The withdrawal of Sharon DeGraw from the race for Iowa City Council last week leaves two active candidates in the primary on Feb. 4, and then again in the special election to fill the District C seat on March 4. (Early voting was already underway when DeGraw withdrew, so the primary will be held even though there are only two candidates now.) Both candidates, Ross Nusser and Oliver Weilein, participated in a forum hosted by the Johnson County League of Women Voters at the Iowa City Senior Center on Monday night.
Nusser, whose family has been in Iowa City for generations, is the co-founder of Urban Acres Real Estate. He currently serves as president of the Board of Directors of Community & Family Resources, and on the board of Successful Living.
Weilein moved to Iowa City from Cedar Falls as a teenager, and is well known on the local music scene as a performer in various bands and an organizer of concerts to raise money for community causes, such as providing necessities for unhoused people and supporting LGBTQ Iowans. He works at Systems Unlimited, assisting adults with intellectual disabilities, and is a founding board member of the Iowa City Tenants Union.
Both Nusser and Weilein live on the Northside.
The hour-long forum illuminated the differences between the two candidates, who provided one-minute responses to written questions submitted by League members and some of the approximately three dozen people who attended.
The second question of the evening referenced Gov. Kim Reynolds’ statement in her Condition of the State Speech earlier this month that cities and counties will “need to be lean” to cope with the property tax cuts she is pushing for. To help create the leanness she desires, the governor said she was “launching our own State DOGE, to find even greater savings and efficiencies in both state and local government.”
Moderator Shannon Patrick asked the candidates what impact they thought Reynolds’ plans would have on Iowa City. Nusser responded first.
“Broadly, we in Iowa City are a blue dot in a very red state, and we do not need to put a target on our backs,” he said. “We need to avoid further state and federal intervention. And that means that we have to go along and figure out how we can deal with the legislation coming down from the state. We need to work with them, not against them.”
“I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what the cuts are going to be,” Nusser continued. “I don’t know what decision we’re going to be faced [with]. But I can tell you in going about that, I would rely heavily on the city manager, the city attorney, the city clerk for seeing what council has done in the past, and city staff, as well as community input.”
Weilein started his response by saying it was important to approach the issue without “a mindset of pre-compliance” and to not “pit communities against each other” or “throw our hands up and say there’s nothing we can do, we kind of just have to go along with what the state or federal government is doing.”
“I think that we can get more creative with it. I think that there are models around the world, around the country, of people getting creative with it that Iowa City hasn’t looked at yet,” he said. “In Decorah, they are doing something right with trying to publicize their utilities, which is another revenue stream that also helps with climate change.”
In March, Decorah will hold a referendum in which voters will be asked to decide if the city should create its own utility company to provide electricity locally. Seven years ago, the same proposal lost by four votes in a 2018 referendum.
“I grew up in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and we have a public utilities company. It is a massive source of revenue for the city. That’s one thing,” Weilein said. “I’ve looked at public banking. We have a model like that in the United States in North Dakota. It gets huge revenues for the state of North Dakota. It makes huge, equitable loans available to not only the city, but to citizens who are doing things like starting a small business.”
The issue of Iowa City’s relationship with the governor and the Republican-controlled Legislature, and possible points of friction with the Trump administration, came up in a question about what the candidates would do to “uphold Johnson County and Iowa City’s commitment to nondiscrimination laws and principles,” especially given the hostility to transgender people from the Reynolds and Trump administrations.
“This is deeply personal to me,” Weilein said, mentioning his many transgender friends. He said he had been studying the recommendations of the ACLU of Iowa and One Iowa on how municipalities can protect the rights of trans Iowans and other members of the LGBTQ community.
“I’ve been listening to the transgender community itself,” he said. “I’ve been meeting with them directly, constantly, about this type of thing. And I will never back down on something like this.”
“They can throw anything they have at me and Iowa City. I think Iowa City, not only as a city but as a city council, needs to be strengthening our grassroots community organizations that can help come out and defend these people, on a real ground-organizing basis, instead of always waiting for city and state governments to come protect us.”
“Supporting people is very important, supporting rights is very important,” Nusser said. “How will I do this? I don’t know right now, because I don’t know what’s coming at us. I do know how I would thoughtfully approach it. I would figure out what is coming at me, and what is coming at Iowa City. And then we’d have to work to be very careful on this.”
“These are people at stake, and people being at stake require very careful and personal solutions. And so I would work with my fellow electeds, and I would work with staff and I would work to hear the community, and figure out what the best response for Iowa City would be. And how we can use that as part of our strategy in dealing with things that might come our way in the future that we are not anticipating.”
Affordable housing is an issue both candidates have been vocal about, and on Monday night they were asked to explain their approaches to addressing the problem, while making sure a solution didn’t require cutting other city services.
“This is huge to me, working in housing activism my whole life, with the Iowa City Tenants Union,” Weilein said, adding that keeping tenants informed of their rights is important to making sure they are treated fairly by landlords.
“As someone who’s studied things like social housing and public housing my entire life, there are models that we can work with that are just not explored in the United States, that can generate revenue for the city and can meet a need,” Weilein continued. “All people deserve housing as a human right, and there are ways that we can go about that. And we don’t need to keep kicking the can down the road with temporary market-based solutions.”
“Affordable housing is a multifaceted problem, and it requires a mixture of solutions — providing Housing First solutions; providing solutions for working, middle-class incomes; providing homeownership solutions; providing rental solutions, are all things that are needed,” Nusser said. “I’ve worked to develop three different housing programs — they’re all affordable and they’re all sustainable, too — through my work at the Housing Fellowship, through my work volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, Community & Family Resources, and Successful Living. We can certainly do a lot more — the city has $15 million to spend towards affordable housing, earmarked. We can deploy that responsibly and in a way that it will return back to the community.”
Near the middle of the question-and-answer period, the candidates were asked to explain what they would bring to the city council that would make them different from current councilmembers.
“I think that I’ll bring real estate experience where it’s needed,” Nusser said. “I have devoted my career to real estate and the practice of real estate. I understand the pragmatic value and the pragmatic touches of real estate, and how to operate things at different levels. I understand the pragmatic constraints of lending laws and how that affects the housing that gets built.”
“I understand how to develop a city and how to create policy that shows we are open for business and not closed. And I think that Iowa City gets a bad rap on that. I think that we need to do better going forward understanding, hearing all groups and crafting policy that allows our community to grow our tax base, while preserving the culture that we love and evolving the culture that we so love. We’ve done that really well with ICDD [the Iowa City Downtown District].”
Weilein offered a very different answer.
“I really think that as a rank-and-file worker, as someone who knows what it’s like to struggle as a renter, as someone who has been in the weeds providing mutual aid to unhoused people and knows directly what their experience is, as someone who has for so long been in the weeds of hearing the plight of renters and people who can’t afford to make ends meet, being someone who isn’t a boss, someone isn’t part of a political elite class, being someone who comes straight from working people of Iowa City — [I have] that perspective, the perspective from someone who is willing to think outside the box and really do reading and research and look at all ends of the globe to find solutions to problems that we have.”
“To really just dig deep, instead of throwing our hands up and saying we can’t do something, instead of saying that we need to keep our head down, instead of saying that we need to be compliant to the state or the federal government,” Weilein continued. “I’m someone who is not afraid of these people, and I’m not afraid to have a target on myself.”
The primary in the special election for the District C seat on the Iowa City Council will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 4. Early in-person voting in the primary will continue through Monday, Feb. 3. Mail-in ballots must be received by the Johnson County Auditor’s Office by the time polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Only residents of District C can vote in the primary.
Since they are the only two candidates remaining, after the primary Nusser and Weilein will also face each in the special election on Tuesday, March 4. Early voting in the special election begins on Wednesday, Feb. 12. All registered voters in Iowa City will be able to vote in the special election.
