratic challenger Tiara Mays-Sims this November.
Andrews, 58, is a tech entrepreneur and minister who was first elected to the Statehouse in 2020 and is now seeking a third term in office. He lives in Johnston.
Mays-Sims, 35, also lives in Johnston. She is a contract manager for a managed care organization. Mays-Sims serves on the Heartland Area Education Agency board of directors and was a primary candidate for House District 43 in 2022.
IPR News has been reaching out to candidates in some key Statehouse races to ask them about their positions on important issues. Here are what Andrews and Mays-Sims had to say. Their 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 in the next session?
Mays-Sims: Public education is my top priority, and I think it should be the top priority in the state. One: public schools are attractive to families. That's why people want to come to different communities. It's really the public schools. When you buy a house, that's what people talk about. That's one of the things they ask. If you go on a real estate website, they're going to list the schools. We're a state that doesn't have tourist attractions — mountains, oceans and things like that. So, we do have to be creative in how we attract Iowans to stay here and people move to Iowa.
I also think that our kids are our future, and they deserve a quality education, a free public education, if they so desire. And so, I really think that there's some reform that we need to do to make sure that we properly fund public schools every year. We've got to at least match inflation and what's happening.
Andrews: My biggest passion has been, and will always be, providing better access to mental health care services — and health care services in general. We’ve worked to increase the number of doctors here. We've added telehealth, which shockingly was not even present when I was elected four years ago. That was one of the first things I added. We’ve expanded the psychiatric residency program at the University of Iowa to train more doctors every year, and soon we’ll expand that to Broadlawns here locally.
We’ve added higher psychiatric medical institution (PMIC) rates for our acute cases, for both kids and adults. We've increased the Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rate. You don't have to be an economics major to understand that you're going to get better service if you are providing the health care business with more funds.
And we’ve passed a number of policy changes that allow for better continuity of care.
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 other taxes to make up for that revenue?
Andrews: I'm glad that we're kind of on the same page on that particular one. That's one of the things that I had really thought about doing when I first came into the House, besides the mental health issues. I thought of various things that can leave the state better off and that was one of them, if we can do that responsibly, making sure that we're not scrimping on services.
I have a proposal out for the elimination of property taxes without losing one cent of public services. I was here at the Capitol last week running the numbers to make sure that this can be done. The plan is to start with both seniors and veterans, and the numbers look good. We will certainly be bringing that up at the very beginning of session, should I be reelected.
Mays-Sims: There are states that are able to have successful no-income models because of the level they bring in from tourism. We don't have that. So, my question to Gov. Reynolds really is, how are you going to make that up? Right now, the only way that she's going to make up those funds is by taking money out of the two largest things that our budget accounts for: Medicaid and public education. It's not a sustainable model, in my opinion.
What action if any should the Legislature take to change Iowa’s abortion restrictions?
Mays-Sims: The abortion ban is just unacceptable. First off, six weeks is not enough time for a woman to know that she's pregnant. As a woman, I recognize that a menstrual cycle is four to six weeks. So, we're not giving women enough time.
Quite frankly, there are too many nuances when it comes to pregnancy and women's health care to be considered from a legislative standpoint. We just need to let doctors and women make the decision on their own. Doctors should not be in emergency rooms trying to decide if they need to make a decision on somebody living or dying, and we've seen it happen.
Andrews: I got elected in 2020 before the "heartbeat bill" was introduced. Now that it’s gone all the way through the court system, I think it's a great time to make sure we focus more on the issues surrounding that mother and continue to strengthen the families. We have continued to support the More Options for Maternal Support Program.
We really need to focus on the reasons why a woman would feel desperate to get an abortion. I don't think even most pro-choice people want an abortion. I think the comment used to be “rare and safe,” right? So, we need to focus on child care, protecting women from domestic abuse, making sure that they don't have to worry about whether they're going to be safe and or looking to avoid poverty. And so just giving them all of the options, putting our arms around them and helping them through their life.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In a 2023 special session, the Iowa 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.
Rep. Andrews voted in favor of the law as a member of the Iowa House. Mays-Sims was not a member of the legislature.
With Iowa’s abortion law in place, banning most procedures after six weeks, what if anything does the Legislature need to do to ensure access to fertility treatments or contraception?
Andrews: It's not a six-week abortion ban, it's more of the heartbeat, which you know could depend on the woman, right? If you're thin, it may be six weeks. If you're curvy, it could be eight or ten weeks. The issue is when life is detected, based on the heartbeat. That’s what the Legislature passed. I personally want to support all families. I certainly support fertility treatments, and anything that I could do to support people wanting to have families.
Mays-Sims: We need to get things on the books to protect access to contraception, protect IVF and protect women who need to have a safe abortion treatment for whatever reason. Abortions are not always because people don’t want to have a child. There are a lot of reasons why somebody wants to go through that — health reasons, situations of rape, incest. There are too many nuances for us to put into a legislative bill.
Next year, the state’s Education Savings Accounts that families can use to send students to private schools will be available to anyone, regardless of income. Should there be a cap on what the state is willing to spend on ESAs?
Mays-Sims: I’m going to push back on this question because it's not available to "anyone." It's not available to anyone, as long as private institutions have the ability to deny access to their institutions based on whatever criteria they deem fit.
While the program may say that any family can have access to it, they did not put in any safeguards for children like my own, who has a disability and who needs extra access to things. I'm not even going to go to a private institution and ask if they're going to be able to support him or accept him, because they won't. I think we really got to change the narrative that it's available for all kids. It's not.
Andrews: I come from a strong tradition of education in my family. My grandfather used to always say, “Get that education.” And here's a man that was born one generation away from slavery. He may not have known everything about entrepreneurship or investment or 401Ks, but he did know that education was the key to success.
Education is not a one size fits all, and even in my own family, my two girls were K-12, all the way public school. We also raised my niece in my house, and she was in public school all the way. But it didn’t quite fit my boy. And so, he needed a different option.
We want to make sure that parents have the options for what is best for that particular child. And I just want to make sure that we support all forms of institutions of education, whether that's public school, whether it's private school, whether it's vocational school, whether it's home school.
What more should the Legislature be doing to grow and improve the state’s workforce?
Mays-Sims: We've got to become a more welcoming state right now. People don't look at Iowa and say, “Oh, this looks like a great place that I want to come and raise my family.” We need to be attractive to young women that are interested in setting up a home for their families.
She can't come here and have a safe pregnancy. She can't come here and get the great public education that I got, and that all of us had, before the public ed regulations in the last decade have been tampered with.
When I travel, people will ask where I'm from. I'll say I'm from Iowa, and it's kind of funny when people say, “They’ve got Black people in Iowa?” Because when they hear about Iowa on the news, on CNN or Fox News, this does not seem like a place that is welcoming to diverse communities, and that's something that we have to fix.
Andrews: I'm reminded of three different families who've chosen to stay here, who told me personally, that the bill two years ago that I had a hand in making — to eliminate the retirement income tax — was a major part of why they decided to move here. Two of them were military retirements.
Now they're raising their families here and paying sales tax at HyVee or Target or Casey's, and actually building our economy here.
What looks like, to some people, as a tax reduction is actually an increase in bringing more people to the state. As mentioned, we’re also enticing doctors, enticing different professions here to the state of Iowa. It’s starting to work. You may not feel it yet, but it is starting to work.
This story was updated to provide additional context about Iowa’s abortion law.