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Name: Mike Klimesh, Republican

Office/District: State Senate District 28

Hometown: Spillville

Profession: Printer

Why running for office: “I’ve been involved in politics for a lot of years now. I’m the mayor of a small town in Northeast Iowa, so we’re dealing with the COVID-19 crisis kind of every day as we go along. I’ve not had a lot of time to focus on my campaign in the last few weeks. Why I decided to run for office is just to help bring common sense leadership to the state. Of course, those things are changing. With the crisis, there will be a lot of work that needs to be done at the state level. All of the years of running a business and managing a small town, I’ll take that knowledge and information with me to Des Moines and help the state recover from this unprecedented disaster.

“I don’t really think there were any issues in specific, there are a lot of issues that face Iowans from prior to the COVID-19 crisis. Education was a huge issue, making sure we fund education properly. Transportation and infrastructure — roads and bridges in the counties I represent, a lot of them need further assistance in helping maintain good infrastructure. But we’ll be looking at a whole new set of problems coming out of this crisis. I think it’ll change what we viewed prior to COVID-19 as important, I think we’ll look at that now and say that was important then, but this is important now. We’ll have to circle back to those things that we thought were important. There will be a different set of issues we’ll need to address immediately. Every day it’s fluid.”

Sen. Michael Breitbach, a Republican, is retiring from the Iowa legislature.

Author: Jacob Hall

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