Breaking down boards of supervisors
Breaking down boards of supervisors
How Iowa's county governments are structured, and why Tama County's is growing
Two years after Tama County finalized its plan for voting precincts and county supervisor districts for the 2020s, it’s done it all over again.
New maps were necessary following approval of a ballot measure to expand the county board of supervisors from three to five members.
After a series of meetings, confusion on who’s in charge of drawing the maps and two final public hearings (the third was waived), the plan was sent to the Iowa Secretary of State on Jan. 23. The precincts that were supposed to be in effect until 2033 will end up used only for the 2022 midterm elections, 2023 city/school elections and 2024 presidential caucuses.
The five-supervisor map is the next, but possibly not final, step in a grass-roots campaign against construction of two large wind farms in Tama County.
A proposed wind farm named Winding Stair Wind (after Traer’s Winding Stairs), a project from Apex Clean Energy of Virginia, came into public light in March 2022. Within a month, opposition led to creation of the group Tama County Against Turbines. After the supervisors voted 3-0 to reaffirm and leave unchanged a wind ordinance from 1998, a petition forced a vote on expanding the board. More detail can be found in an Oct. 31, 2022 blog post at Iowa Highway Ends. A wind farm by the same company has been proposed in Taylor County. That county had a well-attended meeting on its wind ordinance in April.
The Tama County backlash seems to have succeeded, as Winding Stair Wind’s office in Dysart closed last February. Its website is gone. Salt Creek Wind, which is not connected to the other project, still has a website, but nothing has been built. No moratorium on wind farms has been voted on, nor have any changes to the ordinance been made — yet. In 2023, an industrial solar ordinance was discussed.
Tama County joins 20 others in Iowa, mostly in the western half of the state, that have five supervisors in districted maps. There are six possible styles of board based on number of members (three or five) and three plan options. Currently, any county may select any combination.
Senate File 2061, introduced by Sen. Adrian Dickey, R-Packwood, would require all counties with a population over 75,000 to use Plan 3, which creates equal-population districts with district-specific elections. It would not mandate a number of members.
A 75,000-person threshold would apply to 10 counties. (In 2020, Iowa had zero counties between 53,000 and 93,000 in population, but Warren is making a run into that gap.) Only two of those, Polk and Linn, use Plan 3. This is not the first time such a bill has been proposed; there was one last year too.
Floyd County in 2022 changed from Plan 1 (unrestricted at-large) to Plan 3. A proposal in Pottawattamie County to go to Plan 2 (entire county votes on supervisors in specific districts) failed last August.
The highest-profile change in the past decade was Linn County’s 2016 reversal of a 2006 vote for expansion, going from five supervisors back to three.
If Linn County returned to having five supervisors, its rank in number of residents per supervisor would stay at second-most in the state, but a lot closer to third-most Scott than most-by-a-mile Polk.
Adams County, Iowa’s smallest, has five supervisors. Its 2020 population per supervisor (741) is by far the lowest in the state. When Tama County goes to five, its 2020 population per supervisor will drop from 5,712 to 3,427.
Last year, a five-member board in a county outside Iowa discussed expanding to serve its growing population. Until that happens, Tama County, Iowa, and Los Angeles County, California — the nation’s largest — will have something in common.
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