Iowa / State / 91st General Assembly, 2026 Regular Session

2026 Iowa Acts ch 1088 (S.F. 93) Widened who may serve as a county veteran affairs commissioner while narrowing who may be the executive director

Catalog reconciledEnactedScope changed

Signed 2026-05-15 · Takes effect 2026-07-01

Rewrote Iowa Code section 35B.3 so that a county commission of veteran affairs member need no longer be a veteran under section 35.1. Three classes now qualify: a veteran as defined in section 35.1; an Iowa resident who is a current member of the Iowa national guard or an Iowa unit of the reserve forces "whose service is satisfactory according to a letter of recommendation from the commander of the person’s current unit"; and an Iowa resident who is a former member of either, discharged under honorable conditions as evidenced by a DD-214 or a commander’s letter. Subsection 2 was changed from requiring each member to be "a veteran of" a different military branch to requiring each to "have served in" a different branch. In the same act, section 35B.6, subsection 1, paragraph "a" was amended in the opposite direction: the executive director previously had to "possess the same qualifications as provided in section 35B.3 for commission members" and must now "be a veteran as defined in section 35.1", so the new guard and reserve routes open commissioner seats and do not open the executive director post. The pre-July 1, 1989 exemption for sitting executive directors is unchanged. Tracked because the act takes a single cross-reference in two directions at once, and the widening and the narrowing are easy to conflate.