CEDAR RAPIDS — City Hall here now has a communications apparatus that can spit out press releases with the best City Hall flak-catching machines in the nation.
Somehow, though, the operation failed to make note that the Iowa City/County Management Association has named Cedar Rapids City Manager Jim Prosser as the group’s Manager of the Year.
This was back on Sept. 11.
Prosser’s schedule did not permit him to attend the awards event in Council Bluffs, which was part of an Iowa League of Cities’ annual conference, reports Alan Kemp, the League’s executive director.
The management association consists of about 150 city managers, assistant city managers and city administrators and a few county administrators.
The group’s award for top manager is a new one. Prosser is the second recipient.
Tim Vick, city manager in Manchester and a member of the association’s six-member awards committee, said two members of the committee nominated Prosser for the award.
In making the award to Prosser, Vick said the committee noted that Prosser had overseen the successful transition to the city manager government in Cedar Rapids after nearly a century in which the commission form of government was in place in the city.
Vick said the awards committee also took note that Prosser had reorganized city government, had taken city government through a controversy over an idea to sell a piece of the Twin Pines Golf Course and had used what Prosser calls the balanced decision-making process in helping the city recover from the June flood.
The award came to light this week via an anonymous letter to The Gazette. The writer of the letter said Prosser was “too modest” to make public the recognition from his peers.
Eye on the Island 
He didn’t tell anyone. I suppose that means he’s “humble” and not because he knows he is completely undeserving of it.