Member profile: Rep. Dolores Mertz
Dolores Mertz is serving her tenth term in the Iowa House. She serves as the Chair of the Agriculture Committee and also serves on the Judiciary, Natural Resources, and Transportation Committees as well as the Agriculture & Natural Resources Budget Subcommittee.
Dolores Mertz was born May 30, 1928, one of three children of John and Gertrude Shay. She grew up in Bancroft, Iowa, where her father was a grain elevator foreman.
Dolores enjoyed public speaking and even wrote a three-act play which was performed at her high school. She graduated from St. John’s High School in Bancroft in 1946 and enrolled at Briar Cliff College. She earned an A.A. degree in elementary education in 1948.
She was working in West Bend as a bank teller when in 1951 she married H.P. Mertz, a local farmer. Dolores and Pete had seven children – Peter, Mary, David, Ann Marie, Helen Kay, Janice and Carol – and there are now eleven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Pete served as a Kossuth County supervisor until his death in 1983. Dolores was appointed to take his place and was then elected to the board in 1984. She served for five years, learning about local government and working to improve local human services. In 1988, she was elected to the Iowa House and has served for ten terms. She is the senior Democrat on the Agriculture and Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee with responsibilities for funding conservation and farm programs in the state. She is the House Agriculture Chair and is the first woman to hold this position.
Dolores was recently elected to the Board of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national organization of state legislators and government officials. For the past seven years, she has served as the chair of ALEC’s Health & Human Services Task Force. She was National Chair of AIEC in 2007. She is also National Director of Women in Government, a national organization of women legislators. She was recently named legislator of the year by Agri Business Industry of Iowa.
She was recently awarded the first National Crop Life Award for outstanding legislators.
Dolores has been active at Sts. Peter and Paul Church in West Bend. She was a member of the National Legislative Board of the Catholic Daughters and served three years as head of the state Catholic Daughters, an organization of 12,000 Catholic women dedicated to charitable work. She was also president of the Council of Catholic Women for the Sioux City Diocese.
She serves on several state boards, including the Farmers Advisory Council with the Department of Natural Resources, the FFA Educational Advisory Council and the Water-Shed Improvement Board. Locally, she is a member of the Algona Soroptimist Club, the Humboldt Business and Professional Women, and the West Bend Drama Club, which she worked with to raise money to build a new local swimming pool.
In her free time, Dolores enjoys crafts, especially painting ceramics.
