Sheldon, Iowa — Absentee ballots are now available for the Northwest Iowa Community College Referendum vote.
The Special Northwest Iowa Community College Election will be held on April 3, 2018. A qualified voter may go to the Auditor’s Office to personally cast his or her vote. Or the voter can request an absentee ballot in writing, but it must be on an Iowa Official Absentee request form. Area auditors advise us that this form is available on the Iowa Secretary of State’s web page. They also say that each voter must use a separate form.
The deadline to request a ballot to be mailed is 5:00 p.m., Friday, March 23, 2018.
All ballots returned through the mail must be postmarked before Election Day. For more information concerning absentee voting, you can call your county auditor’s office. Northwest Iowa Community College covers O’Brien, Sioux, Osceola, and Lyon Counties and portions of Cherokee and Plymouth counties, so the election will be held in those counties.
Northwest Iowa Community College president, Dr. Aletha Stubbe tells us the purpose of the referendum and how they decided that upgrades needed to be made.
The proposal is for the measure to raise $14.2 million over fifteen years. She says this is less money than they’ve asked for in previous elections, and would amount to a small commitment per taxpayer.
Here is the full text of the measure, which is being called “Proposition B” on the ballots:
“Shall the Board of Directors of Northwest Iowa Community College in the Counties of Cherokee, Clay, Dickinson, Lyon, O’Brien, Osceola, Plymouth and Sioux be authorized to expand nursing/healthcare, career/technical, and agriculture-related training, to strengthen student services and partnerships with high schools and businesses, to expand, renovate, erect, and equip buildings, to contract indebtedness therefore, and to issue to its school bonds in an amount not exceeding $14,185,000 for those purposes?”
