In April 2022, the Coralville Community Food Pantry (CCFP) broke ground on a new building, on a site donated by the Coralville United Methodist Church. At 5,000 square feet, the pantry’s new home next to the church was twice the size of the building it was then located in.
At the groundbreaking ceremony, CCFP Executive Director John Boller explained the new building was coming at “a critical time,” because “more of our neighbors than ever before” were facing food insecurity as “inflation is at record levels while safety net programs are diminishing at a rapid rate.”
Four years later, all that remains true. CCFP is outgrowing the building that opened in 2023, because the need for its services continues to grow.
“On a given week, we see about 500 households come through here to shop in-person,” Boller said last week.
Boller was speaking to Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor. Sand was at CCFP on Wednesday for a roundtable discussion on food insecurity and access to food in Iowa. Boller and Sand were joined by nine leaders from community organizations in Johnson, Linn, Scott and Story counties, all of which work to make sure hungry Iowans get the food they need.
Since the changes in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which was supported by all four of Iowa’s representatives in Congress, SNAP enrollment in the state has dropped by 9 percent, with 25,000 Iowans disappearing from its rolls.
The need for food assistance doesn’t go away just because people lose access to SNAP benefits.
“Food pantries, as hard as we work, we just provide a small sliver of the help that’s needed to sustain households,” Boller said.
For every meal a food pantry provides to a family, SNAP benefits provide another nine, he explained.
“I used to say that food pantries were designed to be more of a Band-Aid, that’s how we’re structured to be,” Boller said. “But I think a more apt analogy now is a tourniquet.”
Ryan Bobst, executive director of the North Liberty Community Pantry, pointed out the OBBA has shifted more administrative and benefit costs of SNAP to states at previously unheard of levels. The bill also creates a severe penalty for any state with a SNAP payment rate error of 6 percent or greater, with “error” covering a broad category in a program that is complex to administer. Iowa’s current error rate is just below 6 percent, and if it crosses the newly imposed line, the federal government will withhold at least $25 million from the state’s SNAP program.
Iowa is also fourth slowest in the country when it comes to processing SNAP applications.
“How would Gov. Sand make sure Iowa HHS [which administers the state’s part of SNAP] has the capacity to process applications quickly and accurately?” Bobst asked.
Sand began his reply by talking about how state government functions now.
“The more I hear from people throughout this campaign across this state who work in state government, the more I hear about how everything they have been telling this administration just falls on deaf ears,” he said. “… It’s very much top-down.”
“I tend to take the opposite approach. If there is something that is on the books in the state of Iowa as a law, then we should be executing it to the best of our abilities.”
According to Sand, “That means you have to listen to the people whose job it is to make it work.”
“How does your job suck? What are the things that you have to do that don’t actually help you do the thing you came here to do?” Sand gave as example of questions it is important to ask state workers directly providing services people and businesses rely on. “I think that when we have people in leadership who want to take that approach, all of sudden things can work a lot better.”
“Also, my goodness, is it better for morale” of state workers, he added.
Raymond Siddell, founder and president of Together We Achieve, a Cedar Rapids nonprofit with a community pantry, asked Sand about what practical steps he would take as governor to address the affordability crisis that’s driving prices higher and bringing more people to food pantries across the state.
It’s a topic Sand routinely addressed in his 100 town hall tours both this year and last year, and he suggested the roundtable participants visit the affordability plan page on his campaign site. He then listed some of the actions he would want to take, including ending the privatization of Medicaid, eliminating duplicative regulations on home construction, importing lower cost pharmaceuticals from Canada and capping utility rates for consumers.
Sand gave a similar list the night before during the first gubernatorial candidates’ debate at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, when he responded to a question about affordability. At the end of Sand’s answer, his opponent Republican Zach Lahn ,jumped in without being asked to comment, and accused Sand of being a hypocrite for being in favor of greater affordability, because Sand is a liberal.
“He has not seen a tax increase that he did not like,” Lahn said. He then elaborated, “Because that’s what liberals do, they want to raise taxes.”
Sand began to point out that an attack ad accusing him of wanting to hike a variety of taxes has been debunked by fact-checkers, and Lahn started talking over him. That exchange happened roughly 17 minutes into the hour-long debate, and it set the tone for the rest of the event. Lahn talked over Sand when it was Sand’s turn to answer questions, Lahn talked over the moderators from KWQC-TV. When moderators asked Lahn to stay on topic or respect the time limits for replies, he just kept going. Sand, for the most part, stood by quietly as Lahn carried on with his prepared answers, regardless of whether they related to the questions being asked.
Responding to a reporter’s question on Wednesday, Sand explained his sedate reaction to Lahn was deliberate.
“I have said over and over and over again in this campaign that I really want all the voters in Iowa to get to know my opponent,” Sand said. “And we let him introduce himself extensively last night.”
“We think the debate went very well,” he added.
Building on Ryan Bobst’s question about affordability, Nicole McAlexander, executive director of Southeast Linn Community Center in Lisbon, brought the particular challenges faced in rural Iowa, where the economy is depressed and assistance from food pantries or local government agencies is a long drive, something made more difficult at the moment by higher gas prices. McAlexander asked about specific plans for improving the economy in the rural areas.
“I really want us to move economic development away from huge grants to out-of-state companies and crossing our fingers to hope that they’ll keep their jobs here for a few years. I want us to do placemaking again like we used to with Vision Iowa,” Sand said as part of his answer.
Vision Iowa was a program created with bipartisan support under Gov. Tom Vilsack, and launched in 2000. The state sold bonds to fund a $200 million loan program designed to finance local economic development and quality-of-life initiatives around the state, and $15 million from the gambling revenue taken in by the state was allocated to make the annual payments on the bonds during the 20-year-lifespan of the program. In 2020, Gov. Kim Reynolds decided not to extend Vision Iowa, citing the expense associated with the program.
It’s estimated that Vision Iowa’s $200 million in loans was leveraged into $3 billion in projects.
Vision Iowa helped create, among other things, the Science Center of Iowa and the Pappajohn Sculpture Park in Des Moines, as well as the Mid-American Recreation and Convention Complex in Council Bluffs and outdoor amenities like the Kings Pointe Water Park in Storm Lake, the Flint River Trail in Burlington and the Trout Run Trail in Sand’s hometown of Decorah. It also helped establish quirky local attractions like Matchstick Marvel, a museum dedicated to the remarkable matchstick sculptures made by a local craftsman in the little Tama County town of Gladbrook. It also provided funding for a 200-seat movie theater run by volunteers next to Matchstick Marvels in the town of 950 people.
“It’s a really simple idea,” Sand said. “The vast majority of our economic development is fueled by small businesses and a lot of people making small decisions together. If we can have one or two more amenities in small towns, then you have a much stronger sense of gravity there, people just feeling pulled there. They want to be there, in part, because there’s more to do.”
Deb Dunkhase and Betsa Flores of Open Heartland in Iowa City described the extra stress the immigrant families they work with feel due to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant actions and the aggressive and violent enforcement actions by ICE. Many are worried that making a needed trip to a food pantry will result in being seized and imprisoned by ICE, even if they have done nothing wrong.
Sand said that because immigration is a federal issue, a governor’s role is very limited. The best thing a governor can do, according to Sand, is to advocate for systemic reform to create “an orderly, common-sense immigration system.”
The Coralville roundtable at noon on Wednesday was Sand’s second campaign stop of the day. He started the day with an 8:30 a.m. visit to the Brewed Book, a combination coffee shop and used book store in Davenport. After Coralville, Sand traveled to Grinnell for an event aimed at young voters, before finishing the day with an evening rally in Indianola. The Coralville roundtable on food insecurity and access was billed by the campaign as Sand’s first stop on his new “Iowa for All” tour.
