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Exodus of Its Restless Young Makes Iowa Fear for Future

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Times Staff Writer

The cafe was selling hot biscuits and coffee for $1.50, but most of the red vinyl seats were empty, as they often are. Bert McCandless, 73, glanced around glumly.

“This place used to be full. Now look at it,” he said. “Iowa’s losing people like crazy.” With a grumble he added: “What ... is there to keep them here?”

That’s a question state legislators are trying very hard to answer.

Iowa suffers from an alarming brain drain: It loses more of its young, single, well-educated adults than any state except North Dakota. In search of bigger cities, hipper crowds and warmer weather, young Iowans flee in such numbers that demographers predict the state will face a drastic labor shortage within two decades.

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Desperate to keep the state’s future from bolting, the Republican leadership in the state Senate is proposing trying to entice young adults to stick around by abolishing the state income tax for everyone under 30.

About a dozen states, including California, exempt low-income elderly from filing tax returns. New Mexico offers a free ride to anyone who makes it to 100. But Iowa would be the first state in the nation to stop taxing young adults.

The proposal, introduced two weeks ago, would save the average twentysomething about $12 a week -- and cost the state treasury an estimated $200 million a year. The bill’s sponsors say that’s money well-spent if it persuades a few thousand more bright, ambitious young Iowans to stick around.

“The ones like my 16-year-old daughter who say, ‘I’m getting out of here as soon as I can’ ... well, there’s probably nothing we can do to keep them,” conceded Sen. Jeff Lamberti, a Republican legislative leader. “But we really have to get serious about this problem.”

It’s a problem that has been building for decades, not only in Iowa, but all across the Great Plains. And civic leaders have proposed all manner of responses.

At least eight small towns in Kansas are offering free land to any family willing to try living on the prairie, where the winters can be fierce and the cultural attractions sparse, but where a brand-new four-bedroom house costs less than $150,000 and a teacher who has 18 students in a class is considered overworked.

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The rugged counties of northwest North Dakota are trying reverse psychology. Locals have set up a website that describes the frozen frontier as too brutal for the typical suburban softy to handle. “Do you have what it takes to be a 21st century pioneer? Most don’t,” the website taunts. It goes on to admit that residents are looking to recruit 5,000 hardy new neighbors and asks whether “you just might make the cut.”

Targeting the rabid fans of Cornhusker football, former Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns, a Republican, held a job fair last year for alumni living in Denver, wooing them with a video of young professionals who had happily traded the big city for the wide-open prairie.

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, has tried something similar, holding cocktail parties for former Iowans living in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. He boasts of recruiting more than 1,000 people back to the state in four years of aggressive promotion.

But that’s not enough to offset Iowa’s losses.

In the five years leading up to the 2000 census, Iowa lost close to 12,000 young, single, college-educated residents. By comparison, Colorado reported a net gain of nearly 18,000. The state is third behind Florida and Pennsylvania in the proportion of the population over 65.

Lamberti, the state senator, rattles off other statistics as well: Half of those who graduate from the state’s public universities leave Iowa as soon as they get their diplomas.

Here in Whiting, a welcoming town of 707 in far western Iowa, locals can see the demographics shifting as school enrollment shrinks and church congregations gray.

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Desperate to attract more young families, the community organized an open house last year to promote its virtues.

Visitors were treated to hot dogs and homemade brownies, then whisked around Whiting in minivans. Volunteers showed off the school, the library, the nursing home, the cheerily retro Wagonmaster Cafe, with its cutout of James Dean by the counter and its $4.65 meatloaf special. They drove prospective buyers to all the homes up for sale and introduced them to bankers and real-estate agents.

The open house was a hit: Several families ended up moving to town, boosting the school’s K-12 enrollment to 212. Another open house is in the works. But Dave Storm, president of the school board, acknowledges that rural Iowa will never be a youth magnet. “A town this size is limited in what it can offer, as you would expect,” he said.

He’s not at all sure that the under-30 tax cut would help. And many here echo his doubts.

The way they look at it, Iowa needs to offer a good deal more than an extra $600 a year to be attractive to young families. A giant sunlamp to toast up the winter months might help. And more things to do: 43% of young adults in a 1999 state poll cited the lack of entertainment as their top gripe about Iowa.

But first on most locals’ lists is more industry. Many in Whiting drive half an hour north to Sioux City or an hour south to Omaha for work. Even then, they often complain that good jobs, not to mention fulfilling careers, are hard to come by in rural Iowa.

“All the tax exemptions in the world are not going to help if you don’t have jobs,” Whiting Mayor Nancy Brenden said.

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The proposal also draws skepticism from those raised on the Midwest ethos of self-reliance. They consider it wrong on principle to cut young adults a break just because they’re young.

“Heavens, you bet they should pay. Why shouldn’t they?” said Laura Reitan, 43, who owns the local hair salon. “That’s the American way: You start working, you start paying.”

Even the bill’s strongest supporters acknowledge they’re not sure of its prospects.

North Dakota considered similar legislation several years ago but never passed it because of the price tag. In Iowa, Gov. Vilsack has praised the tax exemption as a bold idea at least worth considering, but several lawmakers from both parties have already spoken against it.

William Mattingly, one of 15 in his class at Whiting Senior High School, hopes opponents reconsider, or come up with their own plan for building a peppier Iowa.

“It seems like 97% of the people around here are elderly,” said Mattingly, 18. “My quote for it is ‘old fogeys.’ ”

Mattingly, who aspires to be a minister, added that he’d settle down wherever his church needed him, even in rural Iowa. “But for a lot of kids,” he said, “when they come out of high school, this is probably not where they want to be.”

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His classmate Jenifer Weidt, 17, knows exactly what he means.

Iowa is a fine place to grow up, she said. One day, she’d like to raise her own kids in a small, safe, friendly town like Whiting. But for now?

“I’d like to see what else is out there.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The flight of the young

Some states have no trouble attracting young, single, college-educated workers. Others are losing them in droves. A look at the winners and losers. The figures are from 1995 through 2000.

Top five ‘brain drain’ states:

North Dakota: 3,706

Iowa: 11,691

South Dakota: 2,731

West Virginia: 4,691

Montana: 2,750

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Top five ‘brain gain’ states:

Nevada: 6,788

Colorado: 17,862

Georgia: 24,667

Arizona: 9,264

Oregon: 6,356

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North Dakota: -28%

Montana: -16%

South Dakota: -22%

Iowa: -22%

West Virginia: -20%

Arizona: +11%

Oregon: +10%

Colorado: +16%

Georgia: +15%

Nevada: +28%

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Sources: U.S. Census Bureau

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