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House Journal: Page 1964: Wednesday, April 22, 1998

And a special thank you to our Page, Emily Paul.  Emily, best
wishes in your future.  I know you will be successful in life.
Finally, a thanks to all of the elected members of this House. 
I do not think the people of Iowa comprehend the sacrifices that
we make to serve.  I'm not complaining, but I just don't think
they know how tough it is on all of us.
Three weeks ago yesterday, my wife called to tell me that my
son, Evan, had gotten up two days in a row and asked, "Where's
Daddy?"  She told me that so I would know that he missed me, and
I should feel good about that.  And I did.  But it tore at my
heart because it's a fine line between working to make this a
better place for my son to live and not being as good of a Dad
as I want to be.
So, thank you to each and every one of you for the sacrifice you
make to be here.  It's important and the people of Iowa
appreciate it.
So, it's time to go to Wellman's - I mean home to family and
friends.  I know I'm ready because it's been a tough year.  As
usual, my favorite performer can sum it up for me in one of his
songs.  In the song, Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season,
Jimmy Buffett writes, "I must confess, I can use some rest, I
can't run at this pace very long.  Yes, it's quite insane, I
think it hurts the brain."
I think we all need to rest our brain and our bodies and go home
to our families.  Have a great interim and God bless you all.
REMARKS BY SPEAKER CORBETT

Speaker Corbett offered the following remarks:

Well to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I had a chance to meet him
once in my life when he was in Cedar Rapids. He said "we could
be masters of our own destiny or victims of fate." One hundred
and one days ago you all had a choice in front of you.
Thankfully you chose not to be victims of fate. I do want to
take just a moment to maybe view the record, and like you
Representative Schrader, I'd like to talk a little bit about the
people here.

When you start a session you always have some goals that you
want to work toward achieving, and we did. Education reform, tax
relief, value-added agriculture, and trying to improve the
recreational opportunities for the people of this state. The
first issue of education reform, certainly there was a lot of
pre-session hype with the Governor's recommendations and the
Pomerantz Commission, and then the uncertainty of this last
hundred days that the legislative process has had with the
education issue. I'm sure when the session closes here in ten
minutes we'll have a post session analysis on education on
whether we did enough or if we didn't.

The minority party brought a couple issues to the table on
education. The issues of class size and of infrastructure. They
were very legitimate issues. We chose not to address those
issues in the same fashion that you would have wanted the
legislature to do. We chose a couple different issues to focus
on- early childhood and trying to improve the quality of the
teachers in this state. One of the reasons we did that is that
not every school district has a class size problem and not every
school district has an infrastructure problem. Though we did
feel that every school 

© 1998 Cornell College and League of Women Voters of Iowa

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Last update: Tue Apr 28 03:40:02 CDT 1998
URL: /DOCS/GA/77GA/Session.2/HJournal/01900/01964.html
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