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COMMUNITY COLLEGE DAY

Pictured below are more photos from the Community College Day:

FAST FACTS:

• Des Moines Area Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship is helping to grow Iowa’s workforce. For graduates of this program, their wages and employment in 2021 ranged from $43,790 to $50,593. Eighty-six percent of these graduates were employed in Iowa and they earned $12,512 each year more than those not in the program.

   

• Eastern Iowa Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship award 628 students in 2022 with a total of $731,279 and 564 students with $484,193 in 2023.

   

• Iowa Western Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship awarded 294 students with a total of $879,735 in the 2022/23 academic year and 221 students with $478,191 in the the 2023/24 academic year.

   

• Northeast Iowa Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship has helped 1,619 students save $6.1 million on tuition since 2019.

   

• Southeastern Community College’s Last-Dollar Scholarship awarded 306 students with a total of $894,000 of direct support during the 2022/23 academic year.

BILL ON ELECTRIC ADVANCE RATEMAKING

• HF 2554: This is a bill that relates to electric power regulation, energy storage, and transmission facilities advance ratemaking principles. Advance ratemaking is a practice where utilities petition the Iowa Utilities Board for a pre-established set of regulations and rate of return for future energy projects, allowing them to recover costs proactively to reduce risk.

   

• This is a good bill that helps to establish base load, which is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, so that the rate costs are kept down.

   

• Overall, this piece of legislation essentially adds oversight to the electric process by making the Iowa Utilities Board privy to the growth of any electrical company in any certain sector. Infrastructure such as wind turbines and solar panels are subsidized by the government, so electrical companies tend to build a great number of them as it is fairly cheap to do so. However, this creates an excess of energy in our state, so it’s passed on to the MISO Grid. The MISO Grid is the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and manages the flow of electricity across the high-voltage, long-distance power lines that stretch from Canada all the way down to Texas. This energy is then sold to other states to use, like Illinois for example. The ratepayers, i.e. people like you and me, pay for this energy, so we want to make sure we are getting the best return on this investment by adding more supervision.

   

• In addition to all of that, it also opens the door for future conversations on moving towards nuclear energy here in Iowa, which has the potential to be the cleanest energy source yet.

Please join me at www.wilzforiowa.com and on Facebook at Hans for Iowa House District 25 to stay up to date on everything I’m doing!