Sidestepping what looked like an unwinnable battle with Iowa Senate Democrats, Governor Terry Branstad announced in a press release today that Teresa Wahlert will retire as head of Iowa Workforce Development. Apparently Wahlert informed Branstad on January 9 that she would step down, effective today. Iowa Civil Rights Commission Executive Director Beth Townsend will take over as acting director of Iowa Workforce Development. After the jump I’ve posted background on Townsend as well as today’s press release about Wahlert’s retirement.
Wahlert’s tenure was rocky from the start, as she only barely was confirmed to lead the agency in 2011. Iowa Senate Democrats objected to the planned closure of staffed Iowa Workforce Development offices all over the state, a policy that Wahlert later carried out despite lawmakers’ efforts to keep the offices open. (The Iowa Supreme Court eventually ruled unanimously that Branstad acted improperly when he struck language about the field offices without vetoing the money allocated to fund them, but the offices were never reopened.)
Wahlert’s conduct is also mixed up in two lawsuits filed by former senior state employees. As if that weren’t enough, an arbitrator ruled in November that Wahlert “overstepped her bounds when she promoted a judge who had been demoted after complaints that she created a hostile work environment.” For those reasons, she certainly would not have received the 34 yes votes she needed in the Iowa Senate, had Branstad re-appointed her to her current job. Today’s official press release does not acknowledge any of the controversies surrounding Wahlert’s work. Instead, the governor and Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds praised her leadership on worker training and job creation.
Final note: words attributed to Reynolds today greatly exaggerate the number of jobs created during Wahlert’s years in state government. No matter how many times real economists dismantle this zombie lie, the Branstad administration is hell-bent on counting only gross jobs created (a “fake” number), not net jobs created (which accounts for job losses as well). Townsend could do all Iowans a service by getting her new subordinates out of the fuzzy math business. As Mike Owen of the Iowa Policy Project argued here, the “political tainting” of Iowa Workforce Development is unacceptable: “IWD should be trying to determine and illustrate the actual job picture facing our state, so policy makers can make decisions in that light.”
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