CEDAR FALLS - It's believed to be the biggest promotion for a United Auto Workers official from Waterloo-Cedar Falls in 20 years.

Dennis Kinard, 52, of Cedar Falls, international representative at the UAW's Waterloo subregional office and a 31-year John Deere Waterloo employee, has been promoted to assistant regional director for UAW Region 4, based in Chicago.

It's considered the biggest jump for a Waterloo UAW official since now-retired Bill Stewart, also a John Deere Waterloo employee, became regional director in 1984.

Kinard began his new duties earlier this month. He reports directly to UAW Region 4 director Dennis Williams. Region 4 covers Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana and covers roughly 65,000 members.

His responsibilities will include negotiations, working with international representatives from the various states, union organizing efforts, and directing the UAW's Pat Greathouse Regional Education Center in Ottawa, Ill.

He took the job because of "what's interested me in the union for the past 31 years - to represent the UAW membership," he said.

"Obviously, part of the reason I took the job is, with the economic times we face, it'll be challenging because of the economic downturn and layoffs under the current administration in Washington," Kinard said, "We're looking forward to turning the corner and starting to come back."

Kinard was hired at Deere in 1973, and worked his way up within UAW Local 838, serving as a steward and committeeman; he participated in national contract talks in 1980, and in 1997 replaced Mike Hewitt as shop chairman for the downtown Westfield Avenue site, the Foundry and the Product Engineering Center in Cedar Falls. He helped negotiate a new contract for the Foundry in 1997 and participated in national Deere-UAW contract talks later that year and in 2003.

In 2000, Kinard succeeded retiring Jim Schuler as international representative at the Waterloo subregional office, responsible for seven labor agreements and bargaining units in addition to Deere.

Schuler, who passed away later that year, was a mentor and encouraged Kinard to succeed him.

"'It's a good chance to see if what you really believe will make a difference,' Jim Schuler said, and it's time to do that again," Kinard said. "They only make one kind like him. I still miss him."

Kinard and his wife, Jean, who works at Covenant Medical Center, will relocate to Chicago. They have two grown children.

A portion of Kinard's former duties as international representative in Waterloo have been assumed by Tom Wallace of the UAW's Moline, Ill., subregional office.