PLAY ratcheting up profile for new ‘community life/recreation center’ with day of reckoning still ahead

PLAY in Linn County (Planning Life-long Activities for You) is ramping up its public profile.

It’s been at it for three years.

PLAY is one of 15 committees formed as part of a community initiative to accomplish 15 goals in five years - Fifteen in 5.

PLAY’s idea began as one to create a “state-of-the-art community center.”

The idea now has evolved into the development of a “community life/recreation center” that would be a new home to the Witwer Senior Center, operated by Linn County, and two aged, city of Cedar Rapids facilities, the 40-year-old, indoor Bender Pool and the Ambroz Recreation Center, housed in a 103-year-old former school. The group also is looking to add playing fields.

Its task is formidable going forward. It is talking about building an expensive building. It is expected that voters will need to approve some of the funding. And the group has to decide at some point where to put things: East side? West side? North side? South side? Westdale Mall? Inside Cedar Rapids? Outside Cedar Rapids? The Sinclair site? The Tuma site? Or a couple different places at once - playing fields one spot, a building somewhere else?

PLAY currently is conducting an opinion survey of Linn County residents to see what their interests and priorities are in relation to PLAY’s wish to build a new community life/recreation center.

With funding support from the city of Cedar Rapids, Linn County and others, PLAY also has a consultant working to prepare a feasibility study for such a center.

Additionally, PLAY has scheduled three public open houses in early June to give the public an update of where the group is in its plans.

The open house schedule is this: 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., June 4, Kirkwood Training and Outreach Service Building, 3375 Armar Dr., Marion; 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., June 5, the Armory at Cedar Rapids City Hall; 5 to 7 p.m., June 5, Teamsters Hall, 5000 J St. SW.

It appears Cedar Rapids City Hall has plenty on its plate. It is focusing on several costly initiatives to get the revitalization of downtown moving. Those include riverfront redevelopment, incentives for a new downtown housing development, the building of an Intermodal Transit Facility.

In fact, council member Monica Vernon asked last week about the PLAY effort and what it might mean for the City Council. A few city staff members are on the PLAY committee, she learned.

Vernon asked for an update from City Manager Jim Prosser on the PLAY idea.

She said she and her council colleagues needed information as they decide “how are we going to work with them or not.”

Vernon said the PLAY concept “is coming at us,” and she wondered “what do we all need to know to make some pretty big decisions.”

 

New life for the riverfront looks likely: The effort welcomes your input, but it doesn’t need your approval this time

All eyes once again are on the Cedar River running through downtown.

Only today, there appears to be huge differences from just five years ago — from January 2003, when some of the community’s leaders were excited about a $10.5-million grant the city had won from the state Vision Iowa Board for the RiverRun redevelopment project.

Back then, local elected officials, who were required to come up with local matching dollars to obtain the state grant, turned to the public and asked it to pass a local-option sales tax to support the project. The public voted against the tax in June 2003, and RiverRun fell apart. A scaled-down version of the project, Cedar Bend, couldn’t find local financial support, and it, too, had to give up on Vision Iowa money.

It was kind of embarrassing for Cedar Rapids.

One thing that seemed to indicate just how much things have changed in five years came in a comment council member Chuck Wieneke made during a council session May 8 at which the council was interviewing two nationally accomplished design firms in a competition to design a riverfront improvement plan for Cedar Rapids.

Wieneke told representatives from one of the firms, Sasaki Associates Inc., Watertown, Mass., that he understood that Cedar Rapids’ corporate community was buying in to the riverfront plan. But he wasn’t sure that there yet was “citizen buy-in.” He said bottom drawers at City Hall and elsewhere are lined with past plans for the riverfront and downtown that never came to anything. He said citizens know that. He said citizen buy-in was important to him.

Both design firms, Sasaki and Close Landscape Architecture+, Minneapolis, detailed their approaches for incorporating public comment into the design process.

But, in truth, what the public thinks at this point isn’t going to matter as vitally as it did in the RiverRun days.

No one is talking about any tax or bond votes this time.

This time the City Council already has committed money, new state money looks like a sure bet and, by all accounts, corporate Cedar Rapids is ready to open the private-sector wallet.

The only public votes that will matter will be the ones in November 2010 when six of the nine City Council members will be up for reelection.

This is one of those times when the city’s elected officials are running with the idea that the public elected them to make some decisions on their own, not with polls, market surveys or ballot initiatives.

………………………………………………

The May 8 council session with the two riverfront design firms was a treat to watch. It went something like this:

This time, the pretty pictures will not be rolled up and placed in a City Hall basement to gather dust, predicted Bruce Jacobson, partner with Close Landscape Architecture+, one of the two consulting firms picked as finalists among 18 applicants to help create a new riverfront design for the city of Cedar Rapids.

This time, Jacobson said, stuff is going to get built.

That expectation is based on an incredible change in the landscape compared to just a few years ago.

That’s what Dan Thies, president/CEO of OPN Architects Inc., Cedar Rapids, assured. His firm has aligned with Sasaki Associates Inc. in the competition for the Cedar Rapids riverfront project.

“I think for the first time in a long time the community is poised for something great to happen,” Thies said.

For instance, this time, the City Council has agreed in the budget year beginning July 1 to sell $3.5 million in debt to help with downtown revitalization projects.

This time, too, the city’s biggest private employers have made financial commitments to downtown redevelopment, council members, Doug Neumann, the president/CEO of the Downtown District, and other local community leaders have said.

Also this time, local leaders — it seems a little incredible - helped convinced the Iowa Legislature and Gov. Chet Culver to create a new, $42-million pot of money for the very specific thing that Cedar Rapids city, community and corporate leaders are mobilized to do. That is, to enhance the city’s riverfront.

The new pot of money is called RECAT, Riverfront Enhancement Community Attraction and Tourism.

And Cedar Rapids’ application for the money is at the ready, awaiting the state’s Vision Iowa Board, which will dispense the RECAT money, to establish new rules for handing the money out.

The focus this time is also different. Much of talk about the big Vision Iowa projects of a few years ago was about creating unique venues to attract people to a city from far and wide.

So RiverRun ended up with a whitewater kayak course on the Cedar River, which turned out to be an idea that local voters never quite gra

This time, the idea is more about creating a downtown that people who live here and near here will first come to enjoy and embrace. Make the riverfront and the downtown the kind of place that the locals want to live near, work near and play near, is the thought.

Employees and employers will stay here, expand here and move here if the city does that. The tourists will come later.

Both designer finalists competing to help the city of Cedar Rapids redefine the Cedar River as it runs through downtown have impressive records of accomplishment.

Close Landscape Architecture+ showed off all it has down along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities, while Sasaki Associates showed off major riverfront project in big cities like Cincinnati and Indianapolis and smaller ones like Stamford, Conn., and Wheeling, W.Va.

Sasaki representatives Mark Dawson and Gina Ford also used the time with the council to show off some ideas and images of what could happen to Cedar Rapids’ riverfront and downtown.

The images were surprising:

One turned First Street SW along the river into a “great boulevard” with three rows of trees and new multi-story buildings on the streets west side, facing the river.

A second picture imagined moving the existing dam, above downtown, to below downtown, a move that would raise the water level downtown and turn it in a sheet of water. Boaters could boat in-season, ice skaters could skate in winter.

A third picture had a riverfront amphitheater, on the river’s west side, just upriver from the police station and looking across the river to the heart of downtown.

There were spectacular renderings of a pedestrian/bicyclist bridge across the river, touching at the base of May’s Island.

Both design firms have had much experience in creating riverfront features that are able to endure flooding in the periodic times when the river floods.

Part of Cedar Rapids’ need is to figure out a way to deal with flooding through the downtown without the existing, unsightly flood walls.

Those walls, as it turns out, do not provide necessary protection against a 100-year flood, the Federal Emergency Management Agency determined in the last year.

As a result, the designer picked to create a master plan for the downtown will be working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on flood issues.

As interesting as anything at the council/design-consultant session was OPN Architects’ Thies unveiling of a rendering for a Great America II building, which he said his firm is in the process of working on. The idea is that the building would be built along the river next to the Great America building, the last multistory building to go up downtown. Great America II is planned to include retail, riverfront restaurant, offices and top-story residential units, Thies said.

Thies’ firm also is working with Sherman Associates, Minneapolis, the “preferred” developer selected by the City Council to provide a first new downtown housing development.

At the same time, the city is moving ahead on plans to build a new Intermodal Transit Facility at Ninth Avenue and Third Street SE. And the city is still waiting for federal construction money so the long-planned federal courthouse can move ahead. It’s will go up between the river and Second Street SE and Eighth and Seventh avenues SE and will face back toward downtown.

At the May 8 council session, council member Justin Shields wondered about the possibility of making the river in downtown an attraction 12 months of the year.

Council colleague Tom Podzimek talked about his interest in a creative approach to flood control so that the downtown would not require an unsightly flood levee. To that, Sasaki Associates representative Gina Ford pointed to the riverfront park in Cincinnati that she said is built to flood. “Flood protection doesn’t mean you have to build walls,” she said.

Council member Brian Fagan said he wanted the riverfront effort to serve as a catalyst for downtown revitalization.

To that, Sasaki representative Mark Dawson said his design idea would “leverage” the river, what he called the downtown’s greatest asset.

“Now it’s down and out of sight and not touchable,” Dawson said. He pointed to his firm’s riverfront project in Reading, Pa., in which cleaning up the riverfront and turning building windows to face the river had people really seeing the river there for the first time.

Fagan said he understood that it might take 10 to 15 years to complete a riverfront revitalization. But he also said the council was interested in a “quick turnaround” on at least part of the effort.

OPN’s Thies said “great rigor” had been shown over some months to line up corporate, state and local government support for the riverfront and downtown.

“There is energy, momentum and excitement right now,” he said. He talked about “finding that piece” of a long-range effort that can serve as a “demonstration project” to prove that something substantial is in the offing.

Close Landscape Architecture+’s Bob Close said the task is to turn the Cedar River into more than just a “ribbon” of water. The idea is to make it a place that local people repeatedly will seek out and want to be near.

That could mean trails, public art and a riverfront amphitheater, he said.

Close’s Bruce Jacobson pointed to all-grass, 18-hole miniature golf course near the river in Minneapolis where it’s difficult to get a tee time, he said. He talked about the need to animate, activate and populate the riverfront.

 

Police chief race down to 3: A Florida deputy chief and two local captains

Jeff Hadley, a police captain in Fort Wayne, Ind., and one of the two outside finalists to become Cedar Rapids police chief, is out of the running for the job.

Hadley, 37, who is a finalist for the job of Kalamazoo, Mich., public safety chief, has told the Kalamazoo Gazette that he did not get the Cedar Rapids job.

City Manager Jim Prosser said Thursday that he will name Cedar Rapids’ new chief early next week in time for the City Council to act on the selection at its Wednesday evening meeting.

Three finalist candidates remain in the hunt: Kenneth Greg Graham, 46, deputy police chief in Ocala, Fla., and Steve O’Konek, 46, and Bernie Walther, 47, Cedar Rapids police captains.

Graham had been a finalist in January to become chief in Bellevue, Wash., but city officials there picked a local candidate.

The new chief will replace Mike Klappholz, who retired in March.

During a first round of interviews, Mo Sheronick, assistant city attorney, noted that the Cedar Rapids department has not had a chief from outside its ranks for more than 30 years.

Earlier this year, a consultant helping the city find a new chief, the Police Executive Research Forum, Washington, D.C., said most times a chief comes from outside a department when it is called into help in a police chief search.

 

Lamentations from Cedar Rapids City Hall did not fall on deaf ears at Statehouse after all

It’s not exactly been wailing at Cedar Rapids City Hall in the last year or more.

But it is certainly correct to say that there has been very much talk from City Manager Jim Prosser and the majority of City Council members that Iowa cities need more diversified ways to raise revenue. Now they are stuck primarily with property taxes.

In recent weeks, the City Hall lament became more than spitting in the wind when state Rep. Tyler Olson, D-Cedar Rapidcs, floated a bill in the Iowa House late in the now-completed legislative session. The bill proposed allowing several “pilot” cities in Iowa a chance to try other revenue-raising tactics. Revenue raised via alternative means would offset revenue raised by property taxes, according to the bill.

Among the other revenue sources might be franchise fees on utility bills, a local sales tax without a need for a referendum and even a police/fire fee. The thought behind most of the alternative fees and taxes is that people who don’t now pay property taxes in a particular jurisdiction – out-of-towners and nonprofits, for instance — would then contribute to the operation of basic city services like police, fire, streets, parks and so forth.

Earlier this week, Cedar Rapids City Council member Brian Fagan, who was among City Hall figures to lobby state lawmakers on the revenue issue, noted that lawmakers did little with the idea this legislative session.

Fagan said the thought of introducing the measure was to float an idea, to start a conversation, to identify who might be with you and who might be against you.

Then on Thursday, a news story in The Des Moines Register reported that state Senate Majority Leader Michael Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, told that newspaper’s editorial board that he expected that top legislative leaders next year will review property-tax-relief legislation that would provide cities with new revenue options just as Cedar Rapids City Hall has been agitating for.

“More choices for local governments, I think that makes some sense,” Gronstal told The Register.

State lawmakers have talked about property-tax relief for some years, particularly for commercial and industrial property owners who pay tax on all or nearly all the value of their property. Residential property owners pay tax currently on only 44 percent of the value of their property.

Come next year’s legislative session, a two-year legislative study of the property-tax issue will have been completed and lawmakers will be forced to confront the matter.

Don’t expect any lovefest.

Iowans for Tax Relief, for one, came out against much of the revenue-diversification idea, calling it a tax shift that “would bury” middle-class and low-income residents with new fees while doing nothing to control the cost of local government.

 

Prosser will ask council to approve new police chief on Wednesday; one finalist in the hunt in Kalamazoo, too

City Manager Jim Prosser on Thursday said he anticipates selecting the city’s new police chief from four finalist candidates early next week and asking City Council approval of his selection at the council’s Wednesday evening meeting.

The drama in the selection process is whether Prosser is going to select one of the two outside, out-of-state candidates or one of the two candidates who are current Cedar Rapids police captains.

The finalists are Kenneth Greg Graham, 46, deputy police chief in Ocala, Fla.; Jeff Hadley, 37, police captain in Fort Wayne, Ind.; and Steve O’Konek, 46, and Bernie Walther, 47, Cedar Rapids police captains.

Meanwhile, the blog, Fort Wayne Observed, reported Thursday evening that Hadley also is a finalist for public safety chief in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Graham had been a finalist in January to become chief in Bellevue, Wash., but city officials there picked a local candidate.

After a first round of interviews in Cedar Rapids of seven candidates, the city’s Civil Service Commission determined that five of the seven were qualified to be the Cedar Rapids chief. The commission ranked the five, with O’Konek first, Graham, second, Hadley, third, Capt. Joseph D’Agostino, 49, of the Port St. Lucie, Fla., fourth, and Walther, fifth.

D’Agostino withdrew after a second round of interviews with City Manager Jim Prosser, Mo Sheronick, assistant city attorney, and Conni Huber, the city’s human resources director.

Prosser makes the final selection with the approval of the City Council.

The new chief replaces Mike Klappholz, who retired in March.

During the first interviews, Sheronick noted that the Cedar Rapids department has not had a chief from outside its ranks for more than 30 years.

Earlier this year, a consultant helping the city find a new chief, the Police Executive Research Forum, Washington, D.C., said most times a chief comes from outside a department when it is called into help in a police chief search.

Videotapes of the first round of interviews can be found at neighborhoodnetworknews.com.

 

Next week is Bike-to-Work week: Get ready to ride with council members Podzimek, Fagan, Shey

Council members Tom Podzimek, Brian Fagan and Pat Shey are celebrating National Bike-to-Work Week on Monday by taking a bike ride by some of the city’s major employers.

Join them at 6:30 a.m. Monday at Greene Square Park downtown, Podzimek says.

The three will ride south on the Cedar River Trail to C Street SW, and head south on C Street SW out to AEGONUSA’s south campus and Kirkwood Community College and then back into town.

“I’ll be thrilled if we get 20 people to join us,” Podzimek says.

At the same time, he told his council colleagues this week that he was a little disheartened when he got to the BikeIowa Web site — http://biketowork.bikeiowa.com/default.asp — this week to register the city of Cedar Rapids’ Monday morning event  only to find that other Iowa cities already had registered with a number of employees.

Employees can go to the Website to register their employer or sign up if their employer already is on the list.

The good news, AEGONUSA was leading the list as of Thursday afternoon, with 78 employees signed up to participate in Ride-to-Work Week. The University of Iowa has 27 employees and Rockwell Collins, 17, ready to participate.

Podzimek also wants the City Council to commit to winning for Cedar Rapids the designation of “bike-friendly city.” The designation, awarded by the League of American Bicyclists, requires work, new policies and some spending to create identifiable bike routes and other bicycling features, he says.

“It’s definitely doable,” Podzimek says.

 

Police Department watchers: Relax; City Hall says police chief announcement likely next week, not this week

The city manager’s office on Wednesday said it hoped to name the city’s new police chief next week, the week of May 12.

Four finalists remain in the running, two out-of-staters, and two locals. They are Kenneth Greg Graham, 46, deputy police chief in Ocala, Fla.; Jeff Hadley, 37, police captain in Fort Wayne, Ind.; and Steve O’Konek, 46, and Bernie Walther, 47, Cedar Rapids police captains.

After a first round of interviews of seven candidates, the city’s Civil Service Commission determined that five of the seven were qualified to be the Cedar Rapids chief. The commission ranked the five, with O’Konek first, Graham, second, Hadley, third, Capt. Joseph D’Agostino, 49, of the Port St. Lucie, Fla., fourth, and Walther, fifth.

D’Agostino withdrew after a second round of interviews with City Manager Jim Prosser, Mo Sheronick, assistant city attorney, and Conni Huber, the city’s human resources director.

Prosser makes the final selection with the approval of the City Council.

The new chief replaces Mike Klappholz, who retired in March.

During the first interviews, Sheronick noted that the Cedar Rapids department has not had a chief from outside its ranks for more than 30 years.

Videotapes of the first round of interviews can be found at neighborhoodnetworknews.com.

 

Are worlds colliding? Can City Hall insist on nice design from developers focused on less regulatory red tape?

One of the roles of City Hall is to oversee what gets built in the city.

In that world of development, there are two interests that often seem to pull in different directions.

On the one hand, there is the development community — developers, landowners, builders, Realtors, engineering companies and others.

And then there are those on the City Council who have an interest in design and beautification, extras that can cost builders more than they might have planned on investing.

Earlier this week a Rhode Island tourism expert was in town talking to elected officials about their plans for riverfront improvement through the downtown, plans that include a RiverWalk, an outdoor amphitheater and other amenities.

Council member Tom Podzimek asked Robert Billington what communities in the Blackstone River Valley of Rhode Island and Massachusetts were doing to prevent themselves from looking just like every other community in the nation. Billington told Podzimek that the Blackstone Valley hadn’t figured out what to do with the expanding number of strip malls either.

“They (developers) can build what you want,” Billington said. “… But if you don’t know what you want, you’re going to get what they want.”

The factors brought to bear of what is built and how it is built in a community can include more than just more taxes,  jobs and money for the community, Billington said.

Be that as it may.

At this week’s Wednesday evening council meeting, city staff will report on yet another special endeavor - it is being called an “event” this time around - in which a selected group of developers, builders, Realtors and others in the development community have been huddling with city staff to try to streamline what the development community perceives as City Hall hurdles, rigmarole and red tape. All the regulation slows down building projects and drives some off, the development community says.

Twice in the mayoral administration of Paul Pate, from 2002 through 2005, similar efforts were made.

One of those, in part, did away with special design standards required of building projects along major routes at the gateways to the city. The thought of the design standards, adopted during Lee Clancey’s mayoral run, was that there was merit to beautify the spots people saw first when they came to Cedar Rapids. But the developers and builders ultimately prevailed: The bow to beautification at certain spots simply prevented people from building there, the development community insisted.

Apparently many of the recommendations of the second Pate-era development task force were put aside as the city changed its form of government and a new City Council and the city’s first city manager took over in 2006.

So, City Hall and the development community are back at it again.

Surely, the effort has merit. The very nature of government regulation is that it slows the pace, and who would object if regulation can be thoughtfully tweaked to accomplish without obstructing.

It might be nice to hear from a contingent of neighborhood representatives who have battled development projects in recent years to get their read on any proposed changes.

How the hopes for design standards and “sustainable” practices — another idea supported on the City Council - fits into streamlining regulation remains to be seen.

It’s easy, though, to remember the City Hall effort, which it set aside in December, to insert itself into planning for a better future for the long-struggling Westdale Mall.

In the Westdale instance, the city staff had proposed suggested special design standards for the mall’s periphery where two developers were planning to build a couple of restaurants and to renovate the former Big Lots store building. The developers wondered who was going to pay the additional costs to incorporate the design standards into the project. Ultimately, the development was set aside.

Remember, too, the construction of the new neighborhood Hy-Vee Food Store at 1556 First Ave. NE a few years ago on the busy, highly visible First Avenue East. Improving the exterior look of the store required local tax incentives or the company would not have replaced its old, ugly store with the new one.

 

Mayor Halloran answers the call for jury duty; not surprisingly, passed over as juror

Mayor Kay Halloran recalled her days as a practicing attorney this week and the times in which clients would call her asking for some advice on how to get out of jury duty.

Halloran said her answer was always the same: Do your duty. Her idea was something like this: Wouldn’t you want someone like you in the jury box if you were on trial?

So early Monday morning, there was the mayor, joining in a large pool of fellow Linn County citizen who had turned out at the Linn County Courthouse to perform jury duty.

Her number was called among a group of 16 potential jurors to hear one of the cases on the docket, a civil case involving a traffic accident of some sort. The civil jury needed just half of the 16, so attorneys on both sides of the case asked questions of the potential jurors and picked some and not others.

Halloran didn’t stand much of a chance to make it.

Mayors know people. They have entanglements.

For starters, Halloran knew attorneys on both sides of the civil case. Surely, police officers would be testifying. Police officers work for the city, the place the mayor leads.

Early on, one of the attorneys, Robert Wilson of Cedar Rapids, asked Halloran a question by calling her “Mayor Halloran.”

“The jig was up from the beginning,” Halloran said.

Wilson, of late, has represented the former city’s Veterans Memorial director, Gary Craig, as Craig worked out a resignation from his job. Halloran is an ex officio member of the Veterans Commission in her role of mayor. Even now, a state audit is underway looking at veterans’ issues in the city.

In the end, one of the attorneys asked her to explain the difference to other jurors between the criminal standard of evidence, which is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, and the civil standard, which is the preponderance of the evidence.

Then she was sent packing. She said she was just kidding when she said she felt rejected. But she sounded like she wouldn’t have minded sitting on the jury.

“I would have served cheerfully,” the mayor said. “But I can understand why I wasn’t anybody’s first choice.”

She was back at her duty station at City Hall by early afternoon.

 

City Hall at the Statehouse: yes on riverfront funds, no on revenue diversification

City leaders lobbied state lawmakers hard on two issues in the legislative session just ended late last month.

There was one huge victory for the effort and one quiet defeat.

The defeat came in the rejection of a proposal that would have given a small group of cities, most of them larger cities, the ability to experiment with an assortment of different ways to raise revenue other than the one that cities now must depend on — property taxes.

The need to diversify sources of revenue has been an oft-repeated theme at City Hall in Cedar Rapids for a year or more.

Council member Brian Fagan on Monday conceded that the revenue-diversification effort did not win support after it had been introduced in the latter part of this year’s legislative session.

Fagan, though, said introducing the idea made sense, and the dividends may come later.

It is no secret that many state lawmakers have talked for some years now about reducing the burden of property taxes, particularly on the state’s commercial and industrial property owners.

The Cedar Rapids City Hall-promoted idea of revenue diversification would have reduced property taxes on those property owners, in part, by increasing fees on those who use city services — out-of-towners and non-profit groups — but don’t pay property taxes.

The idea, Fagan said, was to start the conversation, which now has happened.

Floating the idea, he added, gave backers of the proposal an idea of who is against it, who wants to know more about it and who is for it.

“In terms of that, it was a good effort,” he said.

But the focus of Fagan and other local leaders now is on the good news for Cedar Rapids that city leaders here fought hard to secure from the Iowa Legislature.

That news comes in the form of a new $42-million pot of money for Riverfront Enhancement. And a plan in Cedar Rapids for riverfront redevelopment, which features a RiverWalk, an amphitheater and other amenities, is expected to be a strong candidate for a chunk of the new cash.

The state’s Vision Iowa Board will analyze community applications and dispense the money, and on Monday, Lu Barron, Linn County supervisor, noted that city and county staff members already have readied the community’s application for money from the Vision Iowa Board.

There are both new state funds for RECAT — Riverfront Enhancement Community Attraction and Tourism — and new funds for the longstanding program called Community Attraction and Tourism or CAT.

It’s no secret that the Vision Iowa Board and the city of Cedar Rapids have had some history together.

The state board at one point awarded the city $10.5 million in Vision Iowa funds - intended to support large projects — for a redevelopment project called RiverRun. The award was contingent on a local-option sales tax to support the project, but voters rejected the tax.

Subsequently, the Vision Iowa Board required the city to reapply for money after RiverRun was scaled back into something called Cedar Bend. Cedar Bend won a $5-million Vision Iowa award, a sum the city gave back when the new City Council in the city’s new form of government in 2006 decided it didn’t have an interest in or money for Cedar Bend.

Different today as the community approaches the Vision Iowa Board anew are three things: some fresh new local leadership; a commitment by the City Council to spend some money; and the backing, according to City Hall, from the city’s major private employers.

In the past, some local Cedar Rapids projects have successfully competed for CAT funds dispensed by the state board even if the city’s success for larger Vision Iowa funds did not work out.