March 10, 2005

Mary Lou Freeman

STATE REPRESENTATIVE

Fifty-Second District

Statehouse: (515) 281-3221

e-mail – mary.freeman@legis.state.ia.us

HOME ADDRESS

203 Villa Road

Alta, IA 51002

Home: 712-732-3781

House of Representatives

State of Iowa

Eighty-First General Assembly

STATEHOUSE

Des Moines, Iowa 50319

COMMITTEES

Natural Resources, Chair

Commerce, Regulation & Labor

Human Resources

APPROPRIATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Economic Development

FREEMAN FOOTNOTES

March 10, 2005

“Fun”nel Week in the Iowa House

This week has been a flurry of activity in the Iowa House of Representatives as every committee chair tries to get all of the bills out of committee that have importance to various constituencies.

So it was in Natural Resource Committee this week. The most important bill for the session for our committee was the “Deer Bill” which we have been working on for several weeks. This bill will help to encourage more deer hunting (particularly doe hunting) in the State. The bill will allow for a special hunt after December 15^th in those counties that do not sell out all of their additional antlerless licenses. It will also require non-resident hunters to purchase a doe tag in addition to the any-sex tag. Since many hunters, resident or non-resident, do not want to bother with processing does, the bill also adds a one dollar fee to each license purchased to be used to extend the HUSH (Help Us Solve Hunger) program statewide.

Two other bills that came down quite late were sponsored by the ATV and Snowmobile associations. We did allow time for the sub-committees to meet on those two bills so that we could get them out of committee before the end of funnel week.

This has been probably the most orderly funnel week in recent years. Part of that could be due to the make-up of the legislature. Realizing that there are certain bills that are not going anywhere in the Senate, there were certain issues that did not even make it out of sub-committee.

I don’t believe that anyone down here wants to go through hours of debate that, in effect, would be an effort in futility.

Thank you for all your messages and information I have received. While I do try to answer everyone, there are times I am sure that I miss one or two. Please let me know if you are coming to the Capitol. I will do my best to meet with you. I can be reached via email at mfreema@legis.state.ia.us or mfreema@iw.net ; phone 515-281-7481 (weekdays) or 712-732-3781 (weekends).