DES MOINES – A liberal political group, says that the Branstad Administration has stonewalled a public records request for jobs data, saying that the governor is 146,000 short of his promise to create 200,000 jobs.
According to Progress Iowa, the Branstad administration is now more than one week past the legally mandated 20-day public records response time for a request submitted by Progress Iowa. The request, submitted as part of the ongoing Iowa Accountability Project, was for an explanation of the significant revisions in last month’s tally of Iowa job numbers, as well as communication between Iowa Workforce Development and the Governor’s office. The open records request was submitted on Friday,November 22nd and is now the second request to be ignored by the Branstad administration.
“The Branstad administration has refused to release public information yet again,” said Matt Sinovic, executive director of Progress Iowa. “Iowans deserve an honest accounting of the state of the economy, and instead we’re being stonewalled by the people paid with our tax dollars.”
Following the administration’s November jobs report release, Progress Iowa reached out to the Iowa Workforce Development office to better understand the reasons behind this significant revision. The administration has been under fire for counting gross job gains, rather than the standard, accepted practice of using net job growth.
Previously, Progress Iowa learned that the Branstad administration was only counting new jobs, while ignoring any jobs that were lost, which created a skewed result. In other words, a person could be hired for a series of temporary positions and be counted as having ‘created’ that number of jobs, even though they may have not even had a steady paycheck during that time period.
Governor Branstad has promoted this new and misleading statistic as a way to hide his own failures at creating jobs for Iowa families. Governor Branstad is still well short of the 200,000 job goal that he promised Iowans. Despite being three quarters of the way through this term, he is still 146,000 jobs short of his goal.
