By

Representative Dawn Pettengill

Free weekends are great! I haven’t had one since Christmas and really was looking forward to spending the free time doing absolutely nothing political. So, I went to the movies tonight to see “Hotel for Dogs” and met Lizzie. When Lizzie first laid eyes on me, she said “How’d you get so big?” I told her “Cookies” and she looked surprised. Man alive, I thought the crowd at the Capitol was tough. What happened this week? We did some debating, but not much. Mainly it was lots of subcommittee meetings. When a legislator requests a bill, it goes to drafting. Then it comes back to you for proofing or changing. If it’s okay, then you file it and it gets assigned to a committee. The committee chair assigns it to a subcommittee to work it.

Besides meeting with your legislators one on one, a subcommittee meeting is the one chance a person or group can come to testify to make their opinions known on a particular bill. Because funnel week is getting close, we have to get all of our bills through committees for voting out. That’s why this one and the next two weeks will be full of those subcommittee meetings. So far, I’ve been assigned to 45 different bills. You learn a lot about a subject during these meetings, and I really enjoy that part. For instance, this week I learned quite a bit about the ICN or Iowa Communications Network. How the ICN was developed, maintained and the private and public agreements to make it happen. Every day is a learning day, which is one of the things that makes the job enjoyable! Visitors this week were Mike and Bev Riege, Nancy Farmer, Dave McKechnie, Steve Thompson, Al and Ruth Schafbuch, Robert Ritscher, Dave Wrage, FCCLA from Center Point Urbana and Benton Community. The Benton Community group had an appointment at 1:00 and I waited outside the chamber until about 1:20 when we started debate. For those of you who don’t know, I never leave the chamber during debate. That way, when you ask me a question, I was there and can recount what happened. Sometimes, you have lobbyists try to pull you out to try to get you to change your mind. While debating, the only people who will be changing my mind are the other legislators. I have gotten feedback from home via the Saturday coffees, emails, phone calls, the Constituent Advisory Committee and statehouse researchers. Once the bill is called up, the only people I’m listening to are my colleagues. Oh, and I have email up too, if you have last minute comments or opinions. Reminder: March 7th at 10:00 am will be the Keystone Legislative Coffee.

Sen. Kapucian will be joining me. We hope to see you there! My next column will be on the Rebuild Iowa Committee I sit on and the good things that are happening. It isn’t all doom and gloom! There is real progress being made and I will tell you all about it. If you have any questions you can reach me at 319-610-3412-celloe email dawn.pettengill@legis.state.ia.us.