Name: Rex Troute, Democrat
Office/District: State Senate District 44
Hometown: Burlington
Profession: Retired journalist
Why running for office: “I wanted to run for years, but being in the newspaper business, I couldn’t. So I’m running because there’s a lot of issues that Iowa needs to address. It’s getting to the point where we need to compete with our neighboring states in terms of wages. I want to raise the minimum wage. We need to address our teacher shortage, and that’s part of the problem too where we need to raise our wages for teachers because we’re losing our college graduates to neighboring states like Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska. With Medicaid, I want to return it back to the state and get it away from the two MCOs that now exist in the state. I want to keep our college graduates in the state and I have a couple of programs where I think we can do that.
“We have a shortage of workers no matter where you look — teachers, nurses, manufacturers — we may have 2.6 percent unemployment, but we still have tons of job openings in this state that aren’t being filled and that’s because we just don’t have enough people able to fix them. I was an Iowa State graduate and a business major. I had a lot of fraternity brothers who were engineers, none of them live in state. So, we just need to raise wages up and down the board in this state, so we can kind of grow a little faster than we normally do. We kind of grow at a snail’s pace and it’s just basically birth rate I think that is the reason why we grow at all.”
Website: Rex Troute for Iowa Senate
