In a recent interview, the Business Record sat down with Andrea Woodard, executive director of the Iowa State Association of Counties. Among other topics, we asked her about the Iowa DOGE Task Force’s idea to reduce the number of counties in Iowa. The job of the task force is to improve efficiency in the state. Look for a full story about Woodard’s new leadership role at ISAC in an upcoming edition of the Business Record.

The Iowa DOGE Task Force had suggested cutting down the number of counties in Iowa. Has ISAC talked to them about that?

It’s my understanding that that question [of does Iowa have too many counties] comes up every decade or so.

It has come up before my time, and has recently with comments from the DOGE committee. I’ll say, too, we reached out to the leaders of the DOGE committee right away. And we really, truly do see the state as a partner in what we do together. Our members serve the same constituents of theirs, and so we’ve tried to really be a contributor to the conversation at the table.

We truly believe in local control, and so that is first and foremost where our principles lie is; it’s up to the people of Iowa and those local elected officials to make those decisions. I mean, there are considerations within the constitution for making changes to the county makeup, but we continue to focus on our members and what they’re wanting to see, and also continuing to offer ideas.

The other piece of that has been, we’ve met with the DOGE committee a couple of times and offered not just ideas we have that need some legislative approval, but also ways in which counties are already being efficient and sharing resources.

A county attorney could serve more than one county and be on the ballot in both. There are two counties that have shared auditor recorders, and so there are a lot of things that are already happening that are geared toward efficiency, saving taxpayer dollars, and we’ve tried to highlight those existing examples to the DOGE committee as perhaps models for even expanding and incentivizing.