Corbett gets closer to mayoral run; says City Hall doesn’t need to spend taxpayer money to build a ‘Taj Mahal’

Ron Corbett reports he is getting closer to a mayoral run, and on Thursday afternoon, he was at the ready with an opinion about the City Council’s interest in building a Community Services Center that would essentially be a new city hall.

“The city doesn’t need to use taxpayer money to build a Taj Mahal,” says Corbett, a vice president of trucking firm CRST Inc.

Corbett points to the digital age and the era of the Web and the Internet and he says more and more people are paying bills and conducting business without a need to go to a public building.

“Twenty, 30, 40 years from now, taxpayers aren’t ones who are going to get in their cars and drive down to City Hall,” Corbett says.

He also says he doesn’t like the idea of taking a parcel of land off the tax rolls for a new public building.

Instead, he wants to see what kind of life is still left in the city’s historic, flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building, which has housed City Hall on May’s Island for more than 80 years.

“I’m a fan of sitting down with the Veterans Commission and working with them on the best use of that facility,” Corbett says.

He notes, too, that the city will be taking possession of the existing federal courthouse, down the street from the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall, in 2012 when the new courthouse opens. That should present some different options for some departments in city government, he says.

Corbett is past Speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives and he served as president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce from 1999 to mid-2005. He resigned to join CRST Inc.

Corbett backers are thought to have conducted a recent phone survey to see whom voters might back for mayor.

The choices in the survey were Corbett; council member and attorney Brian Fagan; Gary Hinzman, executive director of the Sixth Judicial District Department of Correctional Services and former police chief; Scott Olson, a commercial Realtor who lost a close race for mayor in 2005; and Monica Vernon, a business owner and council member.

Fagan and Vernon this week both expressed strong backing for a public participation process that will take the next six to nine months to look at building a Community Services Center.

The city also is interested in seeing if the county or school district wants to consider “co-locating” services in the center.

In addition, the city is interested in building a Community Safety Training Center for police and firefighters, which also could include a new dispatch center. The city and county have long avoided joining forces in such a center, but this could be an opportunity to rethink that.

The city also is talking about reconfiguring its Public Works Facility into a Community Operations Center.

C-SPAN junkies see Rockwell Collins chief tell Obama, face to face, that Cedar Rapids needs help

For anyone who failed to spend Friday evening watching C-SPAN, you missed a chance to see President Obama address The Business Council, which describes itself as “an association of the chief executive officers of the world’s most important business enterprises.”

“Membership is personal, not corporate, and by invitation,” the council’s Web site explains.

In any event, Obama spoke to The Business Council in the East Room of The White House on Friday to tell the CEOs that the $789-billion economic stimulus plan was good for the nation. Obama told the council members that he needed their help and that government needed the thoughts of the nation’s business leaders.

It all took about 15 minutes. Obama then mixed with the crowd, shaking hands and thanking the top dogs for coming.

He came to one familiar looking fellow, and the C-Span microphone picked a little of the exchange.

Rockwell Collins’ CEO Clay Jones introduced himself to Obama and noted that he was there from Cedar Rapids.

Obama connected with Cedar Rapids, of course. It was his first presidential campaign stop after announced his campaign for the presidency in Springfield, Ill., in Feb. 10, 2007.

“How’s Cedar Rapids?” Obama asked Rockwell’s Jones, shaking his hand.

“We need a little help there, sir,” Jones told Obama in this eye-to-eye moment.

The exchange continued for a few seconds, out of microphone range. Obama seemed to say that he was aware of Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery, and he could be heard mentioning Gov. Chet Culver’s name.

Jones had a few seconds at Obama. And the Rockwell Collins CEO wasn’t talking the aviation industry, he wasn’t telling Obama how wonderful he was. He doing a one-CEO lobbying campaign for Cedar Rapids — the chief of Cedar Rapids most major employer, eyeball-to-eyeball with Obama.

Who knows.

There have been thousands of pleas in Cedar Rapids about the need to lobby Washington, D.C., for disaster funds. City and community delegations have been to the nation’s capital, and City Hall is paying a D.C. firm $120,000 a year to make its case.

Where Friday’s interchange between Rockwell Collins’ Jones fits in is hard to know.

No to local-option sales tax vote March 3, says group called Cedar Rapids Tea Party

There has been quite an outpouring of organized support as the March 3 vote approaches on a 1-percent local-option sales tax.

The City Council supports it. There’s a local grass-roots group, Vote YES! For Our Neighbors. The Chamber of Commerce, Downtown District, Hawkeye Labor Council, the Next Generation Commission, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and on and on.

That surely doesn’t mean there aren’t opponents.

Tim Pugh, who identifies himself as a 32-year-old small business owner, is leading a group that calls itself Cedar Rapids Tea Party.

Pugh says he has about 75 people who have signed for the cause to date.

He handed out a flier at the Wednesday evening council meeting: “Now is NOT the time to get LOST,” the flier reads. LOST, of course, is local-option sales tax.

The 1-percent tax is expected to raise between $18 million and $24 million a year for five years and three months, with 90 percent going for flood relief and 10 percent for property tax relief. Cedar Rapids Tea Party says the portion going to property-tax relief is “pennies for Homeowners.”

The group wants the city to cut waste in its budget, not raise taxes. The group says the city already has “squandered” flood relief funds.

Carol Martin, the well-known critic of City Hall spending, also is organizing a network of sales-tax opponents separate from Tim Pugh’s group.

Two efforts focused on the same message is a good thing, Martin said Thursday.

Looming slugfest between City Hall and FEMA foreshadowed in move to rebuild flood-damaged Ellis Park pool

City Manager Jim Prosser, with the full support of the City Council, is spending a total of a few million dollars on at least four consultants to help the city assess the flood damage to an assortment of the city government’s key buildings and 300 or so other city facilities ranging from the sewer plant to water wells to park pavilions.

The consultants also are putting a price tag on what the city thinks the cost will be to fix the facilities as they were, fix them and improve them or demolish them and build something else. So much rebuilding needs to take place that the consultants are helping, too, to prioritize the order in which things get rebuilt. It can’t all be done at once.

It’s been a methodical process, the value of which might very well surface in the debate in this year’s coming municipal elections. Look for some candidates to question the speed of the city’s recovery.

One read of the value of the City Hall approach will come by April 1. That’s the date in which bids are expected on the renovation of the Ellis Park swimming pool, one of those 300-plus city facilities damaged in the June flood.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has put the cost of repairs at $214,502; the city’s consultants, at $314,187. The city’s estimate is 46 percent more than FEMA’s.

Granted, $100,000 here and there is only that. But the number will be tens of millions of dollars when estimates differences in the range of 46 percent are applied to a $25-million renovation bill like the ones talked about at the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall and the Paramount Theatre and the $17 million to $21 million estimate for the library. And then there’s the Water Pollution Control facility, city wells, park buildings and on and on.

From the earliest days after the June flood, the city’s Prosser has said that fighting for dollars from FEMA would be one of the big tasks that city government would face in repairing or replacing what it lost in the flood. Other cities that have had the experience report that they never got what they believe they should have from FEMA, Prosser has said.

Last week, Prosser shrugged off the current difference in estimates on the Ellis pool project between FEMA’s estimate and the one provided by the city consultants.

Council member Kris Gulick agreed the current estimate figures didn’t matter.

The key, Gulick said, was to correctly chronicle all of the particulars of the damage on the worksheet that the city submits to FEMA. In the end, FEMA apparently will pay the actual cost -– revealed in the contractors’ bids and the actual construction cost -– if FEMA agrees on just what was damaged in the first place.

In the first couple months after the flood and in the months since, FEMA has publicized what it thinks damage awards will be on several of the largest city items damaged in the flood. At one point, FEMA even sent out a memo questioning the hiring of consultants to add up damages.

City Hall here continued on its way.

In the end, the back and forth between City Hall and FEMA might have big value for the taxpayer. Few would want the federal government to simply hand over all that the city asked for. And at the same time, FEMA could end up wanting to spend less rather than more in Cedar Rapids. The true figure likely will be somewhere short of the city’s estimates and somewhat more than FEMA’s.

It’s called bureaucracy, isn’t it?

It is the same thing that is frustrating so many owners of flood-damaged homes as they wait for state, federal and local governments to try to tally up just what is appropriate to spend on a particular renovation project.

As for the Ellis Park pool, city staff members were preparing not to open it this summer.

However, the City Council now has pushed to open it. The council has given the impression that having someone splash around in the pool might provide the community with a little bit of a psychological lift. The expected opening date is July 13 if the renovation can be started by April 20, city staff members report.

The long-range future of the Ellis pool is still under review, Julie Sina, the city’s parks and recreation director,told the council last week. Prior to the 2008 flood, attendance had been dropping at the Ellis pool, in part, because of the newer, better pools at Cherry Hill Park, Noelridge Park, Bever Park and Jones Park. The changing demographics in the Ellis area also might have been playing a role, Sina said.

In 2005, 22,973 people used the Ellis Pool; in 2006, 19,468; in 2007, 17,475. In 2008, 602 did before the mid-June flood closed the venue for the year.