City Hall confident on buyout money; but when it arrives, the legal hurdles will take a few to many months to jump, city reminds people

News elsewhere in Iowa of small-sized buyouts of flood-damaged homes does not mean that the first round of buyouts in Cedar Rapids using funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is not on track, Jennifer Pratt, the city’s development coordinator says.

Pratt on Wednesday said the city still expects to hear in August from FEMA on funds to buy out 167 properties closest to the Cedar River to make way for a riverside “greenway.”

The city intends to buy out ten times as many properties as the 167 in the greenway — 554 in a construction area needed to build a flood-protection system; and about 600 considered “beyond reasonable repair” that sit outside the greenway and construction area. The city will use federal Community Development Block Grant funds and revenue from the city’s local-option sales tax for those purchases. And every expectation is that there will be sufficient money to do the job, the city has said and Pratt repeated on Wednesday.

“It’s been so nerve-wracking getting to this point,” she said. “We just hope everything works out smoothly.”

Having said that, Pratt made clear a central point that she said those awaiting buyouts have been told and need to remember: No buyout check is going to show up in the mail quickly in any event.

Pratt said every buyout amounts to a “legal land transaction,” which can be slowed down by title problems and other legal issues.

In the best circumstances, she said it will take 60 to 90 days to get any property’s legal documentation in place before the buyout actually takes place once money arrives.

In worst cases, the entire process could take nine months, she said.

Included in the paperwork transaction is the need for each purchase to appear in front of the City Council on two separate occasions, Pratt said.

Grass-roots group that engineered local-option sales tax triumph donates $24,183 in excess campaign funds to Habitat for Humanity

Vote Yes for Our Neighbors, the Cedar Rapids grass-roots effort that successfully campaigned to secure passage in early March of a 1-percent local-option sales, has donated its leftover campaign funds — $24,183 — to Cedar Valley Habitat for Humanity.

In less than a month, the Vote Yes campaign raised $85,343.46 from what Gary Ficken and Dale Todd, campaign co-chairmen, said Tuesday was a diverse group of donors.

It did not use $24,183 of the funds raised for the campaign.

Ficken said Vote Yes for Our Neighbors and those who donated to it acted with “housing, housing, housing in mind” for flood victims. It only made sense, then, he said, to use what was left of the campaign dollars on housing for flood victims. Habitat has agreed to use the money in that way, he said.

Ficken said the mix of donors supporting the five-year, local-option sales tax for flood-victim housing was tghe most diverse group of donors he’s ever seen in a campaign for anything. He said the support made the campaign “entertaining,” and he added the fact that the campaign lasted just three-and-half weeks didn’t hurt either.

From 71 applicants, nine are chosen: City Council names Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee

The City Council on Monday named the nine members of the city’s Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee, a group picked from 71 who had applied for the job.

The members are Markell Kuper, Elizabeth Hladky, Heather Schoonover, Charles Watkins, Jeff Palmer, Sandra Skelton, Gary Ficken, Jeffery Beer and Stephen Hammes.

The council will formerly appoint the committee members at its weekly Wednesday meeting, which falls on April 1, the day the one-percent local-option sales tax starts to be collected in the city.

The tax will be in place through June 30, 2014, and is expected to raise between $17 and $18 million a year for the city.

The oversight committee’s mission is to review how the council spends the tax revenue to make sure it is in accord with the March 3 referendum that put the tax in place.

Ninety percent of the money is to go to flood relief, and more specifically, to housing buyouts and rehabilitation. Ten percent is to be used for property-tax relief.

Ficken, a local business owner, led the citizen campaign, Vote Yes! For Our Neighbors, that promoted the local-option sales tax. Hammes, an accountant, led the city’s Twin Pines Golf Course Task Force that recommended in 2008 that the city not sell 20 acres of the 150-acre course for a commercial development.

Is passage of a local-option sales tax proof that government can work?

Listen to citizens who come to council meetings, listen to the news, listen to those outside of local government and those wanting to get in on it, and it seems nothing – nothing – works well. Government doesn’t do anything right. …

It didn’t take the Flood of 2008 to push the City Council and City Manager Jim Prosser to focus a great deal of their public comments and much of the city’s Statehouse lobbying energy on trying to figure out a way to convince the Iowa Legislature to give cities more flexibility in raising revenue.

Property taxes, the chief revenue source for Iowa cities and counties, provide most of the revenue now, and those taxes hit those who create jobs, the industrial and commercial sectors, particularly hard in Iowa.

The flood and the task of recovery from it only focused City Hall’s interest in “revenue diversification” all the more. Why can’t cities have an income surcharge or a wheel tax or a tax on alcohol and tobacco use? The nine other largest cities in Iowa joined the cause.

And lawmakers and policymakers in Des Moines spoke back. They told Cedar Rapids City Hall to use a revenue option already available to them first before asking for more. And the one chief revenue-raising source that is available is the local-option sales tax.

After all, nearly every city in Iowa has the 1-percent tax in place, and only six of Iowa’s 99 counties have county seats without the sales tax. Those six include Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

At first, the Cedar Rapids council dithered, thinking state lawmakers might meet last fall and give some special consideration to Cedar Rapids and its flood recovery. On the city’s list of requests was to have the ability to institute a local-option sales tax without a vote by the residents.

There was no special legislative session.

By January, members of the City Council said in public that they had gotten the message from Des Moines: The city’s position would be strengthen in asking for large sums of federal and state funding if the city could show it was doing all it could to raise money locally using the taxing machinery it already had the ability to use. The council decided it would ask voters for a local-option sales tax to be used mostly for help in flood recovery.

By then, though, the state’s existing local-option sales tax law, which sets out a four-month timeline for when such a vote can be held, would not have allowed a vote before late spring.

Sen. Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, then wrote a piece of legislation designed especially for Cedar Rapids and Linn County and Iowa City/Coralville and Johnson County. The bill allowed an expedited vote on the sales tax, allowed the tax to begin to be collected immediately and did not require a metro area to vote as a block. Cedar Rapids could try to pass the tax for flood relief without worrying if Marion, Hiawatha and Robins would vote against the move and bring the tax down.

Hogg led the bill through the Iowa Legislature, the governor passed it and the City Council got the measure on the March 3 ballot.

The council assured the public that 90 percent of the funds would go to flood relief, and then in got even more specific and told the public it would be used in tandem with federal money to buy out as many as 1,300 flood-destroyed homes and rehabilitate many, many more.

The council also created an Oversight Committee to assure the public that a citizen group would help advise the council on how it spends the more than $90 million in sales-tax revenue that will be coming in over the next five years and three months.

On Tuesday, residents voted 59 percent to 41 percent to approve the sales tax.

The measure passed despite a palpable sense of frustration with the pace of flood recovery, a frustration level that Mayor Kay Halloran says she is quite aware of.

The Sunday before the tax vote, a Gazette Communications poll found the mayor’s approval rating at 20 percent and City Manager Jim Prosser’s at 29 percent, and the poll found a slight majority of residents said they had little or no confidence in the council.

In the end, with Sen. Hogg’s push in the legislature and with no little lobbying effort on the part of Halloran, council member Justin Shields and others in Des Moines, the city got a special, one-time deal out of the Statehouse for Cedar Rapids.

The city’s local elected officials — in a year in which six of nine council seats are up for grabs — then helped to make the case for the tax.

The voters this year might toss most up for election out of office. Who knows?

But each of the five people mentioned as a possible candidate for mayor –- Ron Corbett, Gary Hinzman, Scott Olson and council members Brian Fagan and Monica Vernon — supported the local-option sales tax for flood recovery.

And the tax is now in place. It will begin to be collected April 1.