City and state celebrate funding that will help put people into 177 new residences by year’s end

Sometimes a city needs a dog-and-pony show.

At least the case could be made for the one — for the news conference — on Thursday in which state and local officials met in a new housing development in northwest Cedar Rapids to celebrate a significant infusion of federal dollars designed to help build 177 owner-occupied residences here by the end of the year.
Of the 177, 94 will be single-family homes and 83 will be condominiums.

In total, the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the Rebuild Iowa Office are steering about $7.5 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds into Cedar Rapids for the new construction. Statewide including in Cedar Rapids, a total of $17 million is being spent on the program, which will result in a total of 343 new owner-occupied residences, Mike Tramontina, director of the state economic development agency, noted at Thursday’s news conference.

Lt. Gen. Ron Dardis, who heads up the Rebuild Iowa Office, said the homebuilding is part disaster recovery and part economic stimulus that will fill a need for affordable housing in Cedar Rapids that existed before the June 2008 flood and exists even more now.

Those purchasing the 177 new residents can qualify to receive up to 30 percent of the cost of the home or condominium as down payment assistance on new homes worth $180,000 or less. The new owners must have a household income at or below the average median household income and they must be able to support a mortgage on the new residence.

Dardis said the program’s down payment assistance will open up some of the homes to those who lost residences in the flood, and as a result, will allow some flood victims to regain “a sense of neighborhood.” It’s hard to measure the extra value of that, Dardis said.

Thursday’s news conference on Moose Drive NW in the Wilderness Estates Edition took place almost directly in front of the basement of Rick Davis’ new house.

Davis, an active member of the Northwest Neighbors, lost his house in the Time Check Neighborhood, and he said he Thursday he would not be preparing to move into a new house on the edge of town except for the down payment assistance in the program that was being celebrated on Thursday.

A lover of the Time Check Neighborhood, Davis said he did not want to live there now because he didn’t trust the river.

“I’m out in the country now,” he joked. “I’ve got corn instead of the river.”

Ben Busch spoke at the news conference and said the program was allowing him, wife Jenna and their two young children to move out of apartments and into not just their first house, but a new house.

City Manager Jim Prosser noted that 20 local builders are involved in building the 177 new residences that are part of the down payment assistance program. He called the funding program a “signature” one and he said it has been well-designed to provide needed housing in an efficient way.

Prosser pointed to a January 2009 survey of the city’s flood-recovery housing needs, and he said the 177 new residences plus another 20 new homes being build in the Oakhill Jackson Neighborhood have put the city well on the way to meeting a goal of seeing 300 or so owner-occupied residences built as part of the city’s flood recovery.

Local home builders already have been inquiring about the prospects of a second round of funding for the program, and the state’s Tramontina did not rule out such a prospect. He said it would depend on money and actual housing demand in Cedar Rapids.

Kyle Skogman, president of Skogman Homes, left Tramontina with an idea. Skogman said the state of Iowa should consider similar housing incentives in the years ahead as the city buys out and demolishes flood-damaged houses and has lots, in some instances, on which new homes can be built.

Flood victims in newly purchased homes may not lose their down-payment assistance after all; city looks at using local-option sales tax revenue to help

City Hall is investigating the possibility of providing targeted help to flood victims who received state Jumpstart down-payment assistance on a new home and now have learned that the amount of assistance will be subtracted from any buyout payment on their old home.

The local Jumpstart office two weeks ago said 383 homeowners had received Jumpstart down-payment help to date at a cost of $8.8 million or about $23,000 per home.

Initially, it was unclear if that money would be considered a “duplication of benefits” subject to deduction from a homeowner’s buyout settlement. However, the down-payment assistance is now considered a duplication of benefits.

City Manager Jim Prosser brought up the issue at Wednesday evening’s council meeting as he and the City Council talked about how much money the city will need to buy out some 1,300 flood-damaged homes and other properties.

There seems a growing likelihood that the city will have enough money to do the job.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay to buy out a first group of about 170 flood-damaged properties that sit in a proposed greenway area along the river.

Additionally, the state of Iowa has proposed setting aside $245 million of a latest round of $517 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds for buyouts statewide. And the city has made a request for $175 million of that amount to pay help for buyouts of another 1,150 or so homes and other properties.

The city also is now collecting a 1-percent local-option sales tax, which could raise $80 million or more over five years for use in buyouts and other housing issues related to flood recovery.

It is from this last batch of money, the local-option sales tax revenue, that Prosser said the city is looking to draw to provide some relief to those who stand to essentially lose their Jumpstart down-payment assistance on a newly purchased home once the city buys out flood-damaged homes.

Prosser said such a use of sales-tax revenue was needed for those who bought a home not unlike the one they lost in the flood only to find that they do not have sufficient income to support mortgage payments on the newly purchased home.

The city has expected FEMA and CDBG money to carry much of the load on buyouts, but Prosser said the city always knew there would be funding “gaps” for which local-option sales tax revenue could be used.

Those who stand to lose their down-payment assistance may be one of those gaps, he said.

On Thursday, Prosser said his staff is still looking into how many properties might be involved and how much the city might be able to steer to help those who had gotten down-payment assistance.

Vernon vents; dresses down City Manager Prosser for not getting police substation in storefront at 1501 First Ave. SE open quickly

Council member Monica Vernon, fresh off her decision on Tuesday not to try a run for mayor, took time at Wednesday evening’s council meeting to tear into City Manager Jim Prosser.

Vernon, who for many months has made it clear she thinks the current City Council has acceded too much power to Prosser, was angry that the Police Department had not yet gotten the city’s first police substation open in a vacant storefront at 1501 First Ave. SE.

Police Chief Greg Graham initially had said he wanted to be in the building in June in the wake of an attack on police officer Tim Davis just two blocks away.

It’s not worked out that way, and Vernon isn’t happy about it.

Wednesday evening, looking straight at Prosser, Vernon declared that the city has a crime problem, that crime is at its worst in the summer, and it was important to have gotten the substation open.

She called the matter “a can-do moment” and said Prosser has not had a “can-do attitude” about getting the project done.

Vernon then lit into City Attorney Jim Flitz, suggesting that he worries too much about preventing problems rather than solving them.

“I’m really disgusted about this,” Vernon said.

Council member Tom Podzimek calmly weighed in and suggested that the council take what steps it can to speed matters along. Then Podzimek defended Flitz: “I do think our attorney’s job is to keep us out of jail.”

Flitz said he didn’t have anything to do with the procedural steps required by state law to take bids on a renovation project.

The building needs about $50,000 in renovation work before it can be occupied. Last week, Chief Graham said it would likely be fall before the building is ready.

Prosser explained that he had taken a risk by proposing that the building’s owner do the renovations rather than the city so the job would not require public bidding and could be done faster. The cost of that was too great and couldn’t be done, he explained.

By looking at that approach, though, the project got delayed a bit, he said.

“We tried something and it didn’t work,” he said.

Even so, Prosser assured the council that the Police Department has taken additional steps to beef up their presence in the area even if the substation, which he called “symbolically” important and a good practical asset, is not yet in place.

Council member Jerry McGrane said neighborhood leaders are disappointed that the substation isn’t open yet. He called it “very unsettling.” He suggested Prosser talk to the neighborhoods.

City Hall: Changing organizational tables at PD and Code Enforcement not rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic

It’s called “flattening” the organization.

Police Chief Greg Graham detailed to the City Council this week how he is shifting the Police Department’s table of organization to have fewer top dogs and, so, a few more dogs to work the streets.

His changes will eliminate two captain slots – now vacant because of retirements – and add five sergeant spots to the department’s table of organization.

This will make for five captain positions instead of seven; 27 sergeant slots, up from 22; while the number of lieutenants will remain at 13, according to a count by the department on Thursday.

In addition, the department will have a civilian manage the city’s animal control operation, which will allow a police sergeant who has been in that slot to return to other department duties.

In the mix, too, Graham is eliminating a vacant detective slot as well as a vacant animal control kennel work job.

Throw all the changes together and the department will still have the same number of swore police officers – about 200. But the police chief says the department will have better “line-level supervision” and less top management.

At the City Council meeting Wednesday evening, council member Justin Shields asked Graham if cutting the number of captains slots might frustrate officers because it limited the number of top posts officers could aspire to fill.

Graham said it might frustrate officers because it does take away a few promotional opportunities. But the chief said he didn’t want to maintain a particular table of organization just so officers can be promoted. Positions need to have “viable functions,” he said.

“We had too many captains,” the chief said.

When all the budgetary math related to the reorganization is done, Graham is saving the city about $83,000, he told the council.

City Manager Jim Prosser also detailed a reorganization of the city’s Code Enforcement office.

The council earlier this year added nine new positions to the Code Enforcement operation to enable the city to more effectively oversee the flood-recovery rebuilding effort in the city.

One of the changes is to a Code Enforcement management position, which will eliminate the housing/zoning manager post and replace it with an assistant code enforcement manager position.

The reorganization will create two positions with the title “nuisance abatement officer.”

Council member Justin Shields told Prosser that he has been urging the city to take care of a couple of particular nuisances for a year. He asked the city manager if the nuisance positions might better get things done.

Code Enforcement now will have the equivalent of 38.5 full-time positions, up from 38.17, Prosser said.

City readies to take down 71 more flood-damaged homes, but not before councilman Wieneke questions costly caution over asbestos

Seventy down, the next 71 or so at the ready, 1,150 or so to go.

The City Council this week gave the go-ahead to demolish 71 more flood-damaged properties.

The demolition of a first group of 70 properties, most of which were homes, was completed at the end of April.

This next group of properties is part of a group of homes tagged with red placards in the city’s worst-to-best system of purple, red, yellow and green placards. The purple-placarded homes came down first.

The decision this week to go ahead with 71 or so more homes did not come with some disagreement.

Council member Chuck Wieneke took great exception to the city’s plan to – as it did with the purple-placarded homes – treat the next 71 homes as too unsafe to enter. With that status, the city plan is that the properties can’t be checked for asbestos and the asbestos, if found, can’t be removed before demolition.

As a result, the entire property is considered to be asbestos-containing material, which requires special handling and increased costs during demolition.

Wieneke said he had “real heartburn” with the idea that the city would be paying what he said would be five times the regular demolition cost because of the decision about asbestos. He estimated the cost to demolish each house as it it had asbestos at $35,000 to $37,000.

He noted that many of the red-placarded houses have been entered by the homeowners with the assistance of city staff since the flood, and he didn’t see why city staff couldn’t do the same now to identify and mitigate any asbestos.

Wieneke said he’d be willing to walk into the homes.

City Manager Jim Prosser and Tim Manz, the city’s interim manager of code enforcement, countered, telling Wieneke that the city’s latest round of inspections found these 71 properties to be the worst of what is left standing and too unsafe to enter.

Manz said the structural instability of the 71 properties was similar to the purple-placarded homes that have now been demolished.

He noted that the city has another 140 homes that it has received permission from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take down, and he said that group of homes likely will allow for asbestos assessment and removal before demolition.

Council member Justin Shields said it was best to err on the side of safety. Manz assured council member Tom Podzimek that the owners were being notified before the demolitions.

Bids for the work must be submitted to the city by 11 a.m. June 11.

The contract calls for an estimated 71 structures to be down by Sept. 25.

The city continues to await additional federal Community Development Block Grant funds, which it plans to use to pay for buyouts and demolitions of most of the 1,300 flood-damaged homes and other structures it expects to buy out.

FEMA has agreed to pay for demolitions of a few hundred of the worst-damaged properties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Candidate Corbett says city doesn’t need a full-time mayor or a flood CEO

Some critics of City Hall in the business community can begin to long for an earlier time when the city had a full-time mayor, not the current part-time one, to run the show.

Ron Corbett, who announced his candidacy for mayor this week, dismissed such a suggestion in a talk with The Gazette’s editorial board.

Critics who might be thinking about mobilizing the community to change the city’s form of government shouldn’t waste their time, Corbett implied.

“I think you can have strong leadership in any form of government,” Corbett said.

It was only in 2005 that Cedar Rapids residents overwhelming voted to replace its century-old commission form of government with the current professional city manager and a part-time council and part-time mayor.

The commission government had five full-time council members who doubled as department administrators.

But as Corbett pointed out this week, the commission government really was not a strong-mayor form of government. The mayor in that set-up had one of five votes, just like the current part-time mayor is one of nine votes on the council.

What those romanticizing about the past recall, he said, is the city’s long-time, legendary mayor, Don Canney. He said people remember Canney as a strong mayor, but he added it was not because of the form of government.

“It was because he stepped up as an individual,” Corbett said of Canney. “I believe individuals can step in and make a difference.”

Back in 2004, Corbett, then president/CEO of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, led a petition drive that amassed a required 10,000 signatures that prompted the convening of a Home Rule Charter Commission. (The City Council at the time could have convened the commission, but it wanted to see the signatures).

Over many months, the Charter Commission studied government and opted to give voters the option of council/manager government with a part-time mayor and part-time council. It rejected the option for a full-time mayor.

One of the central arguments in that discussion, which also applied to the commission form of government, was that full-time elected positions prevented talented people from running for City Hall office because they didn’t want to give up careers to do so.

Corbett this week said that was the right decision.

He then talked about the news conference he held at 10 a.m. Monday to announce his run for mayor.

Fifteen minutes after the event, he said he was back at his desk at trucking firm CRST International Inc. on the city’s west side working on the employees’ health-care package.

Holding city office while having a job outside of city government “grounds” a person in real life, Corbett said. He said he wouldn’t want to give that up as mayor.

On a second front, the City Council this evening is going to discuss hiring a new executive to focus on flood recovery, what council member Monica Vernon — and possible mayoral candidate — has called a flood CEO.

The council discussion will be interesting, in part, to see where such a new employee might fit in the City Hall scheme in relation to City Manager Jim Prosser.

Corbett said the city doesnt’ need a flood CEO. He said the city needs a stronger mayor.

The city manager can deliver what a flood CEO might with “the right direction from the mayor and City Council,” he said.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EPRC works to matter; its director, Doug Neumann, tightropes a middle ground with gentle kicks at ‘mayor’s office’ and business leaders who are ‘off track’

The day you know what EPRC stands for may not come until the day is closer for the upstart Economic Planning and Redevelopment Corp. to have a quantifiable victory or two for Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery.

Even its director, Doug Neumann, says the acronym is little known and the corporation’s name is pretty cumbersome and bureaucratic-sounding.

But Neumann told the Downtown Rotary this week that the name is what it is and that he and the endeavor had bigger fish to fry. The EPRC’s singular goal, he says, is to find money, particularly from the federal and state government and other non-local sources, to help with the city’s flood recovery.

In that regard, the group is trying to tap the U.S. Department of Commerce’s regional office in Denver, Colo., for $22 million to help fix railroad congestion downtown, support a fiber-optic system for public entities and create a Regional Economic Commerce Center.

The EPRC calls itself a private-public partnership and it has City Council member Monica Vernon, and Linda Langston, Linn County supervisor, on its four-person board.

But make no mistake: The EPRC is where local players in Cedar Rapids’ private sector can focus their muscle to help get the city back on its feet again.

The endeavor’s creation about four months ago came, in part, out of a frustration that City Hall couldn’t do it all, but that it might want to try to.

Apparently, there were some fears with some at City Hall that the private players’ real intent was to create a “shadow government” to run flood-recovery.

In any event, John Smith, president/CEO of CRST International Inc. and the chairman of the EPRC, felt obliged to assure the Downtown Rotary Club earlier this month that the EPRC was not a shadow government. Neumann did the same this Monday.

At the same time, though, Neumann said the EPRC’s intent was to “talk frankly and clearly about progress and problems” in the city’s flood recovery. He then ventured ahead to do so gently.

“When I say that we’ve lacked a strong, confident public voice from the mayor’s office, I don’t say that for any political purpose or because I wish ill-will toward anyone,” he told a crowd at the Downtown Rotary Club on Monday. “I say it because it’s important to identify that shortcoming as one of the major factors impacting long-term economic redevelopment and flood recovery.”

Of note, Neumann, who worked many months on City Hall’s Recovery and Reinvestment Coordinating Team as president of the Downtown District, did not direct his City Hall criticism at City Manager Jim Prosser or the City Council as a whole.

Then he had this to say for the private sector:

“And when I say that some business leaders are off-track when they say there has been no planning for flood recovery, or that they’ve been far too public with that criticism, I don’t say that to be defensive about progress or to pick a fight with anyone.

“I say that because we know that when those comments wind their way to Des Moines and Washington, D.C., that it severely hampers our efforts at long-term economic redevelopment and flood recovery.”

City Council aspires to bigger league; was split with smaller-ball Linn County inevitable?

On a 3-2 vote, the Linn County Board of Supervisors has decided not to study to see if it makes sense to join forces with the Cedar Rapids City Council in a new public administration building, which is being called a Community Services Center.

Even Supervisor Linda Langston, who was one of two on the short end of the vote, said she’d only continue to participate with the city in a public planning process about a building on two conditions: if the city shortened the length of the process and if the city treated the county nicer, as a “full partner.”

Ben Rogers, one of two new supervisors and the youngest of the five, was alone in advocating that the planning process could do nothing but help no matter what it came to conclude. Rogers noted, too, that joining forces with the city didn’t necessarily mean building new buildings. It could mean renovating existing ones, he said.

As much as anything, the supervisor drama on Friday served as a reminder that the city of Cedar Rapids and Linn County are two entirely different animals. They always have been.

Cedar Rapids and its City Hall are big entities with a complicated set of responsibilities: water, waste water, airport, cultural attractions and entertainment and sports venues for starters.

There’s also a downtown, which community leaders ranging far beyond City Hall say is vital to the future vitality of Cedar Rapids and to the city’s ability to keep and attract employers and employees.

Most importantly, Cedar Rapids is what community leaders in and out of City Hall never tire of reminding people of: It is the industrial and commercial economic “engine” for the city, county and region.

City Hall plays a central role in all of that as it oversees and regulates development in the city.

Linn County doesn’t.

The differences could no more clearly have been drawn between Wednesday evening’s City Council meeting and Friday’s late-morning meeting of the county supervisors.

On Wednesday evening, the City Council enthusiastically endorsed moving ahead on a public participation process to see if it makes sense to build a new Community Services Center of some kind that city, county and school district might somehow share.

Council members Brian Fagan and Justin Shields talked passionately about the city’s need to challenge the notion that it was good enough to just restore a damaged city to the way it had been before the flood.

“Sometimes out of ashes you want to rise from those ashes and build something better than what was there before,” Shields said.

 “I think this is a unique opportunity … that the city, county and school districts have to really come together and think of all the things that we do and they do and see if we can’t come up some plan that will put those facilities together and make them better than they ever were, and look to the future that we’re building for the next 50 to 100 years,” Shields said.

Fagan put the matter in a larger framework. He said the city was doing nothing short of challenging what he said was the conventional approach that the Federal Emergency Management Agency tries to insist on. Fagan said FEMA wants jurisdictions to rebuild flood-damaged buildings as they were, while he said he wants to rebuild better than before.

His hope, he said, was that the Obama administration might share his view of how a city should come back after a flood.

“This is an opportunity for us again to be an example for the country in terms of how we rebuild,” Fagan said.

And council member Tom Podzimek wasn’t even at the meeting. He was sick. Podzimek is most insistent of the need for council members to look to the long term and to measure things like a building’s energy efficiency, its environmental impact and its life-cycle costs before making decisions about building or renovating.

Friday morning, over at the Linn County Board of Supervisors, Supervisor Brent Oleson, the new representative on the board from Marion, seemed to state the case for the supervisor majority best.

He said the supervisors didn’t want any kind of new building in which they shared a board room or council chambers with anyone else. The county needs its own, he said.

Oleson revealed  that  Podzimek had called him Thursday evening to talk about the need for more information before moving ahead.

Oelson, though, rejected the Podzimek notion, and the Fagan one for that matter.

“I’m not going to be paralyzed,” Oelson said about the need to get more facts. He said he had plenty of facts.

The county’s Administrative Office Building can live on another 70 or more years, he said. Let’s fix it, he said, and move back in.

Oleson said it was time to separate needs from wants.

Would I want a “greener” building that would be the pride of all of Iowa? Maybe, he said.

“But it’s not feasible now,” he concluded.

Supervisors Lu Barron and Jim Houser were quick to note the existing building can be made more “green.”

Barron was the swing vote on this, and she stuck with the majority in withdrawing from any co-location discussions with the city in a new Community Services Center.

After all, she noted, the public participation process calls for the hiring of two consultants to help lead the process over six or more months. Does the county want to share in those costs? she wondered.

Even Supervisor Langston questioned the need for consultants from out of state, hinting that’s what City Hall had in mind.

The city has had two consultants, national consultant Camp Dresser & McKee and local consultant Howard R. Green, leading months of behind-the-scenes discussions on the co-location idea to date.

In the longer view, this parting of the ways between the supervisors and City Hall isn’t really surprising.

It was only just a few years ago, in the early 2000s, that now-likely mayoral candidate Ron Corbett, then president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, worked to get city and county to merge some of their operations. He threw in the towel on it.

Instead, the city changed its government to a one with a professional city manager and a part-time council, while the county enlarged its government to five supervisors without a professional manager.

On Friday, Les Beck, the county’s chief planner, encouraged the supervisors to stay in the planning process on co-location of facilities. Beck said planning led to “informed decisonmaking,” a concept which Cedar Rapids City Manager Jim Prosser talks a lot about. Planners talk that way.

The planning process, though, would have required spending some funds on it and, maybe, a lot of money down the road on new facilities, and the county opted out.

This is a city election year. Six of nine council members face re-election, including the mayor.

What happened between the county and city last week, no doubt, will help shape the election debate with at least three questions:

Do voters want the city to be better than before? How much planning does that require? And just where does a new public building fit on the priority list?

Council enthused about public process for new ‘Community Services Center,’ but would council avoid a citizen vote to get it built?

Wednesday night, the City Council launched a six-to-ninth-month public participation process aimed to help the city see if it should build what essentially would be a new city hall.

The flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall on May’s Island would serve other functions if a new building is built.

The city is calling the new building a Community Services Center, and the concept is for the city, county and school district to participate in the public input process to see if it might make sense for the three entities to co-locate services in a services center building or on a campus.

All three have had flood damage to their central offices, and all three have been meeting for months to ready for the public participation process.

At the Wednesday night council meeting, council members Justin Shields, Brian Fagan and Monica Vernon voiced strong support for the public process, while Shields and Fagan talked about wanting the city’s future to be better than its past and how a new building might be a way to accomplish that.

At the same time, Fagan and City Manager Jim Prosser both made reference to an ongoing council lobbying effort that might need to succeed if a new City Hall/Community Services Center is ever built.

Those initiatives address how the city might pay to build a new building.

One of the initiatives on the council’s lobbying priority list would change state law to allow the city to use bond debt to pay to build a new City Hall/Community Services Center without holding a citizen vote. Such a vote is required now.

Some months ago, the city’s Statehouse lobbyist, former state legislator Larry Murphy, told the council that a law change to allow the city to forego a citizen vote on bonding for a public building was the least likely of the city’s lobbying initiatives to gain favor among legislators.

It was hard to know what Fagan and Prosser meant when they made passing reference to lobbying initiatives on Wednesday night. But after Wednesday’s meeting both noted that one of the initiatives they had in mind was acquiring the ability to forgo a bond referendum vote. Prosser recalled that lobbyist Murphy had doubts about a law change to permit that.

In the past, Prosser has said times of natural disaster might require such a change.

Fagan noted how difficult it would be if city, county and school district one day did decide to co-locate in a building or on a campus. Current state law might require each entity to go to voters separately to pass a bond vote, he said.

The city also is seeing if it’s possible to raise its debt ceiling or to see if the state might establish a bonding pool to help finance public buildings hit by disaster.

The council also is talking about an idea of a new Community Safety Training Center for police and firefighter training and a Community Operations Center, which might involve a reconfiguration of the city’s Public Works Facility at 1201 Sixth St. SW.

Council to unleash public debate on a new City Hall; Do Twin Pines and Westdale prove that the public can have a say on big issues?

It’s not clear if the brouhahas of the last couple years over the Twin Pines Golf Course and Westdale Mall are relevant to the newest City Hall-engineered public debate that is now set to emerge.

But they might be relevant. Those past debates might be instructive.

What the City Council intends to do this evening is begin a six-to-nine-month “public participation process” to see if it makes sense for the public to spend money to build new public buildings.

Joining the council in the public discussion are the Linn County Board of Supervisors and the Cedar Rapids school board. All three entities have had their central administrative offices damaged by last June’s flood.

The three groups of elected officials want to see – and they want the public to help them see – whether they should build a new Community Services Center where all three central administrative operations would locate. The site might include one building or a campus of buildings.

City consultant Sasaki Associates Inc. has said one of any number of potential sites for such a campus would be on the west side of the Cedar River between the Cedar River and Interstate 380.

This discussion over a new Community Services Center likely will draw more attention to the City Council’s piece of the debate because the council is talking about moving most of city government to a new building and leaving the city’s historic Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall on May’s Island for other uses.

The City Council also will ask the public if it supports a Community Safety Training Center, which would feature training classes and areas for firefighters and law enforcement officers and might be located at Kirkwood Community College. And the council also is looking at Community Operations Center, which could mean just reconfiguring the city’s existing Public Works Building to handle some county and school vehicle maintenance functions.

Pete Welch, chairman of the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission, has expressed concern over many months about the City Council’s plans for the May’s Island City Hall. The city, county and school district have been meeting for months with city consultant Camp Dresser & McKee Inc. to discuss ideas about “co-locating” in a building or campus of buildings as a prelude to the next six to nine months of public debate on the idea.

Welch has worried that the script and its ending already have been written and that the co-location idea will win a ringing endorsement when all is said and done.

On the other hand, City Manager Jim Prosser dismisses such a suggestion. Prosser says elected officials never really know where a public debate will lead once it begins. You just got to trust it will get you to the correct outcome whatever it might be, Prosser says.

The Welch-Prosser comments bring back the memory of the Twin Pines Golf Course and the city’s vision for Westdale Mall.

Out at Twin Pines, the council toyed with the idea of selling a piece of the course to pay to make needed repairs to it. Suffice to say the idea wasn’t embraced by some in the public. City Hall created a special task force, which met at public meetings for months before concluding that selling a piece of the course was a bad idea. That was the end of it. The latest: The council has now agreed to use property-tax revenue to help pay the golf operation’s debts instead of making it rely solely on golf fees.

Out at Westdale Mall –- this was in 2007 before flood recovery became all-consuming — the City Council decided to take a look at the failing mall to see if it could help provide a vision for its future. Westdale Mall is in the same boat as scores of mall across the nation, and the city hired a mall expert to come in and talk about what other places have done to revitalize such “greyfield” properties.

The expert came up with some ideas that would transform the mall from just a retail center into something that was part retail, part office and part residential with the thought that a space there could be made for a public library branch.

The mall owner had no interest. Those from the public who spoke at public open houses said they didn’t want to give up the mall as is. A few local Realtors said the mall could be brought back to life. And a few developers were mad because the city asked them to wait before they cherry-picked parcels on the exterior of the mall site to build minor projects.

Eventually, after that public participation process, the council moved on. The mall is in worse shape now and no developer has followed through in building a strip mall or something else on the mall’s perimeter.

At its meeting tonight, the City Council is proposed to create a steering committee to oversee the public participation process related to the building of a Community Services Center as well as a Community Safety Training Center and Community Operations Center.

The steering committee will consist of two representatives from the council, the county supervisors and the school board.

As now planned, the steering committee initially will seek proposals for two positions: a process manager, who will coordinate the public participation process; and a planning advisor, who will work on determining things like space requirements, design and construction costs that would come with building buildings.

One argument for “co-location” in new public buildings: ‘Getting people to the right parking lot’

One of the big questions that local taxpayers will face later this year is this one: Do you want to build brand-new public buildings to replace flood-damaged ones or not?

City Hall, along with Linn County and the Cedar Rapids school district, is preparing a six-month-or-so public participation process to take public input on what to build or not to build.

All three central administrative buildings were hit by the flood: City Hall on May’s Island; the county’s Administrative Office Building, across from the Penford Products plant on First Street SW; and the school district’s Educational Service Center on Second Avenue SW.

Camp Dresser & McKee, a consultant for the city, detailed last week what a new Community Services Center might include. SEE http://gazetteonline.com/Assets/images/commservicescenter.jpg

Such a center might be a single building or a campus of buildings with space to house the functions that had been in the three flood-damaged administrative buildings.

A second city consultant, Sasaki Associates Inc., last week said that one place such a Community Services Center might go is on the west side of the river somewhere between the river and Interstate 380.

Proponents of such a center note that it would be more sensible for the public to find and a more efficient place for the government entities to deliver services.

One frequent example often cited is that people no longer would show up at City Hall and be told to go to the Public Works Building to get a building permit. Or they wouldn’t show up at the county building to see the assessor and be told that the county assessor is there but the city assessor is in the city’s office over at Public Works.

The idea behind the Community Services Center is “to get everyone to the right parking lot.”

Such a “co-location” of services also could have common spaces shared by the three entities: a lunch room, for instance, or even a public meeting space that the City Council, Board of Supervisors and school board all could use.

Another proposed new building is called the Community Operations Center. SEE http://gazetteonline.com/Assets/images/commopscenter.jpg

This would be a facility in which the public didn’t need to use much. It would house the city’s streets, sewer and garbage operations and also could house the fleet maintenance operations of city, county and school district.

One idea is that it would be located at the city’s existing Public Works Building, 1201 Sixth St. SW.

A third new public building –- a Community Safety Training Center — might be located at Kirkwood Community College. That’s at least one idea, Police Chief Greg Graham has said.

It would have classrooms, a fire tower for firefighter training, indoor and outdoor firing ranges and driving courses. SEE http://gazetteonline.com/Assets/images/commtrainingcenter.jpg

A joint safety training center also could include a joint communications dispatch center, an idea which holds out the prospect that one day the city and county might actually combine their dispatch services.

One skeptic of the public participation process has been Pete Welch, chairman of the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission. The commission operates the city’s Veterans Memorial Building that houses City Hall.

A new Community Services Center would mean that city government would not return to City Hall, and Welch has been displeased because he says that he and the commission have not been involved in much of the discussion to date. At one point, Welch said city leaders write a script, know the ending and then conduct a public participation process to get there.

City Manager Jim Prosser dismisses such a notion.

“When you are making these big decisions on these facilities, you need to get public feedback,” Prosser told The Gazette editorial board last week. “So we’ll have a public participation process.

“I know people struggle with this idea, but when you do that, you really have to start that process with the idea that you just have to trust the process and not know what the outcome is or not have a favorite son in that outcome. You just have to let it go. Whether there will be co-location or not, I don’t know. You just got to let it go. And if it makes sense, it will show. And if it doesn’t, it will show that, too.”

Melting snow serves as a reminder: What if it floods before new levees, flood walls are in place?

This week’s snow melt has a lot of water flowing into streams and rivers again, a fact that surely is getting some to wonder what the months ahead might bring.

With a certain queasiness in the air, the City Council on Wednesday evening will discuss ways to install temporary flood control methods should a flood arrive again this year or in the next several years.

Additional temporary protection would buy some time while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completes a feasibility study on a new, permanent system of flood control levees and flood walls for the city. The study could take a couple years and it could take eight to 15 years for such a permanent system to be in place.

This week’s council agenda states that the council may take action and purchase an interim flood-control product.

The council first discussed interim flood control at its Dec. 17 meeting with Ken DeKeyser, the city’s storm water management engineer, and city consultant Stanley Consultants Inc., Muscatine, Iowa.

At the December session, the council learned about three products on the market for temporary flood control.

One product, Hesco Barriers, is a plastic lined basket in which sand is loaded.

A second product,  Quick Levee Builder, forces sand into a plastic liner.

A third product, referred to as a tiger dam, is a liner that holds water.

The consultant estimated that it would cost $1.5 million for the Hesco Barriers to protect the downtown, Czech Village, and the Time Check area to 22 feet, which is three feet above what had been the previous record flood level in Cedar Rapids of 19 feet.

The June 2008 flood hit 31.12 feet.

At the December council meeting, council member Tom Podzimek wondered if the ingenuity of some local engineers might lead to another, less costly interim protection system.

Just last week, City Manager Jim Prosser said interim flood control could cost anywhere from nothing – presumably little would be done – to $50 million.

Council not using L-word or F-word, but it seems to sense: big hike in property taxes might louse up sales tax

At last Thursday evening’s budget meeting, City Council member Pat Shey put it this way: “We’re going to ask a lot from citizens this year.”

Shey mentioned higher fees: The proposed new budget includes a 14-percent hike in the city utility bill — for water, waste water, storm sewer and garbage services; and the proposed budget includes a brand-new 2-percent fee on electric and natural gas bills.

And then Shey mentioned the 1-percent local-option sales tax, which the council is asking voters to approve on March 3.

With the fees and the sales tax, he didn’t think the public would take kindly to a 14-percent boost in property taxes at the same time.

That level of property-tax increase was what the city manager had proposed for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

But Shey said, maybe the question was this: “What can we do to trim services.”

He wasn’t alone among council members, who sent Casey Drew, the city’s finance director, City Manager Jim Prosser and the city government’s department heads back to the drawing board. In short, the message was this: go find some place to cut.

One inference from what Shey had said is the council has the ability to louse up passage of the local-option sales tax if it doesn’t take it easy on property taxes, which is the principal revenue source for local governments in Iowa.

And the council – and a host of local groups from the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce to Hawkeye Labor Council – doesn’t want to louse up the prospects for the sales tax, the revenue from which they say the city needs as it works to recover from the 2008 flood.

The sales tax will raise between $18 million and $23 million a year for Cedar Rapids for five years and three months.

However, it’s still unclear what the City Council is going to cut out of its proposed budget.

No council member has mentioned the L word – layoffs – or the F word – furloughs.

Two-thirds of the city’s 1,400 employees are in bargaining units, and the council pretty much agreed that those bargaining units wouldn’t have any interest in opening up contract agreements that are set to pay those employees raises of 3.25 to 3.5 percent.

So council members Kris Gulick and Monica Vernon said the council may have to lower wages for the other third of employees outside of bargaining units. The part-time council’s annual salary is tied to the cost of living index, which went up 1.1 percent in the last year, and maybe that is where wage increases should be for others, Gulick and Vernon said.

The City Council has been at its budget-making business for a good month now. That’s where council members have been Thursday evenings, and a Tuesday evening or two.

In the process, the city government’s department heads have trooped in, stating needs, making their cases for how to better deliver services.

Until last Thursday, it had been an odd few weeks. Everyone was asking for more. No one, including council members, was talking about less.

But then, after all, it was a time of recovery from a natural disaster.

Last Thursday evening, all those department heads were back, sitting, shoulder to shoulder, and listening to what the council had to say.

Suddenly, the tone shifted.

Talking green at City Hall until they’re blue in the face

They’ve been talking green at City Hall until they’re blue in the face. And they did last week, too.

In unveiling plans for renovating and/or replacing flood-damaged city buildings, the City Council and the city’s team of engineering and architectural consultants made it clear that any of the work will incorporate “green,” “sustainable” techniques.

Eric Davis, an architect for consultant Camp Dresser & McKee, Inc., used the example of the 30-year-old, flood-damaged downtown public library and how it might be brought back to life — but to a different life than before the flood.

In truth, the city had been trying to figure out a futurist, efficient way to heat and cool the place for some years prior to the flood.

Davis imagined the flood-damaged library with a roof that was part grass or other vegetation — to capture rainwater rather than sending it all into the sewer – and part white in color, which would reflect heat away from it so the building would stay cool in the summer.

The library, too, could come with “superinsulation.” Cisterns could catch rainwater and use it in toilets. There could be trees that lose their leaves close to the building to shade the building in summer and help heat it in winter. The roof also could include solar skylights that track with the sun’s path. And some of the new thermal windows would open to cool the building on some days rather than running air conditioning. There also could be a closed-loop geothermal heating and cooling system.

Davis used the example of the flood-damaged Central Fire Station. He estimated that it would cost an additional $425,000 to add green, sustainable features to the building as part of what is estimated to be a $10-million repair project. He said the upgrade would save $10,000 a year in energy costs – not counting the value that accrues to the nation in using less energy — and save 150,000 gallons of water a year.

It’s still unclear, both with the library and the fire station, if they will be renovated or replaced. Both are in the same boat: the Federal Emergency Management Agency must agree that the buildings sustained flood damage in excess of 50 percent of their value before they pay to replace the buildings. Otherwise, the buildings must be renovated, city officials have said.

It will be fascinating to watch this discussion about green and sustainable in upcoming months and in the next few years.

Both words, green and sustainable, are all the rage from the Potomac River to the Cedar River and beyond.

In discussions here, both words can be used as an argument for building new.

The City Council last week said it was starting a six-month public participation initiative to ask citizens if it should build a brand-new Community Services Center and a brand-new Community Safety Training Center. A services center would mean that city government wouldn’t return to the flood-damaged City Hall on May’s Island.

One idea is to “co-locate,” with city, county and school district locating services in the services center – which might be a building or a campus of buildings. City and county also could both use a new safety training center. The city also is talking about a community operations center, which might be a fancy name for doing some renovations at the existing public works building.

In talking about building new, there is still the fact that the city has two flood-damaged icons that will be renovated in any event. Those are City Hall and the existing federal courthouse on First Street SE, which the city will inherit once the new federal courthouse opens in 2012.

In an interview last week, City Manager Jim Prosser said that the City Council has made it clear that sustainability would be an important feature of the city’s plans moving ahead.

“We have to walk our talk in these areas,” Prosser said. “We can’t say to everybody else, ‘You should be more sustainable’ and we don’t do it. We’ve got to set the standard.”

The Corporation raises profile on flood recovery; chairman John Smith backs local-option sales tax

There’s a new guy on the block when it comes to flood recovery. It’s called the Economic Planning & Redevelopment Corp.

 

The Corporation, formed last fall with modest fanfare, is a place for private business leaders to flex some muscle. It is a place for them to bring their influence to bear in hopes of landing some public and private funds that the city might not get otherwise.

 

If successful, the public might come to calling the entity, The Corporation.

 

Even with a bit of a corporate titan-feel, the group is structured as a public-private partnership. This is, in part, because much funding that might come into the community will need to come through City Hall or Linn County.

 

Thus, the four-person board of directors of the Corporation consists of its chairman, John Smith, president of trucking firm CRST International Inc.; Monica Vernon, Cedar Rapids council woman; Linda Langston, Linn County supervisor; and Dan Baldwin, president/CEO of the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation.

  

Doug Neumann is the full-time executive director.

Smith gave something of a profile-raising speech on Monday in front of the Downtown Rotary Club.

 

Smith said the Corporation was not intended to usurp the power of elected officials but to help.

 

He held out a challenge in saying that the Corporation will have mattered if it brings home money to the city and if it helps to quicken the pace of the community’s recovery.

 

If Smith was critical of the seven months of flood recovery to date, it was when he said the recovery had been without a “management mentality” needed to see projects through to completion.

 

It is unclear how such a suggestion might be received at City Hall or among the Linn County Board of Supervisors.

 

It is probably correct to say that seven of nine Cedar Rapids City Council members are strong supporters of City Manager Jim Prosser, who in recent months was named by Iowa’s city and county managers as Iowa’s manager of the year.

 

One of two council members who has thought the council has given up too much power to Prosser is Monica Vernon, the city representative on the Corporation.

 

Vernon is among those mentioned as a likely candidate to run for mayor.

 

Another likely candidate for mayor is Ron Corbett, a vice president for John Smith at CRST.

 

Smith is in agreement with the City Council in one regard: He told the Downtown Rotary that he supports a 1-percent local-option sales tax on the ballot March 3.

Westdale Mall owners have been over at City Hall, too; Prosser’s all ears, but he says there’s nothing to hear

It’s been a little odd to see no mention of City Hall what with all the talk about the owners of Westdale Mall trying to get Linn County to buy the long-faltering retail center.

After all, Linn County primarily fixes secondary roads and oversees state and federal funding of vital services for the developmentally disabled, the mentally ill and the poor.

Linn County historically hasn’t been out there trying to orchestrate a huge redevelopment task inside the city of Cedar Rapids.

Turns out, the current owner of the mall -– a bank stuck with the property it assumed control of in a July 2007 sheriff’s sale when the former owner failed to pay $18 million in debt — has been over to City Hall after all, reports City Manager Jim Prosser.

Or people “purporting” to represent the mall owner, the city manager says.

The thing is, though, neither Prosser nor the City Council is any kind of dumping ground.

At the same time, Prosser is the first guy standing in line to listen to somebody who wants to invest as much thoughtfulness, creativity and fiscal accountability as he does.

Prosser last week said he was all ears when owner representatives showed up a couple times in the recent past. But he Prosser said they didn’t have anything to offer the city.

“Give us a plan,” Prosser said he asked them. “Our response has always been … we’ll listen.”

Any plan would have to include a different vision for the mall, which would identify which part of the retail operation is viable and what do with the rest of the place. There might offices, condos, a public library and more, which is what City Hall spent much of 2007 suggesting to the owners.

Prosser says the city needs to have some facts about which retailers now at the mall have good numbers and what the retail prospects are for the place. How else can the city determine the site’s value, and so, a purchase price? he says.

Many have probably already forgotten, but, yes, Prosser and the City Council invested considerable time and some money back in 2007 trying to help the owner of the failed mall to imagine what the future there might look like.

This City Hall effort, of course, came before the June 2008 flood at a time when the council and the city manager had the freedom and luxury to imagine they could try to fix chronic city problems.

Back then, they wanted to try to help figure out how to transform the failing retail center into something the future could support. The reasoning: the 80-plus-acre Westdale property has been a valuable piece of property, which has contributed to the city’s valuation and its property-tax base.

Prosser and the council brought in an out-of-state consultant, and yes, there was a little anti-consultant bashing.

But they had pictures and everything of how the future might look. Some of the mall would survive, with the strongest stores “refaced” to face out to the parking lot. Other parts of the mall would be demolished to make way for other uses, condos, offices and, perhaps, a library.

In fact, the council established a development moratorium on the entire 80-plus-acre site for a few months, in an effort to make sure a developer didn’t come along, cherry-pick the best development sites on the edges that might louse up the ability to market the entire site as a whole.

By the end of 2007, the council had done enough. The owner wasn’t interested. A few local Realtors said the mall could survive as a retail center. And citizens turned out and said they wanted to see stores like “Hobby Lobby” in the retail mix.

Council caves on golf course debt; utilities, bus fares headed up; new vacuum trucks for leaf pickup; monthly downtown parking at 82 percent of pre-flood levels

The council’s annual budget work goes on.

It’s a different day, this flood-recovery era. All the numbers seem to be headed up.

Rates on the city’s package of four utilities -– water, waste water treatment/sanitary sewer, storm sewer and solid waste/recycling – are slated to go up 14 percent or $100 a year for the typical homeowner, Pat Ball, the city’s utilities director, proposed to the City Council last night.

Even the number of employees is climbing after years of cuts and after a major City Hall reorganization two years ago that sent some senior management talent packing. Some 30 new employees may be in the offing.

Among the most notable budget items last night had to do with the city’s golf operations.

In the year prior to the 2008 flood, there were few City Hall stories that garnered as much space in the news as one about the city’s Twin Pines Golf Course. The city had floated an idea to sell a piece of the place to raise money to fix it and make other golf course improvements. Golfers and park lovers were incensed, a City Hall task force was convened, and the city idea faded into a bottom drawer somewhere.

Even so, one City Hall position survived: the city golf operation would pay its way with golf fees as it always had done. It would get no general property-tax revenue to help balance its budget, no matter that it faced years of having to pay an annual debt bill in the range of $400,000 to cover the cost of improvements already made to the city’s Jones and Ellis courses.

Well, last night it was as if all of that debate never happened.

With little discussion, the City Council signaled that it will relieve the golf operation of its ongoing annual debt payments and pay those bills with general property taxes.

It was an easy switch of direction. After all, the golf operation’s entire budget was damaged what with the damage that the June flood did to the Jones Park Golf Course. Seventeen of the course’s 18 holes were destroyed, the clubhouse was flooded and the course was closed for the season. It will open this year, though to somewhat limited use, Julie Sina, the city’s parks and recreation director, said last night.

Sina noted that the trend here and nationwide continues: Fewer people are playing golf. And Sina predicted that the current recession will keep more people away from the courses this year, too.

City Manager Jim Prosser said the debt taken on in recent years to modernize the Jones and Ellis golf courses was not bad planning. No one could have foreseen golf’s downward trend, he said.

In an effort to lure more golfers to the city courses, the new budget keeps city golf fees where they have been.

Council member Brian Fagan wondered if Prosser and Sina had any plans to present the council with a plan to privatize one or more of the courses. Some other cities have tried such a thing.

Prosser said the council would likely see some information about that, but he added that privatization can be an unwelcome concept in some corners. There were some chilling responses to the idea of privatizing the city’s downtown parking operation, an idea which was set aside when the flood hit last June.

The city’s parking operation, which historically has paid for itself with fees, won’t in the next budget year. The council has given monthly parkers a reduction in fares to encourage businesses to return to the flood-damaged downtown.

Prior to the June flood, the city had 3,422 monthly parkers. It now has about 2,800 or 82 percent of the pre-flood number. The downtown parking system is now at 60-percent capacity. Some 1,800 spaces are available, Casey Drew, the city’s finance director, reported.

Two other budget highlights from last night: City bus fares are headed up from $1 to $1.25 a ride for adults and from 50 cents to 60 cents for seniors.

Fares cover about 15 percent of the cost of operating the city bus system, the city’s Ball told the council last night. One idea to cut costs was to eliminate Saturday bus service, which Ball said has reduced ridership whose fares cover only 6 percent of the cost of the service.

Council members, though, said they wanted to keep the Saturday service and preserve the five jobs that Ball said would be lost without it. Brad DeBrower, the city’s transit chief, said the Saturday service provides between 1,200 and 1,300 rides each Saturday.

For now, too, the council has kept in the proposed budget the purchase of new vacuum trucks that will change the city’s fall leaf pickup program.

With the vacuum trucks, residents no longer will rake leaves into the street, but will rake leaves to the edge of the street where the city trucks would vacuum them up. Without the trucks, Ball said the city would require residents to put all their leaves in Yardy carts of paper bags.

City readying to loan local Jumpstart office cash because state money is slow in coming

City Hall is readying to loan city funds to its Jumpstart office because of the state of Iowa’s sluggishness in paying flood victims’ housing claims to the local office.

The city’s Jumpstart office, which is being administered by two nonprofit agencies on contract with the city, reported a week ago that it was working with hundreds of frustrated flood victims, who had been cleared for funds to repair houses or make down payments on news ones but had yet to receive any money.

The local office is dispensing both state Jumpstart money and federal Community Development Block Grant money, and the federal funds come with additional rules and regulations that require more checks.

Just days ago, Doug Nelson, the local Jumpstart project manager for the Affordable Housing Network Inc., reported that the office had approved $11,013,689 in claims for CDBG funds, but the state office had only released $21,030 of the money.

Little had changed on Tuesday, when Nelson updated the City Council on the work on the local Jumpstart office.

Nelson reported that the slowdown is the result of the state’s checks to make sure there is no duplication of benefits. The local office has done the same thing.

Most flood victims seeking Jumpstart or CDBG money received payments earlier from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and, in some instances, from private insurers. The portions of those earlier payments intended for housing repair must be deducted from any new Jumpstart or CDBG award, and the process of checking those earlier payments has bogged the process down, Nelson has reported.

City Manager Jim Prosser said Tuesday that city staff members are still checking to make sure that the city can use its funds on a short-term basis to cover the state and federal funds that will be coming in the weeks ahead once claims are approved by the state of Iowa.

Prosser said directing city funds to the Jumpstart office would be a matter of shifting city cash for several weeks to the Jumpstart office to help the office with its cash flow.

The local Jumpstart office anticipates it will need about $15 million more in funds in a mix that includes about $9 million to $10 million more in state Jumpstart money. The office should have ample CDBG funds in the future, but it needs the additional Jumpstart funds to pay claims of those who can’t qualify for CDBG funds for one reason or another, Nelson has said.

Nelson noted that his office has taken 1,678 applications with 57 of those people ineligible because they had been renters not homeowners or because they had purchased another home outside of Cedar Rapids.

Of the 1,617 approved applications, 1,166 people are seeking housing rehabilitation funds and 451 down payment assistance and/or interim mortgage help.

To date, the local Jumpstart office has committed funds to 1,045 households totaling $20.87 million and has paid out $7.075 million, Nelson reported to the City Council. 

Income surtax for Iowa cities makes sense, says Iowa think tank. School districts do it, why not cities?

A progressive Iowa think tank says it makes sense to let cities in the state do what Iowa’s school districts already can do – levy an income surtax.

The Iowa Fiscal Partnership says such an income surtax for cities would provide cities with a new source of revenue so they would not need to lean so heavily on their chief source of revenue, property taxes.

State lawmakers have been promising to do something about the state’s property-tax system for years. The promise has come in large part because the property-tax system hits the job-providing sector – commercial and industrial property owners – particularly hard. Those two sectors pay tax on 100 percent of their property’s value, while homeowners pay tax on only about 45 percent of value.

No one has done any more in the state of Iowa than Cedar Rapids City Manager Jim Prosser and the Cedar Rapids City Council to try to make the case for giving cities access to more diverse kinds of revenue so it can reduce property taxes and, at the same time, raise more money.

In an issue paper published late last week, the Iowa Fiscal Partnership said an income surtax is one new revenue option for cities and it is one that is simple to implement.

The group’s report notes that 82 percent of all Iowa school districts now levy an income surtax, which is computed by individual taxpayers on their state income tax return forms. The taxpayer figures out his or her state income tax and adds the percent surtax to the figure. The state then returns the amount collected via the surtax to the school district. Iowa law allows districts to collect a surtax up to 20 percent of a person’s state income tax bill, but the average levied by school districts is between 6 and 10 percent, the Iowa Fiscal Partnership reports.

A person with a $1,000 state tax bill pays an extra $50 with a 5-percent surtax.

According to the Iowa Fiscal Partnership, the city of Cedar Rapids could raise $5.8 million a year with a 5-percent state income tax surtax, Iowa City could raise $2.72 million and Marion, $1.53 million.

By way of comparison, the city of Cedar Rapids, which does not now have a local-options sales tax, figures a 1-percent local-option sales tax could bring in between $18 million and $23 million a year.

Iowa lawmakers would have to change state law to allow cities to collect an income surtax whereas they now can collect a local-option sales tax with voter approval. Counties now can collect the income surtax, but only for emergency medical services.

The Iowa Fiscal Partnership – which is a joint policy effort of the Child & Family Policy Center in Des Moines and the Iowa Policy Project in Iowa City – says the income surtax is attractive because it does not disproportionately impact low-income and middle-income taxpayers.

The group’s report points out that an income tax surtax has the ability to help one city more than another depending on the size of one city’s income tax base.

In contrast, a state formula is in place to make larger cities that are retail centers share revenue taken in via a local-option sales tax with smaller communities around them that also put the tax in place.

Every county seat city in Iowa has a local-option sales tax in place but six –- Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Des Moines, Adel, Indianola and Ida Grove.

The Cedar Rapids City Council said it wants to put a local-option sales tax vote on the ballot, perhaps as soon as March 3.

Part of the revenue that a sales tax would raise in Cedar Rapids, no doubt, would be used to lessen or at least contain an expected significant increase in property taxes as the city works to recover from the 2008 flood.

Dismissed Civil Rights director leaves budget challenges for his successor

The city’s Civil Rights Office is a largely autonomous city operation with just a handful of employees overseen by its own citizen commission. Traditionally, its director and staff members have waltzed through city budget meetings, hearing mostly ‘thank you’ from council members for the work they did.

The latest annual budget appearance was different.

The commission’s brand-new director, Karl Cassell, has inherited budget problems, he told the City Council last week.

Cassell reported that the office’s current budget, crafted by dismissed former director, Kenneth White, was based on revenue projections that were not accurate.

As an example, Cassell reported that the budget factored in about $180,000 in grant money the office had not secured. Cassell said even if the former director had managed to secure the grants, it would have not been a sustaining way to cover annual bills. Each year would have required going out and finding a similar amount of money, he told the council.

Cassell, who had been executive director of the Jane Boyd Community House in Cedar Rapids when he was named executive director of the city’s Civil Rights Office in late November, said his office has an operating reserve, though he said that reserve is being depleted by rent costs for space his office doesn’t need. He further noted that office is locked into a lease at the 425 Plaza Building – formerly called the APAC Building – until 2010. Three work spaces in the Civil Rights Office’s suite of offices are not used, he added, and he wondered if, perhaps, his office might lease the extra space to someone else.

In the budget year beginning July 1, Cassell said his office will draw on some reserves and will forgo hiring a sixth staff member. That person was supposed to have been hired in the current budget year, but was not.

Looking ahead, Cassell noted that 2010 Census will show that the city of Marion has more than 29,000 people, which is the line beyond which a city in Iowa must devote staff resources to civil rights. Cassell said he expects that the Cedar Rapids office can handle the Marion caseload on a contractual basis. Cases in Marion now are referred to the state of Iowa’s Civil Rights Commission.

At least two local Civil Rights Commission members accompanied Cassell to the office’s budget hearing with the City Council last week.

Cassell got a warm reception.

City Manager Jim Prosser thanked Cassell for working closely with him and Casey Drew, the city’s finance director, on the budget matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

City Hall here continued on its way.

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

It’s called bureaucracy, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

Once again, who owns City Hall anyway?

It happened again at last night’s City Council budget session: The City Council and Pete Welch, chairman of the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission, were discussing who owns the Veterans Memorial Building on May’s Island that houses City Hall.

City Manager Jim Prosser has said, unequivocally, that the city government owns the building. However, Welch has said, and said again last night, that the question had an uncertain answer.

At one point, council member Monica Vernon suggested to Welch that the citizens of Cedar Rapids own the building.

In response, Welch allowed that the city surely owns the ground upon which the building sits, but he said the entire building was built as a memorial to veterans. It’s a memorial, he emphasized.

The issue of land and the air above comes into play at the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel downtown: the city owns the land, the hotel owns the building.

The seven-story Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall has been there since the 1920s.

The city’s City Council-appointed veterans commission operates the building and hires a director and a maintenance staff. The operation is financed with a portion of the city’s annual property-tax levy designated specifically for the veterans memorial.

In recent months, City Manager Prosser has emphasized that city government is only a tenant of the building, and Welch has made it clear that city government has been a “rent-free” tenant at that.

There is a sense that the City Council does not intend to return city government to the building — which was significantly damaged in the June flood and still sits empty – with the presence it had had prior to the flood.

The council, the Linn County Board of Supervisors and the Cedar Rapids school district all have spent some time, largely behind the scenes, talking about the prospect of locating together in one spot, likely in a new building. The entities call it “co-location.”

The Veterans Commission’s Welch has been displeased that he has been kept largely out of the discussion about the future of the building that his commission operates.

At this point, both city staff and the Veterans Commission have filed paperwork with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to position themselves to receive FEMA reimbursement for the flood damage to the building.

FEMA will sort out to whom the reimbursement should go, Welch said last night.

This prompted council member Justin Shields to question whether the city needed FEMA to tell it who owned the building.

In his budget presentation, Welch and the commission are preparing for a new day at the city building on May’s Island whatever the future should bring.

Welch imagined the building could be used as arts center and a spot where nonprofit agencies and others could locate offices. He said he’s gotten calls from lawyers inquiring about the prospect of putting law offices in the building. The Linn County Courthouse is just across the May’s Island lawn from the Veterans Memorial Building, he noted.

As Welch approached a the council’s table to begin his budget presentation on Thursday evening, he jokingly asked if the seat he was about to sit in was wired for punishment.