State development chief says unraveling “mystery” necessary for fair share of fed’s disaster relief

Michael Tramontina, director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development, was in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday and stopped by The Gazette for a chat.

It’s nice to see a genuinely enthusiastic guy. He was reading the front page of the Tuesday Gazette, excited about the prospects of the federal stimulus package providing funds to upgrade the nation’s electrical delivery system. Such investment will get Iowa’s wind power to market and help the emerging wind power industry in the state, he said.

He imagined, too, that the federal government might find money to build an ethanol pipeline to get Iowa’s ethanol speedily to market.

But Tramontina stopped by to field questions on the federal government’s delivery of disaster relief funds to the state, and in particular, the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development’s delivery of Community Development Block Grant funds to Iowa.

Tramontina said the latest stab at quantifying the state’s unmet disaster needs are $900 million in housing assistance, $900 million in assistance to business and then some untold amount for public infrastructure.

He didn’t think all the losses that Iowa businesses sustained to disaster in 2008 would ever be recovered.

Most interesting was Tramontina’s discussion about the amount of CDBG money that Iowa has seen to date.

It has become something of a statewide and Cedar Rapids-wide truth that Iowa has not gotten all the CDBG funds it should have from the federal government.

In the shortest of shorthand, Tramontina noted that the federal government dispensed $85 million and then $72.5 million to Iowa from an initial disaster relief allocation made on June 30. The money has now arrived.

A second Congressional appropriation at the end of October called for spending $6 billion on disaster relief, with about one-third of it to be allocated in short order.

One great thing had changed from June 30 and Oct. 30, Tramontina said: Only a few states were included in the first pot of money; now more than 30 are as a result of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, wildfires in California and much more.

He said HUD nicely explained to the state of Iowa some months ago how they determined which states would get what from the first Congressional allocation for disaster relief last summer.

In the second allocation, in which Iowa is slated to receive $125 million of the first $2 billion of $6 billion in relief, the formula for allocating the money is what Tramontina calls “totally a mystery.”

SEE who got what at http://www.hud.gov/news/release.cfm?content=pr08-179.cfm

To date, Iowa has not received any of the $125 million in the second allocation, thought Tramontina said the federal procedure is moving ahead on that. He said HUD must publish a Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA), the state must submit an action plan for its share of the funds, and then HUD approves the plan and begins to make funds available. The NOFA has not yet been published, but it is expected to be shortly. Iowa intends to file its action plan with HUD before that.

Tramontina used the analogy of an ATM machine. HUD doesn’t simply write Iowa a big check, but it puts money aside for the state. The state then accesses it, case by case, he said.

Any decisions about how the remaining $4 billion in disaster relief will be parceled out to states remain in the future.

Tramontina said Iowa’s Congressional delegation, including its senators and Congressman Dave Loebsack and Bruce Braley, are working hard to make sure that the HUD formula used for the next $4 billion in relief uses factors that are fair to the state of Iowa.

Asked what the state of Iowa was doing to lobby Iowa’s Congressional delegation about HUD’s CDBG money, Tramontina said, in truth, “They don’t need to be lobbied.”

“The Congressional delegation is working real hard,” he said.

One argument for “co-location” in new public buildings: ‘Getting people to the right parking lot’

One of the big questions that local taxpayers will face later this year is this one: Do you want to build brand-new public buildings to replace flood-damaged ones or not?

City Hall, along with Linn County and the Cedar Rapids school district, is preparing a six-month-or-so public participation process to take public input on what to build or not to build.

All three central administrative buildings were hit by the flood: City Hall on May’s Island; the county’s Administrative Office Building, across from the Penford Products plant on First Street SW; and the school district’s Educational Service Center on Second Avenue SW.

Camp Dresser & McKee, a consultant for the city, detailed last week what a new Community Services Center might include. SEE http://gazetteonline.com/Assets/images/commservicescenter.jpg

Such a center might be a single building or a campus of buildings with space to house the functions that had been in the three flood-damaged administrative buildings.

A second city consultant, Sasaki Associates Inc., last week said that one place such a Community Services Center might go is on the west side of the river somewhere between the river and Interstate 380.

Proponents of such a center note that it would be more sensible for the public to find and a more efficient place for the government entities to deliver services.

One frequent example often cited is that people no longer would show up at City Hall and be told to go to the Public Works Building to get a building permit. Or they wouldn’t show up at the county building to see the assessor and be told that the county assessor is there but the city assessor is in the city’s office over at Public Works.

The idea behind the Community Services Center is “to get everyone to the right parking lot.”

Such a “co-location” of services also could have common spaces shared by the three entities: a lunch room, for instance, or even a public meeting space that the City Council, Board of Supervisors and school board all could use.

Another proposed new building is called the Community Operations Center. SEE http://gazetteonline.com/Assets/images/commopscenter.jpg

This would be a facility in which the public didn’t need to use much. It would house the city’s streets, sewer and garbage operations and also could house the fleet maintenance operations of city, county and school district.

One idea is that it would be located at the city’s existing Public Works Building, 1201 Sixth St. SW.

A third new public building –- a Community Safety Training Center — might be located at Kirkwood Community College. That’s at least one idea, Police Chief Greg Graham has said.

It would have classrooms, a fire tower for firefighter training, indoor and outdoor firing ranges and driving courses. SEE http://gazetteonline.com/Assets/images/commtrainingcenter.jpg

A joint safety training center also could include a joint communications dispatch center, an idea which holds out the prospect that one day the city and county might actually combine their dispatch services.

One skeptic of the public participation process has been Pete Welch, chairman of the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission. The commission operates the city’s Veterans Memorial Building that houses City Hall.

A new Community Services Center would mean that city government would not return to City Hall, and Welch has been displeased because he says that he and the commission have not been involved in much of the discussion to date. At one point, Welch said city leaders write a script, know the ending and then conduct a public participation process to get there.

City Manager Jim Prosser dismisses such a notion.

“When you are making these big decisions on these facilities, you need to get public feedback,” Prosser told The Gazette editorial board last week. “So we’ll have a public participation process.

“I know people struggle with this idea, but when you do that, you really have to start that process with the idea that you just have to trust the process and not know what the outcome is or not have a favorite son in that outcome. You just have to let it go. Whether there will be co-location or not, I don’t know. You just got to let it go. And if it makes sense, it will show. And if it doesn’t, it will show that, too.”