Benjamin Schauer
Occupation: Educator
Email: voteschauer@gmail.com
Office Seeking: Iowa House District 15
Benjamin is a proud Iowa transplant who loves his adopted state! He lives in Dunlap and just started his 11th year teaching for the Boyer Valley Community School District. He is constantly present in his local community and sits on the Dunlap City Council and the Dunlap Community Development Corporation board, serves as the Boyer Valley Education Association president, and helps organize the local fine arts scene as a board member for the Western Iowa Arts Association. He is also an active church musician and regularly serves on the worship team of his home congregation (Grace E-Free Church) and accompanies the Our Savior Lutheran Church choir.
Benjamin was inspired to run for office because Western Iowa needs a strong representative in Des Moines that will advocate for us. This means fighting for our public schools, clean water, access to healthcare, and private property rights and working to revive and grow our communities.
Long-term economic growth and water quality. Clean water must be a priority for our entire state. Every community depends on clean drinking water, but maintaining infrastructure and addressing pollution and runoff are adding additional costs and strains on our already stretched system. As a legislator, I would support greater state investment into water system upgrades, especially for rural communities that often lack resources to keep up with their water-system upgrade needs. I would also support state investment into proven water-quality practices like cover crops, wetlands, and precision nutrient management while also expanding cost-sharing opportunities for farmers and landowners to make these policies affordable long-term. Finally, I support holding habitual polluters financially accountable for the costs their pollution imposes on our communities. We also need long-term economic growth plans that give people a reason to build their lives here. This goes beyond basic business recruitment. It means investing in and expanding our infrastructure systems, balancing support for small businesses owners and corporations, fully funding and strengthening partnerships with our local school systems and community colleges, and raising the minimum wage to keep up with our neighbors in Nebraska. Ultimately, we need a vision that transcends election cycles and partisan politics and gives us something to work toward for the next 20 years. |
What should be done to strengthen business climate, grow the workforce, and encourage economic and population growth?
This starts with long-term strategic vision. A community cannot grow if there is no concept of where it wants to be in 5, 10, or 20 years. Failure to plan means local and state governments are constantly putting out fires as they appear rather than addressing the systemic causes of the challenges facing our communities.
Beyond this, we have to ensure our communities are desirable locations to live, work, and raise a family. This means ensuring our public school systems are strong and adequately funded, greater access to healthcare services, recreational activities, and cultural opportunities, and reliable basic services like infrastructure and public safety. Economic growth is difficult to sustain if people can’t afford of find joy living in their community.
The third pillar of this plan is a robust public-private partnership to help recruit, maintain, and grow both the business community and its workforce. This means investing in local entrepreneurs and small businesses, expanding career and technical education programs (and partnering with the local business community to save costs and increase exposure), and seeking out outside grants to fund these endeavors.
Ultimately, the goal should not just be to get another business in town. It should be to build a community that grows organically and attracts people because of what it offers to them and the life they want to build.
Property tax relief should focus on reducing the burden on the taxpayer without shifting it to local governments or forcing them to cut essential services. If the goal is to limit a local government’s ability to raise property tax revenue, the state must also provide a stable and adequate replacement source of funding. This means fully funding public schools at the rate of inflation and increasing state investment in crucial infrastructure like roads and water systems. The legislature should also give governing bodies more predictability in their annual budgeting by passing supplemental school state aid agreements on time and providing additional funding or rollout windows for new state mandates. We should also be exploring ways to grow the local tax base, especially in our rural communities that are seeing their main streets shutter and close. This means setting long-term visions in all of our communities for what this looks like and how we integrate it. More businesses mean more jobs, economic activity, and additional revenue to help distribute the cost of local services across a wider tax base. This can be done through a variety of public-private partnerships, state and federal grants, small business development programs, and strategic investment and planning to attract new businesses to these communities. |
What would you like voters to know about you, beyond your positions on the issues?
I moved a lot as a kid. I came to Iowa from Oklahoma when I was a teenager and then moved to Western Iowa 11 years ago for a teaching position. Prior to Dunlap, I never would have called anywhere "home," but now I've put down roots that grow deeper every day. That's the power of a strong community, and it's why I'm running to represent it. I want to give back to the community that has poured so much into me and made me feel welcome and truly at home for the first time in my life. I am humbled by this opportunity, and I appreciate the support I've received so far.