Narup announces candidacy for Iowa House District 18

Villisca’s own Tripp Narup has announced he is making another run for the Iowa Legislature.
Narup said he is running for the Iowa House District 18 seat, currently held by Republican Tom Moore of Griswold, who is in his sixth term. Narup said he moved to Clarinda in 1995 to work for the Clarinda Company and retired to Villisca around seven years ago. Shortly after the move, Narup said he was elected to public office in the community.
“Several of my friends suggested that I run for city council when I’d only been here for a few months. I told them, nobody’s going to vote for me. I just got here, nobody knows me. They said, believe us, they’re looking for new blood. Well, turns out they were right. I was elected to my first term on the council in 2019,” Narup said.
Narup said he thought long and hard about a campaign slogan, and is running on “More Common Sense, and More Common Courtesy.”
“I’m really tired of listening to people yell at each other on the TV, and I’m really tired of some of the crazy things that have come out of Des Moines in the last few years. The biggest among them racking up a billion-dollar-a-year deficit thanks to the flat tax, which I said was a stupid idea at the time,” commented Narup.
This is Narup’s third run for the legislature. He previously ran against Sen. Tom Shipley, and a few years ago, ran against Moore. Narup said he felt like the time may be right for another run.
“I think and hope that people are a little tired of the kind of gotcha politics that we’ve got going on in Des Moines. I also think that for little towns like Villisca, they and really all of rural Iowa, are all feeling kind of picked on lately. There’s a lot of things that have come out of the legislature and out of the governor’s office that have made our lives more difficult. As a result, we have had to make some very careful choices on how we spend our money now, thanks to the property tax bill that passed in 2023. That’s been hitting us for the last few years. In Villisca’s case, we are maxed out on our general fund levy. I recently attended a League of Cities meeting Des Moines and I had the opportunity to ask some people on a panel about their situation, and they said the same thing. They’re having to cut back on things,” Narup advised.
For bigger cities, Narup said they can simply cut back on personnel, but in a small community like Villisca, which only has five people on the payroll, cutting personell isn’t as easy. The city also had to make reductions in other areas, such as cutting back on the 28E agreement the community has with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office for police protection. Narup said all of these changes are a direct result of action taken in Des Moines.
Narup also weighed in on Supplemental State Aid, saying that once again, the numbers agreed on in the legislature aren’t enough. 
“We have all the same issues we had two years ago and four years ago. It’s kind of depressing that we haven’t made any progress on that at all. The last I heard, they were suggesting a 2% supplemental aid for schools. Depending on which numbers you want to use, inflation alone was 2.7 or 3% in the past year. So once again, the SSA has been below the rate of inflation,” Narup commented. “You also have to couple that with the fact that the rural population is declining, as is enrollment. This isn’t just in Southwest Iowa, it’s really across the whole country. You know, rural population is declining, which means our student enrollment is declining. With SSA paid on a per head basis, you have schools that are basically having to get rid of personnel because that’s the one thing that for them, they have complete control over. They have no control over how much it costs to heat the high school or things like that, so it’s been a very difficult 10 years for schools and financially, the legislature is not making things any easier. I think we’re going to spend somewhere over $300 million on Kim Reynolds’ voucher plan. I’m 100% opposed to that. I don’t actually know anybody amongst the people I deal with who think it’s a good idea, that’s including people who went to Catholic school when they were kids. Nobody thinks the state ought to be funding private schools.”
Narup said he’s also been bothered by what he sees as unfounded attacks on teachers, and the state’s six-week abortion ban.
“I’m very opposed to that. At six weeks, you have something the size of a pea that looks like a tadpole. It’s beyond me why that has more rights than a grown woman who probably has other kids and a husband and a career. The ban has put women’s lives in danger, and it’s just not a good idea. I don’t think the legislature’s a good place to be making medical decisions. That kind of stuff should be between you and your doctor.”
Narup added he also feels the legislature has no business getting into the school district’s inner workings or deciding what books they can and cannot have.
“Under the old system, each school would have a librarian who reported to the principal, who reported to the superintendent, who reports to probably a five-member board. That’s eight people who are all local who know a whole lot more about what belongs in their school than 150 people in Des Moines,” Narup said.
While he’s not a farmer, Narup said he knows many people who are and he lives in a very agricultural area and is a big fan of Southwest Iowa.
“I love being here and I love this lifestyle. It really upsets me that we are, in some ways, working very hard at getting rid of the things that really make Iowa great. The family farm is seriously in danger right now. The last time I looked at prices, the cost of production for corn or beans was in the neighborhood of a dollar to $1.50 over what the current going rate is at the elevators. That can’t go on for very long, even if a bailout is provided by the federal government. If you get a portion of the bail out, it’s probably not going to make you whole. So we as farming communities in Southwest Iowa need to think long and hard about what will make things work. How can we make the family farm work? Because at the rate we’re going, there isn’t going to be anything left but corporate farms. And I don’t think anybody wants that.”
Narup said a lot of the people he knows are fourth, fifth, and even sixth generation farmers on the family farm, and it’s really difficult for him to see what these folks are going through right now.
“There’s some people who are comparing this to the 80s, and we’re already seeing a huge uptick in farm bankruptcies, and even worse in suicides. It’s just not a good situation. We need to be doing something to help the farmers out, and I’m not hearing anything, you know, about what we should be doing. I think some things are kind of obvious that we can’t rely just on corn and beans. That’s kind of the way things have been going. I’m old enough to remember when Iowa farmers grew a whole lot of things. You’d see sorghum and barley and sunflowers, and then pretty much every farm had a few pigs on it,” Narup explained. “Thanks to the consolidation of agribusiness, hardly anybody has pigs anymore, because they’ve been put out of the market by the CAFOs, and you really can’t raise anything besides corn and beans because your local elevator won’t take anything else.”
As far as the proposed Summit Carbon pipeline project, Narup said he is completely opposed to its construction.
“It boggles my mind that they’re getting away with it so far. It’s obviously not a public good. I mean, this whole project is for the benefit of some people who are already immensely wealthy. Even if that weren’t the case, there is no successful installation currently of a carbon sequestration facility. There’s nobody who has proven that this saves any carbon from being put into the atmosphere, just because of the amount of energy it takes to compress it and push all that carbon wherever they’re going to push it. Also, at this point, they have no idea where it’s going to go. How can you have a project for a pipeline and you don’t even know where the pipeline’s going to go yet? You’re still trying to make up your mind. That’s just craziness, in my opinion,” said Narup.
With all those things in mind, Narup feels that this is a good time for him to be running.
“I realize I’m a Democrat, and that puts me in a serious minority around here, but I think if people listen to the issues and hear from me what I think some of the solutions are, I’m hoping I can get some votes from people who are otherwise not inclined to vote for a Democrat. Because of the pipeline issue in Montgomery County, I’ve had 80-year-old farmers come up to me and say, ‘you know, I’ve voted Republican my whole life, but I’d vote for you.’ So that, you know, that gives me a lot of encouragement,” stated Narup.
The upcoming election will take place on Nov. 3.