Halloran and Fagan bring Condition of the City speech downtown; city needs sales tax, they say; Alliant exec has few hopes for downtown steam

Mayor Kay Halloran and Brian Fagan, mayor pro tem, told an audience of about 300 at Friday’s Condition of the City speech that a 1-percent local sales tax will help the flood-damaged city rebuild.

“We need it,” Fagan said bluntly, when asked about Tuesday’s upcoming sales-tax vote during the noontime event in the Ballroom of the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel.

The annual event is sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Cedar Rapids/Marion.

To a question about the viability of a low-cost steam system in the downtown, Fagan turned to Eliot Protsch, Alliant Energy’s chief operating officer, in the crowd.

Protsch came to the microphone to say that there “may be” a solution to the steam issue for large users of the steam system, including the Quaker and Cargill plants. But he said it was “difficult” to see how steam, which had been provided by Alliant’s flood-damaged Sixth Street Generating Station, could be provided to the downtown “absent” a very large subsidy.

On the sales-tax question, Fagan said the estimated $18 million a year that the sales tax will bring to the city for five years and three months will allow the city to rebuild properly. Passing the sales tax also will show federal and state lawmakers, from whom the city is asking disaster help, that Cedar Rapids is doing its share to “support ourselves locally,” he said.

Mayor Halloran noted that the City Council will use the sales-tax revenue to buy out, repair and replace flood-damaged housing vital to the city’s work force.

“I don’t want residents of Cedar Rapids leaving (town),” Halloran said.

City Manager Jim Prosser, who joined the mayor and Fagan during the  question-answer period, said the city’s share of flood-related costs could come to $500 million even if the city and community secure substantial federal and state funds. “That’s the number,” he said.

In prepared remarks that reprised ones made at the City Council meeting Wednesday evening, Halloran said the city remains “open for business” despite the 2008 flood and its aftermath. She said the council promises to be “vigilant” with its budget and to work hard and deliver efficient government.

Halloran noted, too, that the she and the council continue to push the Iowa Legislature to stop its “draconian” ways and give Cedar Rapids and other cities the freedom to raise revenue from diverse sources. That will mean the city won’t need to be so heavily on property taxes, she said.

Halloran had Fagan focus his comments on the city’s flood-recovery effort, the costs of which are “staggering,” Fagan told the audience. He said the needs and costs don’t get better if they are ignored.

As he did on Wednesday evening, Fagan defended the City Council’s use of outside experts, who he said are helping guide the city through a community recovery that could cost $5 billion. The $5-million cost for the help, he said, is small in relation to the damage.

“Yes, we needed outside experts. Yes they are ‘consultants,’” said Fagan in acknowledging that it was issue for which the council has taken criticism.

Those in Friday’s audience also asked if the city can get too much public input before it acts and if lobbying efforts to obtain disaster relief have failed.

On the question of public input, Fagan said other communities that have gone through disasters have told Cedar Rapids that their ability to get projects started and finished had been hampered by not taking time up front to listen to the public.

Prosser said cities easily can make decisions about rebuilding, but he said the key is to make decisions that actually get implemented. Without adequate public input, they don’t, he said. He pointed to Tulsa, Okla., which he said we still trying to put a flood-protection system in place 25 years after its devastating flood.

Halloran, Fagan and Prosser all noted that much has been done and is being done to lobby the federal and state governments for disaster relief. But Prosser said the truth was that “this terrible disaster doesn’t have a simple solution.”

The League of Women Voters put Friday’s attendance at about 300, which is down from 359 people who attended a year ago.

From the podium, Halloran said the audience she was addressing looked “very intent.”

“I think they care what happens to the city, and as long as we continue to tell them what we are doing, they will recognize that we’re doing a very big job,” the mayor said.

Davenport’s Gluba says what Cedar Rapids City Hall says: city leaders are at least as smart as state legislators and cities need more financial freedom

Davenport Mayor Bill Gluba served in the Iowa Statehouse back in the 1970s, and this week he was recalling how back then was the time when Iowa cities secured “home rule.” Back then, Gluba, a Democrat, was among state lawmakers who also pushed to give Iowa cities what he called “financial home rule.”

At the time, though, state lawmakers wanted to keep a tight hold on the freedom local jurisdictions had to decide how to raise money to pay for local government, Gluba said. That’s still the case, he added.

“The people on the Cedar Rapids City Council, the mayor, the council members, they’re all as intelligent as anybody in Des Moines. I know them all in Des Moines.

“The elected officials in Cedar Rapids are responsible, caring, concerned citizens who all have the best interest at heart of the people of Cedar Rapids. And so we should have financial home rule across the board and let them make their own decisions.”

Don’t be misled: Gluba was really talking about himself and his own colleagues on the Davenport City Council as much as he was anybody at Cedar Rapids’ City Hall.

He was simply making the point that Cedar Rapids’ city leaders are in the same pickle as he thinks Davenport’s city leaders and many other city leaders are across Iowa.

He was making the point that the Cedar Rapids City Council and City Manager Jim Prosser have been trying to make for more than a year. That is, cities in Iowa are too dependent on property taxes to pay their bills, and that the Iowa Legislature needs to give cities freedom to raise revenue in other ways.

Cedar Rapids City Council members call it “revenue diversification.”

One of simplest ways to accomplish that might be to let cities charge an income-tax surcharge just like school districts in Iowa now can do.

But one thing state law now allows cities to do to diversify revenue is to pass a local-option sales tax.

Only six county-seat cities in all of Iowa – Iowa has 99 counties – do not have a local-option sales tax in place. Those are Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Des Moines, Adel, Indianola and Ida Grove. Ida Grove puts it in place this summer.’

“I really can’t believe Cedar Rapids doesn’t have it,” Gluba says of the sales tax.

Cedar Rapids and other Linn County jurisdictions vote on the tax on March 3; Iowa City and other Johnson County jurisdictions on May 5.

Davenport’s mayor: Tuesday votes on local-option sales tax in Cedar Rapids and Davenport could help both cities’ work forces and help keep both from becoming second rate

Davenport Mayor Bill Gluba is a proponent of the 1-percent local-option sales tax that his city has had in place since 1988.

Sixty percent of the revenue goes there has gone for property-tax relief and 40 percent for infrastructure and capital improvement projects. It’s bringing in $15 million for Davenport a year.

Why Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second largest city, hasn’t embraced the tax is a mystery to him, Gluba says. For Davenport, Iowa’s third largest city, the tax has been little short of a Godsend, he says.

In Gluba’s view, Cedar Rapids surely needs all the extra revenue it can get as it works to recover from the June 2008 flood.

“I really can’t believe Cedar Rapids doesn’t have it,” says Gluba of the local sales tax. “It’s one of the most progressive communities in the state. I hope they will listen to the leadership of your mayor and others who know the need to do this.

“You were devastated in the flood. … Do you want to become a second-rate city?”

At the same time, not all is well in Davenport even with the local-option sales tax.

Gluba is candid: Davenport’s population is stagnant and it’s getting older and poorer. Those are the facts, he says.

With that in mind, Davenport is sending its voters to the polls on Tuesday, too. Only Davenport is seeking to change the way the city distributes the $15 million in revenue the tax provides each year.

At the heart of the change is an issue that is one that Cedar Rapids leaders have been talking about and worrying about for a few years. That is, how does a city keep and attract talented workers and employers for the future? Cedar Rapids council members and community groups supporting the local-option tax talk about the need keep and attract a quality work force as part of the reason to rebuild the city better than ever.

In Davenport, community leaders think “Davenport Promise” is the answer and they are asking voters to steer up to 30 percent of the city’s annual local-option sales tax revenue to fund the program.

Davenport Promise’s promise is to pay the tuition of every Davenport student when they go to college or a vocational school. For students who enter the military, the program will provide $7,500 in mortgage assistance should the veteran return to live in Davenport.

The program is based on a privately funded one in Kalamazoo, Mich., which Gluba says has accomplished what Davenport is looking to do. It has attracted residents, increased the number of public school children, spurred home sales, increased home prices and helped the commercial and industrial sector.

Gluba calls the Davenport Promise an economic development tool. He says it is designed to attract talented workers to live in Davenport, have them raise their children in Davenport and help prepare their children for an education after high school.

Gluba says cities in Iowa provide incentives to businesses all the time to attract or keep them. He says Davenport Promise goes a step farther and looks to use incentives to attract the workers and the families. The goal is for everyone to know that Davenport is “The Education Community,” he says.

Davenport Promise, he adds, isn’t without organized opponents.

What is surprising, perhaps, is that a vote on such a fascinating idea is coming on Tuesday in a city as close as Davenport with little or no mention in Cedar Rapids. It’s an indication that Cedar Rapids is focused on its flood and recovering from it.

Pass the tax and get on with that job, Davenport’s Gluba encourages Cedar Rapids.

Whether you do or don’t, he adds, just know Davenport has Cedar Rapids in mind.

“Davenport, we’re trying to surpass Cedar Rapids,” Gluba says. “… If you don’t get on about it, you’re going to be the third largest city in the state rather than the second.”