Tea, SD — A disappointment today for Iowans looking forward to the day when Lewis & Clark water flows to their town — the Iowa legislature has decided not to loan any money to Lewis & Clark.
That’s from Lewis & Clark Regional Water System Executive Director Troy Larson. He says system officials had been working with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds and local legislators to secure a federal funding advance, since promised federal funding has been so slow to come in. He says last time Iowa loaned them $7 million over two years. This time they were seeking $3.5 million from fiscal year 2020 through 2021. Larson tells us that the governor had included it in her proposed infrastructure budget. He says they received strong support from the Iowa Senate too.
But he says they got “nixed” in the House version.
He says it was not due to lack of trying. He says the local legislators really “went to bat” for Lewis and Clark, and there was nothing that could have been done differently.
According to Larson, Chairman Gary Mohr, a Republican from the Quad Cities area told them he supported the project strongly, but since they had received a loan recently, it was “someone else’s turn.”
Larson says the news was a bit of a shock.
Larson tells us that realistically, this will probably mean about a year’s delay in getting water to Sioux Center and Hull, meaning they would probably be connected by the end of 2022 instead of 2021. He says it’s too early to know how this will affect the timeline for Sheldon and Sibley.
