Governor-elect Terry Branstad has picked Siouxland Chamber of Commerce President Debi Durham to be the new director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development.
As Branstad introduced her, the two of them began outlining how they plan to change the department into a public/private partnership and create the 200,000 new jobs in Iowa that Branstad promised on the campaign trail.
“That takes legislation,” Branstad said of the transformation to a public/private partnership. “We’re going to work from the present framework that exists, but we are going to envision where we want to go and we’re going to lay that out. We did some of that during the campaign, and we’re now going to move forward very aggressively on this even during the transition before we take office. But we will then need to work through the legislative process to get the changes made that we want to get made.”
