City Council set to up its Statehouse lobbyist spending from $15,000 a year to $60,000 a year

It’s not every year a City Council brings in some key local Statehouse lawmakers to a City Council meeting to applaud what they have done for City Hall and the city.

The current City Council, though, did just that.

By the council’s count, it had a good run this year at the Iowa Legislature.

The city got special consideration to hold an expedited local-option sales tax referendum for flood-recovery, a vote that succeeded and will bring in $90 million or more into city coffers over five years.

The legislature also gave cities the ability to institute a franchise fee of up to 5 percent of gas and electric bills; gave cities recovering from natural disasters the ability to sell bonds for public buildings without asking voters first; steered $20 million in I-JOBS earmarks to flood-damaged city facilities; and on and on.

Whether in response to what the council considers legislative victories or not, the council on Wednesday evening is prepared to up its spending on lobbying in and around the Statehouse from the just-ending fiscal year’s $15,000 a year to $60,000 a year in the new fiscal year beginning today.

In recent years, the city has contracted with former state Democratic legislator Larry Murphy of L & L Murphy Consulting, Oelwein, to do the city’s lobbying in Des Moines.

In the new fiscal year, the council proposes to keep Murphy and also hire Gary Grant of Grant Consulting LLC of Cedar Rapids. Grant was district director for Republican Congressman Jim Leach from 1993 through 2007.

The total contract for the two firms is for $70,000, which includes an extra $10,000 for lobbying in Washington, D.C., if necessary, Casey Drew, the city’s finance director, noted on Tuesday.

Drew said the expanded contract will provide the city with more help in developing a Statehouse legislative strategy and will provide additional lobbying and increased communication with state elected officials and state agencies.

City Council poised to award city towing contract to lower-scoring firm after top scorer Darrah’s drops out in response to last-minute change in contract terms

City Hall is ready to turn over the city’s towing contract to the lower-scoring of two bidders after a last-minute change in the bid terms prompted the top-scoring firm to drop out.

Carmela Darrah-Chiafos, owner of the top-scoring bidder Darrah’s Towing and Recovery, on Tuesday said City Hall was ready to award a new two-year contract to her firm a week ago. Darrah’s has held the contract for many years.

But at the last minute, she said the city decided to make the length of the contract just six months, instead of the two-year period stated in the city’s bid documents. The contract long has been a two-year one.

“I was stunned,” Darrah-Chiafos said on Tuesday upon learning the city suddenly was changing the terms of the city towing contract.

She was informed of the contract change two hours before last Wednesday’s council meeting when the City Clerk’s office called to say that Police Chief Greg Graham made the change in the length of the towing contract because that’s the way Graham had done it when he worked for the Ocala, Fla., Police Department.

Darrah-Chiafos said it didn’t make sense for her business to invest in equipment to continue to service the city contract if the contract was only guaranteed for six months. Her bid was based on a two-year contract, not a six-month one, and so she withdrew it, she said.

In city documents provided to the City Council and the public, city staff members acknowledge that Darrah’s scored “higher” than a second company, Pro Tow LLC, and that Darrah’s withdrew because of the change in the length of the contract.

The initial bid documents posted on the city’s Web site state that the contract was for two years, not six months.

A three-member City Hall committee — Sandi Fowler, assistant to the city manager; Cory McGarvey, a police sergeant, and Dennis Hogan, the city’s fleet services manager — scored proposals from Darrah’s and Pro Tow on five criteria. Darrah’s received 91.66 points, Pro Tow, 77.49 points.

Darrah’s won on four of five criteria.

The average age of Darrah’s equipment is 6.9 years, Pro Tow’s, 12.9 years, according to the committee.

During site visits by committee members, Pro Tow’s surveillance cameras weren’t working “due to a lightning strike.” Pro Tow did not have two-way radios installed “at this time.”

Conversely, Darrah’s had in good working order a radio and computer-aided dispatch system integrated with surveillance cameras.

The Iowa Secretary of State’s office lists Marilyn Philipp as company representative of Pro Tow at 941 66th Ave. SW.

The City Council is slated to vote on the six-month towing contract at its Wednesday evening meeting. The current contract expired Tuesday night.

Renovation getting closer for smaller flood-damaged venues; Ellis pool, trails, police locker room, Jones golf clubhouse and Third Avenue parkade

Having just passed the one-year mark of the June 2008 flood, the city is getting closer to beginning work to renovate a few of its smaller flood-damaged facilities.

This week, the City Council will hold a public hearing to discuss renovation plans for the flood-damaged Jones Golf Course/Clubhouse. The estimated cost of the work is $292,000.

Also, the council will hold a public hearing on a $330,000 repair of flood damage to the Cedar River Trail, the Sac and Fox Trail, the Ellis Trail and the A Street levee.

In addition, the council will hold a similar public hearing on July 8 to discuss repair plans for the flood-damaged Ellis Park pool, the cost of which is estimated at $367,000.

A second public hearing on July 8 will address $400,000 in repairs to the flood-damaged locker room area of the Police Department.

Also on that date is a public hearing on repairs for the flood-damaged Third Avenue SE Parkade. Renovation is expected to cost $731,000.

Meanwhile, City Hall on Tuesday is holding the first of three open houses to obtain public input as it decides what to do with the city’s major flood-damaged buildings, including the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall, the library, the bus depot and Paramount Theatre. Other open houses will follow on Aug. 18 and Oct. 6.

Fast change in City Council agenda can’t conceal the thought that University of Iowa business manager ranks as front-runner for City Hall flood-recovery post

George Hollins, the University of Iowa’s business manager who has worked on the university’s flood fighting and recovery, appears to be the front-runner to fill a new city of Cedar Rapids post, flood-recovery director.

Late Monday afternoon, City Hall released the weekly City Council agenda with agenda item #39 stating, “Resolution approving the appointment of George Hollins as flood recovery director.”

A short time later, City Hall released an amended agenda showing item #39 crossed out.

Conni Huber, the city’s human resources director, said late Monday afternoon that all four finalist candidates remain candidates for the job.

Thirty-one people applied for the new post, and a nine-member selection committee picked six to interview.

Greg Eyerly, the city’s utilities operations manager, Tom Watson, Palo’s flood-recovery manager, Sara Jones, an emergency management planner in New Jersey, and Hollins are the four who remain in the competition.

This City Hall flood-recovery job is unique for Cedar Rapids because of how it will be financed — the private sector will pay some of the cost — and because it was created at the urging of Rockwell Collins, the city’s largest employer.

Hollins was earning $116,400 in salary at the University of Iowa in the 2008 fiscal year.

Let the shooting continue: Police Department says the 2008 flood has helped it comply with State Ombudsman’s questions about shooting range

Neighbors next to the Police Department’s regional outdoor shooting range have been trying to get someone to do something to quell some of the range’s racket for years.

The Iowa Citizens’ Aide/Ombudsman spent the last couple years reviewing the matter before, in April, sending City Hall a letter suggesting that the shooting range, at 2727 Old River Rd., SW, violated state law.

In the letter, Bert Dalmer, assistant ombudsman, noted that the particular section of state law in question falls under a section of state law that prohibits hunting near buildings and feedlots.

Nonetheless, Dalmer said the law prohibits discharging a firearm within 200 yards of a building “inhabited” by people without the consent of the owner or tenant.

City Hall now has answered back. In short, the city says the shooting will continue.

In a letter to the state office signed by Police Chief Greg Graham, Graham says he “doesn’t necessarily agree” with the office’s analysis.

Graham hones in on the word “inhabited.”

He notes that the 2008 flood drove residents out of two of three homes within 200 yards of the firing range.

A third resident has rebuilt his house, and in this instance, Graham says the Police Department can close down a section of the range so the remainder of the range is not within the 200-yard distance of this residence’s house.

A fourth structure is a truck repair shop, not a residence, and Graham argues that the word “inhabited” only applies to residences.

Don Sedrel, a retired firefighter who has most persistently complained about long hours of racket and some stray bullets, lives farther than 200 yards from the shooting range.

In a return letter to the city, the state’s Dalmer said his office is reviewing the city’s response.

Of note, the city has proposed building a new Public Safety Training Center, perhaps at Kirkwood Community College, that would include a shooting range. In seeking funding for the center, the city has pointed to the state agency’s probe of the current shooting range as a reason to build the new center.

City Council lets it be known: It’s not hand-outs to everyone who asks

Ask and you shall receive, it seems, can often be what happens with the City Council when a business shows up seeking a little financial consideration for doing something.

The current City Council has put something of an elaborate apparatus in place to try to help it judge whether a request for tax breaks or other incentives makes sense.

At its last council meeting, a council majority decided to use the apparatus and to follow what it was saying.

The upshot: Cedar Valley Heating & Air Conditioning won’t get a property-tax break of an estimated $75,000 over 10 years – about 44 percent of the total bill – if it builds a new 11,640 sq. ft. metal building to house its business at 60th Avenue SW and Fourth Street SW. Cedar Valley also intended to rent space in the building to four other shops.

In return for the tax break, Cedar Valley told the City Council it expected to retain four jobs and create three new ones, all with an average wage of $15 an hour.

Seven of the nine council members said they didn’t need time to think about the deal: They rejected it out of hand.

That was so even though council member Monica Vernon made mention of the issue that often can be the only one that guides such decisions. Aren’t we inviting this business to go to another community if we don’t grant the tax break? Vernon asked.

Other council members pointed to the five-point scorecard that the council established in May 2008 as part of an Economic Development Investment Policy.

The five points: Does the request facilitate significant investment that shows a strong commitment to the community? Does if help retain and create “high-quality” jobs? Does it add diversity to the region’s economy? Does it provide a long-term community benefit? Does it comply with sustainable development principles?

City staff credited Cedar Valley with only one “yes.”

The City Council majority thought that the one positive score — that the proposal created well-paid construction jobs — was a stretch. Council member Chuck Wieneke didn’t think $15-an-hour ranked as good pay for a trade job.

Council member Tom Podzimek put it most bluntly: “We’re not in the business to provide tax incentives to build a metal pole building,” Podzimek said.

Salvage company ready to tussle with Board of Adjustment; salvage-yard blues may be returning for KZIA radio

KZIA Z102.9 radio may need to rev up anew.

The local radio station took to the airwaves last December to make the case against a salvage company that wanted to open a salvage operation at 2525 12th St. SW next to the radio station’s studio.

The radio station’s position prevailed. The Cedar Rapids Board of Adjustment turned down the request of A-Line Iron & Metals Inc. of Waterloo, concluding that the salvage company’s plans were incompatible with the neighborhood.

The salvage company went to court, challenging the Board of Adjustment’s ruling, and now a trial is slated for July 30, according to court documents.

The Board of Adjustment is meeting this week, likely in closed session, to discuss the litigation.

Prior to the board’s December decision to deny A-Line Iron’s request for a conditional use permit to site a salvage yard on 12th Street SW, the city’s City Planning Commission, which is a recommending body, had approved the plan.

The board, though, has final say on conditional use permits.

City secures Iowa Power Fund grant to help with its 21st Century Green Energy Project; one day burning sewage sludge and garbage may produce steam here

The city on Wednesday secured a $253,406 Iowa Power Fund grant to help finance the city’s plans for a 21st Century Green Energy Project.

The city must match the grant.

Greg Eyerly, the city’s utility operations manager, on Wednesday said the city also secured a $1.29 million federal Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant award in April to help in the city’s energy planning.

He said the city is studying how it might replace the old incinerator at its Water Pollution Control facility, which has been temporarily brought back to life after last year’s flood, with a system that could burn sewage sludge, other kinds of biomass and municipal garbage and at the same time generate steam energy for the downtown and elsewhere.

“It’s viable,” said Eyerly, who is among five candidates competing for the city’s flood-recovery director post. “St. Paul, Minn., is doing it, and we have better and more-reliable fuel sources than they do. It’s why we are studying it.”

City will try once again to sell surplus city property next to Ellis Golf Course; relax, though; no apartments; two $72,500 lots for high-end homes

The city has had the idea of selling excess city property for a couple years now, and last night the City Council agreed to sell some.

In one instance, the council will sell two quarter-acre lots in the 2100 block of 20th Street NW next to the city’s Ellis Park Golf Course.

Rita Rasmussen, the city’s senior real estate officer, said each of the lots is appraised at $72,500, and she said the city anticipates that single-family homes will be built on them. The city will accept sealed bids on the lots.

By the way, the two lots are not part of a 6-acre city parcel that used to be home to the golf course’s practice chipping area. Late last year, a developer gave up on a proposal to build affordable apartments on the chipping-area after neighbors in single-family residents objected.

The council last night also approved the sale of a .45-acre site at 6900 Council St. NE. The city earlier had purchased the property, which at the time had a house and garage on it, for $216,000. The city demolished the buildings, carved off some of the land to widen the intersection at Council Street NE and Boyson Road NE, and now is reselling what is left.

Rasmussen said the city must give the previous owner right of first refusal, and the previous owner wants to buy it. The land now is appraised at $115,000, she said.

Clearing city of hundreds and hundreds of flood-wrecked homes nears reality: HUD changes formula and sends Iowa bigger pot of disaster-relief funds

It was possible to imagine a future Tuesday in which hundreds and hundreds of flood-wrecked Cedar Rapids homes no longer are sitting, empty and ugly.

A much-awaited announcement by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will be sending a new round of Community Development Block Grant funds into Iowa totally $516.7 million. The state also will be able to compete for a share of another $300 million of new CDBG money, a pleased Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Mount Vernon, announced Tuesday afternoon.

“I think it’s progress,” Loebsack said. “We’re on the road to recovery and rebuilding.”

Cedar Rapids, with more than 50 percent of the flood damage in Iowa a year ago, will get some sizable share of the new money coming into the state.

Council member Chuck Wieneke, who is the council’s lead voice on buyouts of flood-damaged properties, said Tuesday that the city’s first priority for the new CDBG money will be the buyout of flood-damaged homes. The city has estimated it may need to buy out 1,300 homes at a cost of $175 million.

Wieneke noted that the latest HUD money won’t arrive in the city tomorrow, but he said he hoped the city might see it by latter in the summer.

Jennifer Pratt, the city’s development coordinator, on Tuesday reported that more than 1,000 people have begun the city’s buyout process as the city prepared to purchase some 554 flood-damaged homes in the proposed levee construction area and another 600 or so homes elsewhere beyond reasonable repair. The city has initiated the buyout process so it is poised to buy out properties quickly once CDBG money arrives, Pratt pointed out.

Another group of 167 property owners, which own flood-damaged homes closest to the river, are ready for buyouts using Federal Emergency Management funds. The FEMA money could be here by late August, Pratt said.

City Manager Jim Prosser on Tuesday said the city had hoped, at a minimum, to garner $200 million in the latest allocation of CDBG funds. It remains to be seen if the city gets that much from the state of Iowa’s allocation of $516.7 million, he said.

However, Wieneke and Mayor Kay Halloran both emphasized that Cedar Rapids sustained more than 50 percent of the flood damage in the state a year ago, though both said the city had not managed yet to get that large a share of federal funds coming through the state.

Prosser said the city will use the CDBG money for buyouts, new replacement housing and reconstruction of city infrastructure in flood-damaged neighborhoods.

Key will be rules that accompany the money, the city manager noted.

One HUD spokesman on Tuesday said, for instance, that the new CDBG money could be used to supplement FEMA disaster funds that will come to the city to repair or rebuild flood-damaged public buildings.

Much attention by Iowa’s Congressional delegation and Iowa’s state and local officials has been devoted since late last year to the formula HUD has used to dispense disaster funds among some 30 states that have had disasters in the last year.

HUD apparently changed the formula this time.

In a HUD allocation in November, Iowa received $125 million or 5.8 percent of the $2 billion total. Now, Iowa will receive 13.2 percent of the $3.9 billion total.

In a phone interview Tuesday, Congressman Loebsack said that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan told him that Iowa fared better in the latest formula because of a factor in the formula addressing “unmet needs.”

“For me the bottom line is I think I made the case for Iowa and certainly for the Second (Congressional) District,” Loebsack said. “My goal is to make sure that the people of Cedar Rapids and the Second District as a whole get their fair share and get what they deserve.”

City Council keeps its distance from May’s Island; may extend lease for 2 years on temp setup in suburban-style office park; big June 13 ceremony on river’s west side

The City Council isn’t rushing to go near May’s Island, home to the flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building, which houses City Hall.

On its agenda this week, the council says it will discuss at its next meeting, on June 10, a proposal to extend its lease at City Hall’s temporary location, 3851 River Ridge Dr. NE, for another two years. The city’s lease for the spot in an office-park building owned by AEGON USA is $23,410 a month. The Federal Emergency Management Agency pays the money. The AEGON USA sign is still out front.

The return of city government to May’s Island in the future is among the questions about the city’s flood-damaged buildings that the public will be asked to weigh in on during a series of open houses, the first of which is June 23.

On another front, City Hall revealed this week that it will hold a Flood 2008 Commemoration Ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 13.

The ceremony, though, will not be on the giant lawn on May’s Island in the middle of the river, but instead, will be held at Sunner Park and Lot 20 on the west side of the river near the police station .

Cassie Willis, the city’s communications liaison, on Tuesday said the parking ramp underneath the May’s Island lawn was flood-damaged, and it’s unclear if it’s safe to congregate on the lawn above it.

Willis noted that she has invited Iowa Sens. Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley to the event, neither of which can come, she reported. Congressman Dave Loebsack, D-Mount Vernon, will be on hand and will speak, though Gov. Chet Culver’s office has said, to date, that the governor will not attend, said Willis.

Spielman’s Event Services and Rausch Productions Inc. will help put on the event for the city.

About 100 are expected to attend in addition to 45 participants and 35 event volunteers.

Flood-recovery milestone reached: All 70 purple-placarded properties now demolished and off to the dump

One flood-recovery landmark has been reached.

All 70 of the worst-damaged properties – the ones with purple placards signifying they were too unsafe to enter – have now all been demolished, City Hall reports.

The last of the properties, most of which were homes, came down at the end of April.

The demolition effort took some months to start after a couple false starts over bidding.

Some of the job was done by winter, when it then had to take a break because water used to control possible asbestos dust from the properties would have frozen. The properties were so unsafe that crews couldn’t enter to assess asbestos materials inside. As a result, all the demolition debris had to be treated as asbestos-containing material.

In recent months, city officials successfully lobbied the Federal Emergency Management Agency to have the agency pay for the demolition of another 200 or 300 or so homes. Those are the ones, also considered too unsafe to enter, with red placards in the city’s best-to-worst system of green, yellow, red and purple placards.

Those demolitions are expected to begin in July once paperwork requirements are satisfied, city officials said this week.

In total, the city estimates it may buy out and demolish 1,300 homes and other properties at a total cost of $175 million.

Much of the buyout money will come from federal Community Development Block Grant funds, and the city is expecting word any time from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development of the next large release of CDBG disaster money.

In the meantime, the city has set up a buyout assessment system and is in the process of interviewing those wanting a buyout whose homes qualify.

Past council candidate Bates back with profanity-tainted yelling; but a criminal charge from an earlier episode in September was dismissed

One of the last times Robert Bates — a City Council candidate in 2005 who is open about his criminal and prison past — showed up at a City Council meeting, he ended up getting arrested.

That was in early September, and the misdemeanor criminal charge of disorderly conduct for disturbing a lawful meeting was the result of Bates’ profanity-laced and yelling-tainted performance during the council’s public comment period.

Turns out, Bates, who runs a traveling concession business, contested the charge and beat it in February.

On Wednesday, he was back at the City Council podium with a new version of public comment that featured profanity, a loud voice, personal attacks and a short refusal to leave the microphone when the council’s 5-minute time limit had been reached.

Council member Brian Fagan, the council’s mayor pro tem, asked Bates to moderate his comments twice, and then Fagan had to insist that Bates leave the microphone.

By then, Police Chief Greg Graham had moved to the side of the room to accompany Bates outside.

Bates asked if he was getting arrested again, to which Graham did not respond.

In his presentation, Bates once again brought up a decade-old dispute with the Linn County Sheriff and the Police Department. Bates also is a flood victim, and he talked, too, about what was not being done for flood victims.

Bates also had a notable outburst in the council chambers in the fall of 2007 when he sought to run for City Council a second time. However, a citizen successfully challenged some signatures on his nominating petitions and, as a result, he did not have enough signatures to qualify to run.

On Thursday, Bates said he and Chief Graham talked for about 15 minutes outside the City Council meeting on Wednesday evening in a discussion that he said did not result in any criminal charge.

He said he is just “standing up for our American rights” of free speech to make the point of how he and other flood victims feel.

He said he is planning a new run for City Council this year.

City Council ’steam team’ leader Vernon says work underway to create an equitable way to dispense $21 million in steam conversion funds

City Council member Monica Vernon, the City Council’s “steam team” chief, reports that the city’s Pat Ball, utilities director, and Mike Sable, a special assistant to the city manager, are helping to work up an approach to dispense $21 million in state funds to help those in the downtown steam network convert to their own systems.

ernon said the effort involves devising an “equitable” way to hand out the funds. She said a proposal may be coming in front of the council as soon as next week.

The money consists of $5 million in state I-JOBS funds and $16 million in money set aside by the Iowa Department of Economic Development.

The City Council brought absolute clarity to the lingering downtown steam issue two weeks ago when the council voted unanimously not to allow public funds to be used to rebuild Alliant Energy’s flood-destroyed Sixth Street Generating Plant as a coal plant.

There had been a push to find federal and state money to rebuild the Alliant plant –which provided low-cost steam power to the key industries Quaker and Cargill, the two hospitals, Coe College and the downtown and near downtown — as a coal plant. Alliant, a private entity, cannot directly receive public money, and so it would have had to be allocated to the City Council for use.

The council, though, concluded that burning coal and environmental issues associated with it represented the past, not the future. Council members said a new era of taxing emissions from coal plants will make mean that coal may not be as much of a bargain as some now think it is.

Council rejects push for special new committee in fight for $118.5-million in I-JOBS money; it says established flood-recovery committee is already there to help

The business community apparently continues to want to create new entities to try to help the City Council.

This time, City Council member Justin Shields told his council colleagues Wednesday evening that a noontime meeting Wednesday of some local business and other leaders led to the suggestion of a special new committee to help the city decide which projects it should get behind in the competition for $118.5 million in state I-JOBS stimulus funds.

Backers of several local projects are interested in a piece of the $118.5 million in state-distributed funds, including, no doubt, those eager for a new community center/recreation center and also those who want to upgrade the U.S. Cellular Center and add a convention center to it.

At the suggestion of new help, the council, though, decided it didn’t need to create something new to decide how best to compete for the state I-JOBS money.

The council will use the City Hall-based Recovery and Reinvestment Coordinating Team, which has been in place and providing advice to the council since the early days of flood recovery.

Shields and council member Chuck Wieneke both noted that the RRCT has representation from a wide sector of community interests, including the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown District as well as leaders in housing, arts and culture, non-profit agencies, neighborhoods and government.

Council member Monica Vernon and Shields said it was important that the council pick a couple of quality projects and get them submitted to the state I-JOBS competition quickly.

Forget the “wish lists,” Shields said.

As for getting pushed by outside forces, the council currently is in the process of hiring a flood recovery manager, the majority of whose salary will be paid for by the private sector. This was a private-sector idea pushed by Rockwell Collins.

The council also is contributing some money to a private-sector creation, the Economic Planning and Redevelopment Corp., which came to be, to a degree, from some private-sector frustration with City Hall over the pace of flood recovery.

Shields last night said there is a sense in the community that Cedar Rapids never fares very well in competitions for money that the state hands out. So, he said, it was important to make a good case.

At the same time, the state already has earmarked other I-JOBS money to Cedar Rapids and Linn County in the tune of $45.5 million. Proposals to secure these funds must be submitted by Sept. 1.

Of that money, $5 million goes to each of three flood-damaged city buildings, the library, Public Works Building and Paramount Theatre, with another $5 million to provide steam replacement assistance for those who have been on the flood-wrecked downtown steam system. The National Czech & Slovak Museum and Library is receiving $10 million as are backers of a new human services building. Options of Linn County is getting $5 million the city of Palo’s fire station, $500,000.

Wellington Heights’ president invites council for an awareness walk; castigates suggestion that garbage crews wear bullet-proof vests

Terry Bilsland, longtime president of the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association, this week invited the City Council on a 20-block-long neighborhood walk the evening of May 21 to help concerned citizens make it clear they aren’t going to put up with criminal activity.

The walkers will travel through parts of both the Wellington Heights Neighborhood and the Mound View Neighborhood, which are split by First Avenue East.

A similar walk a few years ago mobilized council member Brian Fagan and others to push for a new Enhance Our Neighborhoods initiative, an initiative that got set aside a bit after last June’s flood, but is now, City Hall says, back on the front burner.

Evidence of that is the Police Department’s move to open a district police station in June at 1501 First Ave. SE between the two neighborhoods. Code enforcement officers and other city employees will call the district station home, too.

Bilsland, who is known for working with City Hall to try to get things done, had another issue on his own front burner that he let the City Council know about this week. Bilsland referred to a TV news report in which a city solid waste employee apparently said he wanted the city to issue him a bullet-proof vest to pick up garbage in Wellington Heights.

Bilsland, who is not shy about chiding the local media when he says it unfairly characterizes Wellington Heights, said the matter suppossedly centered on a dispute over garbage, and Bilsland wanted to know how often that has happened in the neighborhood and how often it happens elsewhere in the city. He was sure it was a rare event and certainly no more frequent in one place than another.

He told the City Council that he expected solid waste employees to wear the bullet-proof vests citywide if such vests were ever issued, and Bilsland said he’d be out checking to make sure the workers — if the city was going to spend such money — had the vest on even when it was 100 degrees outside and no matter which part of the city they were in.

Jade calls it quits on license tussle with Police Department; she sells her downtown Brick’s Bar & Grill; new owner has license approved

Jade Harper-Hronik, the seemingly battle-weary owner of Bricks Bar & Grill downtown, has thrown in the towel.

In a terse one-sentence note to City Hall, Harper-Hronik has told the Police Department and City Council to forget the fight between the business and the city over the renewal of her liquor license. She has sold the business, she tells the city.

The new owner, Drew Munson, had his application for a liquor license approved by the City Council on Wednesday evening.

Harper-Hronik and the Police Department had been going back and forth for many weeks over the application she submitted for her downtown venue’s annual liquor license renewal.

The department said she had not answered some questions truthfully, while she said she had answered all questions several months ago in an earlier application and that the current application was incomplete.
The City Council asked the department to work with Harper-Hronik, but the department came back with additional questions.

Harper-Hronik indicated in her last correspondence with the city that she had attempted to sell the business in the recent past, and apparently now she has.

Police Chief Greg Graham, who arrived in the city a year ago, has signaled that he is going to take liquor license applications seriously.

The downtown Tycoon nightspot also had a go-round with the Police Department and the tavern currently is operating with a kind-of probationary liquor license.

Mr. $475-an-hour — who became Mr. $225-an-hour — still a vital cog in the city’s drive to get all it can from FEMA

The City Council approved a contract extension last night for John Levy.

The extension takes Levy’s contract through June 30, adds $186,400 to the cost of it and brings the total cost to $786,400. The contract began Oct. 1.

Levy showed up at City Hall even as flood water was receding last June. He came with disaster experience from Hurricane Katrina and a message: Experience makes all the difference for cities if they are to make sure they get all they deserve in flood-disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Levy was then an executive with an entity called Globe Midwest, and after the city hired him, he achieved a measure of celebrity when it became noted that the city was paying the firm $475 an hour for Levy’s services.

In the first three months after the flood, the city paid Globe Midwest $691,000.

The city had a parallel contract for other flood-recovery duties with a second disaster-services firm, Adjusters International, to which the city had paid $645,000 in the first three months of recovery.
Last September, the city put the contracts up for new bids. Several firms competed, but Adjusters International won one contract, and Levy, who created his own company, Base Tactical Disaster Recovery, won the second contract. The new contract, at least at its inception, called for Levy’s new firm to get paid $225 an hour for his services.

In a memo this week to the City Council, city staff members note that Levy’s current contract extended through Jan. 9, 2009, and had been extended twice, through May 9, at no additional cost.

The city says Levy matters.

At a Veterans Memorial Commission meeting earlier this week, Levy was center stage as commission members challenged City Manager Jim Prosser about why renovations to the city’s flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall on May’s Island hadn’t yet begun. The city has suggested the building has had $25 million in damage.

Prosser called on Levy.

Levy explained the negotiation that cities and FEMA engage in as they come to some agreement on how much damage has occurred to a building. The city has weighed in with its “worksheet” on the damages, while FEMA is still working on its worksheet. FEMA was preparing for a fourth visit to the building, he said. Negotiations then would follow. After that, a second process takes place in which the city presents its plan on how it will mitigate against flood damage to the building in the future, Levy said.

Prosser noted that the city estimates it may have as much as $500 million in damage to its public buildings and facilities. Moving FEMA by a few percentage points on the size of damages is worth millions of dollars to the city, he noted.

Council members weren’t kidding about killing a downtown coal plant; they now put their support for federal bucks behind a better U.S. Cellular Center and a new community/rec facility

The chase continues for federal dollars from the U.S. Department of Commerce that the Cedar Rapids community never really knew much about until it started trying to recover from last June’s flood.

A line of local projects is lined up for a shot at this pot of federal funds, and each of the project sponsors has come to City Hall asking the City Council to provide the required council endorsement of their projects.

A few weeks ago, the council decided to prioritize the requests so the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration might use that information to help it make a decision on what to spend money on in Cedar Rapids.

And a few weeks ago, the council put the concept of some kind of new downtown steam plant at the top of its list.

But that was then. Last week, the council pulled the plug on any plans to rebuild Alliant Energy’s flood-damaged Sixth Street Generating Station using public dollars because the plan called for the plant to burn coal. The council can make such a decision because federal funds have to come through the city. They can’t come to privately owned Alliant.

The council is now ready to pass a new resolution with new priorities for how it would like to see Commerce Department funds spent in the city.

There no longer is any mention of a community steam plant.

At the top of the new list is a plan to upgrade the city’s U.S. Cellular Center and add a new convention center to it. Next in line, is a plan to build a new community center/recreation center to replace the flood-damaged Witwer Senior Center and Time Check Recreation Center and the aged Ambroz Recreation Center and outdated Bender indoor pool.

Both projects are among the fifteen projects in the Fifteen in 5 community planning initiative, which was conceived in 2005.

Below the U.S. Cellular Center and community center/rec center on the priority list: a new Economic Commerce Center; steam systems for Coe College and the two hospitals; planning to remedy freight train traffic in the downtown; and funding for a joint communications network now being built to connect city, county and school facilities.

City is doing what it said it would: setting up a customer-service infrastructure to expedite buyouts; now if the money would get here

The city is taking the steps it said it would take to set up a system to expedite the buyouts of some 1,300 flood-damaged properties once federal money arrives to pay for much of the buyout expense.

This week, the City Council is expected to approve a contract with JCG Land Services Inc., which has an office in Cedar Rapids, for up to $69,736 to provide one-to-one consultations with the owners of buyout properties.

The city has said it intends to buy out about 1,300 properties.

A first group includes 192 properties in the proposed “greenway” that will be created along the river with the construction of a new levee and floodwall system. Most of those property owners have already agreed to buyouts.

A second group of 554 properties sit in area next to the greenway that is expected to be needed as a construction area for new levees and floodwalls and related construction and alteration of existing streets and sewers.

A third group of another 600 properties are outside both areas but have been damaged beyond reasonable repair.

The contract with JCG Land Services Inc., which a City Hall “project evaluation team” chose over three other bidders, will pay the company $60.43 per property. The company said it will devote 11 people to the project, can start immediately and will be able to interview 270 owners a week.

Of note, JCG Land Services was one of the bidders late last month in an inspection contract awarded to Prosource Technologies, Inc., Minneapolis, Minn. The council voted 5-4 on the earlier contract after great debate about passing over two local companies for the Minneapolis one. Prosource also bid for the new contract, which is now expected to go to JCG Land Services Inc.

In a related matter, the City Council is expected to award a contract to Iowa Title Co. (the company has several Iowa offices including a Cedar Rapids one) to provide title and abstract services for the properties the city intends to buy out. The 12-month contract with Iowa Title Co., which a City Hall review team chose over one other bidder, is not to exceed $962,000. The company has the capacity to complete work on 150 to 200 properties a week, a city staff memo to the City Council states.

The city intends to use federal Community Development Block Grant funds to pay for these services. The city’s expectation continues to be that a large infusion of additional CDBG money will be coming to the state of Iowa and the city of Cedar Rapids this summer.

FEMA will pay $5 million more to control climate in six empty, flood-damaged buildings; work readying on one so Montessori can return to GTC space

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will continue to pay to control the temperature and interior climate of six unoccupied, flood-damaged city buildings through at least November 30, 2009.

The cost to continue the climate-control contract from June 1 though Nov. 30 is $5,012,526.

Four companies bid for the contract, with Munters Corp. Moisture Control Services, Amesbury, Mass., submitting the “most responsive” bid, according to city staff memo to the City Council.

Munters Corp.’s bid says the job will require $1.43 million in equipment and staff and another $3.58 million for fuel.

The six city buildings in need of climate control are the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall; library; Paramount Theatre; the first-floor of the Public Works Building; the Ground Transportation Center bus depot; and the GTC’s Montessori School space.

As for the latter, it appears the school is readying to return to the space.

The City Council is expected to approve a professional contract with Ament Inc. for design and construction administration services as the flood-damaged GTC school space is renovated. The work is expected to start in September and be complete in June 2010. Ament will receive up to $198,424 for its services.

Port ‘O’ Jonnys to populate flood-hit neighborhoods at least through the end of 2009

Call the Port ‘O’ Jonny a testament to the fact that there is much yet to do in the city’s flood-hit neighborhoods.

The city has agreed to extend what it calls its “emergency” contract with the portable toilet company to provide portable toilets in the cities flood-damaged neighborhoods through the end of the year.

The anticipated cost, which will be paid by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is $320,000.

In a memo to the City Council, city staff notes that that FEMA initially provided portable toilets only to abruptly withdraw them in September 2008, three months after last June’s flood.

Port ‘O’ Jonny, which already had a contract with the city, agreed to step in and replace what FEMA had provided. Currently, the city has 132 units in the flood-affected areas, a number it expects will decline as rebuilding areas continue.

Port ‘O’ Jonny charges $70.17 per month per unit plus a $25 charge each time a unit is serviced.

Vets Commission asks: Why is Linn County back in the May’s Island courthouse and jail while the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall sits empty?

Three government buildings damaged in last June’s flood sit on May’s Island in the middle of the Cedar River.
Why is it that the Linn County Courthouse and the Linn County Jail are now back in business, while the Veterans Memorial Building that houses City Hall remains empty with no plans for now to reoccupy it?

That is the question that Pat Reinert, a member of the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission and an assistant federal prosecutor in Cedar Rapids, wanted City Manager Jim Prosser to answer at the commission’s meeting Monday evening.

The answer provided by Prosser was this:

The city isn’t Linn County. The city has more than 10 times as much flood damage to its public buildings and facilities than the county. More damage means longer, more complicated negotiations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency over the amount of damages that FEMA will pay to fix the building.

To this, commission member Gary Grant stressed to Prosser that the commission does not care if city government intends to return to the building.

“We think the building has great potential even if the City Council doesn’t come back,” Grant told Prosser.

All the commission wants is to be included in the planning for the building’s future, Grant and Reinert said.

This is one of the central rubs about the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall that only has become exacerbated as the months have passed.

The City Council has never expressed any enthusiasm for returning to the building.

Prosser on Monday evening reminded the commission members that the City Council is embarking on a several-month public participation process to determine the futures of several of the city’s flood-damaged public buildings. Much of the talk over many months now has been about “co-locating” city, county and school functions in the same buildings. The county, which seemingly had the most potential synergies with the city, dropped out of the process a few months ago, and the City Council has used the word co-locate less if at all recently.

Prosser emphasized last night that he and the City Council go into the public participation process without any idea if city government will return to the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall or not.

But as he and several council members repeatedly mention, one important factor will be the life-cycle costs of buildings. This often has seemed a euphemism in favor of building a new, “greener,” more efficient building than the existing City Hall.

Last week, though, council member Tom Podzimek said no one was going into the decision-making over buildings with any preconceived notions. At the same time, council member Kris Gulick said he wanted to make sure that the cost to retrofit existing buildings was factored into any analysis.

Monday evening’s commission meeting was eye-opening because it showed just how great a gulf exists between the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission of volunteer appointees and the paid machinery of city government.

Prosser, Casey Drew, the city’s finance director, and John Levy, a city consultant who is helping direct the city’s plans for its flood-damaged buildings, came armed with much information that, surprisingly, eleven months after the flood, was news to the commission. It was as if the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall, the management of which the commission is responsible for, was a great mystery and Prosser, Drew and Levy were sharing some of the secrets.

Commission members were a bit testy and eager to let Prosser know that it was time to get moving on repairing the building.

In fact, on its own, the commission has been trying to hustle around to establish temporary electrical service to the building just so government –even if FEMA was paying the bill — could stop paying huge bills to run generators.

The city can’t just do nothing and let the building continue to “degrade,” Reinert said at one point.

“Quite frankly, it’s driving me insane,” he said.

The exercise in establishing temporary electrical service at a cost of about $9,000 has proven a bit of a comedy: Prosser and Drew said written bids weren’t used, and Drew explained that two commission-employed maintenance workers had their city-issued purchase cards revoked because they attempted to pay for services before they were provided against city policy. All of this is getting cleaned up.

Commission chairman Pete Welch listed on the commission agenda all the special state grants that the city secured for other local buildings: $5 million for the library; $10 million for a new human services building; $10 million for the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library; $5 million for Options of Linn County; $5 million for the Paramount Theatre; $5 million for the Public Works Building; $16 million for the downtown steam issue. And zero for the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall.

Commission member Gary Craig acknowledged that he had seen a city list that had sought $5 million for City Hall, but somewhere along the line that amount failed to make the final list.

Reinert said the building might get more backing if it is called its real name, the Veterans Memorial Building.

The commission noted that $118 million in state IJOBs funds are available for other public projects on a competitive basis. Prosser said the city intended to present plenty of proposals to try to win some of the money.

This is “a really critical city facility,” the city manager said of the Veterans Memorial Building.

Veterans Commission returns to May’s Island icon; frustrated commissioners learn that repairs to flood-damaged building still months away

The Veterans Memorial Commission last night held its first meeting in the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall on May’s Island since the June 2008 flood.

It was a something of a sobering event.

The commission designed the agenda to try to encourage City Manager Jim Prosser to get work on the building started immediately, only to learn that such work must await a back-and-forth negotiation between the city and the Federal Emergency Management Agency over just how much damage the flood of almost a year ago did to the building.

Trying to rush ahead with work without following the FEMA process would only jeopardize FEMA payments to the city to make the building repairs, Prosser and John Levy, a consultant whose job it is to help the city get all that it feels it deserves from FEMA, told the commission.

Levy, of Base Tactical Disaster Recovery of Birmingham, Mich., told the commission that the city completed its “worksheet” on its assessments of damages to the building, but FEMA has not yet completed its worksheet. FEMA still has not done so, either, for other flood-damaged city buildings, including the Paramount Theatre, the city-owned Sinclair site, the city’s transit garage and former animal control shelter among other buildings, Levy noted.

Once FEMA submits its worksheet of the building’s scope of damages, Levy said the city and FEMA then sit down and debate “scope realignment” to see if FEMA and the city can agree on a final scope of damages. Then the city must submit plans to protect the building and its contents against future floods.

“It’s the process we’re stuck in, and it’s very frustrating,” said Levy, agreeing with commission members.

Levy said FEMA representatives have visited the building four times to date, and now want to return again to examine the building anew. He said it would be summer before there would be any developments.

Commission member Pat Reinert said the commission was eager to get to work on basic infrastructure of the building, what he called its “spine.” He said the commission wants to move electrical and heating air-conditioning systems to a room above the commission’s office on the building’s first floor. He said the commission even has considered using its own funds to start the process.

All of that will need to wait the FEMA process, Prosser and Levy said.

Even one modest attempt at a commission victory met with problems. The commission decided to spend about $9,000 to establish temporary electricity in the building. Reinert said the electricity will let the commission see how much damage is done to building’s air handlers and to make sure they don’t further degrade. But the commission didn’t follow city policy of written bids, a problem which could cause issues with FEMA later, Levy and Casey Drew, the city’s finance director, told the commission. The commission last night agreed to seek written bids so it can then have electricity in the building.

Prosser told the commission that cities that had experienced disasters told Cedar Rapids how much money they failed to obtain from FEMA because they embarked on work outside the FEMA process expecting to be reimbursed anyway. With the city looking at $500 million in damages to public buildings and facilities alone, the city stands to lose millions by not following procedure, Prosser told the commission.

There has been much tension between the commission and city officials and the City Council over the very basics: the commission thinks it owns the building, and the city thinks the city does. FEMA decided its payments will go to the city. Reinert last night said the commission wants to leave such disputes in the past.

Prosser noted that a public participation process begins next month on the future of city buildings. He said some people assume that city government won’t return to the May’s Island building, but he said no one has decided that.

Commission member Gary Grant said the commission doesn’t care if city government comes back or not. The commission’s concern is that the building is restored.

The lack of communication between commission members and city officials was clear last night when both sides learned that they agree that work needs to begin immediately to make improvements to the building’s celebrated Grant Wood-designed stained-glass window.

Commission members said there weren’t sure if the window had been insured prior to the flood, but Levy said it had been and that the city continues to make its case for a claim to be paid.

Both sides agreed to seek proposals to get the window assessed and fixed as quickly as possible. Both sides said they have wanted to remove the window months ago to begin the renovation of it.

District police station at 1501 First Ave. SE may be ready in mid-June; chief says some contractors, suppliers want to donate for storefront renovation

At a budget meeting this week, the City Council learned that it will cost as much as $55,000 to renovate a vacant storefront at 1501 First Ave. SE as the Police Department turns the space into its first district station.

In the last few weeks, Police Chief Greg Graham noted that the building’s owner was providing the building rent-free, though he has noted that, among other items, the city needed to put in a first-floor bathroom as part of the renovation work.

Graham this week told the council that he was meeting with contractors and suppliers yet this week, and he said he still hoped to have the district station open and operating by mid-June.

The cost of the renovation may be less than expected, he noted, because he said some contractors and suppliers want to donate work and supplies.

The chief, who arrived from Ocala, Fla., on June 1, 2009, has wanted to open district police stations, and, in fact, has plans for two others.

But the move to open the one at 1501 First Ave. SE comes about six weeks now after police officer Tim Davis was assaulted and hospitalized while investigating a robbery just two blocks from the site of the new district police station. Three teenagers have been arrested in the matter. Davis returned home from the hospital on Thursday.

New state legislation for disaster areas will let City Council pass big bond issues for public buildings without a mandatory citizen vote

Late last year, the City Council presented its state lobbyist — former state lawmaker Larry Murphy of Oelwein — with a wish list of requests to take to Des Moines when the state legislative session began in January.

At one meeting last fall, Murphy went over the list with the council and singled out one item that he doubted the legislature would ever agree to. He didn’t think there was a chance lawmakers would let cities sell bonds for expensive public building projects without taking the matter to voters.

Well, it turns out Murphy was wrong.

Deep in a recently passed piece of state legislation – Senate File 457 – is wording that will allow jurisdictions in which there have been natural disasters in the last year to approve the sale of bonds for repairs, improvements and replacements of flood-damaged buildings and facilities that today would require a 60-percent approval vote from voters.

Under the legislative change, city councils like Cedar Rapids’ could approve the sale of, say, $20 million to build a new City Hall – which surely will be a controversial matter if it ever should come to that — without prior voter approval.

The new legislation, instead, replaces a required referendum with what is known as a reverse referendum. In a reverse referendumm, citizens must take the initiative and mount a petition campaign to force the measure to a citizen vote. But to do so under the new law, the citizens would need to amass at least a number of signatures equal to 20 percent of the total number of city voters in the last presidential election.

Last November, 66,662 Cedar Rapidians voted in the presidential election. That means a petition drive would need to find 13,332 signatures to force a council decision on a bond matter to a vote.

This piece of a complicated bill, which passed both houses of the legislature unanimously, makes some sense. A city like Cedar Rapids, which faces hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations and, perhaps, the replacement of public buildings isn’t interested in going to voters every time it needs to get such work completed. Some of the bonding will be necessary, for instance, to front the cost of construction until money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of Iowa arrives once parts of construction projects are complete. Without the law change, a city would be required to have a bond vote on projects that ultimately will be paid off by federal and state dollars.

At last word, Gov. Chet Culver had yet to sign the legislation into law.

Among other legislative victories from the City Council’s priority list:

— Cities that have been declared disaster areas can sale bonds for projects and pay them off over 30 years instead of the current required 20-year period.

— Cities will be able to institute a franchise fee of up to 5 percent on electric and gas bills. The city of Des Moines, for one, had been collecting such a 5-percent franchise fee, a practice for which they now are fighting a court case over. For the first time, the Cedar Rapids council has put a franchise fee in place – a 1 percent fee – in its budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1. The new law will permit the council in future years to raise such a fee to 5 percent.

— Cities that have been declared disaster areas also now will be able to move quickly to take possession of abandoned, flood-damaged homes instead of having to the follow existing state law that has allowed many abandoned, empty homes in Cedar Rapids to stand as vacant eyesores for years.

Possible mayoral candidate Gary Hinzman has a good question, but the answer might best be divined by some good reading

Gary: Two pieces of suggested reading — the city charter and the city’s nepotism policy.

Mayoral prospect Gary Hinzman asked the city’s Board of Ethics a simple question: Do his wife, Linda Hinzman, and daughter, Paula Hinzman Mitchell, as well as a brother-in-law have to quit city employment if he is elected the city’s part-time mayor.

They won’t. But he is not going to get a simple answer like that.

At a meeting at noon Thursday at City Hall, the Board of Ethics concluded that it doesn’t have jurisdiction in the matter because Gary Hinzman is not now a city official and is not a prospective candidate for city office with a business relationship with the city that might create a conflict should he be elected.

The board members suggested that Gary’s relatives confer with the city’s human resources office or their department supervisors if they had any question about the matter.

However, board member Bill Quinby noted that, as he understood it, city employees in the city’s council/manager government report to the city manager and not to elected officials.

City Attorney Jim Flitz, who attended the board meeting, agreed with Quinby, saying city employees report to managers and directors who, in turn, report to the city manager.

Flitz made reference to the city charter which he says spells out what the City Council can and can’t do. He noted that the charter treats police and fire chiefs differently than other city employees.

The city charter gives the council, of which the mayor is one of nine members, the responsibility to hire the city manager, city attorney and city clerk.

The charter also says the city manager hires a police chief and fire chief “with the advice and consent of the city council.”

The city charter goes on to say it is the city manager’s duty to “supervise and direct the administration of city government and the official conduct of employees of the city appointed by the city manager including their employment, training, reclassification, suspension or discharge as the occasion requires, subject to state law.”

In another section, the charter says this of the City Council’s role:

“… (N)either the City Council nor any of its members shall control or demand the appointment or removal of any city administrative officer or employee whom the city manager or any subordinate of the city manager is empowered to appoint, but the council may express its views and fully and freely discuss with the city manager anything pertaining to the appointment and removal of such officers and employees.

“Further, a council member may not interfere with the supervision or direction of any person appointed by or under control of the city manager.”

Flitz also noted to the Board of Ethics that the city has a nepotism policy.

In that policy, it states that “no employee shall be supervised, either directly or indirectly, by a family member.”

Earlier this week, Hinzman said he was seeking an answer to the question about city-employee relatives should he decide to run for mayor. As much as anything, he wanted to be able to have something to lean on should the question come up.

Hinzman, long-time director of the Sixth Judicial District Department of Correctional Services, is a former Cedar Rapids police chief. He is sensitive to issues surrounding relatives in city employment because of questions raised in 1987 when he was police chief and his wife, then a civilian staff member in the Police Department, was positioned to become the department’s accountant. Then-Public Safety Commissioner Floyd Bergen transferred the accounting position to the auditor’s office to resolve the matter.

Deadline for news on huge pot of federal buyout money has passed; City Hall upbeat that good news will arrive soon

It’s been something of the Great Waiting at City Hall.

State officials who have come to Cedar Rapids in recent weeks, and city officials themselves, have said that the federal government would make a crucial disaster-funding announcement by the end of April on how it intended to divvy up a huge, $4-billion pot of national disaster relief.

It’s May 7.

These federal Community Development Block Grant funds are the ones that City Hall intends to use to pay for most of the buyouts of 1,300 flood-damaged Cedar Rapids homes. The city has put the cost at about $175 million.

In a talk yesterday, May 6, council member Justin Shields and Sue Vavroch, the city’s treasury operations manager who doubles as a key legislative point person for the city, both noted that they and others at City Hall were sitting on the edge of their chairs on Friday, May 1, expecting an announcement on the crucial federal funds.

Shields said there were “wild rumors” circulating. But nothing came.

Shields and Vavroch said the expectation now is that the announcement will come within the next couple of weeks.

“We are frustrated that we haven’t heard. But we are very hopeful,” Vavroch said.

Shields said he remains upbeat and confident that the dollars will come in.

A big concern of City Hall’s and of the state of Iowa’s has been the way the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development dispensed an earlier allocation of CDBG disaster funds last year. The thought is that Iowa got shortchanged in favor of former President George Bush’s state of Texas, Cedar Rapids and Iowa officials have suggested.

This week, Shields and Vavroch said that it was likely that the federal formula used to divide up the latest $4 billion in CDBG money will be more favorable to Iowa.

City Manager Jim Prosser characterized the arrival of the expected new round of CDBG funds as “huge.”

He noted that the city has been busy putting into place a buyout registration system so that it can begin the process of buyouts as speedily as possible once money arrives.

Vavroch emphasized that the announcement of the new allocation comes first. Actual allocation of funds will take another couple months at least, Prosser said.

Buyouts in the proposed greenway along the Cedar River – there are 192 properties there – will be made with flood-mitigation funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Those funds are expected to arrive in the next few to several months, city officials have said.

Basic flood insurance for city buildings costs considerably less than first feared; but cost of extra insurance needed later apt to still be scary

The city can buy basic flood protection for 46 of the city’s flood-damaged city buildings for $101,129, a sum considerably less than an earlier estimate of $280,000.

The purchase of this basic line of insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program provides $500,000 in coverage for damage to a structure and $500,000 to the structure’s contents.

The cost is considerably less than the estimate, in part, because the city has decided it needs a total of $17.08 million in coverage, and the estimate was based on $25 million of coverage, Mike Shoger, the city’s risk manager, explained on Wednesday.

Shoger said the actual cost for basic flood protection is less, too, because some buildings at the city’s waste water treatment plant are not insurable under the national program; some buildings are a total loss – the Time Check Recreation Center and the Animal Control shelter, for instance – and don’t now need insurance; some original damage estimates are less than earlier thought; and the city isn’t insuring buildings on the city-owned Sinclair packinghouse site.

In total, 46 buildings and structures – from the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall, library, bus depot, Science Station and Paramount Theatre to the dugouts at the Tait Cummins Softball Complex – will be protected under the insurance.

For most of the city’s flood-damaged buildings, insurance provided by the National Flood Insurance Program is all that will be needed.

However, extra insurance will be needed for major city buildings like the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall and the Paramount Theatre once the city accepts money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and begins to make repairs on them.

One estimate put the cost of extra insurance above $3 million a year, an amount that prompted City Council members to ask city staff to request a waiver of insurance from Iowa’s insurance commissioner.

Five companies bid to provide basic National Flood Insurance Program coverage to the city.

The bids were evaluated on cost, coverage and deductibles and experience with handling flood insurance.

The city’s selection team concluded that TrueNorth of Cedar Rapids provided the “most advantageous” bid to the city from five proposals. The City Council is scheduled to vote on the bids at its Wednesday evening council meeting.

TrueNorth’s bid was $101,129; Marcotte Agency of Omaha, Neb., $98,414; Millhiser Smith of Cedar Rapids, $101,247; Stamy Agency of Cedar Rapids, $99,070; and Aon Risk Services of Omaha, Neb., $106,863, according to the city.

Vernon says her jump from Republican to Democrat has nothing to do with a possible mayoral run against Republican Corbett

Council member and mayoral prospect Monica Vernon says her jump from the Republican to Democratic Party on Tuesday has nothing to do with her plans to run or not run for mayor.

She declined to say if she was in or out of the mayoral race.

A Republican since she first registered to vote as a teenager, Vernon, 51, says she has been thinking for “a long time” about changing political parties, “and I just changed.”

At the same time, she says that the Republican Party is different than it once was and so, she says, is she.
“And as a woman, as a person who believes that we must absolutely take action and make progress here (in Cedar Rapids), being a Democrat makes more sense to me,” she says.

She adds, “I want to be true to what I am. … I want to be somewhere that’s closest to where I am. … It’s really a tough one. But I’ve got to be true to myself.”

Vernon, a business owner in her second year of a four-year council term, says she is someone who understands both Republican and Democratic parties well and is someone who has friends in both places.

City Hall elective office is non-partisan; candidates don’t run by political party. But political parties, nonetheless, play a role behind the scenes.

When Vernon was elected in 2007 to the District 2 council seat, she received the backing of both labor and business, which she says is proof that she is a person who has a history of crossing party lines.

The only declared mayoral candidate to date is Ron Corbett, vice president of trucking firm CRST Inc. and a former Republican speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives.

Twenty-two apply for City Hall flood-recovery post that comes with a job description worthy of Superman

The job description for City Hall’s new flood-recovery manager sounded worthy of Superman when it was released a few weeks ago.

However, the job description hasn’t intimidated applicants. Twenty-two people applied for the position before Monday’s “preferred” application deadline, reports Conni Huber, the city’s human resources director.
Others still can submit applications, but those who met the Monday date will be reviewed and considered first.

Huber says some of the applicants are from Cedar Rapids. Like in any pool of applicants, not every applicant meets every qualification, she says. For instance, she says not all have a college graduate degree preferred in an applicant.

A review will select the best applicants and a City Hall selection team will interview those. The plan is to have a flood-recovery manager in place by the first anniversary of the flood in June.

The flood-recovery manager position inside City Hall is an unusual one in that the idea for the position emanated from the private sector and because most of the position’s cost will be paid by the private sector.

The creation of the position provoked a dispute within the City Council when council members Justin Shields, Monica Vernon and Jerry McGrane pushed to have the flood-recovery manager sidestep City Manager Jim Prosser and report directly to the council. The six others on the council said Prosser was the city government’s CEO and the boss of city employees, including any flood-recovery manager.

Downtown establishment Brick’s still going round with Police Department on liquor license renewal

Bars aren’t churches, but, nonetheless, City Hall has some new expectations when it comes to the annual renewal of a liquor establishment’s liquor permit.

So the saga of the downtown Brick’s Bar and Grill, 320 Second Ave. SE, continues.

At the start of April, the City Council set aside a request from the Police Department to deny a liquor license renewal to Brick’s because Brick’s application for the license had some problems. The Police Department called omissions untruths, while the bar’s owner, Jade Harper-Hronik, called it an incomplete application.

Back then, the police made note of Harper-Hronik’s arrest for intoxication and felony convictions of two people associated with the downtown club.

In capturing the consensus of the City Council in early April, council member Brian Fagan asked Police Chief Greg Graham if he would be willing to meet with Harper-Hronik to see if he could create a consequence short of license denial for what the Police Department called untruthfulness. Graham, who said consequences are important, said he would be willing to do so.

It seemed like all was well.

Then a week ago, the Brick’s license matter returned to the City Council agenda, again in a way that looked as though the Police Department was seeking to deny the license renewal.

The matter then was pulled from the agenda.

This week, in a letter to the council, Harper-Hronik refutes the latest questions about her business practices in a letter to the City Council.

Harper-Hronik states that unpaid state sales tax payments have been paid. She states that she has satisfied two liens on the property. She states that her husband, Richard, did not threaten a prospective buyer of the business over the potential buyer’s decision not to make the purchase. She states that inspections of the premises are in the process of being completed.

In early April, Harper-Hronik won sympathy from some council members because she purchased and renovated the downtown Brick’s after the June flood.

She continues to argue that she had correctly filled out paperwork in September on the bar and for another drinking establishment in the city even if there were some questions raised about the latest application.

In any event, should the council ultimately deny a license to Brick’s, the bar can stay open as it appeals to the state’s Alcohol Beverages Division. Appeals can take up to a year to resolve.

And it’s not just Brick’s.

The Police Department in recent weeks convinced the City Council to block the renewal of a liquor license for The Tycoon, which is just down the block from Brick’s. The Tycoon, which did not move to renew its license in timely fashion, now has a probationary license and has agreed to better police its bar customers in an agreement with the Police Department.

After years of neighbor complaints about racket and stray bullets, state ombudsman descends on Police Department shooting range

The pleas from property owners next to the Police Department’s regional outdoor shooting range out on Old River Road SW reach back to at least 2004.

Those neighbors, led by retired Cedar Rapids firefighter Don Sedrel, made their way to the state office of Citizens’ Aide/Ombudsman, which asked the neighbors to try to reach a compromise with City Hall and the Police Department. In March 2007, the neighbors said the problem – the volume and frequency of noise and potential safety hazards from stray and ricocheting bullets – had changed little.

That’s when Bert Dalmer, assistant citizens’ aide/ombudsman, began looking into what state law might say about the police firing range so close to neighbors, Dalmer now tells City Hall in a letter.

In that letter that arrived at City Hall this week, Dalmer concludes that the outdoor range, at 2727 Old River Rd. SW, may violate state law.

He makes note that the particular section of state law in question falls under a section of state law that prohibits hunting near buildings and feedlots.

Nonetheless, Dalmer argues that the law prohibits discharging a firearm within 200 yards of a building occupied by people without the consent of the owner or tenant.

He says four buildings are within 200 yards of the police firing range: Tracy and Cheryl Sedrel’s home at 2901 Old River Rd. SW; the home of Pat Freilinger at 2949 Old River Rd. SW; the home of Chris Simonsen at 2849 Old River Rd. SW; and a business operated by Mike McMurrin at 2665 Old River Rd. SW. Don Sedrel’s place at 3261 Old River Rd. SW is a little farther away, though on Thursday he said he now owns 2901 Old River Rd. SW, too.

Dalmer says the specific section of state law allows exceptions for target shooting ranges that are open to the public and have been used prior to the erection of a building occupied by the public after May 14, 2004.

However, the police range is not open to the public and does not meet the second part of the exception. The range opened in the late 1960s, and two of the occupied buildings nearby were build many years before that.

Dalmer says city officials have noted in the past that the city has taken steps to better supervise the shooting range and to limit the times when shooting occurs.

But he says, “Regardless, I question whether these mitigating actions are adequate to address the prohibitions (in state law).” Neighbors have continued to complain that too little has changed, he adds.

Neither Police Chief Greg Graham nor City Attorney Jim Flitz returned calls on Thursday.

Out at Freilinger’s home and shop on Old River Road SW on Thursday afternoon, he and Don Sedrel said little had changed to make living next to the shooting range tolerable. Law enforcement officers were shooting at the range Thursday morning, they said, and shooting practice had taken place every day this week, Sedrel noted.

Sedrel said what has started out 50 years ago as a pistol gallery for city police officers has become a regional range with city, county, state and federal agencies using it. There are days when neighbors might have to listen to 8,000 rounds of shooting go on, he said.

“There’s absolutely no excuse that anyone should have to live with that kind of noise,” Sedrel added.

Neither he nor Freilinger have heard anything from city officials about the range for what Sedrel thought might be two years.

Both wondered if the city could take its shooting practice to the Matsell Bridge Natural Area near Viola where there is a public shooting range and where the Linn County Sheriff’s Department is establishing a range.

Both said they would not consent to the status quo, but Freilinger said he might be open to working with the Police Department if there is no option in the short run and if closing the range prevented the department from performing its job.

One thing that has changed is that the Linn County Sheriff’s Office has decided to leave the city’s shooting range and open its own in rural Linn County. Meanwhile, the Iowa City Police Department, which also has used the Cedar Rapids range, has been looking for its own place to practice.

Most interestingly, in January 2009, Cedar Rapids Police Chief Greg Graham and other city officials proposed building a $35-million Regional Public Safety Training Center with an indoor shooting range. One of the arguments cited for the need to build a new center was the problems associated with the city’s existing shooting range.

“The State Ombudsman is investigating the possibility of closing the police shooting range because of noise pollution and its proximity to houses and businesses in the area,” the city’s written request for federal funds for the new training center states.

The request went on to say that “the current situation dictates drastic changes and soon.”

In his letter to City Hall in late April, the state’s Dalmer asks city officials to respond within 30 days if it believes his arguments are in error or if the state law does not apply to the city’s police shooting range. After a review of the city’s response, he will decide if formal recommendations to the city are warranted, he says.

Red-light and speed-enforcement cameras a step closer as city seek proposals for “bullet-resistant” cameras that provide “indisputable” proof

City Hall and the Police Department weren’t kidding.

The two have now moved ahead and are seeking proposals, due May 18, from contractors who will install and maintain red-light enforcement cameras at up to 10 intersections as well as a mobile speed-enforcement camera and a fixed speed-enforcement camera.

For the contractor who wins the city’s business, cameras are expected to be in place at four intersections within 90 days after the award of a contract and in place at six others within six months. The mobile speed-enforcement camera should be ready by Sept. 1 and the fixed speed-enforcement camera by Oct. 1.

For violators, warning tickets with snapshots of a violation will arrive in the mail for the first month the system is in operation.

The city is seeking an automated, digital traffic-camera enforcement program that is a “total turn-key operation with no program expenditures to be incurred by the city.”

Just how much an actual ticket will cost a violator to cover the contractor’s needs and the city’s needs will be part of each contractor’s proposal to the city.

The contractor pays for cameras, computer hardware, computer software, poles, wiring, installation, maintenance, training, reporting, community education and awareness on issues related to red-light violations.

Some intersections may have cameras at more than one approach to the intersection, and the city also wants a system that can expand to more intersections.

In its request for proposal, the city says it would prefer a camera system that provides both still photos and video of sufficient resolution to ensure “indisputable” proof of violations.

The cameras will capture an image of a vehicle’s rear license plate as well as a view of the specific intersection in which the violation is alleged to have occurred. The cameras must have a capability of flashing to take pictures at night and the cameras must be tamper-resistant and “bullet-resistant.”

The city’s request for proposals notes, too, that the red-light and speeding infractions will be city offenses and so will not be reported to insurance companies or the state motor vehicle office. Cedar Rapids police officers will review all photos and determine if an offense has occurred. Appeals of infractions will be made to the court system.

The contract is for three years.

The city’s proposal requires the contractor to remove the system at no cost to the city if the state of Iowa or the courts in the future decide that the cameras no longer are permitted. (To date, state courts have allowed the cameras). At each one-year point in the contract, the city also can ask that the system be removed if the city determines it is not effective.

The city is asking each of the companies submitting proposals to provide a fee structure, which details how much revenue goes to the company and how much to the city.

The city will pick a contractor based on 10 criteria, including qualifications and experience, references, total scope of services being offered and fee structure.

In the city budget for the fiscal year beginning July, the city anticipates it can raise $750,000 for the city from the enforcement cameras.

Tickets go to the owners of vehicles, whether they were driving or not. The city has said the owner has the responsibility to get the ticket to the driver or pay the ticket.

The flood of 2008 eroded riverbank in crucial spots; without $800,000 in repairs, water and waste water infrastructure remains at risk

The flood of 2008 also loused up and eroded the banks of the Cedar River in places.

Sufficiently so as the 2008 flood damage, that the city, in concert with the federal Emergency Watershed Protection program, is spending up to $815,065 to stabilize the riverbank in six crucial spots. Without the repairs, certain water lines, water wells and sewer lines along the river will be at risk of being damaged, Pat Ball, the city’s utilities director states in a memo to the City Council.

The city is responsible for 25 percent of the cost of the improvements, and much of that share of the project expense will go to hire Foth Infrastructure and Environment LLC, for the engineering part of the riverbank stabilization project.

In his memo, Ball said the city is likely to do additional riverbank stabilization work at its own cost to make sure its water and waste water infrastructure is protected.

Costs to city climb for its sewage sludge while providing area farmers with free fertilizer

The city’s nearly unending supply of sewage sludge keeps costing even as it keeps farmers in a steady supply of fertilizer with no expense to them.

The city’s travails with biosolid sludge, which is the byproduct left over after the waste water treatment process at the city’s huge Water Pollution Control plant, are just another result of the June 2008 flood.

The flood, among other things, damaged the WPC facility, which is located on Bertram Road SE near Highway 13. And among the flood damage at the plant was damage to the plant’s incinerator, which is used to burn the sludge left over after the treatment plant. With the incinerator out of commission, the city has had to do something else with the sludge.

For a few months after the flood, the city was forced to transport the sludge to a private Illinois landfill at high cost because the local solid waste agency did not want to take up any of its limited landfill space with the sludge.

In recent years, periodically some of WPC plant’s sludge has gone to area farmers for fertilizer at times when the plant’s incinerator has been down for maintenance. But with the incinerator out of commission, a much larger amount of sludge has gone to more farmers to use on more fields. In fact, in recent months, the city has had to stockpile the sludge in certain places in the country until farmers could get back into fields to apply the material.

Last week, the City Council approved additional spending on sludge because the WPC’s incinerator has taken more time to repair than had been thought, Pat Ball, the city’s utilities director, reported in a memo to the City Council.

Last October, the council had authorized spending $800,000 from WPC revenues, which are paid by user fees, to hire contractor Wulfekuhle Injection and Pumping to haul and apply sludge to farm fields.

Last week, the council added another $800,000 to the contract.

Long term, the city council and the solid waste agency board still hold out hopes that one day the sludge might be burned, perhaps along with municipal garbage, to make energy from waste.

Indian Creek Nature Center bestows a Czech name that means ‘perpetual’ on newly acquired woods

The Indian Creek Nature Center has named 28 newly acquired acres of woods at the corner of 44th Street and Otis Road SE the Vecny Woods. That’s pronounced VEE-etch-nee.

It means “perpetual” in Czech. The nature center’s board of directors chose the name to honor Czech immigrants who settled in the Cedar Rapids area, Julie Sina, the city’s parks and recreation director, explained in a memo to the City Council last week.

The City Council also approved the new name because the city actually owns the land, which it acquired on behalf of the center with a grant from the state of Iowa’s REAP program – Resource Enhancement and Protection. For a nominal fee, the city leases the land to the nature center, which has established an endowment fund to pay to care for the land.

The center is engraving the name Vecny Woods on a rock so it is ready for a dedication ceremony for the site on May 3, Sina said in her council memo last week.

Council wrestles over hiring local firm vs. hiring “more responsive” one and sides, 5-4, with the Minneapolis outfit

Do you hire a professional firm because it’s a local one with a less expensive proposal even if a City Hall review team has concluded another firm from out of state has a better proposal and brings more horses to the task?

That was the central question this week that provoked a spirited debate among City Council members, who, in a rare 5-4 vote, awarded the contract to ProSource Technologies Inc., Minneapolis, Minn.

The city will pay ProSource an estimated $516,400 over six months for the firm to provide data required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the estimated 1,300 flood-damaged homes and other flood-damaged properties that the city hopes to buy out.

The contractor will obtain right of entry to properties, verify ownership, document the property’s legal description, check an owner’s insurance coverage at the time of the flood and notify lien holders of the intent to demolish a property.

ProSource’s proposal charges the city $380 per property while a bid by AllTrans Inc. of Cedar Rapids would have charged $350 per property for the work.

The City Hall’s review team concluded that ProSource and a third contractor, JCG Land Services of Cedar Rapids, were the top two of four proposals based on of the four contractors’ overall proposals, experience, method of approach to the project and cost.

Council members Tom Podzimek, Monica Vernon, Jerry McGrane and Pat Shey voted to award the contract to AllTrans Inc., while Mayor Kay Halloran and council members Brian Fagan, Kris Gulick, Justin Shields and Chuck Wieneke supported the city staff recommendation to award the contract to ProSource.

Podzimek argued that the council has spent some time over many months discussing what steps it might take to purchase more products and services from local companies. It didn’t make any sense to talk about buying locally if the city wasn’t, too, going to look at hiring locally as well, he said.

Podzimek said this contract related to property acquisitions was a chance to use a local employer with local employees and a chance to give a young, local firm the opportunity to build skills that the firm then could use to bid on other jobs. The city would be using its disaster recovery, he said, to help beef up the resume of a local firm for other disaster recovery projects.

The inference was that the Cedar Rapids firm then could become the out-of-state consultant – the council here as gotten some criticism for hiring out-of-state consultants – that other cities in other states might hire.

On the other side of the debate, council member Shields used the example of a boiler and said he didn’t want anyone building a boiler under the theory that, let’s give this person the job, “You got to learn sometime.” Cedar Rapids needed to hire “the very best,” he said.

Disagreeing with Shields, council member Vernon – she and Shields have been a one-two punch in recent weeks in trying, unsuccessfully, to arrange to have a new flood-recovery chief sidestep City Manager Jim Prosser – said the contract to assess properties for buyouts was a “great opportunity” to buy local and award the contract to the low-cost bidder. She said the contract involved “basic things” for which previous like experience might not be as important as other work the city needs to be completed.

Both Rita Rasmussen, the city’s senior real estate officer, and Prosser emphasized that the local firm did not provide a “detailed scope” of plans of how they would deliver the service.

Rasmussen told the council that the city’s proposal review team had concerns about whether AllTrans had the capacity to do the work in a timely manner. AllTrans did not address “capacity issues,” she said.

Council member Kris Gulick asked, specifically, about “adequate staffing,” and he wondered how many staff members AllTrans would bring to the job and how many ProSource would. Rasmussen said AllTrans listed four employees while ProSource said it would bring many more than that to the job.

The 5-4 council vote backed a resolution awarding the contract to the Minneapolis firm ProSource because it had submitted the “most responsive and responsible” proposal.

In hiring professional firms, cost is only one of several variables that jurisdictions look at in a competition for a city contract.

In matters involving price bids — street contracts, for instance — jurisdictions must pick the lowest responsible bidder.

Vernon and Shields say plan to upgrade U.S. Cellular Center and add convention center has best chance among local projects for securing U.S. Commerce Department grant

The City Council last night endorsed a previously-announced decision by the city’s Five Seasons Facilities Commission to seek $39.2 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce to upgrade the U.S. Cellular Center and add a convention center to it.

The total cost of the U.S. Cellular Center improvements is estimated to be $52.25 million, and the Five Seasons Facilities Commission envisions securing $13 million in additional funds from the state of Iowa.

The U.S. Cellular Center is one of several local projects seeking disaster relief from the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration. The council has endorsed all of them.

Last night, though, council members Monica Vernon and Justin Shields suggested that the city’s U.S. Cellular Center project may stand the best chance among local projects to win an Economic Development Administration grant because it meets the federal agency’s requirement that a project promote economic development.

Having a convention center that can attract conventions will help spur development in the downtown, Shields said.

Recently, the council prioritized the local projects seeking grant money and, in doing so, it said the top priority was a proposal to support the flood-damaged steam system that serves the downtown, industries nearby, the hospitals and Coe College.

Last night, council member Kris Gulick suggested that the council revisit how it prioritized projects.

Little tidbit of the past shows up for forward-looking library; past director Barkema wins jobless claim on top of $65,170 in severance benefits

Much of the news about the city’s flood-damaged main library is forward-looking. The library board is now hoping for a spectacular new library at a new site to replace the empty, flood-damaged one on First Street SE.

The library board and the City Council last week said they will ask the Federal Emergency Management Agency to approve their request to allow the city to build a new central library at a new location. FEMA can permit the building of a new facility at a new location if the existing building has sustained more than 50 percent damage. FEMA has concluded that the main library did in the 2008 flood.

The City Council will approve the letter to FEMA this week.

Another tinier tidbit of library information has surfaced this week, too. It is backward-looking.

The city has decided not to appeal an unemployment claim filed by former library director Lori Barkema.

Barkema resigned a year ago, leaving with $65,170 in severance benefits. The total included about $15,000 in unpaid leave and four months of salary and benefits, the city said then.

Barkema subsequently filed for jobless benefits. Initially, a state of Iowa claims representative denied her jobless claim, saying that she resigned voluntarily.

However, Barkema appealed the decision to a state administrative law judge. That judge, Steven Wise, ruled in Barkema’s favor in December. The city could have appealed the decision to the state Employment Appeal Board, but has chosen not to, Conni Huber, the city’s human resources director, noted on Tuesday.

In the administrative law judge’s decision, he concludes that Barkema did not really have a choice but to leave. The library board offered to let her resign in the face of what seemed likely termination, so she didn’t leave of her own choice, the judge says.

“To voluntarily quit means a claimant exercises a voluntary choice between remaining employed or discontinuing the employment relationship and chooses to leave employment,” Wise states in his December ruling. “The unemployment insurance rules provide a claimant has not voluntarily left employment if the claimant was compelled to resign when given the choice of resigning or being discharged.”

The ruling also provides a look into the process that led to Barkema’s departure from the library in April 2008.
The ruling says:

In January and February of 2008, the library board created an ad hoc committee to look at “concerns regarding” Barkema’s job performance. Barkema addressed the concerns with an action plan, a plan that the board found “inadequate.” The board then hired a consultant, John Langhorne, to evaluate matters.

Langhorne interviewed Barkema, library staff members and board members. He determined that a “significant lack of trust” between Barkema and the board and that the trust was “damaged beyond repair,” according to the administrative law judge’s ruling.

Langhorne and Joe Lock, a library board member on the board’s ad hoc personnel committee, then both met with Barkema. According to the judge’s ruling, Langhorne told Barkema she needed to resign or the board was going to terminate her. Lock knew that Barkema’s mother had recently died, and he suggested to her that “this would be a good reason to give the public for her resigning,” the judge’s ruling states.

The judge states Barkema “reasonably believed” that she had been given a choice, and she chose resignation over termination because she did not want to be discharged.

In an e-mail to Barkema’s attorney on April 23, 2008, the city’s attorney’s office stated that, “Lori was not asked to resign, but allowing her to resign and accepting it is very much part of the consideration here.”

She resigned and the library board accepted the resignation later that day, the ruling states.

An employer may be justified in discharging an employee, but the city presented no evidence of any misconduct by Barkema that would justify the denial of jobless benefits, the judge notes.

Gov. Culver calls out the TV cameras on Tuesday to sign bill that forgives Jumpstart housing loans in five years, instead of the current 10

Gov. Chet Culver is making a big deal about it.

His office on Monday announced that Culver would hold a public ceremony on Tuesday in Iowa City to sign a new law that benefit flood victims who have gotten Jumpstart housing assistance.

Until now, those receiving the assistance got it in the form of forgivable loans that took 10 years to forgive. The change in the law will make the loans forgivable in five years.

“Thousands of Iowans have benefitted from the state’s Jumpstart Iowa Housing Program since it was created last fall,” Culver said in a press release on Monday. “With this legislation, we are giving a little more help to these who have already suffered so much.”

Culver will sign the new legislation – passed unanimously by both the Iowa Senate and Iowa House – at Old Capitol in Iowa City on Tuesday afternoon. Culver will be using Old Capitol as his office for the day.

Last Friday, Sen. Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, announced that the Jumpstart housing matter had passed the legislature and was on the way to the governor’s office. Hogg was one of the bill’s proponents.

Two months ago, at a nighttime neighborhood meeting in the Time Check Neighborhood, flood victims spoke to city officials and Iowa lawmakers. On that night, shortening the period of the Jumpstart forgivable loans to five years was one of the requests. Neighbors noted that Jumpstart business loans were for five years, why couldn’t the housing loans be? they asked.

That night, City Manager Jim Prosser said City Hall would see what it could do. Hogg was on hand that night, too.

City Hall’s lobbyist, Larry Murphy, was among lobbyists pushing lawmakers in Des Moines to make the Jumpstart change.

City Hall readies to review flood-insurance proposals; Linn supervisors are as eager to get huge costs waived by state insurance commissioner

Local government is going to turn to the Iowa Insurance Division for help in confronting giant insurance costs that are required in exchange for accepting giant payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fix flood-damaged city, county and school buildings.

Linn County Risk Manager Steve Estenson on Monday morning revealed potential annual insurance costs facing Linn County once it repairs and returns to the its courthouse and jail on May’s Island and to a few other county buildings flooded last June.

He put the first estimate of costs at about $600,000 a year, but a final total is not known other than it is not apt to be that high. That is, in part, because the county may not return to the Witwer Building downtown and it intends to move the flood-destroyed Options Building elsewhere. Even so, it will need to pay some flood insurance on the Options Building.

What the Linn supervisors were most interested in, though, was Estenson’s comment that the city, school district and county all are now planning to ask the state insurance commission for a waiver of some of the insurance costs. FEMA regulations permit such waivers, although they are not common.

The Cedar Rapids City Council said two weeks ago it was interested in exploring such a waiver.

The council is a step ahead of the supervisors. It already made a formal request for brokers to handle the city’s flood-insurance matters.

The council will be able to forgo much of the huge insurance costs this year because it will not be returning this year to City Hall, the library and Paramount Theatre, three city buildings flood-damaged in June 2008.

At private-sector’s push, City Council launches quest for flood-recovery manager with a job description fit for Superman

More than five weeks have passed now since council member Tom Podzimek suggested that an unsuccessful move by three council members related to a flood-recovery CEO was tantamount to a coup d’état.

Council members Justin Shields, Monica Vernon and Jerry McGrane all wanted this flood-recovery chief to bypass City Manager Jim Prosser and report directly to them and the other six on the City Council. But the other six dismissed the notion out of hand. The city charter calls for one CEO who reports to the council, not two, the six said.

With all the pizzazz of government overthrow now put aside, the council still is in the process of filling the position that Shields and Vernon, in particular, had agitated for.

All of the council members have gotten in line behind the position — the job is now called flood-recovery manager and the person filling it will report to Prosser — and it comes with an unusual twist. The city’s largest employer, Rockwell Collins, has pushed for the City Hall position, and Rockwell Collins is joining other private-sector contributors to pay most of the cost of the public-sector flood-recovery manager.

Conni Huber, the city’s human resources director, last week noted that the council resolution creating the position anticipates that 80 percent of the cost will be paid by private-sector corporations and/or people.

Huber last week also reported to the City Council that a multi-stepped process is underway to try to fill the flood-recovery manager position. There have been two sessions in which the public offered suggestions about the qualifications and experience that the new flood-recovery manager should possess. Council members have weighed in on the matter, too, and others have filled out surveys via the city’s Web page, Huber said.

It wasn’t clear if there was anyone in America who could fill the role after Huber had told the council what kind of person that the public and council members said they were looking for.

The new manager will need to be a top-notch coordinator, a person who can make connections, someone who is a great communicator, who can become the “face of Cedar Rapids flood recovery and reinvestment,” Huber said. The new manager must be expert in finding funding and someone who can quantify how much he or she is accomplishing. The new manager must be a leader, a consensus-builder, articulate, an effective advocate for Cedar Rapids, experienced in disaster recovery and have an advanced degree in public administration, management or some other relevant field.

After Huber finished, Mayor Kay Halloran asked, “Do you feel you can find people (to meet the qualifications)?”

“I always have to be optimistic,” Huber said. “People are out there,” she assured. The task, she added, was to connect with them.

The city now has begun to advertise the new job and hopes to have a list of applicants by May 4.

Interviews will be held June 1 and 2 with council members and others with the hope that the job will be filled by the June 12/13 anniversary of the 2008 flood.

The private-sector push by Rockwell Collins to have a private-sector-backed presence inside City Hall came even as a different local private-sector initiative here created something called the Economic Planning & Redevelopment Corp. The City Council has contributed $50,000 to the EPRC and Linn County about half that amount, but it’s a little murky what the mission of the EPRC’s director, Doug Neumann, will be once the private sector has a flood-recovery manager inside City Hall.

Council member Chuck Wieneke has suggested that the City Council take back its $50,000 from the EPRC now that the city is creating a new position at City Hall.

Crucial City Planning Commission hit with two resignations

Two of the nine members of the important City Planning Commission have resigned.

In a letter to Mayor Kay Halloran and the City Council, long-time commission member Carole Schmidt cites health and conflicts with her job as the reasons for her stepping down. Of note, Schmidt tells the city’s elected officials that she is now required to take vacation leave to attend commission meetings.

Also announcing her resignation from the commission is newer member Lisa-Marie Garlich, a community development planner.

In her resignation letter, Garlich says she has taken a job with the city of Marshalltown.

Those who would like to compete to replace Schmidt and Garlich can inquire at the mayor’s office, 286-5051.

Library Board and City Council will ask FEMA to let the city replace its flood-damaged library with a new downtown library at a new downtown site

The city’s library board wants to replace its flood-damaged main library with a new library at a different downtown site. And at the board’s request, the City Council last night signaled it will formally ask the Federal Emergency Management Agency to support the idea, most of the cost of which FEMA disaster-relief funds would pay.

FEMA’s determination that the library sustained more than 50 percent damage in the 2008 flood — a crucial conclusion reached after much negotiation with the city — allows the city to ask that FEMA provide disaster-relief funding to build a new library elsewhere. A damage assessment under 50 percent would have forced the city to repair the library where it is at if it used FEMA funds. FEMA now also could back building a new library where the current one is.

FEMA would pay 90 percent of the cost and the state of Iowa 10 percent, though costs over and above a similar-kind of library could fall on the local community, Doug Elliott, library board vice president, told the council last night. Elliott said it wasn’t a “foregone conclusion” that the library site would move even if that is what the library board wants to do.

Earlier Wednesday, Susan Corrigan, the president of the city’s library board, said the library board’s intent, as it waits to hear from FEMA, is to quickly begin a public participation exercise. The library board will want to know where a new library might go, what should be in it and what it should look like.

Corrigan said the library board has adopted “guiding principles” for a new library at a new site, three of which are key: That it be somewhere that won’t flood. That it be centrally located in or near downtown. And that it has plenty of parking.

Corrigan noted that the definition of downtown is different for different people, but she said the board is looking on the east side of the Cedar River where future flooding may be less of an issue than on the west side of the river.

In recent months, the City Council, with the help of the city’s Community Development Department, has taken a look at possible downtown parcels on which the city can build a new Intermodal Transit Facility and other possible public buildings.

The council has picked a two-block area now occupied by a Pepsi warehouse and maintenance operation between Fifth and Sixth avenues SE as its first choice to build with the second choice being the site of TrueNorth, which is on Fourth Avenue SE across from Greene Square Park.

Corrigan said the library board was aware of sites that the City Council had been looking at and is “open” to those and others.

One estimate, she noted, is that a new library might cost $24 million, while repairing the existing library was estimated to cost perhaps $17 million. But she said the latter number was “irrelevant” now because the library is not going to simply be repaired as it had been.

She said the library board is looking for “a fresh start.”

“Whatever we’re going to do, we’re going to do the right, long-term thing,” she said.

Corrigan said she would like to see the new library completed or well on its way to being completed by 2011.

Perhaps, another entity might be located at a downtown library, she said, but she added that the library board would want to make sure the library is the dominant partner in any sharing arrangement.

“When you walk in, you know it’s a library,” she said.

“I would like it to be spectacular looking with parking,” Corrigan emphasized. “We have to solve the parking issue.”

She said the library needed at least 200 parking slots, but said a parking ramp might be one way to get them.

The library board’s Elliott told the council last night that the board understood that the council was set to being its own public participation process to look at the future of other flood-damaged city buildings like City Hall and the existing federal courthouse which the city will take ownership of in 2012 when the new courthouse is in place.

Elliott, though, said the library board is interested in pursuing a more “aggressive” timeline in its public input process. The council has talked about a six- to nin-month process.

Petite woman from Nevada shows sturdy public works crews how simple it is to set up Tiger Dam temporary flood protection

Last year’s disastrous flood could not have seemed farther away: The spring sky on Wednesday was blue, the sun warm, the nearby Cedar River lazily gliding by.

Yet a burly force of city Public Works Department employees were preparing for the worst.

They unfurled several 50-foot sections of orange bladders in a parking lot at Ellis Park, guided the bladders into place — two next to one another and a third on top — and filled them with water from a nearby fire hydrant.

This system of water-filled bladders, trademarked Tiger Dams, will be the principal piece of additional, new, temporary flood protection for the Time Check Neighborhood should the Cedar River threaten once again to spill into the neighborhood.

After Wednesday’s trial run, Mike Kuntz, the city’s sewer superintendent, said he was confident city crews could set up a line of Tiger Dams without difficulty for the 1,900-foot stretch in which they will be used at this spot in the city. The city will use a system of metal baskets filled with dirt elsewhere to temporarily protect the downtown and Czech Village.

“I was skeptical if we would be able to do it as rapidly as necessary,” Kuntz said of setting up the Tiger Dams. “But I’m pleased how well this has gone. I have no doubt we will be able to do it and do it well.”

As if to intentionally make the point, the maker of the Tiger Dams, U.S. Flood Control Corp., Carson City, Nev., sent Cheryl Witmer, company business developer and product trainer, to Cedar Rapids to train Cedar Rapids’ city crews in the use of the system.

Witmer is sufficiently petite that she was hard to spot amid the 30 or so sturdy city crew members.

“Don’t pull it by the edges,” Witmer instructed the crew members. “If you pull it by the edges you’re just going to make it ugly and wrinkly.”

Her central point, the city’s Kuntz said, was that the bladder that sits on top of two others needs to be positioned correctly as it starts to fill with water.

But Witmer said having her lead the demonstration helps to drive home the message that installing the flood barriers is so simple “a girl can do it.”

“That’s the beauty of it. It’s light, it’s easy and you don’t need any heavy equipment,” Witmer said.

Each 50-foot section of bladder weighs 65 pounds, but when each is unfolded and filled with water, they weigh 6,300 pounds. “That’s a great deal of weight and a great deal of security,” Witmer said.

The city has purchased 282 of these 50-foot sections, at a cost of $375,000. They will provide 1,900 feet of protection from the existing earthen levee at Ellis Lane NW down Ellis Boulevard NW to Penn Ave. NW. At that point, the Tiger Dams will tie into the existing levee along First Street NW in a way that should protect this part of the city to a river height of 24 feet.

That is four feet higher than the city’s previous record flood, but still seven feet below the historic flood of 2008. Providing temporary protection to the 2008 flood level is far too costly. A proposed permanent flood protection system, which could cost $1 billion, is the long-term solution for the city’s flood-protection needs.

Witmer said the Tiger Dams have been used in hurricane country in Louisiana, Florida and Texas as well for flash flooding in Nevada and river flooding in several states and Canada. Private corporations also use them. She said Walmart used the product to protect a store in Ames, Iowa.

Once set up, the Tiger Dams can remain in place for a couple months and can be reused. They also can be filled with a saline solution so the water in them freezes at a lower temperature than 32 degrees, though Cedar Rapids’ flood season usually comes later.

In purchasing the Tiger Dams and the second system, called Hesco Concertainers, the city acknowledged that it might never have to use them between now and the day, perhaps eight to 10 years from now, when a permanent system is in place.

“That’s the hope,” the city’s Kuntz said. “We hope we never have to use them.”

Big steam bills, lost Paramount revenue prompt request for $200,000 more in hotel/motel money for U.S. Cellular Center

High steam costs and lost revenue because of the 2008 flood are prompting the manager of the U.S. Cellular Center and Paramount Theatre to ask City Hall for $200,000 in leftover hotel/motel tax revenue to help pay the bills.

In a memo to the City Council, Scott Schoenike, executive director for VenuWorks of Cedar Rapids, reports that steam costs for the U.S. Cellular Center operation have more than tripled during the winter despite his efforts to keep temperatures down in the arena when it was not in use.

For the month of February alone, the center’s steam bill was $52,593, up from $14,000 from the February before, Schoenike reports.

There are many similar refrains from customers small and big – including the Quaker Oats and Cargill plants near downtown – that had depended in years past on cheap steam from Alliant Energy’s now-flood-wrecked Sixth Street Generating Plant.

In addition, Schoenike tells the City Council that his operation is facing budget pressures because the Paramount Theatre is out of commission and not bringing in revenue because of the flood.

Schoenike reports that he has cut staff by 25 percent and made other cuts that in total have axed $600,000 in costs from the operating budget. Even so, the operation needs the $200,000 in extra hotel/motel revenue, he says.

The City Council is expected to approve the request on Wednesday evening.

Community center/recreation center called a ‘Multigenerational Community Life Center’ in the hunt for $5.75 million for planning/design

Throw it into the mix.

The city’s Parks & Recreation Department has gotten the paperwork together and is now joining a crowd of local entities in the competition to try to pry loose some post-flood money from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration.

The city department effort is focused on garnering a $5.75-million EDA grant for what project backers are now calling a “Multigenerational Community Life Center.”

The life center project is one of the 15 in the community’s four-year-old, Fifteen in 5 initiative — 15 projects in five years. It often has been referred to as part community center and part recreation center.

In a memo to the City Council, Julie Sina, the city’s parks and recreation director, says the $5.75 million will pay for planning and architectural and engineering fees, but not the cost of construction.

Sina says the new structure could be a new home for what now is the flood-damaged Witwer Senior Center building, the flood-damaged Time Check Recreation Center and the worn-out Ambroz Recreation Center and Bender Pool.

As a Fifteen in 5 project, the community center-recreation center has had an active, dedicated committee studying the concept and promoting it. However, the project got pushed a little to the side as the city and community has worked to deal with the aftermath of the June 2008 flood.

The prospect of a federal EDA grant now has brought the project to the forefront again.

Three weeks ago, the City Council was asked to prioritize which projects it thought were most deserving of limited EDA money.

The council settled on a ranking that placed projects in this order: downtown steam system, first; a public fiber-optic system, second; the community center-recreation center, third, tied with a steam system for Mercy Medical Center; a steam system for Coe College and St. Luke’s Hospital, fourth; improvements to the U.S. Cellular Center and the construction of a new convention center next door, fifth; and a Regional Commerce Center, downtown freight rail planning and parking system upgrades, tied for sixth.

At the time, one local community leader noted that the city of Coralville already had secured an $8-million EDA grant.

On Tuesday, Ellen Habel, assistant city administrator in Coralville, said the city had not yet been awarded an EDA grant. She did say, though, that the city submitted its $7.16-millon grant last fall, has had a site visit from EDA and is now awaiting a decision.

The Coralville project would elevate the rail corridor along Highway 6 and incorporate permanent and removable flood protection into it to protect against a flood one foot above the 2008 one, Habel explained.

Colorful former mayor, Robert M.L. Johnson, passes away at 88

Former Mayor Robert M.L. Johnson died Monday. The funeral home’s death notice says he died of a sudden illness. He was 88.

Johnson held the mayor’s post from 1962 through 1967 at a time when the city turned its attention to urban renewal in the downtown and to building an Interstate through the city.

“He was the strongest mayor we ever had,” Don Salyer, who served as the city’s director of planning and redevelopment for 37 years until the mid 1990s, said Monday.

“He laid out policies and programs and followed through on them,” Salyer remembered. “He took charge. He was a man of action so to speak. … There was nothing wishy-washy about him, let’s put it that way.”

Johnson was first elected to city office as public safety commissioner, but Jerry Elsea, a beat reporter for The Gazette at the time who went on to be the newspaper’s editorial page editor for some years, remembered that Johnson lost the backing of voters after he touted such ideas as one-way streets in the downtown. Johnson, though, reemerged quickly and was elected mayor.

Elsea remembered Johnson’s time in office as an era of strong leadership at City Hall. The city leaders at the time — they included two future mayors, Frank Bosh and Don Canney, in addition to Johnson — was sufficiently strong, Elsea said, that it allowed Cedar Rapids to put off the idea of changing its commission-style government with full-time mayor and commissioners for years. In 2006, the city did change to a part-time council and full-time city manager, a move, by the way, that Johnson supported then and in 1996 when voters rejected the idea.

Elsea said Johnson was at the epicenter of this group of City Hall leaders back in the 1960s who he said made some “wise and far-seeing decisions,” decisions that featured the kind of contentious public hearings that come with matters like urban renewal.

“It was a pretty colorful time for a reporter, because Johnson was not shy about giving his opinions,” Elsea remembered. “He was a colorful character and it was a colorful era for the town.”

Johnson first came to public life in Cedar Rapids as a local radio and television newscaster.

While mayor, he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Congress in 1966 as a Republican against incumbent John Culver. Later, he served in the Iowa House of Representatives. In 1971 and 1972, he served as city manager of the city of Marion.

Johnson, who resided at Cottage Grove Place, 2115 First Ave. SE, was a tireless writer of letters to The Gazette’s editorial pages over the years and had frequent contact with reporters and others in his retirement.

Former Mayor Don Canney, who was the city’s public improvements commissioner during part of Johnson’s time as mayor and then became mayor in 1969, on Monday called Johnson “a good friend.”

“We disagreed on a lot of things, but as gentlemen,” Canney said. “I really admired him, and he did a darn good job as mayor.”

Canney said he and Johnson talked on the phone just a month ago. “We talked about how we both we’re getting along,” Canney said.

Two months ago, Johnson took time with a reporter, too, tickled, he said, to see that local artist Fred Easker was painting a landscape for the interior of the new federal courthouse now going up downtown.

Johnson wanted to point out that Easker was a Jefferson High School student back in the mid-1960s when Johnson was mayor and decided the city needed a city flag. Easker came up with the winning design.

Johnson said he was also proud that he initiated the charcoal portraits of the city’s mayors that now hang outside the council chambers in what is now the empty, flood-damaged City Hall. He also held a contest for a city song.

He said the city band always used to play the song at the end of their concerts, but then he said that gave way over the years.

Johnson said he asked the band why it stopped playing the song, and he said he was told, “The minute we start to play it people start to leave.”

Council passes new budget, but not without anti-Prosser theatrics by three of nine council members

It is easy to be caught by surprise when the City Council finally gets around to voting on the annual city budget.

The final vote always comes after much discussion and many long, nighttime meetings over three or so months with the final pre-vote meeting seeming to bring some consensus of what the council has tossed into the mix.

But once again on Wednesday evening, three of the nine City Council members – Justin Shields, Monica Vernon and Jerry McGrane — opted to use the council budget vote as theater and as symbolism which they knew would have no bearing on the majority’s vote to approve the budget.

It was the threesome’s chance to lodge a protest vote against City Manager Jim Prosser.

The new budget, approved on a 6-3 vote, adds 26 new employees, increasing the city’s total number of employees to 1,422.

The new budget is huge by Cedar Rapids city budget standards. The regular piece of the budget amounts to $392 million, but the flood fund portion of the budget adds another $359.5 million to the budget, raising the total size of the thing to $752 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

However, Shields, Vernon and McGrane rejected the budget over raises totaling $23,358 to two of the city’s top department heads, Conni Huber, human resources director, and Christine Butterfield, community development director.

The raises came outside the council’s budget deliberations as City Manager Jim Prosser has explained that he was bringing the department heads’ salaries in line with the other six department directors that report to Prosser and in line with salaries of such positions in 23 other cities in the Midwest.

On Wednesday evening, Prosser noted that the move to establish pay equity for the city’s department directors began two years ago, but got pushed aside by last summer’s flood and by the focus on flood recovery. That’s why the two raises came now.

Shields, Vernon and McGrane said they didn’t think Huber and Butterfield should have been singled out for special consideration — Huber’s raise was 15.8 percent and Butterfield’s, 10.2 percent — when the 400 or so other city employees not represented by bargaining units were getting just 2 percent raises and another 800-plus bargaining-unit employees were getting raises in the 3-percent range.

Shields wondered if Prosser had spent any time looking at other classes of city employees to see if their wages were in line with other cities.

Prosser said, in fact, the city does that on an ongoing basis.

Vernon, a business owner, said her employees aren’t given the luxury of a review of 23 other cities to justify where their salaries should be.

Council member Tom Podzimek said the issue was about “fair compensation” based on a review of many other cities. Podzimek wondered if the city really wanted to lose its top directors or if the city wanted to become a “second class city.”

In a moment unusual for him, Prosser got exercised. He said it was his decision to raise the salaries of two of his directors and if Shields or the council had a problem with it they could address it during his performance review. He said he had no difficulty defending the raises so that the salaries were in line with the city’s other department directors and other cities’ directors.

“If you don’t think I did it right, take it out of my salary,” Prosser said.

Shields came right back at Prosser: “Those comments don’t change my mind,” Shields said. “I don’t agree with singling out two employees.”

Shields and Vernon have been at public odds with the city manager.

In recent weeks, the two made a much-publicized attempt to hire a flood CEO that would sidestep Prosser and report directly to the council. McGrane agreed with them.

The council majority, though, dismissed the move out of hand, arguing that the city’s still-new council/manager government is designed with one top dog, the city manager, to report to the council. The council has agreed to hire a flood manager, but that manager will report to Prosser.

It is a City Hall election year.

Six of nine seats are up for a vote, including Shields’ District 5 seat and McGrane’s District 3 seat. Vernon, the District 2 council member, has been thinking of running for mayor.

Brick’s Bar & Grill finds soft spot at City Hall; council asks police chief to negotiate if he turns up nothing beyond shaky liquor license application

Brick’s Bar & Grill, 320 Second Ave. SE, got some sympathy from the City Council last night and may be able to renew its liquor license.

The bar’s owner, Jade Hronik, stumbled into problems with the Police Department for, as Police Chief Greg Graham said last night, not being truthful on her liquor license application.

Graham cited three specifics on the license renewal application in which Hronik, who signed the document, did not report her own prior intoxication arrest and the felony arrests in 2006 of two others connected to the bar.

In her own defense, Hronik noted that she purchased and renovated the downtown Brick’s after the June flood, and that she had correctly filled out paperwork in September on the bar and for another drinking establishment in the city.

She said her license renewal application at Brick’s was incomplete, not untruthful, and she said she had not paid sufficient attention to it but had another person handle it.

Council members Tom Podzimek and Monica Vernon asked Graham to look at Hronik’s earlier liquor applications and see if they, in fact, supported Hronik’s position.

Council member Brian Fagan asked Graham if he would be willing to meet with Hronik, if all else is in order, to see if he can create a consequence for the untruthfulness short of a license denial. Graham, who said consequences are important, said he would be willing to do so.

In any event, should the council ultimately deny a license to Brick’s, the bar can stay open as it appeals to the state’s Alcohol Beverages Division. Appeals can take up to a year to resolve.

The Police Department in recent weeks convinced the City Council to block the renewal of a liquor license for The Tycoon, which is just down the block from Brick’s. The Tycoon, which did not move to renew its license in timely fashion, now has a probationary license and has agreed to better police its bar customers in an agreement with the Police Department.

City Hall enthusiasm aside, Jack Hatch’s replacement housing for Oak Hill must wait; lousy economy, questions about flood protection are getting in the way

More than six months has passed now since Des Moines developer Jack Hatch unveiled a plan to no little City Hall enthusiasm to build the Oakhill Jackson Brickstone Apartments along Sixth Street SE.

Hatch chose to locate his so-called affordable housing proposal in the Oak Hill Neighborhood, which is near the downtown and long has been in decline, was flood damaged and has been a City Hall target for revitalization.

City Hall saw Hatch’s idea, which is financed in large part with federal tax credits with some city incentives, as a great example of “work force housing,” the label that city officials say better describes who lives in such housing than “affordable housing.”

All that came back at the start of October.

In an interview on Tuesday, Hatch, who is a state senator, said the project is on hold.

The reasons, he said, are at least three, with the primary reason being the difficulty in finding investors in a lousy economy.

Those potential investors, he said, also are a little skittish about building in a spot that was flooded in 2008, even though Hatch has proposed his two-building project with first-floor parking designed to flood.

Additionally, potential investors are interested in what will happen to Linn County’s flood-damaged, industrial-like Options building that backs up to Sixth Street SE. Hatch’s idea is that the county demolish the building – The Linn County Board of Supervisors said last week it is interested in moving Options to a new site with the Federal Emergency Management Agency paying most of the bill — so that large block can become open space or space for additional new residential development.

Hatch said none of the problems with the economy or the building site has deterred him from his commitment to build the Brickstone Apartments.

However, he acknowledged that he pulled the project from consideration this week by the Iowa Finance Authority.

The Authority awards federal tax credits for affordable housing proposals, but Hatch said he pulled his project for now from the Authority’s agenda until he secures his investors.

In tax-credit projects, corporations, for instance, contribute cash to an affordable housing project in exchange for credit against their federal tax bills over 10 years.

In recent years, tax credits have been limited, corporations have had cash to invest in them and the corporations have had to invest about 90 cents for $1 worth of tax credit.

Today, in the aftermath of Iowa’s 2008 flooding disasters, Iowa has received a major infusion of additional tax credits, but corporations have less cash to invest and those that do invest are investing only about 70 cents per $1 worth of tax credit.

“The difficulty is this global economy,” Hatch said Tuesday.

Hatch has successfully built several tax-credit financed projects in Des Moines, and is pushing ahead with an 18-unit building there even now.

But for now, his idea for Oak Hill Neighborhood must await.

At the same time, Hatch said his current difficulty in Cedar Rapids is more than the global economy. He said he thinks he could build the project elsewhere in the city, but he added he doesn’t want to. He said he has a commitment to the Oak Hill Neighborhood, and that’s where he thinks the project needs to be.

His proposal calls for building one Brickstone on the east side of Sixth Street SE at the corner of 12th Avenue SE and one on the west side of Sixth Street SE from Ninth to 10th avenues SE.

He envisions his development and others to help turn Sixth Street SE into a pedestrian-friendly area where residents can walk to Eighth Avenue SE and to the downtown.

Flood protection remains an issue for the project, he said, even though, as now designed, the project’s first floor will be reserved for flooding.

Hatch said he thinks the City Council should alter its recent decision not to provide additional, temporary flood protection below Eighth Avenue SE.

The council made the decision after city staff reported that it would cost $3 million to install temporary flood protection below Eighth Avenue on the east side of the river to protect only about $1 million of homes and first-floor properties.

City’s pursuit of cool, bicycle-friendly status needs you: Thursday evening event will help define where future bike routes should go

There is a reason that no city in Iowa currently holds the standing with the American League of Bicyclists as a bicycle-friendly city.

It’s hard to accomplish.

The City Council here, though, wants to try to achieve the bicycle-friendly status just as cities like Madison, Wis., Ann Arbor, Mich., Eugene, Ore., and Fort Collins, Colo., have achieved it.

In that effort, the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee is holding a workshop/open house on Thursday evening to work on a plan of action to secure bike-friendly status.

Thursday’s event will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. at the African American Museum of Iowa, 55 12th Ave. SE.

Those who attend will help the committee identify desired bicycle routes and amenities along the routes.

Participants also will address the five “E’s that are part of being bicycle friendly: engineering, education, encouragement, evaluation and planning and enforcement.

For more information, contact Ron Griffith, a city traffic engineer and the city’s bicycle coordinator, at 286-5154 or r.griffith@cedar-rapids.org.

Tedious debate on sidewalks pushes crucial discussion on flood insurance into last place on council’s agenda

Sometimes it’s hard to know if the City Council starts talking about sidewalks again just so it can be sure a council meeting empties out before more important discussions to follow.

Or at least it was easy to think that last week as the council spent nearly an hour trying to fine tune its 2007 Sidewalk Installation Policy.

Getting through the talk on sidewalks got the meeting into the start of its fourth hour before the council took on the matter of the high cost of insuring flood-damaged city buildings in case there is a new flood.
Council member Chuck Wieneke was quick to the microphone on both sidewalks and flood insurance.

On assessments for sidewalks, Wieneke said there are few matters that repeatedly come before the council that provoke such upset from the public and waste so much city staff time.

The typical flashpoint on sidewalks surfaces when the city decides to install them in long-established neighborhoods where it is clear children if not adults are walking in streets to get from one stretch of sidewalk to another. Homeowners aren’t happy when the city shows up ready to charge them for a portion of the sidewalk installation.

Wieneke noted that the property owner’s share of the cost is usually some complicated formula — he used the example of 15 percent of 50 percent of the cost — that the city would be better off just to continue on with its program to install sidewalks in older sections of the city and forget about making property owners pay a part of the cost.

Council member Monica Vernon said Wieneke might have something, but council member Tom Podzimek, who led the sidewalk discussion, noted that the sidewalk issue at hand was not the one Wieneke addressed.

The council, Podzimek noted, was trying to figure out how to assess the cost of sidewalks in industrial areas or at developments on the outskirts of town that might be a half-mile or mile from the next nearest sidewalk, park, school or trail.

The city has a handful of appeals awaiting the council on that sidewalk issue and the city staff was trying to determine a policy so the matters would not have to come to the council for debate.

One thing the council insisted on when the long-winded discussion had ended was that those with sidewalk issues could still appeal their cases to the City Council.

Council member Kris Gulick noted that the council’s existing sidewalk policy has worked pretty well in that only eight people have appealed to the council in 81 cases in recent years. That’s a 90-percent batting average, he noted. Maybe it is OK, he seemed to suggest, if the sidewalk policy didn’t tie up every loose end.

Long one of the central points of debate on the sidewalk issue has come from developers who must install sidewalks in new developments at their cost. They don’t think it’s fair that the city pay to install them in existing neighborhoods where developers at the time were not forced to install sidewalks and build the cost into the price of the lots and homes.

Oh, and for that issue of flood insurance on city buildings:

It is turning up at the spot in this little story about where it turned up at last week’s council meeting — at the end, after most people had vanished from the council meeting.

The council decided to seek insurance brokers to compete to handle the purchase of $25 million in flood insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program at an estimated cost of $280,000 a year. This level of insurance will cover the cost of cleanup should the same buildings flood as they did in June 2008.

Wieneke made the point that there is no rush to buy a higher level of insurance — which the Federal Emergency Management Agency will require as part of taking FEMA money to fix the city buildings — because none of the buildings has been fixed.

Both Vernon and Wieneke said city staff had been tardy in bringing the insurance matter to the council what with the flooding season upon the city.

Casey Drew, the city’s finance director, explained that the city only began to get good damage assessments on its buildings in January and that it had taken six or so weeks for the city to get an idea of how much insurance might cost. By one estimate, it could cost $4 million a year, Drew said.

The council said it wants to work on an estimate like that. Council member Podzimek said he wanted the city to get in touch with the state insurance commissioner. FEMA rules allow state insurance commissioners to grant waivers for flood insurance on public facilities in certain instances, Drew had noted.

A gush of praise: Another top Iowa official comes to Cedar Rapids to say the city is doing a great job in disaster relief and the state is, too

Two big cheeses from Iowa’s state government in Des Moines have to come to two of the last three City Council meetings here with the same message: city leaders are doing a great job in flood recovery; the state is, too; it’s the federal government that’s slowing disaster relief down and dispensing it unfairly.

The council and City Manager Jim Prosser couldn’t hire important people — this week it was Michael Tramontina, head of the state’s Department of Economic Development, and two weeks ago it was David Miller, head of the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management — to say such nice things about them.

That was no truer than when Tramontina, like Miller before him, went out of his way to praise the use of outside consultants to help with flood recovery.

Of course, no issue at City Hall has garnered nearly as many hoots as the use of a stable of costly consultants to help in the city’s flood recovery.

“Consultants are invaluable,” Tramontina said in his lengthy presentation in front of the council, a meeting that the city tapes for rebroadcast on local cable TV.

He said the state of Iowa, in his case, simply did not have the number of employees or employees with disaster experience to figure out how to deal with a disaster as large as the flood disaster of 2008.

“You need someone who has been through it,” he said. “You need consultants to find your way.”

He, like others, rated Iowa’s flood disaster as one of the top ones in terms of damage to public buildings and infrastructure in the nation’s history. He put it at number five.

He said Iowa, to date, has received a total of $282 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds to help with the disaster, an amount, he, too, said was less than Iowa should have had coming.

Talking about Iowa’s share of federal disaster funds is not so unlike talking about the state’s ethanol industry. It’s pretty easy to get a steady dose of the home team’s position.

Tramontina said much work from Gov. Chet Culver on down has gone into cajoling and arm-twisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to come up with a better formula when it shells out $4 billion more dollars among 30 states that had natural disasters in 2008.

The state of Iowa believes the HUD formula should take into account the amount of damage to public buildings and infrastructure as well as things like population.

At minimum, Iowa should get $250 million of the next HUD money, which could be coming by month’s end, he said. Iowa should get $800 to $900 million if Iowa’s version of the distribution formula wins out, Tramontina said.

He was particularly complimentary of the city of Cedar Rapids’ hiring of a third-party administrator to handle the way state Jumpstart and federal CDBG money flows through what he described as a swampland of federal regulations to flood victims.

The local bureaucratic apparatus will do the city well when the federal auditors show up to see how much has been handed out inappropriately, and so, how much money must be returned, he said.

It has been something of a slow go, Tramontina said, in delivering funds. But they are flowing now.

As he was making that point, he had his associates and city staff stand in front of the room and hold up long sheets of paper comparing Iowa’s much quicker progress in delivering disaster funds than hurricane-hit Texas’ progress of a few years ago.

It took Texas 608 days even with Texas resident George Bush in the White House, he said.

Of note, Tramontina’s high praise this week stood in contrast to reports that City Council members like Justin Shields and Jerry McGrane have brought back from lobbying trips to Des Moines. Both council members have said they were told there that Cedar Rapids city government is dysfunctional, and as McGrane has put it, full of a bunch of nincompoops.

Tramontina’s oratory had little impact on the few flood victims and neighborhood leaders who came to the council microphone and chewed on the council once the state official sat down.

Plenty of questions remain as deep-rooted boat-house community in flood-damaged Ellis Harbor works to return to some version of normalcy

The future is still murky for the Ellis Park Boat Harbor and the small, tightly packed little structures on the water there called boat houses.

The boat houses have been part of the local landscape for decades.

The June 2008 flood, though, bashed the little community, sending some of the houses down the river, crashing into a railroad bridge. Other houses were pushed up onto the river bank or otherwise damaged.

What had been 130 homes now is down to about 70.

After their meeting on Thursday, members of the city’s Riverfront Improvement Commission suggested that life will return to the remaining boat houses in some form this spring, but they said it likely will be 2010 before a semblance of normalcy was back in place.

This summer, owners of the boat houses look as if they will have to pay to restore temporary electric service to their homes until a longer-term, permanent service is installed.

Such a permanent solution will need to await the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the city coming to a decision on damages to the harbor and a plan of action to make repairs, council member Chuck Wieneke, who represents the west-side council district where the harbor is located, said after the Riverfront Improvement Commission on Thursday.

Wieneke said the current estimate is that the 2008 flood caused $1.8 million in damage to the public infrastructure in the harbor.

The boat house owners actually have endured two poundings. First there was the flood, and then an announcement in the wake of the flood by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources that the boat houses were illegal structures as set out by state regulations.

After much discussion between owners and the DNR, the DNR has decided to grant variances for a fee of $25 each to the owners to allow them to stay for now. In the meantime, the DNR said it will rewrite rules that will allow boat houses with roofs and sides to stay in the harbor. Boat house owners and commission members Carl Cortez and Jeff McLaud, though, said they still waiting to see the new rules.

Even with new rules, the DNR is insisting that the owners upgrade the way the houses are moored in the river, Cortez said, and the agency also is requiring that owners take better steps to insure that waste water in the form of sewage and shower/sink water not enter the river.

A problem a little farther down the road, said Cortez, is another DNR rule, which says owners’ boat houses must be removed from the harbor once they are sold or passed on to relatives or someone else. Unless changed, it is a rule that will guarantee the boat house community dies out.

The city now charges $360 a year for the typical boat house to sit in the Ellis Harbor, and Bob Fox, one of the house owners, told the commission that he is going to be reluctant to pay the fee if he can’t get electricity to his boat house this summer. Cortez said he wants to see his DNR variance permit before he invests money to temporarily restore electricity to his property.

In recent weeks, the City Council voted to step back and let the DNR take responsibility for the harbor.

On Thursday, though, members of the six-member Riverfront Improvement Commission, four of whom own boat houses, expressed a fresh sense of optimism after City Manager Jim Prosser attended the commission meeting and made some commitments to them.

Prosser heard first hand from Tom Furnish Jr., the commission chairman, and the others how frustrated the commission has been over some years now. The told Prosser how a City Council in recent years, but prior to his time, did away with the commission’s own paid staff and rolled the riverfront responsibility into the Parks and Recreation Department.

In the last couple years, City Hall has all but ignored the commission, members told Prosser.

“We just felt like we’ve been swimming upstream,” Furnish said. “… We were getting somewhat frustrated.”

Prosser made a commitment to the commission that he and council member Wieneke would identify a city employee to facilitate meetings between the commission and city staff. The exercise will try to bring some clarity and resources to the commission’s mission both at the harbor and at many other places along the city’s riverfront, Prosser said.

Commission member McLaud said he’d long had an interest in all parts of the river here, not just the harbor, and commission member Walter Cheney wondered how the commission could add members in the future.

Prosser told the commission that he would expect to start the exercise with the commission within 30 days and to have something accomplished in 90 days.

“I think you told us what we wanted to hear,” Furnish said.

City Council wants police to help fix smaller, ‘broken-glass’ problems as a way to lessen scarier ones

Council member Justin Shields says he constantly gets calls from citizens complaining about chronic jaywalking on busy First Avenue East near where police officer Tim Davis was assaulted Sunday evening while investigating a robbery.

With the attack on Davis fresh in his and other council members’ minds, Shields wondered just how unruly and unsafe some of these areas have gotten.

Council member Brian Fagan said any tougher police approach to crime needed to be seen in the context of the city’s Enhance Our Neighborhoods initiative.

The Enhance Our Neighborhoods (EON) program is premised on the idea that a many-pronged approach to problem neighborhoods is the way to revitalize them. EON, for instance, wants problem landlords to keep up their properties and problem tenants to get evicted.

Council member Monica Vernon said the model for “aggressive” community policing also envisions that citizens participate in helping police by reporting infractions of law and city codes to the city.

This is the broken-glass theory of neighborhood rebirth, Mayor Kay Halloran noted, which former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani gained some credit for putting in place in New York City. The idea is that a community that fixes small things like broken windows and jaywalking finds it takes care of bigger problems in the process.

Vernon suggested it was time for a “community cleanup.” Making neighborhoods look more “ship-shape” would have a favorable effect on life in them, she said.

It was some years ago when the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association led just such a neighborhood cleanup effort that used neighbors and city crews to cart junk out of homes and to the landfill. So successful was the exercise that it spread citywide. But it lost the volunteer flavor, became a cost to the city budget and was abandoned.

Shields said problems in city neighborhoods were not limited to the area where the police officer was hurt on Sunday evening.

He pointed to problems in the neighborhood out by Kirkwood Community College, which is in his council district. And he pointed to his own southwest Cedar Rapids neighborhood. He said a burglar threw a rock through a neighbor’s window at 6 p.m. one recent evening as a way to get inside the house. The owner was on her computer in the basement when the intruder entered, and Shields said it scared her to death.

He said anymore you have to lock your house just to walk out to the mailbox.

City officials say temporary, multimillion-dollar flood protection systems they purchased did yeoman’s duty on the Red River of the North

Two Cedar Rapids city staffers have trekked to Fargo, N.D., and Moorhead, Minn., to see how those cities’ temporary flood-protection systems stood up against the Red River of the North.

The systems included the use of Hesco wire baskets that are filled with sand and rubber bladders filled with water, both of which the city of Cedar Rapids has purchased for temporary flood protection.

In an discussion Wednesday with The Gazette’s editorial staff, Dave Elgin, the city’s public works director, and Craig Hanson, the city’s public works maintenance manager, said they are satisfied with how the two systems worked up north and are satisfied the city made the right purchase for temporary flood protection for Cedar Rapids.

Elgin put the price tag on the city’s purchase at about $5 million, a purchase that includes additional pumps to protect the city up to a flood level of 24 feet. That level is two additional feet above what the city’s flood-action plan can protect today and four feet above what had been the city’s historic flood level. But it is seven feet lower than the level of the 2008 record flood here. Providing for temporary at the level could cost $360 million, the city officials estimated.

Hanson noted that both the Hesco baskets and the rubber bladders had their surprises in Fargo and Moorhead, but those are surprises that aren’t likely to happen here.

For instance, the water in the bladders froze up north, and frozen water floats, Hanson noted. Flooding in Cedar Rapids doesn’t usually include freezing temperatures.

Hanson noted, too, that the Hesco baskets may have tipped a bit up north in certain spots as the ground underneath them got muddy. The plan in Cedar Rapids, he said, it to place the Hesco defense on sidewalks and streets if possible.

The city intends to use the Hescos to protect both sides of the river through the downtown and at Czech Village and to use the water-filled bladders in the Time Check area.

Elgin noted that the Red River up north drains a watershed much, much larger and flatter than the Cedar River that runs through Cedar Rapids. As a result, cities along the Red River have more time to prepare for flooding because the river rises more slowly.

Here, the city has two to three days to prepare for a flood, Elgin said.

Elgin, Hanson and City Manager Jim Prosser stressed that a temporary system of flood protection has a lot of moving parts as a city deals with flood water, rain water behind the temporary protection and water filling sewers with no place to go.

“It’s more than just putting up barriers,” Prosser said.

Temporary protection, he said, will never do what the city’s proposed permanent system of levees and flood walls will be able to do.

At the same time, Prosser noted that the city’s current flood-action plan has worked well in recent years, at least until the June 2008 record flood.

Elgin pointed out that action plan easily handled a flood crest of 17.1 feet last April without anyone here really noticing.

Elgin and Hanson talked about ice jams on the river here and how that can prompt early season flooding. A newly installed sewer shut-off value at Penn Avenue and Ellis Boulevard will prevent water from backing up into the storm sewer there in the event of ice dams, Hanson said.

No, Elgin added, he didn’t think the city would institute a blasting program to break up ice as they do in North Dakota.

The city already has received its purchase of water-filled bladders, called tiger dams. It’s shipment of Hescos will arrive in about a month, Hanson said. The Hescos had been expected last week, but the city diverted its shipment for use in Fargo.

City Hall surveyed May’s Island’s elevation itself to prove it is outside 100-year flood plain; Local taxpayers save up to $3 million

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said May’s Island sits in the city’s 100-year flood plain, and City Hall has now proven to FEMA that it doesn’t.

The upshot: The city of Cedar Rapids will save up to $1 million and Linn County up to $2 million.

The saving comes because local jurisdictions must pay the first $1 million in renovation costs to a flood-damaged public building sitting in the 100-year flood plain. Such payments aren’t required for public buildings outside the 100-year flood plain.

Under the FEMA rule, the city of Cedar Rapids had been expecting to pay $1 million — $500,000 on flood-damaged contents and $500,000 on flood damage to the building – as part of FEMA’s payment to repair the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall on May’s Island.

Likewise, Linn County faced the same $1-million burden for each of its two flood-damaged buildings on May’s Island, the Linn County Courthouse and the Linn County Jail.

Chuck Chaffins, FEMA’s infrastructure branch director in Iowa, was the first to make note that the city of Cedar Rapids had succeeded in challenging FEMA’s flood map that had put May’s Island in the 100-year flood plain. On Tuesday, Steve Estenson, Linn County’s risk manager, credited the city of Cedar Rapids with successfully challenging the FEMA flood map.

On Wednesday, Dave Elgin, the city of Cedar Rapids’ public works director, explained how the city had succeeded in seeking a “letter of map amendment” to Cedar Rapids’ National Flood Insurance Program flood map.

Elgin noted that FEMA itself issued a draft of the city’s new flood map two years ago, a map which put May’s Island outside the 100-year flood plain. Come last December, though, FEMA published the draft and May’s Island was back in the 100-year flood plain.

Elgin said the city then surveyed the island itself and found that its elevation is not in the city’s 100-year flood plain, but, in fact, is in the 500-year flood plain.

FEMA now has said it will amend the flood map to put May’s Island in its correct elevation standing the river, Elgin said.

The position outside the 100-year flood plain does not eliminate the city’s requirement to carry flood insurance on the building if it accepts FEMA funds to repair the building.

The city has put the damage estimate to the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall at $20-plus million.

Raises for some City Hall top dogs are not AIG-like bonuses in tough times; they’re ‘reorganizational improvements’ to achieve ‘internal pay equity’

Calls had been made.

Comparisons were being drawn both by employees in city government and skeptics outside of city government.

Why, the question was, are a few top city employees getting hefty pay hikes even as the 400 or so city employees not represented by bargaining units are seeing their typical annual longevity pay increase eliminated for the budget year beginning July 1.

Isn’t it, callers suggested, kind of a little like the American International Group executives who pocketed million-dollar bonuses even as the economy had soured and the federal government repeatedly had bailed the insurance company out to the tune of tens of billions of dollars?

Apparently, comments and questions similar to this settled in at City Hall, from where late Tuesday afternoon a press release emerged to explain salary increases for three of the city’s eight department directors.

Conni Huber, the city’s human resources director, has received a $13,208 raise, bringing her annual salary to $96,720. That’s a 15.8 percent raise.

Christine Butterfield, director of the Department of Community Development, has received a $10,150 pay hike bringing her salary to $109,304. That’s a 10.2 percent increase.

Pat Ball, the city’s utilities director, has received a $3,057 raise, bringing his salary to $126,588. That’s a 2.5 percent raise.

City Manager Jim Prosser said the salary adjustments were done to establish “internal pay equity” among the city’s eight department directors.

The other directors’ salaries remain the same:

Dave Elgin, public works, and Police Chief Greg Graham earn what Ball now earns, $126,588 a year.

Casey Drew, finance director, and Julie Sina, parks and recreation director, earn what Butterfield now earns, $109,304 a year.

Fire Chief Steve Havlik earns $114,774 a year.

In Tuesday’s news release, Prosser said his staff surveyed the compensation rates of department heads in 23 cities to see where the city of Cedar Rapids fit. Only Elgin’s salary is higher than the median salary of like positions in the 23 other cities.

According to the city’s data:

Ball makes $4,119 less than the median salary for utilities directors.

Butterfield makes $16,292 less than the median salary for development directors.

Drew makes $19,696 less than the median salary for finance directors.

Elgin makes $992 more than the median salary for public works directors.

Graham makes $2,864 less than the median salary for police chiefs.

Havlik makes $$14,226 less than the median salary for fire chiefs.

Huber makes $27,924 less than the median salary for human resources directors.

Sina makes $17,994 less than the median salary for parks/recreation directors.

Prosser noted that the city’s proposed new budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 will not include longevity pay increases for these eight department directors just as it won’t for the 400 or so other city employees eligible for them and not represented by a bargaining unit.

FEMA’s infrastructure director for Iowa says to expect slow-go on flood-damaged City Hall: ‘You eat an elephant one bite at a time,’ he says

There is no panic to fix the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall on May’s Island in the Cedar River as far as the Federal Emergency Management Agency is concerned, says Chuck Chaffins, FEMA infrastructure branch director for Iowa.

FEMA and the city, Chaffins says, continue to negotiate the amount of flood damage to the building, which the city has said is in the $20-million-plus ball park. The State of Iowa Historic Preservation Office is involved in the damage assessments, too.

FEMA can extend the deadline to complete renovation work to 48 months, though Chaffins calls the 4-year-point a “line in the sand” in which FEMA expects to the city to have a big renovation project like that at the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall complete.

“We want work to get underway, but we’re not looking at the watch,” he says.

Chaffins says one key determination has been made: Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall sits outside the city’s 100-year flood plain. This will save the city $1 million, he says. It is the $1 million in deductible liability that the city would have had to subtract from FEMA’s grant to fix City Hall if the building, in fact, was in the 100-year flood plain.

Chaffins says he has not seen one piece of paper cross his desk that would indicate that the City Council, the city manager or anyone else with the city intends to try to use FEMA repair money intended for the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall to build a different city building somewhere else.

The historical standing of City Hall will make it difficult to convince the State of Iowa’s Historic Preservation Office that FEMA funds should not be used to restore the building at least to its pre-flood condition, he says.

Chaffins has been in Iowa 13 months out of the last two years for FEMA, and he is now leaving and returning to the FEMA office in Kansas City.

He says he’s taken a particular interest in two flood-damaged city properties: the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall, which he calls “a pretty serious building” because of its ties to veterans; and the Paramount Theatre, which he calls an “amazing building” with a flood-damaged organ he calls an “amazing instrument.”

Both buildings have sustained more than $20 million in damage, according to estimates provided by the city.
Chaffins calls both buildings historical, cultural attractions, and he says that the complications associated with that standing do not permit “a fast process.”

“It is not a simple process and you as a taxpayer do not want it to be a simple process,” Chaffins says of the repair of such important buildings. FEMA, he adds, doesn’t want to give the appearance of “ramming anything down anybody’s throat.”

Even so, he says much of the responsibility rests on the city, which must provide plans for repairs.

“The city is going to have to commit to a plan of action,” he says.

“But they have an old saying where I’m from: ‘It is what it is and it’s going to take as long as it takes,’’’ Chaffins says. “And there’s another saying where I’m from: ‘What do you do when you eat an elephant? You eat it one bite at a time. Just like you eat anything else.’”

Chaffins hails from eastern Kentucky.

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.

There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s the police chief; just ask The Tycoon tavern

The Tycoon tavern in downtown Cedar Rapids has been tangling with the Police Department of late.
Part of it is timing: The liquor establishment at 427 Second Ave. SE needed to renew its liquor license just as still-new Police Chief Greg Graham has decided to knuckle down on taverns that generate too many police calls.

The Tycoon erred, firstly, by not filing for the license renewal in a timely fashion. The city rule is that an establishment needs to make an application at least 30 days in advance to give the city regulators and, most importantly, the Police Department enough time to review the renewal application.

The Tycoon did succeed two weeks ago in getting the City Council to make an exception and put the tavern’s expedited request for a license renewal on the council agenda for discussion.

In the council discussion, though, Police Chief Greg Graham unveiled his new thinking about taverns in need of an alcohol license that also are in the habit of attracting police officers to their establishments.

Upon hearing that police were called to the bar 17 times this year — and the bar was open only a couple evenings a week — the council denied The Tycoon any special treatment. The bar closed — including for the nice revenue-producing day of St. Patrick’s Day — for a couple weeks until the Police Department could review the tavern’s license in the timeline set out in city policy.

The review is complete and The Tycoon now is open under what the Police Department calls a six-month probationary license.

The conditions of probation are … well, they are designed to modify behavior.

For instance:

The Tycoon must pay $2,875 to the city for the 23 hours of investigative work required by the Police Department to determine that The Tycoon didn’t deserve a new liquor license because of the number of police calls to its establishments. That’s 23 hours at $125 per hour.

The Tycoon must have an “adequate number of appropriately trained personnel,” as approve by the Police Department, at all times. The staff should wear identifying shirts that say staff or security. This staff is there to check identifications, to make sure fire-code occupancy limits are followed, to prevent serving people already drunk and to prevent loitering outside the establishment.

The Tycoon should consider a dress code, a cover charge and the use of an electronic metal detector.

The Tycoon shall implement an action plan to immediately reduce the number of police calls for fight, disturbances, assaults, weapons, intoxication, drugs and public urination.

Within six months, The Tycoon will seek to reduce the number of police calls to the tavern to no more than one a week.

During the first month of reopening, the Police Department will bill The Tycoon $125 an hour for any police call over two a week, and after the first month, The Tycoon shall pay $125 an hour for any call over one a week.

The tavern also will pay a $63 “prisoner cost” for each arrest made at the bar.

Police Lt. Tom Jonker told the City Council last week that The Tycoon’s owner, Tim Bushaw, had agreed to work with the Police Department to reduce police calls to the tavern in exchange for a new probationary liquor license.

“The chief is adamant,” Jonker said on Monday. “It’s a privilege not a right to sell alcoholic beverages, and you need to be a good business person and do the right thing and fix errors and correct things that are wrong.”

On April 8, the City Council will hold a public hearing on the liquor license at Brick’s, a downtown bar down Second Avenue SE from The Tycoon. The Police Department is recommending that a new license be denied to Brick’s.

Some say ‘no vouchers next to me;’ city official reminds that voucher safety net gives 2,453 ‘very low-income’ decent housing

It’s easy to paint a less-than-pretty picture of the poor.

Much of that has gone on in recent months in and around City Hall as the owners of single-family homes and condominiums have turned out to object to proposals to build new “affordable” housing developments with substantial help from federal tax incentives to replace housing lost to the June 2008 flood.

One objecting neighbor who referred to “those” people didn’t win fans among some on the City Planning Commission.
The developers and supporters of the affordable projects can sound kind of similar. They spend much time noting that affordable housing is really “work force” housing and that people who live in those rental units typically have jobs.

Affordable housing is different, the proponents take pains to point out, than the federal government’s housing “voucher” program.

It is different. But sometimes, one objecting neighbor pointed out at a recent Planning Commission meeting, managers of affordable housing complexes let those with vouchers rent from them. …

Once a year, Scott Seibert, the city’s housing services manager, comes before the City Council to talk about the voucher program as required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Seibert was on hand last Wednesday evening to provide the latest update on the federal program that he said provides a vital assist to allow very low-income families, the elderly and the disabled to rent decent, private-market housing.

At the same time, the Cedar Rapids voucher program provides $4.4 million a year in rent assistance payments that go to the metro area’s landlords, he noted to the council.

Seibert reported:

Currently, 1,055 households and 2,453 people in them currently are living in rental property using vouchers in Cedar Rapids, the metro area and elsewhere in Linn and Benton counties.

Eighty percent of the heads of those households are female (down from 86 percent a year ago); 45 percent of the households consist of a single person, some of whom are elderly or disabled; 37 percent of the households have someone bringing home income; and 89.6 percent have annual household income under $20,000 a year.

Those in the program pay, on average, $201 a month in rent.

The voucher program aims to de-concentrate poverty by encouraging landlords from every area of the city, metro area and Linn and Benton counties to participate in the program.

In 2008, 178 vouchers were used in southeast Cedar Rapids; 305 in northeast Cedar Rapids; 303 in southwest Cedar Rapids; 74 in northwest Cedar Rapids; 120 in Marion; and 36 in Hiawatha.

Seibert told the City Council that 155 households are participating in a part of the program called “family self-sufficiency,” which provides some assistance to help households get out of the voucher program. In the last year, 24 succeeded in moving off the voucher program, 13 others no longer need support from welfare payments and two purchased homes, Seibert reported.

One young mother in the program told the council that the voucher assistance has provided the stability she needed to finish her college studies and a disabled woman said the voucher program had been a lifesaver for her.

Updates on waste water sludge, municipal garbage: farmers will miss the sludge; horizon still holds the dream of burning sludge/garbage to produce energy

Greg Eyerly, the city’s utilities operations manager, wasn’t sitting on a bar stool drinking mai tais a 6 o’clock Friday evening.

No, he was gushingly talking about the $1.8-million fix of the flood-damaged incinerator at the city’s waste water treatment plant on Bertram Road SE near Highway 13. It’s an emergency fix, an interim repair, paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief funds. The repair is expected to hold the fort for three to five years as the city studies what is to come next.

Getting the incinerator up and running will have two significant ramifications: The city will no longer need to truck any of its biosolid sludge to a landfill in Illinois at great expense. And it will not need to use its best option, applying the sludge as fertilizer to farm fields, nearly as much.

Eyerly says the city likely will always put some of the sludge on farm fields during times in which the incinerator is down for maintenance. Farmers, by the way, have stood in line to get the stuff, 200 semi-truck loads or 100 tons of which the waste water plant produces each day. Land application, though, comes with uncertainty, Eyerly says. In fact, the city has had to stockpile the sludge in various spots out in the country this winter for use when fields are suitable for working.

Eyerly reports that the city continues to move ahead with plans to study the feasibility of burning sewage sludge and municipal waste to produce energy. The City Council has approved a $1-million study of the issue.

The waste-to-energy idea, in fact, has been much in the news in Cedar Rapids as local elected officials and community leaders imagine what might come to the rescue of the flood-wrecked steam system that had inexpensively served the downtown, Quaker and Cargill and other industries near downtown, the hospitals and Coe College before the June 2008 flood.

At last report, the city’s lobbyists were trucking a plan to build a $200-million waste-to-energy plan around Congress while city leaders also were working the Iowa Legislature for money.

No one has said much about either for some weeks.

Meanwhile, St. Luke’s Hospital and Coe College have one plan and Mercy Medical Center its own plan to find federal money to build their own steam systems.

At the same time, too, the city of Marion, armed with a state grant, has embarked on a $150,000 study of a waste-to-energy technology called plasma arc. A Marion-centered group of enthusiasts called WasteNotIowa have been promoting plasma arc for five or so years, ever since the local solid waste agency proposed and then did expand its landfill on the edge of Marion.

The second piece of waste news is coming from the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency and that Site 2 landfill.

Karmin McShane, the agency’s director, this week reported that the agency has taken initial steps to tap methane gas from the closed cells at the landfill to produce electricity.

Building the system of pipes and generators will provide electricity for the equivalent of 1,800 homes. Revenue from electricity will pay off the investment needed to set up the system in five years, McShane says.

Council pushes back a bit against vocal neighborhood leaders; nice drama unfolding between grass roots and City Hall on neighborhood flood recovery

The outspoken leaders in three neighborhoods hit by the June flood haven’t been the least bit bashful at letting the City Council know what it is doing wrong with the city’s flood recovery.

This week, those leaders – Michael Richards in Oak Hill/Jackson, Frank King in Time Check and Greg Stokesberry wit South West Area Neighbors — got some push back from the City Council.

The three neighborhood presidents had pitched proposals for the council to consider among 19 others as the council decided how to divide up $10,160,406 in special state funds as part of a new state Community Disaster Grant program.

Stokesberry was seeking $41,500 to help in the development of his neighborhood’s association. And all three presidents – aligned in a newly-created umbrella association called River Neighborhoods Alliance — were seeking $37,000 to create a new program called “Once-a-Neighbor Always-a-Neighbor” and $100,000 to create a peer advocacy center. Dianne Yanda, president of the Cedar Valley Neighborhood Association, also is listed as a member of the new neighborhood alliance.

In short, they didn’t get their money.

A council consensus converged around the thought that another of the proposals before the council, which did not come from this group of neighborhood leaders, was for a $100,000 grant to help with neighborhood organizational development. This proposal called for working with flood-impacted neighborhoods to strengthen their community connections and to advocate for their needs.

The council decided that the neighborhood organizations could work with the city to best figure out how to spend the $100,000.

Council member Justin Shields put it most bluntly when he said from what he could see there has been quite a bit of “disarray” among neighborhood associations and the arrival of some new faces on the scene as well.
“It’s a poor time to just start throwing money at them,” Shields said.

Council member Jerry McGrane, a member of the Oak Hill/Jackson Neighborhood Association and the group’s past president, said he wasn’t sure that the South West Area Neighbors had held a meeting in six months.
To all this, Oak Hill/Jackson’s Richards says City Hall is only willing to give “lip service to direct involvement” from existing neighborhood associations.

“Paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars for out-of-state consultants to ‘foster neighborhood governance’ is a very shallow and costly sham,” Richards says.

What all of this translates to in the larger picture is an unfolding drama that centers on just how much grass-roots-directed neighborhood leadership there should be versus how much City Hall-assisted neighborhood leadership there should be.

In the last two weeks, the neighborhood leaders also took it a bit on the chin after Stokesberry, Richards and King “demanded” that the city’s new Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee include strong representation from the city’s flooded neighborhoods.

All three were among the 71 applicants for the committee. King withdrew his name, and the other two weren’t picked in a group of 24 finalists. Jon Galvin, vice president of Northwest Neighbors Association, was chosen, but then withdrew his name in protest.

Richards has said none of the 24 finalists is a neighborhood association member as far as he knew. But at the same time, he has said he and others will be providing plenty of sales-tax oversight whether they are on the committee or not.

To the great credit of most of these neighborhood association chiefs, they have taken time to be a part of City Hall-orchestrated Neighborhood Planning Process that will has been gathering more than 200 people together in eight workshops over four months to help create a game plan for neighborhood flood recovery.

Every time the sometimes-frustrated Richards has been asked about the city-led initiative, he has said he wouldn’t miss being a part of it.

As for the $10.1 million that the council handed out this week, about half went to fill flood-recovery gaps on the housing side and half on the business side. Included in the grants is $1.5 million to start a Neighborhood Development Corp., which will set up shop in one of the flood-damaged neighborhoods and focus on housing and commercial redevelopment in those neighborhoods. Habitat for Humanity also received $1 million to help it build 20 new homes this summer.

First post-flood victory for new ‘affordable’ replacement housing: Cedar Pond Townhouses to go up on a part of what had been Chapman Fun World

Neighbors out along Wilson Avenue SW near Williams Boulevard and Westdale Mall lost out this week on their attempt to block the construction of 90 rental units on about 11 acres of land.

Part of the site used to be home to the Chapman Fun World, but for opposing neighbors, the fun is long gone. Some 224 people signed a petition against the development, called Cedar Pond Townhouses.

The 6-2 City Council vote in favor of the development clears the way for the first newly built, affordable rental housing to be built to replace affordable housing lost in the June 2008 flood.

Much has gone into City Hall’s effort to do just that, build more affordable housing, since the first months after the city’s flood disaster.

The City Council created a Replacement Housing Task Force last September and then it successfully lobbied the federal government to increase a key federal funding tool – federal tax credits – for the state of Iowa.

The Cedar Pond development will use tax credits and some local financial incentives for much of its funding. For the tax-credit financing piece, private investors pay money upfront for a housing project’s construction and, in turn, have their federal tax liability reduced.

The upfront money allows the developer to take on much less debt, and, as a result, the developer can and must keep rents affordable. At Cedar Pond, only those earning at or below 60 percent of the average medium income for Linn County can rent the units.

The opponents made good arguments on Wednesday evening about potential problems with water runoff from the proposed development and about traffic problems that already exist in the area.

District 5 council member Justin Shields — this is his council district — was convinced. He said the site was too wet for the development. And he said he had heard before how a developer’s engineers were going to take care of everything, and then they do not.

But in these discussions about affordable housing, a central concern, too, is just who might live in affordable housing.

It’s clear it’s an issue, not so much by what opponents say, as what proponents and the developer say.

In this instance, Greg and Candace McClenahan, of EverGreen Real Estate Development Corp., Prior Lake, Minn., are the developers, and Candace McClenahan emphasized to the City Council and to the opponents in the audience that people who live at Cedar Pond must have jobs so they can pay up to $570 in rent and $78 a month for utilities each month for a two-bedroom apartment and $670 and $101 for utilities a month.

There is even a new term — work force housing — for these kinds of developments, which Mayor Kay Halloran used to express her support for the project. Given the affordable housing lost to the flood, this is “new housing for our work force,” she said.

Council member Tom Podzimek took exception to neighbors who called the rental development incompatible with the area.

“Affordable housing doesn’t seem like an incompatible use,” he said.

At the end of the day, the opposing neighbors had a tough case to make, in large part, because an early development on the same site had been given approval a few years ago. And that development had three-story buildings, not two-story ones, and it had 38 more rental units.

The McClenahans also came along with a plan at a good time when the City Council was eager to replace some of what the 2008 flood destroyed. And the McClenahans spent much time refining their plan and scaling it back as they worked to please the city’s Replacement Housing Task Force. Task force member Ben Henderson told the council just that on Wednesday evening.

Two members of the City Planning Commission also came to the council meeting to explain why the commission earlier had backed the project.

Chris Dostal, a 2005 City Council candidate, was among neighbors arguing against the development because of the traffic nightmare that he said already exists on and around Wilson Avenue SW. But the timing of that argument wasn’t the best either: the city’s multimillion-dollar viaduct project on 33rd Avenue SW will be ready for traffic in the fall and should reduce traffic on Wilson Avenue by a third, a city engineer said.

Cedar Pond now heads to Des Moines to secure tax credits from the Iowa Finance Authority. This comfortable territory for the McClenahans: They’ve built 11, regulation-heavy, tax-credit projects in Iowa and Minnesota in the last 12 years.

Three other new, new-construction, tax-credit projects have been proposed for Cedar Rapids since last September. One intended for the former Ellis Golf Course chipping area has been abandoned in the face of neighbor objections. A second at 1100 O Ave. NW is opposed by neighbors and has gotten a lukewarm reaction to date from the City Planning Commission. A third project, planned for the Oak Hill Neighborhood has yet to secure tax credits.

Former vets director Gary Craig will ‘vigorously fight’ public misconduct charge; his attorney says Craig is ’shocked;’ calls charge a ‘personal vendetta’

Gary Craig, the city of Cedar Rapids’ former veterans memorial director, was arrested Wednesday afternoon and taken to jail on a charge of felonious misconduct in office. If convicted, the 54-year-old could face up to five years in prison and a $7,500 fine. He quickly posted a $5,000 bond and was released.

Craig is accused of providing the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission with false payroll records, spreadsheets and claim forms during a time when the commission raised questions about his job performance, according to the criminal complaint filed against him.

His attorney, Michael Lahammer of Cedar Rapids, said Thursday afternoon that Craig is innocent.

Lahammer said he and Craig will “vigorously fight’ the charge.

“We think it’s a personal vendetta by some people, and it’s certainly not based on any facts as we understand them to be,” Lahammer said. “Gary’s given a lot of public service to the city and county, he’s a veteran, and he’s pretty shocked at the charge.”

Craig’s initial court appearance is slated for April 3 in Linn County District Court. The Iowa Attorney General’s Office is prosecuting the case.

Also on Thursday, Pete Welch, chairman of the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission, renewed his disappointment with Craig, the former commission’s paid city employee.

Craig resigned from his city post on March 1, 2008, citing job stress, after being paid for 20 weeks while on city paid administrative and medical leave. He joined the city payroll in August 1998.

He was placed on leave by the Veterans Memorial Commission when the commission asked the state auditor to investigate Craig’s handling of money.

The auditor’s report, released in January 2009, found fault with Craig, fault which was apparently the basis for his arrest on Wednesday.

“It is disappointing that when you put a person in a position of public trust that they don’t handle themselves in an absolutely trustworthy manner,” Welch said Thursday.

The auditor’s report in January accused Craig of spending improperly and being paid improperly while a city employee.

Specifically, the state report tied Craig to $10,178 in improper spending and the report said he received $5,021 in city income and payroll taxes while working on veterans projects unrelated to city employment.

The report noted, too, that Craig repaid $6,800 of the $10,178 in questioned spending.

Craig has been driving truck over the road since his departure from the city.

Back in January, Craig said he left city employment and took to driving a truck to relieve stress.

“My doctor felt it would be good for me,” he said. As for the state audit, “I don’t know anything about it. I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

Craig’s attorney in January, Robert Wilson of Cedar Rapids, also said Craig did nothing wrong.

Accusations against him, Wilson said, were a result of Craig’s wearing a couple hats at once. He was both the city’s veterans director and treasurer of Valor Inc., a non-profit organization serving veterans.

“He was all by himself trying to keep track of everything,” Wilson said in January.

Craig was earning $62,067 a year when he left city employment.

City reveals plans to modernize U.S. Cellular Center and to add a new convention center as projects compete for council backing and federal funds

Plans surfaced last night to spend an estimated $50 million to modernize the U.S. Cellular Center and to add a new convention center next to it.

Patrick DePalma, the chairman of the city’s Five Seasons Facilities Commission, revealed the proposal to the City Council last night and said it could help revitalize downtown and spur the building of a new hotel as well as restaurants and shops.

Outside the meeting, DePalma said the commission looked at a range of options for the event center and a convention center and exhibition hall, including a $120-million option that would build a new complex at another site.

But the commission, he said, is recommending a refurbishing of the U.S. Cellular Center and adding a 60,000-square-foot convention center and exhibition hall next to it.

The refurbishment would not enlarge the arena, but would add luxury seating and new concession areas.
The plan also would close Third Street between First and A avenues NE and purchase and demolish commercial buildings and a parking ramp that now sit across Third Street NE from the arena. The convention center would go up on what is street and on the newly created space.

DePalma said the commission likes the idea of a new hotel being built across First Avenue from the U.S. Cellular Center which also could feed the arena and a new convention center.

DePalma, a vice president at AEGON USA, noted the commission has worked with an architect as it developed plans.

He revealed the commission’s plans on a night in which the council was preparing to rank which projects it thought most deserved support from the federal government.

Ten different projects are competing for limited funds from the Economic Development Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The City Council has placed the U.S. Cellular Center project fifth on the list of 10.

At the top of the council’s list is a proposal to revitalize the downtown steam system.

Shannon Meyer, president/CEO of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, lobbied the council last night to move a proposed Regional Commerce Center up the priority list. Six other projects were ahead of it on the list, including a public fiber-optic system, a proposed regional recreation/community center and new steam systems for the hospitals and Coe College.

The recreation/community center and the modernization of the U.S. Cellular Center are projects on the list of the Fifteen in 5 community initiative, the goal of which is to complete 15 projects in five years. Fifteen in 5 began in 2005.

The Chamber’s Meyer said the council needed to pick projects that already have submitted plans to the federal government — like the Regional Commerce Center.

She noted that funds are limited, and that a project in Coralville already has secured an $8-million grant and a project in Waverly has received a $9-million grant from these U.S. Department of Commerce funds.

Doug Neumann, director of the Economic Planning and Redevelopment Corp., was the first to start preparing local projects for Commerce Department funding. He noted that the Linn County Board of Supervisors ranked the fiber-optic project at the top. This project is designed to connect county, city and school buildings with their own fiber-optic lines.

Forging ahead in flood-damaged New Bo, Czech Village and Time Check: a Neighborhood Development Corp. with a $1.5-million infusion of state cash is coming

The City Council has created a new non-profit corporation, the Neighborhood Development Corp., and, in so doing, the council will funnel $1.5 million in state grant money to the endeavor.

Carol Bower, who has run a similar non-profit corporation in Des Moines and who has been providing advice to the city of Cedar Rapids since the fall, has been chosen to run the Cedar Rapids operation.

In conversations Wednesday with Bower and Marty Hoeger, the city of Cedar Rapids’ real estate development coordinator, the two said the new Neighborhood Development Corp. will become a driving force behind reinvestment in the city’s core neighborhoods, particularly those now trying to get back on their feet since the June 2008 flood.

The operation will focus on helping bring about the building of affordable housing, but look for it to concentrate, too, on revitalizing neighborhood commercial development as well.

Hoeger said the commercial development effort is likely to focus on Czech Village, New Bohemia and the Ellis Boulevard area of Time Check.

“The idea is to get businesses back into those neighborhoods,” Hoeger said.

Look for the Neighborhood Development Corp. to quickly identify properties in need of redevelopment and, in some instances, to acquire the property and “get it back online,” said Hoeger.

The corporation will operate independently of the city of Cedar Rapids. It will have a nine-person board. Three of the members will be from neighborhoods; four will be people in the business community familiar with development; and an elected official or employee from both the city and county governments will round out the board.

Cautionary letters from Army Corps and state of Iowa suggest a City Hall not in idle, but one pushing to open doors for flood-disaster help

Two letters with a similar cautionary tone arrived at City Hall in the last few days. One was from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; one from the Iowa Department of Economic Development.

As much as anything the letters portray a Cedar Rapids City Hall unwilling to sit by and wait for state government or Uncle Sam to show up with big bags of money on the day or time upon which they decide.

Instead, the letters suggest that Cedar Rapids city government is testing the limits and the rules and working to convince the federal and state governments to use some creativity to try to give the city of Cedar Rapids the ability to buy out flood-damaged homes faster than the rules now allow.

The city’s central request is that it be allowed to use an expected large infusion of Community Development Block Grants to buy out 550 or so flood-damaged homes that now sit in a proposed construction area where the Corps is expected to build a new levee system and where it is apt to need space to move some streets and to add a series of pumping stations.

The federal rules now say that those property cannot be bought out until the Corps has its flood-protection feasibility study approved, which isn’t expected before June 2010.

What City Manager Jim Prosser is pushing for is for the city to have the ability to use CDBG funds from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development to buy those homes out, and then to have the Corps reimburse the city for those funds (or give the city credit toward money it must provide as a local project match) as the Corps moves ahead with its levee-building project.

“I would like to make you aware that the Federal Government does not encourage land acquisition” prior to the completion of the Corps’ feasibility study and the Corps subsequent notice-to-proceed agreement with the city, Ron Williams, acting chief of the Corps’ Partnership Support Branch, Rock Island, Ill., says in a letter to the city.

Williams then talks of the “risks” to the city. Chief among the risks is that Congress at the end of the day might not fund the city’s proposed flood-protection system. In that event, there would be no Corps’ money to pay for the buy outs that might already have occurred.

At the same time, Michael Tramontina, director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development, writes to Cedar Rapids’ Prosser on a related front about the city’s plan to use city funds to pay for disaster housing relief with the anticipation that CDBG funds will be coming to reimburse the city.

“We share the goal of providing assistance as quickly as possible to eligible applicants,” Tramontina states. But he continues: “The decision to use city funds until the federal funds become available … is a risk-benefit decision for the city to evaluate.”

On Tuesday, Prosser said the letter from the Corps and the letter from the Iowa Department of Economic Development represent bureaucracy in a good sense at work. The letters put the positions of the state and federal agencies down on paper, which Prosser said helps document the issues that need resolved.

The heart of the problem, he said, is that federal programs used in disasters –- by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — are not designed for the quick actions that are needed and that people expect in a disaster.

In particular, Prosser said the city is attempting to make the case that all of the money involved is federal money whether it is CDBG funds that should be available quickly or Corps funds that won’t be available for some time.

The argument, he said, is that the federal government will save considerable money by using CDBG funds in the near-term to buy out homes in the construction area instead of waiting for the Corps to complete its flood study in the next 15 months or so. And Prosser said it also makes good public policy sense to buy out homes more quickly. Why keep people in an ongoing “indeterminate state?” he asked.

Prosser said the city is pushing ahead with “policy papers” on the matter and will be asking Gov. Chet Culver to get directly involved. Some legislative changes in Washington, D.C., might be required to allow an exception to the Corps of Engineers’ current protocols, he said.

“Certainly, they are looking for us to make a case on why there should be exceptions,” Prosser said. “The bigger problem is we’re asking them to do stuff they haven’t done before. It’s not like they are necessarily philosophically opposed to it as much as they don’t have a system in place to support the urgency that we’re pushing ahead with.”

Just a week ago, FEMA announced its willingness to provide funding support for the demolition of more than 300 more flood-damaged houses that the city has concluded are too unsafe to enter. The city is currently in the process of taking down a first group of 72 homes at FEMA expense, but it required the city to make the case to FEMA before the agency agreed to add the larger number of homes to the demolition coverage, Prosser said.

The exceptions the city is now pushing for on buyouts in the proposed levee construction zone is similar to the FEMA decision on demolitions in that it requires the city to make a case to get its way.

“Although with the buyouts, the stakes are much higher, the dollar amounts are much higher and the creativity approach is pushing the limits of what the federal government has done before,” Prosser said.

He said the federal government is willing to allow for certain property acquisition in the building of a highway even before the final approval for the highway project is made.

That model is one the city is trying now to push for buyouts to make way for a levee.

Cedar Rapids diverts a part of its arriving temporary flood protection system to Fargo; ‘We don’t have a crisis today and they do’

The city of Cedar Rapids had signed the contract, made the order and expected an initial delivery Tuesday of a temporary flood control system called Hesco “Concertainers.” The Conertainers are lined metal baskets, which can be deployed and filled with sand at times of high water.

Instead, the city agreed with the manufacturer to divert Cedar Rapids’ supply of Hesco baskets to Fargo, N.D., which is now being confronted by a major flood of the Red River of the North.
Craig Hanson, Cedar Rapids’ public works maintenance manager, says it was an easy call and the neighborly thing to do.

Hanson said Fargo currently is at major flood stage and is facing a river that may reach a record flood level. Meanwhile, the Cedar River at Cedar Rapids is flowing at a level of about five feet, far below any flooding threat for now.

“The right answer is to be neighborly and to help another city in need,” Hanson said. “We don’t have a crisis today and they do.”

Hanson said the Cedar Rapids sentiment was little different on June 14, 2008, the day after the Cedar River crested at record flood stage in Cedar Rapids, when the city still was able to send 50,000 to 70,000 sandbags to Iowa City to help against flooding there.

In turn, the city of Cedar Rapids has received much support from outside in coming to grips with its flood disaster, he said.

The city has purchased two different systems to provide the city with some temporary flood protection should the Cedar River act up again.

In addition to the Hesco baskets, the city also has purchased a product called a tiger dam, which are bladders that get filled with water to add height to the existing levee system.

The tiger dams arrived last week.

The city’s plan is to use tiger dams to protect the Time Check area and the Hesco baskets to protect downtown and Czech Village areas should flooding threaten the city again.

The temporary systems give the city an additional two feet of protection, raising the protection to 24 feet or four feet above what had been the record flood in Cedar Rapids until last year. In June 2008, the river climbed to 31.12 feet.

State’s disaster chief says of local frustration: flood victims want to be first for funds while federal agencies rush to be last to hand it out

The world inside the City Council chambers often finds residents frustrated and critical of what they say are flaws in the city’s flood-recovery effort.

But there is a world outside of those council meetings as the top dog at the state’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division reminded people when he talked at last week’s council meeting and during a talk at the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce.

David Miller’s most striking point was this: That there is a rush by local communities and by every flood-affected individual in those communities to be first in to obtain disaster relief. At the same time, the federal agencies with most of the money to spend on disaster relief are rushing as hard as they can to be the last one in.

“It’s a race to see who is last,” Miller said of the federal government.

The Homeland Security chief’s point was that federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration and the Department of Housing & Urban Development all want to make sure they aren’t paying money before someone else is. What has private insurance paid? What did SBA pay that FEMA doesn’t have to pay?

It is for this reason that the federal government is so interested in “duplication of benefits,” Miller said.

That means, he said, that the federal government will always be checking, if not upfront, then along the way to make sure it is not paying benefits someone else has, too.

Miller reminded people, too, what FEMA representatives said from the get-go: that disaster-relief programs are not intended to “make people whole.” The programs, he said, aren’t an insurance policy. They’re designed to pick you off the ground.

In 1993 when floods hit Iowa hard, the state of Iowa sustained $163 million in damage to public buildings and infrastructure. In 2008, the damage at the current tally is $1.18 billion.

“This disaster is huge,” Miller said. By his count, the 2008 hit to public assets ranks fourth in the nation’s history.

Complicating disaster relief, he went on, is “the problem of cash flow.” The federal government prefers to pay as the work is done; the big check isn’t in the mail first, Miller said.

“If you want to know why people are upset, that’s it,” he said.

And Miller said local cities and counties can be forced to return money if they don’t “mix and match” federal funds correctly, making sure that they are following rules on environmental protection, lead-paint, historical review and more.

What has become a cliché, he said, is, nonetheless, true: “Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint.”

In Iowa after the 1993 floods, he said it took communities five years to recovery from flooding and nine years to put new flood-protection systems in place.

Miller advised cities like Cedar Rapids to get moving on its small public facilities projects, which are defined as those in which there was less than $60,900 damage. FEMA will pay most of the cost of those repairs upfront, he said. Small projects, he said, can get the federal dollars flowing into a community.

For now, the city of Cedar Rapids has submitted 51 small flood-damage projects to FEMA and 146 large ones.

To date, too, he said FEMA has approved $271.5 million in repairs for Cedar Rapids public projects, with FEMA slated to pay 90 percent of the cost and the state of Iowa, 10 percent. To date, less than 10 percent of those funds have arrived, the state’s Miller said.

Miller noted that the state of Iowa has needed to create a new entity, the Rebuild Iowa Office, to help the state get a grip on the 2008 disasters. The state, he said, did not have adequate staff numbers or expertise to do the job along.

“At the state, we hired consultants,” Miller said.

Victorious arrival of federal tax credits hasn’t brought new affordable replacement housing; economy, neighbors’ distaste, iffy sites may factor in

Last fall the City Council and state policymakers billed the arrival in Iowa of a significant new commitment of federal affordable-housing tax credits as a victory for disaster relief.

To date, more than nine months after Cedar Rapids’ 2008 flood disaster, no part of the new pot of tax credits has done anything to bring more affordable housing to Cedar Rapids to replace affordable housing lost to the flood.

Last week in an interview with Iowa Finance Authority officials, though, they assured that tax-credit projects will be forthcoming despite a downturn in the national economy.

Projects are “taking a little longer,” Dave Vaske, IFA’s tax-credit manager, said last week.

But Vaske pointed out that in the best of economic climates it typically can take nine months between the IFA’s award of tax credits for a developer’s project and the actual start of construction.

In recent months, the city’s Replacement Housing Task Force has recommended and Cedar Rapids City Council has voted to provide City Hall financial incentives to five different developers — all out-of-towners experienced in the regulation-heavy tax-credit program — and their tax-credit-financed proposals.

The one of the five projects most likely to get moving in the foreseeable future is the renovation of The Roosevelt, the former downtown hotel-turned apartment complex that is now flood-damaged and empty. Sherman Associates Inc. of Minneapolis said recently that work could begin as soon as April.

In December, the IFA awarded $598,525 to Sherman Associates to acquire and renovate The Roosevelt, and the IFA also awarded $725,464 in tax credits to MetroPlains LLC, St. Paul, Minn., for the construction of Cedar View Apartments, a proposed 45-unit senior-living complex at 1100 O Ave. NW. Cedar View, though, has run into neighborhood opposition and some questions from the City Planning Commission.

In a third project, Sherman Associates has withdrawn plans to build apartments and town houses on a 6-acre site that the city’s Ellis Golf Course formerly used as a practice chipping area. Neighborhood opposition was too organized and strong.

The developers of two other projects — Des Moines developer Jack Hatch’s plans for 96 apartments in the Oak Hill Neighborhood, and the plans of EverGreen Real Estate Development Corp., Prior Lake, Minn., for 90 town homes off Williams Boulevard SW — have yet to obtain approval from the Iowa Finance Authority for tax credits. Hatch’s plans, though, are not expected to see neighborhood opposition, and the EverGreen plan has won backing from the City Planning Commission despite neighbor opposition.

The IFA’s award of tax credits is just a step, and the IFA’s Vaske noted last week that the developer has a tougher job now to put together the entire financing package for a development because the market for tax credits is not what it had been just a couple years ago.

In recent years, he noted, it had been possible for a developer to find the purchaser of tax credits to provide 90 percent of the value of the tax credits to a project in return for the full value of the credits being applied to the investor’s tax liability over 10 years.

Now, the developer may get just 70 percent of the value of the tax credit to apply to a project.

As a result, the developer has to work harder to find other money to make the financing of a project work, the IFA’s Vaske said.

Nonetheless, the core of the financing of these proposed affordable-housing projects comes from the federal government’s tax-credit program. The idea is that the investor contributes money upfront and quality affordable housing gets built in exchange for forgiving the investor some of his tax liability. By getting the investor’s money upfront, the developer can build with limited debt and so can keep rents so they meet federal income guidelines. Arguably, too, developer can build better-quality buildings.

The IFA’s Vaske said the state agency is “hearing some optimism out there” despite the fact that pricing for the tax credits has dropped in the current economic climate.

Both local banks and local corporate investors are expressing interest in some of these tax-credit projects, he said.

The IFA, Vaske added, also is paying particular attention to the recent and sprawling federal stimulus bill to see if there is money in it that can be applied to tax-credit projects to help fill some financing gaps.

“We’ll see if it’s a way to help those projects come about,” he said.

At the end of the day, developers off these projects will often face a wrestling match with neighbors because the name of the tax credits is “low-income housing tax credits.”

In an assortment of public meetings over the last several months, each of the developers proposing projects in Cedar Rapids has argued that their tenants are people with jobs. In fact, a new term has surfaced here in the last year — “work force housing.”

At a recent City Planning Commission meeting, a local Realtor noted those who live in 90 percent of the metro area’s apartments can meet income guidelines for the new apartment projects being proposed. One opposing neighbor, though, noted that she really didn’t want those people living nearby.

At the same time, proposed developments can be badly placed and unfair to existing neighbors and the wider community. Not every opposition emanating from neighbors ranks as a NIMBY — Not in My Back Yard.

Bike racks are turning up on city buses here: Are Cedar Rapids bicyclists and local bus riders the same people?

It seems so Seattle or Madison or Ann Arbor or Iowa City.

By May 1, the city of Cedar Rapids will have installed bicycle racks on the front ends of 27 of the city’s new and newer buses.

Some of the racks are in place now, though Brad DeBrower, the city’s transit manager, reports that no bicycle enthusiast or bus regular has yet inquired about them. He is planning a public service announcement once most of the racks are in place.

Almost to a person on the city’s nine-member City Council is a desire to make the city more welcoming to bicyclists, both those who are out for a ride and those who want to use a bicycle to commute to work.

Even now, the city is attempting to become the state’s only bicycle-friendly community, a status bestowed on a city by the League of American Bicyclists. Bike racks on buses are part of trying to get there. Places like Madison, Wis., and Eugene, Ore., and Ann Arbor, Mich., are bicycle-friendly places.

The City Council also has been insisting that major street projects in the city take into consideration bicyclists and pedestrians, which can mean wider-than-normal sidewalks along major streets.

As for the bicycle racks on city buses, the idea is a captivating one. For instance, the rack-on-bus amenity would allow someone to ride a bike to the bus stop, place the bicycle on the bus bike rack and ride the bus to work. Once the work day is over, the bicyclist then could peddle home.

It remains to be seen, though, if the marriage of the bicycle and the city bus actually works in Cedar Rapids. Are the people who ride bicycles here the same people who ride the bus?

Look for council member Tom Podzimek — a proponent of public transit and bicycles — to have a bicycle hanging off a bus some time soon.

With flood forecast for Red River of the North, Cedar Rapids official assures new temporary protection systems here will be at the ready if Cedar River acts up

The Red River of the North is acting up again as melting winter snow and forecasts of rain are forcing Fargo and Grand Forks, N.D., to think anew about flooding.

Those paid to think about flooding in Cedar Rapids appear to be following the latest from North Dakota. Which isn’t surprising. After all, Cedar Rapids city officials, who are working to help the city recover from its June 2008 flood, have paid a great deal of attention to Grand Forks since June and to how that city recovered from its flood in 1997.

Late Friday afternoon, Craig Hanson, the city of Cedar Rapids’ public works maintenance manager, took time to update the public on temporary flood protection systems that the Cedar Rapids City Council in recent weeks voted to purchase.

The systems consist of water-filled bladders, called tiger dams, and Hesco wire baskets, which are filled with sand.

Hanson said the tiger dams purchased by the city arrived on Thursday.

On Tuesday, the city finalized the purchase of the Hesco baskets, some of which will be shipped as soon as this coming Tuesday.

The tiger dams and the Hesco baskets will give much of the city’s flood-prone areas an extra two feet of protection, increasing the protection to 24 feet, or four feet above what had been the city’s record flood until last year. In June 2008, the river reached 31.12 feet.

The plan is to deploy the tiger dams in the Time Check Neighborhood in northwest Cedar Rapids and the Hesco baskets on both sides of the river through the downtown and at Czech Village.

The city has amassed 200 truckloads of sand at the former Sinclair meatpacking site in southeast of the downtown for use in the Hesco baskets, Hanson said.

He added that the city has 49 pumps at the ready, seven more than at the time of the June 2008 flood.

The city’s updated flood-action plan calls for city crews to mobilize the new temporary flood protection systems when the forecast calls for the Cedar River to reach 20 feet at the gauge in the river above the Eighth Avenue bridge.

The temporary system cost a couple million dollars and may never be used by the time the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers builds a new permanent flood-protection system here. That could take eight to 15 years.

Up north, it took Grand Forks 11 years to get a new flood-protection system in place, a system that is expected to nicely protect Grand Forks from water that is now rising on the Red River. Across the river from Grand Forks is East Grand Forks, Minn., where city officials on Friday were putting a system of removable flood walls in place.

The current flood-protection plan for Cedar Rapids calls for removable flood walls to protect both sides of the Cedar River in downtown Cedar Rapids and at Czech Village.

In truth, it didn’t take the Red River in North Dakota to focus the attention of Cedar Rapids city officials. Just a couple weeks ago, the Cedar River reached 10 feet, the level at which the river first starts minor flooding here on a couple streets.

Twenty finalists now become 24 for nine-member Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee; neighborhood assn. v.p. drops out

The City Council pared the list of 71 applicants for the nine-member Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee down to 20 last week, and on Monday, the council increase the list of finalists to 24.

Added to the list were Markell Kuper, Jerry Gillon, Patrick DePalma, Nick Cappussi and Joseph Michalec Sr., while Jon Galvin, vice president for the Northwest Neighbors Association, withdrew his name from the list.

Each council member reviewed the 71 applications and each ranked applicants one through 20, and then those rankings were thrown together to come up with the finalists.

Each of the 24 will have a 7-minute interview with council members on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. The nine members will be in place by April 1, when the local-option sales tax is collected.

Those named previously are Jeffery Beer, Stephen Hammes; Gary Ficken; James Powers; Elizabeth Hladky; James Sattler; Patrick Courtney; Sandra Skelton; Robert Untiedt; B. Larry Johnson; Heather Schoonover; Don Boland; Richard McArtor; Jeff Palmer; Marvin Dale Hedgecoth; Oran Teat; Jon Galvin; John Gruca; W. Scott Jamieson; and Charles Watkins.

Council members picked the finalists, in part, with an eye to those who could bring expertise in accounting, finance, construction and disaster recovery.

Council members also said they were looking for representation from those affected by the flood.

The heads of neighborhood associations have pushed to get representatives from their groups on the oversight committee. Northwest Neighbors’ Galvin, though, has now dropped out of consideration.

Council members have emphasized that the Oversight Committee’s role is to check and see that the council has spent local-option sales tax revenue as the council said it would prior to the March 3 vote approving the tax.

Ninety percent of the revenue is to go to housing-related flood relief and 10 percent to property-tax relief.

The tax is expected to bring in $17 million to $18 million a year for five years and three months.

Council members Vernon, Shields still frustrated: ‘I didn’t run to walk in St. Patrick’s Day parades,’ says Vernon. ‘Give me a committee. Give me some policy.’

Council members Monica Vernon and Justin Shields stopped by The Gazette on Wednesday to talk to the newspaper’s editorial board at Vernon’s request.

Vernon conceded that part of the intent of the meeting was for her to “vent” a little.

She and Shields last week advocated for the hiring of a city flood-recovery manager — Vernon at one point called the job a flood-recovery CEO –- a move that their City Council colleagues endorsed.

But six of the nine council members rejected the Vernon-Shields idea that the new employee should be hired and report directly to the council and not to the council’s top employee, City Manager Jim Prosser.

The council majority said the city’s still-new council/manager government was designed with one CEO, the city manager.

On Wednesday, Vernon and Shields continued to make their case for their minority position in the table-of-organization debate to The Gazette editorial board.

Along the way, they insisted that their unsuccessful move to get a new employee reporting to the council was not a move around or against Prosser.

Shields and Vernon said their central interest is to get more done on flood recovery better and sooner.

“I’m not blaming Jim Prosser for that,” Shields said. “I’m blaming myself for that because I’ve not been able to move anything to help do it better.”

In their view of City Hall, the part-time council and part-time mayor in a council/manager government play a too-small role in governing and are too dependent on the city manager to set the agenda and to bring items to the council for discussion and votes.

In their view, city government and all of its 1,400 employees and all the city’s consultants are there to work for Prosser, not the City Council.

Vernon even suggested reconvening a Home Rule Charter Commission to modify the City Charter so that the City Council might have clear responsibility for more employees whom the council could direct.

The City Charter, which was put in place by voters in June 2005, calls for the Charter Commission to reconvene, in any event, in 2011 and every 10 years after that.

In addition, the charter allows for amendments by the council itself, subject to a voter referendum upon a petition request.

Organizational charts aside, Vernon and Shields acknowledged that there were things that they could try to do to remedy what they see as a problem: that is, too much coming from the city manager and too little from the council.

Vernon said the council needed a better way to get ideas to the table from themselves and from the public and then a better way to sort through those.

Vernon called for the council to establish committees, where small groups of council members can take time to dig into particular topics and then bring the results back to the full council for discussion.

Prosser, she said, doesn’t favor council committees and Mayor Kay Halloran hasn’t created them.

Shields said most every form of government uses committees.

“My God, the federal government would collapse if they didn’t have committees,” he said. “They wouldn’t know what to do.”

At the end of the day, Vernon told The Gazette editorial board that what she and Shields were shouting about was about better government and the ability of the elected council to play a bigger role to get it done.

“This is not a petty deal with the city manager,” Vernon said. “This is about how should the structure work and what should we be doing and are we able to do what we were elected to do.

“… If everything flows through that person (the city manager), who I thought was sort of an operations person, then you tell me what my role is. (Is it) to walk in St. Patrick’s Day parades? Is that the role?

“I didn’t run (for council) to walk in St. Patrick’s Day parades. I don’t mind it. It’s kind of fun. But give me a committee. Give me some policy. Give me a problem to solve.”

Long-in-coming help for flood-hit landlords is on the way

Help is nearly here for landlords of flood-damaged properties.

The City Council this evening is expected to hire a local firm, Transitions Made Better Inc., to administer housing rehabilitation funds for landlords with flood-damaged properties.

Paula Hinzman Mitchell, supervisor in the city’s Housing Services office, said the city expects the state Department of Economic Development to begin to release Community Development Block Grant funds to help flood-affected landlords soon once the city has its program to administer the funds in place.

To date, more than 500 landlords with a total of 874 rental units have applied for help from the program with the cumbersome name, Rental Rehabilitation – Small Projects Disaster Recovery Assistance Program.

Hinzman Mitchell said it would cost about $22 million if each of the units received the maximum rehabilitation award of $24,999. An additional $12,500 per unit is also available to cover added project costs, which include lead-based paint remediation in instances where it is necessary.

Landlords have been agitating for housing rehabilitation help for many months as both state Jumpstart funds and federal CDBG funds have come into the city for homeowners and small businesses.

The landlords have argued that they were a major provider of affordable housing in the city’s flood-damaged neighborhoods and that getting their properties renovated was the quickest, cheapest way for the city to reestablish affordable housing lost in the June 2008 flood.

“Certainly one of the goals of the CDBG program is to provide decent affordable housing, and so this activity will be consistent with that overall major goal,” Hinzman Mitchell said.

The landlord program is open to those with seven or fewer rental units, and the assistance will come in the form of five-year forgivable loans.

Hinzman Mitchell noted that city had invited several entities to submit proposals to administer the landlord assistance program, but only Theresa Bornbach, president of Transitions Made Better Inc. in Cedar Rapids, submitted a proposal. Bornbach has experience administering state Jumpstart funds for local businesses, Hinzman Mitchell said.

The firm will receive an administrative fee of up to 2 percent to administer the program.

Keith Smith, president of Landlords of Linn County, told the City Council last night Bornbach has earned his respect in the way she has advocated for small businesses during the flood recovery. He said landlords were confident Bornbach would “meet our needs.”

Bornbach is founder/CEO of Corridor CoWorks Inc. and The Corridor Institute, and she is a former Alliant Energy vice president.

City, county contributing to one private-sector effort on flood recovery while private sector contributes to second effort in City Hall

The private sector’s interest in helping with flood recovery got another boost this week.

The Linn County Board of Supervisors has agreed to contribute $20,000 to the Economic Planning and Redevelopment Corp., an upstart private-sector initiative created in Cedar Rapids to help with local flood recovery.

For one, the Linn County board’s contribution should help comfort Cedar Rapids City Private-sector help on flood recovery: City, county contributing to one business-led Council member Chuck Wieneke, who has suggested that the council take back its $50,000 grant to the EPRC if the county wasn’t willing to contribute.

Earlier, the county board had tabled the matter.

On Tuesday, Lu Barron, chairwoman of the Linn board, said Tuesday that the board first wanted to get a better feel for the EPRC’s plans and mission before it contributed to the effort. On a unanimous 5-0 vote, the board now is satisfied, Barron said.

The public support for the EPRC makes it a private-public partnership, though the push for its creation came from some local business leaders displeased with the pace of flood recovery in the city. John Smith, president/CEO of trucking firm CRST International Inc., is chairman of the four-person EPRC board.

The EPRC’s director is Doug Neumann, who also holds down a post with the Downtown District.

In the last two weeks, the EPRC’s still-new role got pushed into the background a bit as yet a second, private-sector initiative surfaced in hopes of helping City Hall better deal with the city’s flood recovery. In this second effort, which is being promoted by Rockwell Collins, local business interests have offered to pay to support a new city flood-recovery manager inside of City Hall not outside of City Hall where the EPRC is operating.

Fund-raising for the City Hall position reportedly is underway even as the city and now Linn County are spending public dollars to pay for the first private-sector initiative, the EPRC.

The EPRC’s Neumann and the EPRC board have said that the EPRC will be out chasing federal grants and private grants that the city and county are not.

“I sincerely appreciate that the county supervisors have recognized the value EPRC can have in helping find funds for flood recovery and in helping accelerate progress on the many redevelopment projects we need to revitalize this great community,” Neumann said Tuesday of the county board’s funding support.

Linn County’s Barron said the EPRC and the private-sector-supported flood coordinator inside City Hall may have efforts that overlap a bit, but she said she sees the two positions as working together.

Linn supervisor Linda Langston and Monica Vernon, Cedar Rapids council member, are on the four-member EPRC board of directors.

The Tycoon closed for St. Pat’s; City Council backs police remediation plan to reform rowdy bars

The owner of downtown bar The Tycoon managed to convince five council members to put his expedited case for  liquor-license renewal on the agenda of a special noon council meeting on Monday. The meeting had been called for another reason, the selection the city’s new Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee.

Why the rush for the bar? Tuesday is St. Patrick’s Day. What bar doesn’t want to be open for St. Patrick’s Day seemed to be at least part of the reason The Tycoon’s plight surfaced at City Hall on Monday.

The Tycoon shouldn’t have bothered.

For starters, The Tycoon needed a quick license renewal because it had failed to abide by the city procedure that requires a 30-day notice for such a renewal. The 30-day period gives the Police Department time to conduct a routine check to see if the bar’s license should be renewed.

Council member Justin Shields was sympathetic to The Tycoon when he first moved see if the bar’s license renewal could be expedited.

But Shields withdrew his interest in the expedited renewal after a presentation by Police Chief Greg Graham and comments by City Manager Jim Prosser.

Graham noted that police had been called to The Tycoon 17 times since the first of the year, a “high” number for a bar of its size, especially so since the bar has been open only two nights a week, the chief said.

Many of those calls to the police were from the bar owner or bar employees, noted Graham, which he said was a good thing.

“But clearly, he’s not doing enough,” the chief said of the owner, Tim Bushaw.

Graham said bar owners can take steps to reduce the need for police calls by making sure they have an adequate number of employees on duty, by banning misbehaving customers or by not serving too much to those who have had too much to drink.

The Police Department’s plan had been to handle The Tycoon much as it handled the R & R Corner Bar, 700 E Ave. NW, a few months ago. That plan would give the bar a six-month license if the bar owner was willing to sign an agreement to improve bar behavior and so cut down on the number of police calls.

City Manager Jim Prosser called the effort “problem-solving” and not punishment.

“We are not security for bars or other liquor establishments,” he said.

One possibility on Monday was to grant The Tycoon an expedited liquor-license renewal if it was willing to enter into an agreement with the Police Department to find a way to reduce police calls to the bar.

But Shields withdrew his interest, saying the owner’s version of police activity at the bar had not squared with the Police Department’s documentation of calls.

In the future, council member Tom Podzimek said businesses that miss important deadlines like this need to pay penalties to the city. Those penalties will help people meet deadlines and will help the city defray extra costs that come when it tries to expedite services, he said.

The Police Department had to hustle its review of The Tycoon after the owner managed to make it in expedited fashion to Monday’s council agenda.

State judge sides with neighborhoods’ wish and city’s order to close First Avenue liquor store; mire of state appeal process slogs on

It can take what seems forever to shut down a liquor store once a city council in Iowa decides to take away the store’s license.

Proof of that is the Liquor & Tobacco Point store, 1545 First Ave. SE, which sits on the border of two of the city’s urban neighborhoods, Wellington Heights and Mound View.

In early September and after protests from neighborhood leaders, the Police Department, which had approved a liquor license for the store in July, notified the store that it was in violation of city law: It was within 300 feet of a church, which, in this instance is the storefront church called Mission of Hope.

On Oct. 8, the Cedar Rapids City Council revoked the license of the liquor store, which was just opening.

It looked like a victory for the neighborhood leaders at something of a noteworthy spot. It is across busy First Avenue East from the still-new Hy-Vee Food Store, which was designed to be, with the help of significant City Hall financial incentives, a commitment and a catalyst to bring new life to a highly visible spot in the middle of two struggling neighborhoods.

However, the Oct. 8 vote by the City Council vote appeared not to matter at all.

Liquor & Tobacco Point stayed open. It is open. And it dispatched its attorney to move the dispute into the molasses of the appeal process at the state’s Alcohol Beverages Division.

Now, nearly five months later, the city and the neighborhood leaders have learned that they have won vindication from Margaret LaMarche, a state administrative law judge. In a ruling dated Feb. 25, LaMarche concludes that Liquor & Tobacco Point, indeed, should close and that the owner’s liquor license be rescinded to operate at the First Avenue East location.

In her 12-page ruling, LaMarche takes note that the Cedar Rapids Police Department had given the store a liquor license not realizing that the location was too close to a church. For that reason, the judge concluded that owner Rabbani Wahidy, of Cedar Falls, should have the license in Cedar Rapids rescinded rather than having his license to operate in Iowa revoked. He has another store in Cedar Falls.

But that is far from the end of it.

Carter Stevens, an attorney in Cedar Falls, said last week that the state appeal process pushes on.

He reported that he has 30 days to continue the appeal to Lynn Walding, the director of the state’s Alcohol Beverages Division.

Walding acknowledged last week that it could take as long as another four, five or six months before the state agency works through procedural steps and then makes a final decision in the case. Then Liquor & Tobacco Point can go to court to challenge any ruling unfavorable to the store.

In the meantime, the Mission of Hope church has begun to display a sign on its front window, seeking help from donors that will enable the 7-year-old church find a new location.

In what might be a year that it will take to close the liquor store down, the reason to close it – its proximity to a church – might vanish.

What will remain is the sentiment of the neighborhood leaders that their neighborhoods needed a bright, shiny new grocery store and that they don’t need another liquor store, tobacco store or payday loan store.

Brand-new congressional ‘earmark’ of $950,000 is intended to get the long-delayed Highway 100 Extension finally built

Cedar Rapids would already have a dazzling new $200-million federal courthouse and a new, $100-million-plus, 7-mile highway extending Highway 100 from Edgewood Road west and south to Highway 30 if only the wants of nearly every community leader and local elected official was what mattered.

Both projects have languished nearly a decade or more.

On Friday, word arrived that the Highway 100 project has benefitted from what came to the rescue of the courthouse project early last fall –- a federal “earmark,” one of those special insertions into big congressional spending bills that are often pooh-poohed but much beloved at the local level.

In the just-passed congressional Omnibus budget bill, Congress has earmarked $950,000 for the Highway 100 Extension, which Cedar Rapids City Manager Jim Prosser and Lu Barron, chairwoman of the Linn County Board of Supervisors, on Friday said is a vital boost for the highway project.

The money will come to the city of Cedar Rapids to begin the process of buying up property for the highway’s right of way, Prosser and Barron said.

The key task now, the two said, is to get the Highway 100 Extension back into the Iowa Transportation Commission’s five-year construction plan, which is where it needs to be for the highway to get built.

Prosser said the congressional earmark will get the project into that crucial Transportation Commission lineup.

The project had been in that lineup at the start of the decade and the project had a champion for it on the Transportation Commission, Cedar Rapidian Tom Aller, the Alliant Energy executive.

In fact, the highway would already be in place had proponents of the highway project, including Cedar Rapids City Hall, not been outmaneuvered by project opponents.

Those opponents fit into two groups: Those concerned about Linn County’s Rock Island Botanical Preserve, which sits along the route of the highway extension; and the developers of a higher-end housing development near the proposed highway.

The federal highway-building bureaucracy requires that a project take steps to make sure it does not damage the environment. And after all these years, the Highway 100 Extension project has cleared the environmental hurdles.

What the backers of the project had not foreseen was the imagination of developers, James Properties Inc., and the ability of a non-elected Linn County Conservation Board to join forces with them to block the project.

Back in early 2002, as the Highway 100 Extension project was working its way through the required federal environmental assessment project, the developers donated pieces of land with no development potential to the county’s Rock Island Botanical Preserve so that the preserve now extended into the alignment of the highway.

The Conservation Board gushingly accepted the donation.

It took several years for the terms of Conservation Board members to end and new appointees by the Linn County supervisors to take their places before the Conservation Board was willing to allow a right-of-way through the donated land for the highway.

By the way, it was back in the early fall of 2008 that the federal “earmark” phenomenon came to the rescue of the downtown courthouse project. That happened after the June flood damaged the existing federal courthouse here and helped Iowa’s congressional delegation to make the case to insert $182-million request into a funding bill to get a new courthouse built.

Construction will start within weeks at the site between the Cedar River and Second Street SE and Seventh and Eighth avenues SE. (First Street SE will dead end at Seventh Avenue SE for the new courthouse, and on Friday, First Street SE was closed off. Drive down there, and get a feel for the new traffic pattern.)

Seeming calm after City Hall storm: Private sector still will help pay for so-called flood CEO no matter who he or she reports to

Dust settled Thursday at City Hall after a City Council dispute the night before in which a council majority asserted the primacy of the city manager as the council’s singular top employee.

A key question left after a 6-3 vote on Wednesday evening was whether unnamed private-sector people would be willing to help fund a new flood coordinator for the city if the person reported to City Manager Jim Prosser and not directly to the City Council.

The private sector is willing, council member Monica Vernon reported on Thursday.

By way of background, Tom Hobson, senior manager for government affairs at Rockwell Collins, on Thursday said Rockwell Collins leaders convened a meeting last week with local business figures, Gov. Chet Culver and city officials, a meeting which included Vernon, council member Justin Shields and Prosser.

Hobson said what emerged at the meeting was an agreement on the need to hire a new specialist working for city government and “dedicated” solely to flood recovery. In agreeing to help fund the position, those from the private sector never insisted that that the so-called flood CEO report directly to the City Council and not the city manager, Hobson said.

Vernon and Shields on Wednesday evening tried to make a case with the a council majority that the new flood specialist should bypass Prosser and report directly to the council. Before the council vote on the matter, Shields wondered if the council first should check to see if the private-sector help to fund the position was contingent on such an arrangement.

On Thursday, Vernon said a private fundraising effort is now under way to raise money to help fund the new flood coordinator at City Hall who reports to Prosser.

A week ago, Vernon and Shields reported to the council that the private sector would foot the entire bill. On Wednesday evening, the two said the city would pay 20 percent of the cost. On Thursday, Rockwell[']s Hobson said there is no specific percentage that will be paid by the private sector. It will be a joint public-private effort, he said.

On Wednesday evening, both Vernon and Shields insisted that it was necessary for the new specialist — Vernon has termed the position a flood-recovery CEO — to report directly to the council, not Prosser.

Six of nine council members instantly rejected the line-of-authority component of the proposal, saying the design of the city’s government charter and the council/manager form of government calls for the council to have one CEO, which is Prosser’s role, and not two.

Most colorfully, council member Tom Podzimek accused Vernon and Shields of trying to “overthrow” the city’s form of government, and he said he wouldn’t stand for it.

Vernon argued that the city needed to try something different because the current setup in which everything flows through the city manager hasn’t been working.

To that, council member Kris Gulick said if Vernon thought things weren’t working well, they likely would work worse under the organizational design that she and Shields had in mind. Gulick said having a city staff taking directions from two bosses was a bad idea.

Council member Pat Shey agreed. He said that Vernon and Shields needed to try to convince the council to replace the city manager if that was their wish and not try to do an end run around him.

On Thursday, Gulick said the council did agree unanimously that it made sense to get “more hands on deck” to help with flood recovery.

Meanwhile, Prosser on Thursday was calling the whole debate over CEOs “theoretical” and “largely irrelevant.” He said he would have been able to work through any arrangement.

The debate was anything but irrelevant on Wednesday evening.

“I don’t know what the big issue is with who he is going to report to,” said an embittered Shields, who was on the losing end of a 6-3 vote that never had a chance. “… You people just have something in your mind that says the city manager is in complete control of everything. I just don’t understand that. I never will.”

Council majority repels ‘overthrow’ of city’s government; questions remain about possible strings attached to private-sector help

City Council member Tom Podzimek last night said he wasn’t going to let three of the nine members of the council “overthrow” the city’s council/manager form of government.

On a 6-3 vote, the council majority agreed with Podzimek.

At issue was an idea pushed by council members Justin Shields and Monica Vernon for the city to hire a new staff person who would be flood coordinator or what Vernon last week termed a flood CEO.

The point of contention was this: Shields and Vernon –- both who have been lone voices on the council for months saying that City Manager Jim Prosser has too much power -– insisted that this new person report directly to the nine-member City Council, and not to Prosser.

In fact, Shields turned bitter when six council members endorsed the idea of getting some help for the city’s flood-recovery effort but in stronger terms insisted that that person report to Prosser.

“I don’t know what the big issue is with who he is going to report to,” Shields said. “… You people just have something in your mind that says the city manager is in complete control of everything. I just don’t understand that.

“We hired the city manager. He reports to us. But we can’t hire this person and have him report to us and ask those two people to work together very closely to get a job done for the citizens of Cedar Rapids?”

He and Vernon, though, were on the short end of the vote along with council member Jerry McGrane.

The vote result proved a strong endorsement of the central role of a city manager in the city’s just-3-year-old council/manager government, while at the same, it left puzzling questions about an unnamed private-sector person or persons who has dangled money at the council to help pay for the new flood help.

In fact, immediately prior to the vote last night, Shields said the council ought to check to see if the private-sector entity ready to pay 80 percent of the cost of the new employee was still willing to pay if the person reported to Prosser.

Vernon, though, suggested that the council vote on the matter and check with the person or persons later about helping pay.

A week ago, Vernon identified the person as a local “captain of industry.” A week ago, too, Shields and Vernon said the entity would pay the entire cost of the new employee, But last night they said the entity would pay just 80 percent of the cost.

No one on the council made any effort last night to ask about or shed light on where the private-sector money would be coming from.

In truth, Shields and Vernon weren’t even close to finding a majority on the council.

“Who drafted this?” council member Brian Fagan asked about a proposed resolution that would require a new flood-recovery coordinator report to the council.

Fagan said he had a “fundamental disagreement” with the proposal to fill such a position if it meant that person would bypass the council’s existing CEO, Prosser.

Council member Kris Gulick agreed. In the week since the idea of a flood CEO was proposed by council members Shields and Vernon, Gulick said he had sought out experts on how a council/manager government should work. He said he found “very few” who thought it a good idea to have “two bosses” making demands on the same city staff.

Podzimek, a contractor, called himself just “a simple carpenter.”

But he said that the line of authority that Shields and Vernon were proposing for a new flood coordinator was like building a house and having the job turn tough. He said he didn’t need a second contractor “crisscrossing over me,” taking his carpenters and electricians this way and that “when I’m still trying to build my home.”

Vernon did extract this from her council colleagues: The council will help Prosser interview and select the new employee, called a flood recovery program coordinator.

SEE PREVIOUS POST: Private sector and recurring theme at City Hall.

FEMA picks City Hall over Vet’s Commission in dust-up over flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building

Maybe the city of Cedar Rapids, not the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission, owns City Hall after all.

At least the city, not the commission, has been found to be the “eligible recipient” of $20-million-plus in federal disaster relief for the building, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has concluded.

Just who owns the building has been a matter of some murkiness over the years because the building is named the Veterans Memorial Building, which City Hall occupies. The 1920s-era structure on May’s Island in the Cedar River also is managed by the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission, and so commission members have been known to make a claim to the place.

The issue began to matter in recent months as FEMA prepared to make a decision on who should be the recipient of federal and state funds to repair the flood-damaged building.

City Manager Jim Prosser has said all along that the city would be the recipient. But Pete Welch, chairman of the Veterans Memorial Commission, wasn’t so sure.

In fact, Welch, who was a bit miffed because he says the city left the commission out of much of the planning about the future of the building, filed documents with FEMA seeking to be the rightful recipient of FEMA repair funds. If nothing else, Welch says, the Veterans Commission needed to protect the city in case FEMA determined that the commission and not the city owned the building. Welch worried that FEMA might not pay anything if the commission wasn’t here to protect the building’s interests.

FEMA’s Wally Armstead on Tuesday put it short and sweet: Any FEMA check is going to the city government, not the commission.

Armstead said that “eligible applicants” are limited to only a few categories of recipients, including local governments, states and certain nonprofit groups. The commission was none of those and, in fact, is “an element of the city” in the city’s table of organization, he said.

Armstead said the money for the May’s Island building’s repair is at the ready with the state of Iowa. The city will draw down the FEMA award -– FEMA pays 90 percent, the state of Iowa, 10 percent -– as it makes repairs to the building.

Just what the city’s intends to do with the building remains up in the air as of now.

Prosser said the city must use the FEMA award to fix the building because of the historic stature of it.

Nonetheless, the City Council has embarked on a six-to-nine-month public-input process to see if the city should build a new city hall at a new location. In that event, the current building would have a new use, the city has said.

At last night’s council budget meeting, Prosser spent some time lamenting how much the city will face in annual insurance costs on the May’s Island building and the flood-damaged library and Paramount Theatre.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, the Veterans Commission’s Welch said the commission decided this week to defer to FEMA and “let” the city be the eligible recipient of the FEMA and state funds.

The commission, “rather than bickering,” wants to move forward and get the May’s Island building renovated, Welch said.

Even if, he added, the issue of who owns the building is still a matter of debate.

Recurring theme at the heart of debate on flood CEO: current City Hall can’t get it right; needs push from private sector

Some in the local business community have been pretty sure they can help City Hall almost since the flood waters began to recede last June.

The latest example of the private sector’s coming to the rescue surfaced last week when council members Justin Shields and Monica Vernon proposed that the city add to its payroll a flood czar of sorts.
Vernon called the position a flood CEO.

The City Council will discuss the matter at its meeting Wednesday evening and may even act on it.
There are two significant features of the proposal:

Firstly, as presented by Shields, the flood czar would report directly to the City Council and not directly to City Manager Jim Prosser. Shields said the city’s organizational chart would include a “dotted line” to Prosser, which apparently means that flood CEO and Prosser would communicate.

This part of the proposal is not particularly new: Shields and Vernon have been trying for some months, without success, to get a staff policy maker who would report directly to the City Council and not be managed by Prosser. Heretofore, the council majority has had little time for such a thing. Prosser is the council’s CEO, and Prosser and the city staff are the council’s policy advisers, the council majority has said.

A second significant feature of the latest proposal is that the cost of the new city employee would be paid by the private sector.

Asked after last week’s meeting, Vernon deferred when asked for details about whom or what this private-sector force might be.

She said it was a “captain of industry” who had come up with the idea.

“I don’t think it’s important to tell you right now,” Vernon said when asked for specifics. “We have some people (in the business community) who are very interested in this and who get it: that it (the new position) needs to be part of city government.”

Suffice to say, it will be a great discuss on Wednesday evening.

Council member Kris Gulick was quick to note last week that creating a CEO slot that reports to the council when the council already has a CEO in the city manager would cause problems for the city’s current structure of “governance.”

Shields did note that Patrick DePalma, a vice president at AEGON USA who headed up the council’s government reorganization task force, recommended a year ago and again in recent months that Prosser needed, at the least, an assistant city manager who would report to Prosser. The council and Prosser have put that idea aside in the past because of cost.

The new wrinkle -– the new allure — is that the private sector will now foot the bill.

In that regard, it’s hard to imagine a local “captain” of industry whose company doesn’t have some entanglement with City Hall.

There are street issues out by Rockwell Collins and economic development incentives as well. The city is leasing an office building as a temporary City Hall with an AEGONUSA sign out front. The city is set to approve a franchise agreement to allow Alliant Energy to continue to operate in the city.

In truth, the city has had relationships with some or all of these private companies for a number of years in the form of donations of executive expertise. No one has suggested any problems with that.

In the broad picture, that the private sector is apparently willing to pay for a flood CEO or specialist is a piece of a recurring theme: that City Hall isn’t doing that good a job on flood recovery.

Chuck Peters, CEO of Gazette Communications, recounted at a recent meeting of the Downtown Rotary Club how he and a few others jumped on an AEGONUSA corporate plane in the days after last June’s flood to see how Grand Forks, N.D., had recovered from a similar disaster in 1997.

That Peters is still telling the story is an indication he doesn’t think lessons learned on the trip got much of an audience at City Hall.

In recent weeks, the Downtown Rotary Club devoted four straight meetings to a newly created, local flood-recovery entity called the Economic Planning and Redevelopment Corp.

The corporation has City Council member Monica Vernon on its four-person board as well as Linda Langston, Linn County supervisor. But the push to create the corporation came from some in the private sector who feel the city’s flood recovery needs private-sector know-how.

The chairman of the EPRC is John Smith, president/CEO at trucking firm of CRST International Inc. Smith, incidentally, is the boss of newly announced mayoral candidate Ron Corbett, who is a CRST vice president.

Clay Jones, CEO at Rockwell Collins, also has turned up in public talking about Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery. That happened when he crossed paths and spoke briefly with President Obama after the president’s speech to The Business Council on Feb. 13 at the White House.

Keep in mind, the city of Cedar Rapids, after much debate and many meetings of the Home Rule Charter Commission in 2004 and 2005, voted overwhelmingly to get rid of the commission form of government that the city had had in place from the early years of the 20th Century. In its place, voters picked a city government with professional management and a part-time mayor and council.

It’s no little irony that the commission form of government came to be in Galveston, Texas, after a hurricane devastated that city in 1900. Back then, the private sector stepped forward and said that city government needed its expertise if the city was to recover. In the commission government, council members double as experts in certain fields like finance, public works and public safety.

After a few years, the council-manager government, which most cities now have, began to replace commission governments.

City’s flood-action plan kicks in: Cedar River expected to reach a tame 12 feet by Thursday, though sewer plant is hustling to avoid any challenges

Believe it or not:

The National Weather Service predicts that the Cedar River at Cedar Rapids will crest at 12  feet on Thursday afternoon, which is the level of the city’s basic flood stage and above the 10-foot stage at which the city’s flood action plan begins to kick in.

The predicted 12-foot crest, issued last evening, is an improvement. At late afternoon, the crest was expected at 12.76 feet.

On any given year, these levels would not draw much of a note.

But it is only nine months since the catastrophic June 2008 flood, when the river reached 31.12 feet, and people are apt to pay attention, Craig Hanson, the city’s public works maintenance manager, said Monday afternoon.

Hanson said there is no general cause for concern.

Nevertheless, he reported that city crews and contractors on Monday were scurrying around because of concern that waters even approaching a relatively low height of 13 feet could cause new problems to the city’s Water Pollution Control facility. That facility is still on the mend from extensive damage caused by last year’s flood.

Hanson and Steve Hershner, the city’s utilities environmental manager, reported that the problems facing the plant are two-fold.

Firstly, a sewer line along Prairie Creek has a hole somewhere along it and the line has been taking in creek water since the heavy weekend rains. Hanson ordered a portion of J Street SW closed Monday because quick raise of water had forced Prairie Creek out of its banks.

A second issue is an open section of sewer line in main sewer interceptor line, which is being renovated near the Water Pollution Control plant.

Too much river and creek water infiltrating into a sewer system designed to carry waste water potentially could overwhelm and damage the city’s main pump station at the Water Pollution Control plant, Hanson and Hershner said.

“We’re taking steps to manage all the flow into the system,” Hershner said.

Both Hershner and Hanson noted that the river was expected to crest at about 8 feet when the two of them arrived at work on Monday morning.

By noon, the projection for the crest had jumped to 12.76 feet, a change dramatic enough that both mentioned it.

Cedar Rapids’ flood-management action plan kicks into gear when the river is expected to reach the 10-foot stage, which is expected to happen at 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Prior to last June, the city’s flood-action plan was designed to protect the city against a river height, as measured on a gauge up from the Eighth Avenue bridge, of 20 feet, which had been the record flood level prior to last June when the river climbed to 31.12 feet.

With Monday’s rising water, Hanson said no one has called the city Public Works Department to express concern, nor should they call, he said.

Hanson said heavy rain on ground that is still partially frozen and that was already saturated from last year is prompting the rise in creeks and rivers.

He noted that March and April typically bring a lot of fluctuation in water levels in Iowa.

Hanson said the city will close Otis Road SE when the Cedar River reaches 10 feet.

At 11 feet, the city starts pumps on Ellis Road NW west of Edgewood Road NW.

At 11.5 feet, water begins to affect Osborn Park on the river’s east side below the 14th/16th Avenue bridge.

At 13 feet, water begins to enter the street under the 12th Avenue bridge between the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library and the Penford Products plant. But that road has been closed since last year’s flood, Hanson noted.

City Hall kindness has not always been easy to find for neighboring jurisdictions that dump on sales tax

City Hall kindness is new found when it comes to jurisdictions whose voters dump on local-option tax.

On Friday, Cedar Rapids Mayor Kay Halloran was out counting noses, trying to find a majority on her nine-member council to pass a resolution, oddly, for the city of Marion.

Halloran got the votes, and as a result, the city of Marion will get a second bite at the local-option sales tax apple.

Marion city officials had lobbied Halloran and other Cedar Rapids City Council members after voters in Marion turned down the local-option sales tax on Tuesday along with the cities of Hiawatha, Robins, Center Point and the Linn County portion of Walford.

At the same time, Cedar Rapids easily passed the tax, the revenue from which it will use primarily for flood relief over the next five years and three months.

Marion stood to take in about $3 million a year during the life of the tax, which is an amount city leaders in Marion weren’t reluctant to easily turn their backs on. Particularly when the measure was defeated by 183 votes out of 4,271 cast.

The Cedar Rapids council is in the middle of the affairs of its neighboring communities because of the demands of state’s local-option sales tax law. That law, as applied to Linn County, creates only two ways to get the question of a local-option sales tax on the ballot: the Cedar Rapids City Council, which represents a majority of residents in Linn County, must do it; or proponents of the tax can amass signatures on a petition that number at least 5 percent of the total who voted in the last general election.

Halloran said the decision was an easy call for her, and she pointed to the first days after the June flood when the city of Marion stepped in and provided public-safety dispatching services for Cedar Rapids.

“So the idea is, as a matter of comity and neighborliness, they help us when we need help, and we’ll help when they need help,” the mayor said.

It was quite a different story, though, back in 2001 when Cedar Rapids and nearly every jurisdiction in the county put the local-option sales tax in place, but unincorporated Linn County rejected the matter and stood to lose about $4 million a year.

No sooner had the election office closed down on election night and the county’s Farm Bureau members and the Linn County Board of Supervisors were on the phone to Cedar Rapids City Hall, hat in hand, asking the council to put the measure up for a revote out in the county.

The Cedar Rapids City Hall has three words for the request: Get some signatures.

“Calling for a vote without a petition drive would be a departure from previous practice of the Cedar Rapids council,” the City Council said back then. The council noted that the city’s 2001 vote on the sales tax for swimming pools was supported by a petition of 5,188 signatures and that an election the previous on a minor-league baseball stadium levy was backed by 3,361 signatures before the council put the matters on the ballot.

Then-Parks Commissioner Dale Todd was the most outspoken of the City Council members back then. Who was he, Todd asked, to decide that rural residents really didn’t mean to reject the tax when they voted that way Tuesday?

Then-Mayor Lee Clancey stressed the City Council’s tradition of asking for petitions from those interested in putting an issue on the ballot.

Clearly, her preference was that any revote come from a petition drive with a sufficient number of signatures to prompt a vote without the City Council’s help.

“The citizens in rural Linn County had an opportunity to vote on this two days ago,” Clancey said. “If there is strong sentiment among the citizens of Linn County that they would like to have this revote, I think it might be an appropriate way to go to have a petition.

“Then at least we would have a feeling for what folks really would like to do. The only thing we have right now is the majority of them declined the option tax.”

Within a few days, the Farm Bureau had rounded up 10,131 county residents, more than twice the number needed to put the measure back on the ballot. Voters in unincorporated Linn, Walker and Walford then returned to the polls and passed the tax.

On Friday, Marion city officials said what was said eight years ago: Marion voters didn’t understand the complicated, quirky tax.

Lon Pluckhahn, Marion’s city manager, said on Friday that Marion council members likely would not have requested a new vote if they and he hadn’t received many calls from citizens who said they had not understood the Tuesday vote.

“I’m glad to see it,” Pluckhahn said of the Cedar Rapids council decision to clear the way for another sales-tax vote. “We’ve worked hard to improve relations between the two cities.”

He noted an e-mail from one Cedar Rapids council member who said he would not have wanted to have to get Marion’s permission if Cedar Rapids wanted a new vote.

Seventy apply for nine slots on Oversight Committee to help City Council spend $90-plus million in sales tax funds

Seventy residents have applied to sit on City Hall’s nine-member Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee.

Among the 70 is Gary Ficken, a local businessman who was co-chairman of Vote Yes! For Our Neighbors, the grass-roots group that the campaign to get the 1-percent sales tax passed on Tuesday.

The residents approved the ballot measure by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin.

Also on the list are some of leaders of the city’s flood-damaged neighborhoods, including Frank King and Jon Galvin, president and vice president of the Northwest Neighbors Association; Michael Richards, president of the Oak Hill Jackson Neighborhood Association; and Gregory Stokesberry, president of the South West Area Neighbors.

In a letter to City Hall on Friday, King, Richards, Stokesberry and Dianne Yanda, president of the Cedar Valley Neighborhood Association, said they were “demanding” that the mayor and City Council make sure that their neighborhoods are represented on the oversight committee.

“We believe that this is the best way to protect the interests and ensure the confidence of those Cedar Rapidians most egregiously affected by the flood,” the four neighborhood presidents said. They have joined in what they are calling the River Neighborhood Alliance.

The mayor will make the selections to the Oversight Committee with the advice and consent of her City Council colleagues. The decision will be made before April 1, when the sales tax begins to be collected. The collections extend through June 30, 2014.

According to the city, others among the 70 applicants are:

Andy Petersen, B. Larry Johnson, Bruce Vander Sanden, Charles Menge, Charles Watkins, David Clemens, David Hogan, David Mather, David West and Debra Dooley.

Don Boland, Donald Leonhart, Erick Skogman, Gregory Pollock, Heather Schoonover, James Nelson, James Powers, Jeff Beer, Jeff Palmer, Jeremy Cobert and John Gruca.

John Malone, Joseph Michalec, Kathi Lewis, Kathy Potts, Kevin Curl, Kevin Litten, Larry Berns, Lyle Broer, Marion Patterson, Markell Kuper, Marvin Dale Hedgecoth and Mauryne Simoens.

Michael Brunelli, Nancy Bruner, Nick Capussi, Richard McArtor, Richard Shoemaker, Robert Untiedt, Ruth Hart, Stephanie Feuss, Tamara Koolbeck, Thomas Haugen and W. Scott Jamieson.

James Sattler, James Young Sr., G. Richard Dirk Johnson, Leland Freie, Stephen Hammes, Terry Chostner, Linda Meanor, Susan Blome, Sandra Skelton, Jean Bell, Elizabeth Hladky, Patrick Courtney, William Overland, Charles Varnum, Jerry Gillon, Jody Lippmann and Thomas Zuber.

The last names of four others were not readable on the city’s list.

An ‘affordable’ housing project wins Planning Commission approval despite neighbor protests; city might get one of these projects built yet

The city might actually see some affordable housing built.

Most of the housing lost in the June flood was old, working-class housing, and many of the residents who lost out were on fixed incomes or were earning moderate to lower incomes.

For that reason, City Hall has been intent on building so-called “affordable” rental housing in the city to replace what has been lost.

In fact, the City Council and the state of Iowa both lobbied Iowa’s congressional delegation hard and successfully to secure additional federal tax credits for the state to help provide funding for affordable housing.

At the ninth-month mark of the flood, the City Council has backed in concept and with local financial support five different affordable housing projects, all designed to use federal tax credits to pay for the bulk of construction.

None of the projects, though, has started.

However, one of the five projects took a big step toward realization this week when it won the City Planning Commission’s approval to move ahead despite strong opposition from neighbors. The City Council now will vote on the commission recommendation.

The latest project calls for the construction of 48 two-bedroom units and 42 three-bedroom ones with affordable rents on 11.2 acres of land east of Edgewood Road south of Williams Boulevard and north of Wilson Avenue SW on property that, in part, used to house Chapman Fun World.

The developer of the Cedar Pond Townhomes is Greg McClenahan, president of EverGreen Real Estate Development Corp., Prior Lake, Minn.

McClenahan addressed the City Planning Commission this week as did a dozen or so neighbors.

One particular strong note from McClenahan: He pointed out that a previous developer – who abandoned a project a few years ago after some grading and sewer work — had gotten all the city approvals to build 128 apartments on the same site. And those units would have been three-story; the Cedar Pond development will have two-story units, he said.

The neighbors centered their objections around water runoff issues and around increased traffic in and out of their developments and on busy Wilson Avenue SW.

One line of reasoning that didn’t resonate with the Planning Commission members was the worry that people living in the new development of “affordable” rental units would lower property values and increase crime.

One objecting neighbor asked the commission “to protect us from these social differences of these people from us.”

McClenahan noted that those who will be renting apartments at his other tax-credit properties are people who work for a living.

Scott Olson, the local commercial Realtor who is one of six partners who own the land, argued to the commission that 90 percent of those who rent apartments in Cedar Rapids have the same incomes as those who will rent one of McClenahan’s units.

Some objectors noted that McClenahan is from Minnesota. He pointed out to the commission that he grew up in Iowa, graduated from the University of Iowa School of Law and practiced law in Cedar Rapids for three years.

He has 11 other tax-credit projects, including ones in Waterloo, Ames and Fort Dodge.

McClenahan has yet to obtain tax credits for the project from the Iowa Finance Authority, the authority said this week.

The authority has noted that there are fewer investors for tax credits now that the economy has taken a tumble.

In the tax-credit program, a private investor provides money upfront for a housing project and then the investor gets its tax liability over 10 years lessened by the amount put up for the project and some additional amount. The project developer then uses the money for construction, which means the developer does not have to take on so much debt and so can keep rents lower than the developer otherwise could. The local jurisdiction usually contributes money to the project as well.

As for the status of other tax-credit project proposals in Cedar Rapids:

One developer has called off one project, which had been proposed for the former chipping green area at the Ellis Golf Course, in the face of organized neighborhood opposition. A second developer’s plans for senior-living apartments on O Avenue NW also has drawn neighborhood fire as well as a cool reaction from the City Planning Commission.

Des Moines developer Jack Hatch’s plans for two new apartment buildings in the Oak Hill Neighborhood are still in the works, though he has not yet secured tax credits from the Iowa Finance Authority, IFA said this week.

A fourth project, the renovation of The Roosevelt downtown, may start by April, the developer said this
week.

City of Cedar Rapids apt to see more than $1 million more a year in revenue from local-option sales tax

The city of Cedar Rapids could see more than $1 million more a year from the local-option sales tax than the $18 million it had expected before five cities in Linn County on Tuesday turned the tax down.

The estimate is based on a look at sales tax revenue for Linn County and for the five cities that rejected the tax on Tuesday, Marion, Hiawatha, Robins, Center Point and Walford.

In fiscal year 2008, sales for all of Linn County totaled $3.1 billion with the five cities and $2.68 billion when sales for the five cities are subtracted.

Without the five cities in the mix, Cedar Rapids will now get 72.94 percent of the local-option sales-tax revenue collected in Linn County, according to the Iowa Department of Revenue.

Using that new percentage and the revised sales figures, Cedar Rapids would take in about $19.3 million, up from the estimated $18 million that the city had expected to see if all the Linn jurisdictions had the tax in place.

Both Sue Vavroch, the city’s treasury operations manager, and Victoria Daniels, of the Iowa Department of Revenue on Wednesday urged caution with any revenue estimates because of the state of the economy.

In fact, the state agency, which collects the sales tax and then distributes it to the jurisdictions, bases its distributions on 95 percent of what it expects to collect in case fewer sales occur than expected.

Daniels said the agency would have new estimates for what the sales tax is apt to pay out in Linn County in about two weeks.

Each jurisdiction will get a larger share of the Linn County sales-tax pot, but the pot also will shrink some because the tax will not be collected or the revenue from it distributed to the five cities that voted against the tax on Tuesday.

For instance, the city of Cedar Rapids would have gotten 59.9 percent of the local-option sales tax revenue if all the jurisdictions in the county had the tax in place.

With the five cities turning the measure down, Cedar Rapids now will get 72.94. Unincorporated Linn County was to have gotten 16.33 percent of the total, and now will get 19.38 percent.

The tax was expected to have brought in about $30 million countywide. It will be less than that now that the five cities won’t collect the tax.

The Iowa Department of Revenue acknowledges that the collection system comes with a level of imprecision because some retailers mistakenly charge the extra 1-percent tax thinking it is in place throughout the county when, in fact, some places in the county do not have the tax in place.

A view from U of I power plant: a new biomass power plant in downtown Cedar Rapids would be ‘claim to fame’ for the city

The University of Iowa’s power plant has been burning oat hulls, a byproduct of cereal-making at the Quaker plant in Cedar Rapids, since 2002.

In a discussion on Wednesday with Ferman Milster, the university’s associate director of utilities and energy management, Milster was asked about burning biomass materials like oat hulls for power and what the future might hold for such examples of renewable energy.

He was informed, too, that some community leaders in Cedar Rapids have pitched a proposal to Iowa’s congressional delegation for a huge federal grant that would pay to build a new biomass energy plant in downtown Cedar Rapids. City Hall, Alliant Energy, the downtown and nearby industries have been trying to figure out how to replace Alliant Energy’s flood-damaged Sixth Street power plant, which had provided low-cost steam.

In his comments, Milster couldn’t have been more excited about the future of burning biomass materials or more thrilled about the pursuit of a new biomass plant in downtown Cedar Rapids.

He said the current state of climate awareness and the current federal administration’s awareness of the issue will mean an increased emphasis on all kinds of renewable energy.

“You’re going to see a biomass fuel market develop,” Milster said. “And oat hulls will be a piece of that, an important piece.

“But there are numerous other sources that are byproducts of industrial production of some form. … And we (at the university) have been very, very active in identifying other sources of biomass. We have a laundry list of those.”

He said his power plant at the University of Iowa is readying to experiment burning corn cobs.

“Biomass fuel combustion is going to gain popularity,” he said. “The economics are going to start to favor it as we start to regulate carbon emissions. If the federal government regulates carbon emissions, that radically increases the value of biomass fuel.”

As for the idea of a biomass power plant in downtown Cedar Rapids, Milster suggested that the city may have a “perfect storm” in place to make such an idea work.

He noted that Cedar Rapids has an existing steam distribution system that serves the downtown and nearby industries. There’s a year-round need for power that a plant would produce. And the city, an agriculture-processing center, has multiple sources of renewable energy.

“A new district energy plant – a combined heat and power plant – is the ideal thing,” Milster said. “It just makes perfect sense. And you could make all renewable energy.

“Wow. What a claim to fame for Cedar Rapids to come out of the flood with a renewable energy plant and a district energy system. That’s super.”

City Hall contemplating breaks on bids for local firms; what is local?

Should local businesses get a local-preference break in City Hall bids?

The City Council has been interested in that idea in recent months, no doubt, because of the huge, flood-recovery rebuilding effort that is in the offing for city buildings, facilities and infrastructure.

In a memo to the council Judy Lehman, the city’s purchasing manager, notes that some jurisdictions have established a “legally-binding preference” in the competition for public projects that gives a direct financial advantage to local companies.

Typically, Lehman reports that the advantage comes by subtracting a percentage off a local bidder’s bid price in a bidding competition that seeks to select the lowest responsible bid. Another approach is to restrict bidders to only those companies in the local area.

Providing a local-preference has pluses and minuses: According to Lehman:

The pluses: Local businesses will be supported and that support will be “repaid” by the local businesses’ commitment to the community. Local businesses contribute to the property-tax base and circulate their dollars locally.

The minuses: Competition for work could be reduced and costs for work could increase. Identifying how much money actually stays in the local community could be difficult. Picking local companies could alienate other jurisdictions.

Lehman says the council will need to decide what size of percentage break on bids it wants to have if it puts a local-preference policy in place. Also, the council will need to define what “local” means, she says. Is it at the city limits? What if corporate headquarters are outside of the city?

Police Department is going after the BB, pellet and paintball guns

The Police Department will ask the City Council this week to ban adults and juveniles from carrying BB, air, paintball or pellet guns in public if they aren’t in a case, unloaded.

 

The request comes after a weekend in which the department received more than 150 reports of vandals shooting out windows with BB guns.

 

However, police Capt. Bernie Walther said Tuesday that the move to ban the carrying of BB guns and similar guns in public has been in the works for more than a year as part of the city’s initiative called Enhance Our Neighborhoods.

 

“I wish there was some way to get rid of them all,” Sandy Bell, president of CR Neighborhoods and president of her own neighborhood association, Lincolnway Village, said Tuesday. “Even when they’re not shooting out car windows, they’re shooting at neighbors’ dogs or something else.”

 

Walther noted that the cities of Iowa City and Waterloo are among those that already have bans on carrying BB guns and those like them.

 

Such a public ban is intended to reduce vandalism. But Walther said the ban also will lessen the chance that a police officer or a citizen will shoot someone carrying what looks like a real gun.

 

“We’re running into kids with these things tucked in their waistband, and sooner or later somebody is going to get seriously hurt because someone is going to take that as a real firearm,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve seen what some of these look like. They’re definitely realistic looking.”

 

From 2003 through 2008, the Police Department received an average of 1,170 criminal mischief reports each year involving BB guns, paintballs and similar items. Walther said that total is more than 50 percent of all the criminal mischief reports that come into the department.

 

At $200 a car window, that’s about $1.4 million in property damage, he added.

 

Walther said there also have been additional crimes against people in which BB guns or other similar items have been used or displayed.

 

A big part of the problem for police officers is that they can catch a person with a BB gun in the vicinity of vandalism but can’t prove the person did the shooting. With a law change, it will be a crime, a simple misdemeanor, to have the gun. Juveniles will be brought to the police station and their parents summoned, Walther said.

 

The ban, he noted, does not prohibit a parent from going to an outdoor range for target practice or from taking a child to such a venue for practice.

 

He said the change in ordinance will treat the BB-gun-like products no differently than firearms. Adults who own firearms can’t carry them in public and they can’t fire them at home except in self-defense, Walther noted.

 

Officers, he added, will have the option to use discretion.

 

“If little Johnny just got his little Daisy Red Ryder (BB gun) for his birthday and he’s running down the street to show his buddy, obviously, there’s officer discretion in that,” Walther said.

Council readies to pick site for new Intermodal bus depot; but construction won’t start until May 2011 with completion in late 2013

The City Council this week is poised to pick between two downtown spots for a new bus depot called the Intermodal Transit Facility.

The first is owned by Pepsi at the 400 block of Sixth Avenue SE and the second site, across from Greene Square Park in the 400 block of Fourth Avenue SE, houses TrueNorth, an insurance and financial services firm.

Owners at both sites are interested in selling.

The city has been trying to build the Intermodal for some years now and is now looking at a fourth site for it. It has had a $9-million federal grant for the project since 2002.

The plan now -– once a new site is picked this month -– is to conduct a feasibility study and an environmental assessment between May and October of 2009; acquire the property between November 2009 and May 2011; and design and build the facility between May 2011 and November 2013, according to a staff report prepared by the city’s Department of Community Development.

Most recently, the plan has been for the Intermodal to be a multistory building with offices, and perhaps even residential units, on the upper floors.

According to the staff report, the Pepsi site has more advantages and more disadvantages than the TrueNorth site.

The advantages of the Pepsi site are these: an interested seller; only one owner to deal with; meets the council’s evaluation criteria; provides a chance to move the Pepsi warehouse operation to an area with similar uses; and requires the purchase of more than one block needed for the Intermodal, which could be used for other civic purposes.

The disadvantages of the Pepsi site: the need to buy more than one block; and the need for a plan for reuse or sale of the extra property.

As for the TrueNorth site, the advantages are: a willing seller; and meets the council’s evaluation criteria. The disadvantage: multiple property owners could delay the property purchase.

Both the Pepsi and TrueNorth sites are outside the 100-year flood plain, and the TrueNorth site is outside the 500-year flood plain.

In April of 2008, the council decided to build the Intermodal on Third Street SE between Ninth and 10^th avenues SE. After the June flood, though, the Federal Transit Administration rejected the site because it is in the 100-year flood plain.

Initially, the Intermodal was going to be built across from the U.S. Cellular Center on First Avenue SE. Then during the Paul Pate mayoral administration, the proposed building was moved to a vacant site on Second Street SE between Sixth and Seventh avenues SE.

The current council nearly began building the Intermodal on that site. However, council member Pat Shey spoke up, saying that it didn’t make any sense to build another transit facility two blocks from the existing one. A Minneapolis consultant agreed, saying that the design of the proposed Intermodal, which was part transit facility and part parking ramp, would be out of date for both transit and parking on the day it opened. She also said the configuration of the existing Ground Transportation Center bus depot, where buses backed from parking stalls, was a public safety hazard.

The June flood damaged the GTC depot. By then the council decided to close the depot and incorporate those transit activities with others in a new Intermodal. The most recent plans have not had a parking ramp associated with the new building.

Corbett files campaign organization document with state board

Ron Corbett looks like he’s really in.

Corbett, the former president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce and past speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives, has created a Corbett for Mayor campaign organization.

Corbett also has filed the first necessary campaign document, a DR-1 Statement of Organization, with the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board in Des Moines.

The organizational statement must be filed within 10 days of a campaign committee’s accepting contributions or spending or taking on debt in excess of $750, according to the state board.

In truth, the public wouldn’t yet be thinking too much about this year’s mayoral race but for backers of Corbett, vice president, human resources, at trucking firm CRST International Inc.

Those backers financed a phone survey earlier this year to check on whom voters might like as a mayoral candidate. The survey asked those contacted to pick between Corbett, council members Brian Fagan and Monica Vernon, Scott Olson, a commercial Realtor who was defeated in a close mayor run in 2005, and Gary Hinzman, executive director of the Sixth Judicial District Department of Correctional Services and a former Cedar Rapids police chief.

Corbett, 48, has talked about the need to help flood victims and the need to get the local economy going again.

“Those devastated and displaced by the flood are at the top of our list,” he said in a conversation last week. “But now we face increasing job losses. Sadly, in some cases, people have lost both (a house and a job).”

Mayor and five possible mayoral candidates have one thing in common: All support the local-option sales tax

There have been local-option sales tax elections in years past in which elected officials and would-be elected officials have deferred to the voters and not expressed an opinion one way or another of the matter.

Not this time. At least not with Mayor Kay Halloran and the five people whose names to date are afloat as possible candidates for mayor in the November election.

Halloran is a strong supporter of the local-option sales tax, as are council members Monica Vernon and Brian Fagan, both who considered possible mayor candidates.

In favor, too, of the sales tax are three other possible mayor candidates: Ron Corbett, Gary Hinzman and Scott Olson.

In recent weeks, backers of Corbett conducted a private phone survey to check out what voters might be thinking about in this year’s upcoming mayoral race.

The Corbett backers asked those surveyed to pick from five possible candidates: Corbett, Fagan, Hinzman, Olson or Vernon.

Olson, a commercial Realtor who was narrowly defeated in his run for mayor in 2005, said last week that additional taxes like a local-option sales tax do have a “negative connotation.” But he said the unique circumstance of the flood recovery “overrides” that concern. “We have many people in need,” he said.

Olson said the local revenue raised by the sales tax will help those who own flood-damaged housing but, for one reason or another, don’t qualify for federal funds. He noted, too, that a citizen oversight committee will be in place to help direct how the sales tax money is spent.

Hinzman, director of the Sixth Judicial District Department of Correctional Services and former Cedar Rapids police chief, said last week that he normally doesn’t jump at a tax increase.

“But it makes better sense than having no concept as to how Cedar Rapids bails itself out of this disaster,” Hinzman said. He said the sales tax will help the city “recover and heal as a community.”

“Without the local-option sales tax, it will be extremely difficult to get beyond the past,” he said.

Corbett, vice president at trucking firm CRST International Inc., said passing the local-option sales tax will “definitely improve” the city’s chances to secure increased federal and state funding.

“Given the scale of our disaster, we can’t pretend that we can recover and redevelop without these funding sources,” said Corbett, past president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce and former speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives.

He said the local-option sales tax will provide a temporary “window of opportunity” that will give the city time to work hard to recruit companies to the city to add jobs and rebuild the city’s tax base.

Alliant COO Protsch talks about life after low-cost downtown steam, about the new world with Obama, about a proposal for a $200-million biomass plant

It was a little telling when Brian Fagan, mayor pro tem of the City Council, quickly looked into the audience at Friday’s State of the City speech when asked about the future of what had been a low-cost steam energy system for the downtown and vital industries and others nearby.

And Fagan drew plenty of chuckles when he saw Eliot out there and asked if he wanted to take the question on.

Eliot is Eliot Protsch, the chief operating officer of Alliant Energy, the utility which had provided that cheap steam from its aged and now flood-damaged and disabled Sixth Street Generating Station.

Amy Reasner, the local attorney who was moderating the event, wasn’t sure if the State of the City speech was designed to have those in the audience help define the city’s current situation.  But in any event, Protsch came to the stage and took to the microphone.

In short, Protsch put it this way:

There might be a solution for the “very large industrial customers” located near the plant. But customers in the downtown and even farther from the Sixth Street plant will need to look for another solution.

“I believe at the end of the day, what I just asserted to you, will end up being where we find ourselves in Cedar Rapids,” Protsch told the audience of about 300 gathered in The Ballroom at the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel.

He added a caveat: “… absent a very large subsidy from somewhere, with the emphasis on very large.”

In an interview at the end of the Friday event, Protsch broke the issue down this way:

The 100-year-old Sixth Street Generating Station worked to provide low-cost steam to eight large users and another 200 smaller ones in and around downtown because the plant had few capital costs and it burned relatively cheap coal without any giant burden required for emission controls.

In fact, it was sufficiently cheap to burn coal to boil water to produce steam that piping the steam through an old, inefficient, poorly insulated and sometime-leaky piping system didn’t matter much.

All that changed with the June flood, which disabled the plant.

Now Alliant and its customers, he said, face two choices, neither attractive.

Protsch said the coal alternative would require huge capital costs — $52 million to retrofit the plant and likely $150 million or more in the years ahead to add emission controls to it to meet the changing and emerging environmental regulations. The capital costs, which would be built into the utility rates, make the idea unworkable, he said.

The natural gas alternative is different: It doesn’t require high capital costs upfront, but he said the cost of natural gas is both higher and more volatile. Suddenly, producing steam with natural gas has a much higher cost, and one too high to be able to ship steam great distances through an old, inefficient piping system. Short of digging up downtown streets and replacing the steam pipes, this idea won’t work, he said.

Protsch said Alliant has been telling smaller users, including all of those steam users in the downtown, that they should look at another solution for their steam needs. Many customers already have converted to their own systems, he said.

“I believe they all should be looking hard at that,” he said. “Because absent -– again absent a big subsidy from somewhere –- I just don’t think it’s going to be economic for anybody to restore the steam service the way it was burning coal.”

The story could be different for large industrial users like Quaker and Cargill –– Alliant continues in ongoing discussions with them, he said — next to the Sixth Street power plant. He thought “a natural gas facility of some sort” could work for them. Alliant wouldn’t have to be part of that solution, but “we’d like to be,” he said.

“Mostly, we want our customers to put in the most efficient steam production capability that they can so that they remain viable,” Protsch said. “So that’s our goal. Whether we have a role in it or not is less of an issue.”

For some months, there has been much discussion at City Hall, from local legislators and from Alliant itself about the lobbying effort in Washington, D.C., and in Des Moines and even at City Hall to find some kind of short-term and/or long-term subsidy to solve the downtown steam matter.

Asked about that, Protsch said Alliant representatives were in Washington, D.C., in recent days was being discussed with Iowa’s Congressional offices about the building of a $200-million power plant that would burn biomass to produce energy in and near the downtown.

Protsch noted that such an idea had been studied in the past.

If any such federal grant would surface, he suggested that it would be made to the city of Cedar Rapids, who then might lease land from Alliant to build such a biomass facility.

“We’re open to that,” he said.

For those looking at the big national and global energy future, Protsch said they need look no further than Cedar Rapids.

“Look at Obama’s budget bill,” he said. “It’s got carbon trading. Coal generates more carbon than natural gas, and you’ve got to build that into the cost.

“This is a microcosm of national energy policy, right here in Cedar Rapids. Because it’s an economic analysis associated with burning coal, biomass or some other fuel versus natural gas.

“It’s a microcosm of putting energy production closer to where it is utilized or moving energy greater distances either in a pipe or wire. It’s a manifestation old infrastructure being replaced by new infrastructure with vast differences in capital costs …”

In short, it isn’t good news in any event for those who had loved the low-cost steam from the disabled Sixth Street Generating Station.

It will cost too much to retrofit the Sixth Street Generating Station and add emission controls – Protsch doubted the small plant could win any environmental waiver — to burn coal.

And it cost too much to pipe more expensively produced steam from natural gas though an old, inefficient system of pipes.

“Absent” some big subsidy, Protsch repeated along the way.

Mayor’s speech downtown is a reminder that all is not well there

A mayor’s annual address on the condition of the city is generally an upbeat affair with a focus on the accomplishments in the year past and the ones sure to come in the year ahead.

That was the case on Friday when Mayor Kay Halloran and Brian Fagan, mayor pro tem, spoke at the League of Women Voters of Cedar Rapids/Marion’s annual State of the City luncheon.

This year, though, it was hard not to feel how far there is yet to go in the city’s recovery from the June 2008 flood, a recovery that must come in the midst of a troubling national economic downturn.

Friday’s event was held in what over the years has become the lone downtown venue for such gatherings: The Ballroom of the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel.

The hotel is in bankruptcy and being run by an interim hotel manager, and for more than a year now, the hotel chain that owns the Crowne Plaza moniker has threatened to withdraw it from Cedar Rapids only downtown hotel.

The previous owner of the hotel had been required to upgrade the building to keep the Crowne Plaza name, and, in fact, much of that work was completed, reports Patrick DePalma, chairman of the city’s Five Season Facilities Commission. The rooms still need new TVs, and, more to the point of the mayor’s Friday speech, there is still a need to upgrade the hotel’s Ballroom, DePalma says.

One of the typical routes to The Ballroom is through the entrance to the U.S. Cellular Center, which is joined to the hotel. You walk in the center’s lobby and head up the towering escalator to the next floor to get to the hotel lobby and The Ballroom. But the escalator has been out of service since the machinery that drives it took on water in the June flood.

Nearly nine months after the flood, there surely are some who, hiking up the stationary escalator steps, aren’t wondering if the city’s recovery from the flood will ever come.

The city’s Facilities Commission oversees the city-owned event center and it plays a role in the hotel because the city owns the land and air rights for the hotel.

The commission’s DePalma says he’s tried to impress on the city the need to get moving on fixing the flood damage to the U.S. Cellular Center’s lobby and to the escalator there. He says the work is dependent on funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and he says City Hall controls the schedule on which of the many flood-damaged city properties gets fixed first.

“We’ve talked to the city and said, ‘Let’s get this done,’” he says. “The work that needs to be done is fairly minor in terms of how much it would take and how much it would cost compared to (other projects).”

DePalma says the city’s first focus in the downtown is to fix elevators in damaged parking ramps.

“We understand that,” he says. But he says he hopes the U.S. Cellular Center comes soon after.

“Any pressure you can put on them,” DePalma says. “It’s not a difficult thing to take care of. But I can’t hire a contractor.”

Under consideration, he says, is doing away with the escalator and replacing it with an elevator and a staircase.

The public now can ride the elevator next door that leads into the hotel lobby on the second floor.

For whatever reason, the audience was a little smaller this time for the mayor’s annual address. The League of Women Voters put the count at about 300, down about 60 from the year before.

Six of nine City Council members did not attend to hear their council colleagues, Halloran and Fagan, speak. Council member Justin Shields was on hand.

The center of the city’s government has been operating out of an office building in a northeast Cedar Rapids office park since the flood. The council holds its formal Wednesday evening meetings in an auditorium nearby on the AEGON USA campus. The flood-damaged City Hall downtown remains empty and awaiting renovation.

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.”

Fix of flood damage to beloved Cedar Rapids trails not expected for months

It was nice and warm enough Wednesday to start thinking about the Spandex shorts and a first bicycle ride of the year.

Go easy.

Dave Smith, the city’s parks superintendent, reports that major flood damage on sections of both the paved Cedar River Trail and the unpaved Sac & Fox Trail isn’t apt to be repaired until late summer at the earliest.

Sections of both trails are being used and have been since the flood, but it will be months before someone can traverse the full extent of either trail, Smith says. In fact, the city isn’t “recommending” use of the Sax & Fox, though that isn’t stopping some.

Both trails are in the same boat.

The city’s damage-assessment consultant has come up with a cost estimate of damage as has the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That process will result in FEMA’s decision for reimbursement to the city to make the repairs. The city will then seek bids and a winning contractor will do the work.

As for the Cedar River Trail, Smith says users can and have been able to use the trail from its northern end at Hiawatha through the downtown. Users then must move into the city’s Park and Ride lot at Ninth Avenue SE where the new railroad bridge is going up, before they can continue on the trail to just south of Czech Village.

It is the next mile of trail, though, that remains closed. At one point, the trail was ripped up for the removal of a flood-damage bridge that crosses the river at the former Farmstead plant. Farther on, the river bank is washed out right to the trail edge, with debris and a fence collapsed on the trail. Once the trail begins to gain some height, it is fine all the way to the southern end south of Ely Road.

This summer, Smith says, should see a fix of the damage and also extend the southern edge of the trail to 76^th Avenue SW.

As for the Sac and Fox Trail, Smith says pretty much the entire trail was flooded. There are several places where flood water has left mud and debris and has caused blowouts and deep cuts in the trail. In addition, the pedestrian bridge just north of Mount Vernon Road SE remains collapsed and in Indian Creek. The bridge needs to be pulled out and its supports rebuilt before the bridge can be reset or replaced.