Roads, dispatch, planning top issues as McIntyre seeks reelection to county supervisors

“I had a lot of reasons not to last year,” she said. “Personal, professional, financial. I just said, I’m done.”

But there was one reason to run, she added.

“If not me who?” she asked. “If I’m not standing for this, who will? I still want someone to represent my family. I want them to stand up for the rural community.”

McIntyre has a definite picture in mind of who she wants in the job.

“I want them to have that tenacity of ‘I love everybody’, I want you to come in and say ‘I don’t care who you are, I love you all, I will serve you all. I may not agree with you, but I will fight for you,’” she said.

So far, she hasn’t found that person. So now, she said, instead of stepping down, she’ll have to be voted out.

Alfonso Valenzuela-Gumucio, a Democrat from Carlisle, is seeking the Democratic nomination for the seat. If he is successful in a June primary, he’ll face McIntyre for the seat in November. So far, no Republican has announced plans to challenge McIntyre for the seat.

McIntyre, a Republican who lives with her husband, Tom, and three of her six children near Liberty Center, represents Carlisle and most of rural Warren County. Since she was elected in 2014, the county has made progress on some of McIntyre’s concerns, including roads and the county’s emergency 911 system.

“The roads have improved greatly,” she said. “The engineer’s budget was a concern of mine.”

For the last two years, the supervisors have allocated the maximum amount of property tax dollars allowed under state law to the engineer’s office. “For the size of our county and the number of issues we had, I thought that was something we needed to do,” she said.

McIntyre said she also is proud of adding a full-time human resources person for the county, but she still wants to complete a strategic plan for the county and continue progress on a secondary roads facility south of Indianola.

Since she was elected in 2014, the county has started construction of a justice center and jail that is slated to be done in July and invested $11 million in the county’s emergency 911 system. While the county has constructed several new towers and provided first responders with emergency radios, there is more work to be done, she said.

“We still don’t have the system signed over to us,” she said. “We have an up and working system, which is working very well. But dispatch needs to be moved, certain towers haven’t been erected. There are just certain parts that haven’t been completed.”

Beyond that, she said, she wants to see more organization around the county’s dispatchers.

“What I saw is there are some unprofessional things going on in there,” she said. Originally, she said, dispatch was put under the Warren County sheriff’s department because it was the county’s only 24/7 organization. Now, she said, it needs to be more independent.

“We need to have a little more professional setup,” she said. “We need to have dispatch that has a supervisor. They need to have a method of everybody doing the same thing. We need to have procedures, we need to have policies. As the 11^th largest county, we can do better.”

Part of “better,” she said, includes growth. The number of dispatchers hadn’t grown in 20 years, she said, but the county recently hired three additional people. They also recently hired Thomas Lampe, who recently retired from the Iowa State Patrol who worked with the state’s communications system.

When voters choose their supervisor, they also will vote on possibly moving to a five-member board, a change McIntyre said she has mixed feelings about.

“As a supervisor, I love five,” she said. “My plate is full. I have a lot of different boards and commissions I serve on, I have a lot of departments I go to to see how they’re doing. I would love to share that work.”

But McIntyre said she has concerns as a citizen. Right now, one supervisor represents Norwalk, another Indianola, and the third a primarily rural district. With five supervisors, every district would include a mix of rural and urban residents, she said.

“As a citizen, I will no longer have a person who represents a rural part of government,” she said. “This is a rural government, but you’ll have every single member that will have more city than rural.”

That’s a problem, she said.

“You have a government that deals with issues for rural citizens,” she said. “If the roads go to pot again, unless you have a surge of people coming in here, will they really care? City folks don’t care if roads are bad in the rural area. I didn’t.”

McIntyre said she’s starting to consider how the county could implement a goal brought up by fellow supervisor Darren Heater.

“He said, I want citizens to come to Warren County and do their business and leave saying ‘I don’t like paying my taxes, but I love coming to Warren County because they treat me so well,’” she recalled. At first, she said, she dismissed that idea. “And then I thought, why not? There’s nothing stopping us from having that right now.”

A new strategic plan, another goal of McIntyre’s, could help rally the entire county staff around that goal, she said.

She also wants to do more work on mental health, particularly around mental health concerns for both victims and perpetrators of sexual assault. But none of those goals will matter, she said, unless she is reelected.

“You can have great ideas, but if you don't get behind it and push people to do things, you don't get anything done,” she said.