I have two questions for you. Do you have a friend or relative with a heart for rural life? Do you know someone with the talent and drive to run for local or state office who’d be good at representing your community? Oh, am I hearing your thoughts correctly? “Are you kidding me? With politics being the way they are? What would anybody like that accomplish now, anyway?”
Well, I have no quick answer to those questions, but I do have an interesting story. A story about a leader with talent and heart. Someone who has shown what can be accomplished politically in our rural counties. Her name is Dolores Mertz, and she is a farmer from Ottosen in north central Iowa’s Kossuth County.
She once recounted for me a conversation she had while serving as Democratic representative of District 8 in the Iowa State House. The interaction occurred during the eighth of her eleven consecutive terms elected to represent her Republican-leaning district. Speaking with Republican Representative Scott Raecker, she offered a simple amendment to a large bill he was helping shepherd through the House that would finalize Iowa state gaming and licensing regulations.
“Scott, my amendment will enable each of the eighty-four Iowa counties which do not host a casino to also benefit from the statewide gambling bill. It will include them in the creation of the county foundation and endowment funds that will make grants for local community and charitable projects.”
Raecker answered, “Dolores, I think this is a good amendment. But I’m hearing from my colleagues that we can’t make any Democrat amendments to this bill.”
Mertz looked at him sharply.
“Scott, I don’t have any pride of ownership. Introduce it as yours. I just want to get it done!”
Representative Raecker did get it done, and Mertz’s generous, savvy work ended up shaping this transformative bill. As skeptical as we are about our politics, it would not hurt to see if the bill actually got results:
The 84 counties Representative Mertz managed to include in the bill’s county endowment fund program have distributed $125,000,000 in the program’s first 17 years, through grants to county-level non-profit and charitable organizations. If you’re interested – or know another leader who may be interested – look those over at this link and appreciate the tens of thousands of local projects across the state Representative Mertz enabled through her amendment.
If you’re an Iowa resident, you can also see what your own county’s neighbors have achieved. Maybe you’ll even think of another local project in need of funding (and a local leader to take it on) in your county. This all derives from one terse declaration at just the right time – “I just want to get it done!”
Let’s explore what’s been accomplished in Representative Mertz’s home, District 8. The district’s largest county, Kossuth County, takes a let’s-keep-this-going-into-perpetuity approach. Their county foundation has now amassed over $7,200,000 in assets. With interest from their investments, they award grants – $169,000 in 2021 alone.
Those 2021 grants include a ventilator project at the Kossuth Regional Medical Center, firefighter equipment repair in Bancroft, increasing disability access and safety at the library in Fenton, updating Lakota’s ambulance equipment, and support for Kossuth’s Food Bank of Iowa location.
Neighboring Emmet County, with a smaller land base, was awarded over $105,000. That county’s grants were focused on cultural facilities, family and mental health wellness, youth athletic and educational facilities, food and vaccination support during the pandemic, and emergency responder equipment.
These are just two of the 84 counties included in Mertz’s amendment. This is also just one year out of the seventeen it has been in effect. Mertz continues to enable tens of thousands of similar accomplishments statewide.
Mertz and her husband, H. P. Mertz, raised seven children on their Ottosen farm, the same farm her sons work to this day. Mertz summed up her decision to run for her husband’s county supervisor’s seat after he passed away by saying, “Seventeen men and myself applied. I took over for the next five years.” In 1988, as a sixty-year-old Democrat running in Republican-leaning District 8, she won the first of eleven consecutive elections to the Iowa State House. She retired at age 82. But twelve years later, she still exudes enjoyment at political work – “It gets in your blood.”
She had hoped her youngest daughter, a social studies major, would follow in her footsteps. Sadly, it didn’t happen. But how about you? Do you know someone with her kind of talent, heart, and drive? Someone who would enjoy being in the right place at the right time? Maybe you would be interested yourself…
Yes, those questions we began with. I’m not coming up with any clear answers. But I do have more stories about Dolores, her love of serving her District, and her style. In case you’re getting interested…