Jasper County’s $6.4M bond issue falls short

Despite supervisors saying the $6.4 million bond issue would not raise taxes, the citizens of Jasper County voted down the public measure on Election Night. In order to pass, the bond issue needed at least 60 percent of the votes in favor. Unofficial results show the bond issue only received 58.75 percent of the votes.

According to the Liberty Avenue Campus Bond Project page on the county’s website, the bond specifically authorized Jasper County to borrow $6.4 million for the purpose of designing, constructing, equipping, furnishing and making land site improvements for a secondary roads maintenance building.

However, the passing of the bond issue would have also kickstarted a number of other county projects for the sheriff’s office and county conservation.

So in addition to the new and upgraded facility for the engineer’s office staff, the county will gain a new training center for law enforcement, a base for the advanced life support program, outfitted classrooms for nature center and two maintenance replacement sheds in county parks.

Supervisor Brandon Talsma was disappointed with the results of the election, and he said the board of supervisors is now going to have to discuss options moving forward. They need to decide whether they want to try again for the November 2025 election or find another way to finance the secondary roads project.

Following the failure of the bond issue, the supervisors may also have to reevaluate how the county will pay for the other projects that would have come online if the bond had passed. Talsma said it may have to require supervisors to shift capital projects around, use property tax dollars or bond for them.

“But bonding for anything less than $1 million when you’re an entity of Jasper County’s size doesn’t really make fiscal sense,” he said. “It’s going to cost us more money to do the bonding than what we’d be bonding for. So it doesn’t necessary take the projects off the table. But it changes the conversation.”

Prior to Election Day, and perhaps even up to it, Talsma had received comments from citizens saying they had no idea the $6.4 bond issue was on the ballot. For the past few months, Jasper County has held numerous in-person and virtual town hall meetings to help spread the word and answer any questions.

Attendance at these town hall meetings was “abysmal,” Talsma said. The highest turnout he could recall was one of the first meetings at Prairie City in which five or six people showed up. The Jasper County website had a bright red banner across the masthead for many months. Pages of details were published.

Still, it seems it was not enough. Talsma said the county decided against sending out any mailers this time due to the issues that occurred from the bond issue for the administration building. Many residents complained they received the flyers late, causing Talsma to publicly apologize for the mistake.

Jasper County even held an open house of the Liberty Avenue Yard.

“We weren’t trying to be secretive about it,” Talsma said. “We believed in these projects. I believed in these projects. As a mater of fact, I felt like the more we could get our message out there the better it would be for us … I don’t know what we could have done different. I’m all ears if anyone has any ideas.”

Talsma said the county did not want to put the bond issue on a ballot that would have a low turnout election, such as a school/city election cycle. The county wanted to have a higher turnout election cycle. Jasper County saw a more than 75 percent turnout this year.

“So I think the next phase of the conversation is, with less than two percent is this something we want to make a run at again next year? Or mid-term elections two years from now? Or are the needs of the current facility that dire that we just say, ‘OK it didn’t pass. Let’s use reserve account funds,’” Talsma said.

The chair of the board of supervisors felt Jasper County went above and beyond to try and get its message across.

“We felt like we had a good message,” Talsma said. “Voters didn’t agree. It is what it is.”