Water-filled bladders and sand-filled baskets to provide temporary flood protection; but cost too great to protect New Bohemia/Oak Hill

The City Council moved ahead to purchase a temporary flood control system to protect many of the flood-prone parts of the city to some degree until permanent protection is in place.

The temporary system, which will cost $6.6 million for materials and mobilization if needed, will be available this flood season.

The council approved the concept of a temporary system a few weeks ago, but wanted to hear more about why it was too expensive to protect the lowest-lying area along the river, the New Bohemia/Oak Hill area.

Last night, the council agreed with consultant Stanley Consultants Inc., Muscatine, Iowa, that it did not make sense to spend an additional $3 million to protect property valued at about $2 million below Eighth Avenue SE on the east side of the river in what is New Bohemia/Oak Hill.

Council member Brian Fagan suggested that maybe that area could be the first to see the coming permanent flood protection when it is built in the years ahead.

The temporary system features a product called a tiger dam, in which water fills bladders, and a product called a Hesco Concertainers, in which sand is used to fill plastic-lined mesh baskets.

The latter was used in Johnson and Des Moines counties last year.

Once the flood forecast is for the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids to reach 20 feet, the city will mobilize the temporary protection. It will protect Time Check, Czech Village and both sides of the river downtown to a river stage measured at a downtown river gauge of 24 feet.

The city twice has had flood water reach 20 feet in its history. The only time it was higher was last June, when the river reached 31.12 feet.

Protecting to 24 feet will protect 830 homes and $21.3 million in property value, consultant Jim Kill, of Stanley Consultants Inc., Muscatine, Iowa, told the council last night.

Kill called that “a good ratio” between the cost of temporary protection and the amount of value being protected.

He said the ratio “validated” the council’s earlier decision to protect to 24 feet. 

Stealth ‘Condition of the City’ address has Halloran assuring city is ‘open for business;’ Fagan says city’s flood recovery will be a model for the nation

Without prior promotion, Mayor Kay Halloran and Brian Fagan, mayor pro tem, last night gave a Condition of the City speech, saying the city is working to recover from disaster in a way that makes the city better than ever.

The speech was part preview: Halloran is scheduled to reprise her comments at a public forum on Friday.

In PowerPoint-aided comments, Halloran last night forewarned Cedar Rapidians that “times will be difficult” in the city for the next few years as the city works to recover from the 2008 flood.

At the same time she assured that the city is “open for business” and she promised that she and her council colleagues will be “vigilant” on spending and continue to work to bring about an even more cost-effective, customer-friendly city government.

SEE
http://gazetteonline.com/Assets/pdf/ConditionofCityPPT.pdf

 

Halloran said, too, that the city will continue to work hard to change “very draconian” state policies that she said force cities to be too dependent on local property-taxes. Those taxes “gouge” the city’s businesses and residents and will “cripple our city” as it works to recover, she said.

 

Fagan said the state of the city’s condition is a tale of two cities – a city before the flood and a city recovering from a flood.

Fagan recalled the images of last June, calling them “difficult” and at the same time “inspiring” and “representative” of the giving and generosity of Cedar Rapids.

Fagan said the city’s needs and costs remain “staggering,” and he put the cost of recovery at between $2 billion and $5 billion. For housing needs alone, the city needs more than $200 million to fix, buyout, relocate and rebuild housing, he said.

In citing the dollar figures, Fagan addressed head on the frequent criticism often heard about the City Council’s use of consultants that have and are providing the city with what Fagan called “expert guidance” in the flood recovery.

He put the cost of consultants at about $5 million, defended the spending and said the expertise was the city’s best way to ensure that Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery is “the best recovery this country has ever seen.”

Fagan, too, talked about the city’s plans to make sure it renovates or rebuilds some 300 flood-damaged public city buildings and facilities in the best way it can for future generations.

He made reference to a comment last week from a Linn County supervisor, who suggested that the city was pursuing wants and not needs as the city talked about the possibility of building new facilities. It meets a public need to study rebuilding options to see what best serves customers and what is sustainable, efficient and affordable for the long term, Fagan said.

In the city’s flood recovery, Fagan singled out several high points: the public-private effort that saved the city’s water supply; the city’s ability to get its waste-water treatment plant back on line quickly; the city’s ability to get a flood-protection plan in place in four months. The speed of the latter two accomplishments was unrivaled in the nation, he said.

Fagan said the last eight months has brought some “incredibly tense times” and plenty of “vigorous debate” at City Hall and throughout the community.

For all of it, the city will come through the recovery a better city, he said.

Corps flood study cost increases; city agrees to front Uncle Sam funds to keep study going

It’s never a great confidence booster when the city of Cedar Rapids is fronting the federal government money.

That is the case, though, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers feasibility study of Cedar Rapids’ flood-protection needs. The two-year study now is expected to cost $7.5 million, up a couple million dollars from previous estimates.

The Corps has not yet secured funding for its share of the study’s cost, and so the City Council has agreed to accelerate funding to the Corps so the study can proceed until federal funds are available.

The Corps study is a prerequisite for the city to qualify for federal funding to actually pay to build a new flood-protection system, the cost of which might reach $1 billion.

The city has the burden to pay for 50 percent of the cost of the Corps study. The city, though, will get credit for an estimated $1.875 million of the study’s cost for in-kind services. It also has received a $300,000 grant to help with the city’s cost share.

The increased cost of the study comes in part because of the increased area being studied.

Initially, in May 2008, the city and the Corps had expected the Corps study to cost $1.4 million and to focus primarily on the Time Check Neighborhood. The city’s disastrous flood hit the next month and changed everything.

City Manager Jim Prosser this week said the city continues to lobby Iowa’s Congressional delegation to position the city to obtain Congressional funding quickly to actually build the flood-protection system once the Corps study is finished.

The Corps has said it might take eight to 15 years to get the system of levees and floodwalls in place, but Prosser said the hope is to cut that time down significantly.

Council ready to take yet another step to assure the distrustful

It looks like the City Council is sufficiently eager for voters to pass a local-option sales tax to help with flood recovery that the council will bite its collective tongue and again try to assure people who think the council can’t be trusted to spend the tax money correctly.

At its meeting this evening, the City Council will approve a resolution that specifies that 90 percent of the revenue from a local-option sales tax will be used “for the buyout, rehabilitation and relocation of flood-damaged housing.”

The tax is expected to generate about $18 million a year for the city in each of five years and three months that the tax will be in place should voters approve it on March 3.

Earlier, the council voted to use 90 percent of the tax revenue for flood relief and 10 percent for property-tax relief. The council-approve language on next Tuesday’s ballot reflects that earlier vote. Of the 90-percent of the tax revenue to be used for flood relief, the ballot language says the revenue will be used “for the acquisition and rehabilitation of flood damaged housing caused by the flooding of 2008, and matching funds for federal dollars to assist with flood recovery or flood protection.”

The language was designed to give the council some flexibility to use the money in the unlikely event that federal dollars, for instance, take care of more of the housing relief than the council now anticipates it will.

However, council critics were sure that meant the council would use the money in ways other than flood relief.

At last week’s council meeting, council member Justin Shields fumed about public distrust in the council and its intentions for the sales-tax revenue. At Shields’ insistence, the council, from member to member, assured that the money would be used to address the city’s couple-hundred million dollars in flood-damaged housing relief.

City Hall, then, issued a press release on Friday.

Earlier, the council voted to create a nine-member citizen oversight committee to oversee how sales-tax revenue would be spent.

Still people were questioning the council.

So tonight the council will pass a new resolution.

At last check, no one is calling for oversight committees and new resolutions to be passed by the Linn County Board of Supervisors or the city of Marion, for instance, both of which will also bring in plenty of tax-revenue should the ballot measure pass in those cities on Tuesday.

An unusual event: Recent state legislator Staed and even Downtown District’s Dusek stand up in public and praise City Council

Recent state legislator Art Staed of Cedar Rapids stood out in a crowd the other night for saying a seldom heard thing: That the mayor and City Council have been doing a great job.

It seems worth noting, because at events where the public gets a chance to speak –- week in, week out at City Council meetings, for instance -– the sentiment often is that the council and mayor are a bunch of bums.

“I don’t know where you’ve been,” Staed told a crowd of about 100 who had turned out Monday evening at a forum sponsored by The Gazette on the local-option sales tax.

He said the mayor and council had been “working their tails off for this city” ever since the flood eight months ago.

Staed had sat on his hands for a time, listening to others in the crowd beat up on City Hall and say they didn’t trust the City Council to spend the $18 million or so in the city’s share of annual sales-tax revenue responsibly.

Then he popped up to speak.

Staed said he couldn’t understand how people could show up at a public forum and essentially call elected city leaders a bunch of “liars.”

He said it was vital for the city to pass the sales tax to show the federal and state governments that the city is “doing something for ourselves.”

One suggestion had been that getting the Iowa Legislature to pass an income-tax surcharge for cities like school district can do would make for a less-regressive tax than a sales tax.

“That’s crazy, sitting around waiting for the Iowa Legislature to pass an income tax (surcharge),” Staed said.

Earlier at the forum, Peter Fisher, a University of Iowa professor or urban and regional planning and a researcher for the liberal Iowa Public Policy Project, said the regressive feature of the sales tax is really erased in the Cedar Rapids instance because so much of the tax is targeted for flood-damaged homes, nearly all of which had been owned by those with modest incomes. The tax also will go directly to creating jobs to renovate and replace the housing, Fisher said.

Fisher said he didn’t think the Iowa Legislature was likely to pass the income tax surcharge.

After Staed sat down the other night, Jon Dusek, president of Armstrong Development Co. and board member of the Downtown District, got up and agreed that the City Council had been working hard. At the same time, Dusek noted that he had sent the council a recent letter urging them not to raise property taxes by 14 percent as the city manager’s preliminary budget had proposed. The council has since sent the budget back for fixing.

Jeff Schott, former long-time Marion city manager and now program director at the University of Iowa’s Institute of Public Affairs, joined Fisher and others on the Monday evening panel. Schott noted that many Iowa cities have turned to a local-option sales tax because of a lack of ways to raise revenue other than property taxes.

The Gazette’s forum on the local-option sales tax issue brought out a nice crowd of 100 or so on a cold Monday night.

Those in attendance included people who see the tax as vital to help in the city of Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery and those who hate the tax.

Every jurisdiction in the county is voting on the tax on March 3 except four of them that already have the tax in place: Bertram, Central City, Coggon and Prairieburg.

Monday’s event actually was held over the Cedar Rapids border in Marion, though all the questions were about Cedar Rapids.

The crowd was sufficiently diverse that it drew healthy applause at some points from the tax haters and from the tax supporters.