Flood-damaged Grant Wood window at the Veterans Memorial Building is coming out for repairs; entrusted to a Davenport firm owned by a disabled Vietnam War vet

The flood-damaged, Grant Wood-designed window is coming out of the Veterans Memorial Building this week, each of its 58 stained-glass panels to be crated and driven to a studio in Davenport for repair.

The restoration work on the window, put in place in 1929, will take up to 34 weeks to complete at a cost of $147,000.

There may be additional costs to repair or replace the window’s wooden frame and to replace safety glass protecting both sides of the historic window, reports Mike Jager, the city’s veterans memorial director.

Glass Heritage LLC of Davenport bested four other design firms — including ones in Philadephia, Chicago and Kansas City — to win the job of fixing Grant Wood’s window.

John Watts, one of three founding owners of Glass Heritage, is a Vietnam War veteran who in his day has wrestled with the war effects of Agent Orange exposure and post traumatic stress disorder, he reports.

Because he is a veteran, Watts says the Veterans Memorial Building’s window — which features a huge image of a rising angel of peace “welcoming all veterans home” and also depicts soldiers from the nation’s six major wars through World War I — has special meaning to him.

“We are acutely aware that this is a one-of-a-kind piece,” says Watts. “Are we nervous about it? We’re nervous about every piece of glass we touch. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be good.”

Watts says Grant Wood’s devotion to the land is reflected in the texture of the paint on the stained-glass window.

He says, too, that there is no question that the June 2008 flood damaged the window, causing bowing and some cracking in some of the 1,000 or more pieces of stained glass in the window.

Nonetheless, he says the window overall is in “decent shape” for its 80-year age.

“We’re just going to take it and give it a new life,” Watts says.

In the restoration, the cost of which a city insurance policy will cover, the city’s Jager says there is some thought be given to leaving damage in place in one small section of the window as a reminder of the flood.

Watts, 60, says he is originally from New York City. His life eventually took him to the Quad Cities, where he spent some years as director of operations at The Mark of the Quad Cities. Ten years ago, he decided to spend all his time working on stained glass, and he left The Mark to open his own business and store in Davenport with two other partners. He’s been working in stained glass for 28 years, he says.

Watts calls the work on fixing the Grant Wood window “meticulous.” He calls the window “amazing.”

Day 1 for Eyerly as flood-recovery director; he’s looking ahead, not back; setting goals; wants to work himself out of a job in a year or two

Greg Eyerly never seemed to fuss too much with the suit and tie the last 16 or so months when he was working on the front lines as the city’s utilities operations manager with an office at the Water Pollution Control facility.

Monday, his first full day as the city’s new flood-recovery director, had him dressed every bit the part of executive. His shirt couldn’t have been whiter, his tie nicer, the shine on the shoes shinier.

Eyerly is operating out of what had been a mini-conference room at the temporary City Hall in northeast Cedar Rapids. And right next door is the office of City Manager Jim Prosser, to whom Eyerly reports.

“I have a great working relationship with Jim Prosser,” he said. “I may disagree with him on some things, and I feel comfortable expressing that. I work for the community.”

First thing Monday, Eyerly said he sat down with Prosser and spelled out for him what he had scheduled for the first couple weeks of his new assignment.

Eyerly said he is headed to Des Moines on Tuesday to talk about flood recovery with officials of the Rebuild Iowa Office, the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Iowa office.

He will talk to the City Council on Wednesday evening about the city’s major flood-damaged buildings and about his goal to bring negotiations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency over the scope of the buildings’ damages to a successful conclusion by Oct. 31.

He said the city also is readying to unveil an addition to its Web page, which will allow people to see, step by step, how work on specific flood-related projects is progressing.

Yet this week, too, Eyerly said he hopes to get out into Cedar Rapids’ flood-damaged neighborhoods to take a look around and talk to people.

Eyerly said he can count his top priorities on one hand. He wants to find funding for flood-recovery projects and get it delivered; make sure the city is moving ahead in a timely manner on neighborhood and business recovery, property buyouts and demolitions, and future flood protection.

As for the city’s key flood-damaged buildings, Eyerly said the city and FEMA are in wide disagreement right now on the level of damage on the Veterans Memorial Building and the Central Fire Station, for instance.

One breakthrough, he said, is that FEMA has agreed to set aside its approach to the issue, which Eyerly said is based too much on prior disasters and square footage. The city and its consultants have been asking for a room-by-room analysis of the damages.

Eyerly said his mission is to make the post of flood-recovery director unnecessary in a year or two, he said.

Two factors that will help Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery have nothing to do with who is doing or not doing what, he said.

The city’s flood recovery will be helped if the national economy picks up and if the nation does not experience a major hurricane or other natural disaster this year, he said.

A detail spotted in a City Hall handout prompts library board president to launch a press release: Yes, she says, a new library will cost $45 million

The City Council and the Linn County Board of Supervisors are working to prioritize a long list of 80-plus local projects, each of which would like a piece of $118.5 million still remaining in the state’s I-JOBS economic-stimulus pot.

Among the project details that have come to light as part of the I-JOBS competition is the fact that the Cedar Rapids Library Board of Directors has plans to build a new $45-million library to replace the flood-damaged one on First Street SE.

Susan Corrigan, library board president, defended the price tag on Tuesday evening when asked about it by a reporter at the city’s open house to discuss flood-damaged city buildings.

On Wednesday afternoon, Corrigan issued a press release to say the replacement cost for a new library will be $45 million, an amount that will cover a new building, materials, furnishing and parking.

Corrigan said the city expects to receive $22 million of that amount from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to replace the flood-damaged library. She noted that the state I-JOBS fund already has given the library $5 million, and she said the library will be seeking an additional $10 million from the I-JOBS program. Additional funds may come from the Vision Iowa program and from a private capital campaign, she said.

“FEMA will pay to build a new facility, but we owe it to the community to make our new library a smart, long-term investment,” Corrigan said.

The library board does not want to rebuild a new library on the site of the flood-damaged one. It’s preference is to get to higher downtown ground.

The library board envisions a 105,000 sq. ft. library to replace what had been an 85,000 sq. ft. one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coe, St. Luke’s first victors in local scrap to land U.S. Commerce Department diaster-related funds

Coe College and St. Luke’s Hospital are the first victors in the local competition to secure disaster-related funds from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA).

Iowa’s senators, Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley, have announced that the college and hospital will use a $4.65 million EDA grant to build a steam heating plant that the two local institutions will share.

This week’s announcement was little surprise.

Coe College and St. Luke’s Hospital were two of eight large users of cheap steam produced by Alliant Energy’s Sixth Street Generating Plant, which was destroyed in last June’s flood.

Last week, the City Council discussed how it would dispense $21 million in federal and state funds to help about 200 steam users covert (or help pay those who already have converted) from the Alliant system to their own steam systems. The council left out Coe College and St. Luke’s in their calculations on the expectation that EDA money was coming for them.

Harkin and Grassley this week confirmed that it is.

The council also left out another of the Sixth Street plant’s eight large steam users, Mercy Medical Center, and for the same reason that it left out Coe and St. Luke’s. Mercy, too, has applied for EDA money, and that now is apparently the next anticipated announcement from EDA.

Several other local projects are competing for the funds. The City Council has said it most would like the EDA to support a proposal to upgrade the U.S. Cellular Center and to add a convention center to it. The city’s Facilities Commission is seeking a $39-million EDA grant to help finance the $52-million project.

Patrick DePalma, chairman of the Facilities Commission, said he and other community representatives met recently with representatives of the EDA, and he said he came away optimistic that EDA is interested in the project.

On its priority list for EDA funding, the City Council placed a proposed recreation center/community center second behind the U.S. Cellular Center proposal.

The Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce also is seeking an EDA grant for a new Regional Commerce Center and the community also is seeking money for downtown rail study as a prelude to redirecting freight train switching maneuvers from the downtown.

Watershed management does matter in flood protection: Harkin announces $24.2 million for Iowa to buy flood-prone land and return it to its natural state

Rep. Dave Loebsack and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials were on the Cedar River last week to talk about protecting Cedar Rapids and other flood-prone cities against another flood.

Both the Congressman and the Corps said flood-protection systems and watershed management were both necessary ingredients in flood protection.

As proof of the need for watershed management, Sen. Tom Harkin on Tuesday announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was sending $24.236 million to Iowa to fund 42 floodplain easement projects.
Harkin’s office said the money will be used to purchase easements from landowners along floodplains to allow land most prone to flooding to be restored to a natural state.

By taking easement land out of farm production, the Emergency Watershed Protection Program will allow flood waters to spread out and slow down, helping to reduce flooding on private property elsewhere in the watershed, Harkin’s office said.

“As we approach the one-year anniversary of the flooding that devastated Iowa, these funds will continue the process of rebuilding our state and will help prevent future flooding,” Harkin said in a news release.

The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service will acquire the property, which can both be private land or certain public land. Landowners will retain several rights to the property, including the right to control public access.

City hires OPN Architects for $400,000 to help with open houses to determine future of flood-damaged city buildings; county, schools dropped out of process

The much-anticipated series of public open houses will start June 23 to help the city determine the future of flood-damaged city buildings.
And Wednesday evening, the City Council hired OPN Architects Inc. of Cedar Rapids for $400,000 to help lead the several-month process.

OPN not only will help conduct the public open houses, but the firm also will provide design and planning options and an analysis of the costs involved in renovating buildings or building new ones.

OPN’s contract runs from May 28 through Oct. 31 and may be renewed in 60-day increments.

Among the key flood-damaged buildings under discussion will be the library, the Paramount Theatre, the Ground Transportation Center bus depot, the Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall, the Public Works Building and the existing federal courthouse, which the city is scheduled to assume ownership of once the new federal courthouse opens in the fall of 2012.

Sufficient damage was done to the library that it will be rebuilt not renovated, and the city’s library board already has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to allow the city to rebuild the library on a different site.

The council also will be interested in hearing about proposals to build a new City Hall, called a community services center, a new Public Safety Training Center and a new community operations center, which would house city departments like fleet maintenance, streets and solid waste.

Only city government is left to participate in the lengthy process to get public input on facilities.

Some months ago, both Linn County government and the Cedar Rapids school district were involved in the facilities process when the idea was that the differing jurisdictions might “co-locate” in a shared facility.
The county dropped out a few months ago, saying they wanted to move faster than the city. The school district dropped out this month.

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

One flood-recovery landmark has been reached.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget the “wish lists,” Shields said.

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

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

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

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

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

Organized group of local spin-doctors and flak-catchers didn’t get NBC News here; hope still alive they’ll land Katie or Charlie Gibson

The local cadre of public relations pros isn’t responsible.

In any event, NBC News’ national operation is in Cedar Rapids to work up a news piece on Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery.

SanDee Skelton, a flood victim still in a FEMA trailer who expects to return to her renovated home at 1125 10th St. NW within a month, reports that she is one of a few slated for an interview.

NBC News’ Dallas-based coordinating producer Al Henkel has set up the interview with her, she says.

Which is perfect.

Henkel, who was in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday, grew up in Cedar Rapids, is a 1977 Jefferson High School, and lived in the Cedar Hills neighborhood, which stayed high and dry in the 2008 flood. He went on to graduate from Iowa State University in 1982, and worked at KGAN-TV in Cedar Rapids from 1982 to 1983. He won an Emmy award for his coverage of the 1993 flood in Des Moines, and he won Emmy, Peabody and Murrow awards for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Skelton says Henkel wants her to talk about the group of retired electricians, plumbers and pipefitters who worked on her house and who were covered in recent local stories.

Henkel, she says, got her name from Liz Mathis, spokeswoman for the Four Oaks family-services agency.
Mathis on Tuesday said that the push in the last 10 days by local public-relations professionals to attract national media to Cedar Rapids to report on the city’s one-year anniversary of flood recovery is not what got NBC News to town.

Mathis says local news coverage by The Gazette and KCRG-TV of local retired electricians and plumbers helping flood victims captured NBC’s attention.

By the way, Mathis, a former long-time TV news anchor, was the one who convinced the local media to cover the story in recent weeks.

Tuesday morning, Henkel said via e-mail he wasn’t sure when the NBC piece might be broadcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The city says Levy matters.

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

Prosser called on Levy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer provided by Prosser was this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it turns out Murphy was wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s May 7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flood-hit National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library seeks Vision Iowa funds; collections will never return to existing building

The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library will seek some millions of dollars over a few years from the state’s Vision Iowa Board to help with its flood recovery, Gail Naughton, president/CEO of the facility, told the City Council last night.

Naughton won City Council support to pursue Vision Iowa funds from the state’s Riverfront Enhancement Community Attraction and Tourism program and/or from its Community Attraction and Tourism program.

During her presentation to the council, Naughton reported that the museum/library now has purchased the former Music Loft space in Czech Village to house its office and some exhibition space so it can get back close to its flood-damaged museum/library building.

Naughton also told the council that the existing building never again will house museum collections and exhibitions. She said that curators in the Czech Republic who provide collections for the Cedar Rapids would not allow their items displayed in a venue that has been flooded.

“It’s just been marked,” Naughton said of the flood-damaged building.

She said the thinking now is the existing building would become an education and cultural center while the museum/library’s collections and exhibits would be housed at a proposed new $17.75-million exhibition center and research library that would house collections and exhibits.

The non-profit organization’s recovery plan includes $25 million in improvements, including the addition of the exhibition center and research library.

Earlier Wednesday, Naughton said the museum/library sustained more than $10 million in flood damage.

Naughton said the organization continues to work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on a final damage assessment and how to proceed with the museum/library’s existing building. The building, she explained, sits one foot above the city’s 100-year floodplain.

The city’s plan for permanent flood protection calls for removable flood walls to protect Czech Village as well as both sides of the Cedar River in the downtown.

Naughton said one concept for the removable flood walls is that they would run on the edge of the museum/library’s terrace between the river and the museum/library, which is perched near the river.

But the final details of such protection won’t be decided for a few years yet, she noted.

Much, she added, is still up in the air. “We’d like to reuse it,” she said of the existing museum/library building, one of the city’s chief tourism attractions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State lawmakers from Cedar Rapids deliver again: Jumpstart housing loans now forgivable in 5 years, not 10, once governor signs the bill

It has gnawed at flood victims who have received Jumpstart housing funds for months: That the money has come in the form of forgivable loans, which take 10 years to forgive, while Jumpstart funds for businesses are forgiven in five years.

This week, though, the Iowa Legislature passed a new law and sent it to Gov. Chet Culver that will make the term of the Jumpstart housing loans now in place and to come five years instead of ten years, Sen. Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, confirmed Friday.

Hogg, who credited Sen. Wally Horn, D-Cedar Rapids, with managing the bill through the state senate, said the measure was somewhat controversial simply because of the work required to change the terms of a large number of loans. But he said the Iowa Department of Economic Development has said it was committed to taking the work on.

Hogg noted that some Jumpstart housing awards were made with state dollars and some with federal Community Development Block Grant funds, and he said the state will have to amend its CDBG arrangement with the federal government so that both sources of forgivable loans are treated consistently.

Jon Galvin, a flood victim and Jumpstart recipient as well as vice president of the Northwest Neighbors Association, on Friday said shortening the time period on the forgivable loan from 10 years to five years puts the homeowner on the same level as the business owner.

Galvin, a retiree, says who knows how long he and his wife might live.

“At our age, our kids would be or could be still paying off these liens at the 10-year rate,” he said. Now, he said he might get out of debt again “before I leave this world.”

State lawmakers from Cedar Rapids see to it that owners of abandoned flood-damaged homes don’t louse up a return to life for neighbors

A common lament in flood-hit neighborhoods here comes from those fixing up their homes while neighbors next door or down the block have abandoned theirs.

On Thursday, the Iowa Legislature did something about that.

State lawmakers passed a bill and sent it to Gov. Chet Culver that will permit Cedar Rapids and other cities to go to court and in expedited fashion take title to disaster-affected abandoned properties if a concerted effort to find the owner has failed.

Sen. Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, managed the bill through the Iowa Senate and on Thursday said that the city of Cedar Rapids has told him that it thinks the owners of 150 to 200 flood-damaged properties have simply walked away from them and can’t be found.

“The biggest thing is it gives the city clear title to this property that has been abandoned so the city can then do something productive to the property,” Hogg said.

Hogg said Rep. Todd Taylor, D-Cedar Rapids, managed the bill in the Iowa House.

The legislation, he said, is “very much in favor” of people who are trying to repair their homes or the business people who are trying to bring their businesses back in the flooded zones.

“One of the things that is so challenging right now is you might have an owner here and an owner here who are bringing their properties back, but these other properties, their owners have just walked away from them,” Hogg said. “And they’re in as dilapidated a condition as they were last June when the flood waters receded.

“And so it’s unfair to the people who are trying to bring their properties back to have neighboring properties that have just been totally walked away from. And hopefully this procedure will allow the city to do something very quickly about that.”

Hogg said the bill includes a provision that brings the legal action to a halt if the owner shows up within the period of the action. The city must work to find an owner of a disaster-affected property at least 30 days before going to court. At least 60 days then must pass before a court hearing on the matter.

If the court agrees the property has been abandoned, the court awards clear title of the property to the city at the property’s existing market value. The city pays that amount to the court, and if unclaimed, the money reverts to the city after two years.

Hogg said the bill, which addresses property damaged by a disaster between May 1 and Sept. 1, 2008, is designed to remedy “truly abandoned property.”

Cedar Rapids City Council member Brian Fagan on Thursday said the city had pushed for the legislation because abandoned properties, which had been a problem for the city prior to the flood, are especially a problem since the flood.

“Certainly we want to be respectful of property rights, but the huge, overriding concern is the health, welfare and safety of our residents,” Fagan said.

Two new gauges now in Cedar River above Cedar Rapids to help track times when river turns surly

Two new gauges are now in place in the Cedar River above Cedar Rapids to help monitor rising river water in the future, Ken DeKeyser, the city’s storm water management engineer, reports.

One gauge is in the river at Blairs Ferry Road (E-36) at Palo and a second in the river at Vinton. A third gauge, which has been in place, is above the Eighth Avenue bridge in downtown Cedar Rapids.

DeKeyser reports that the cost of installation and maintenance of the gauge at Vinton is being handled by the U.S. Geological Survey, while the jurisdictions of Cedar Rapids, Linn County and Palo are sharing equally in the $12,800 installation cost of the gauge at Palo. The annual cost to operate the gauge at Palo is $14,500, 40 percent of which is covered by USGS. Cedar Rapids, Linn County and Palo each will pay $2,900 a year to operate and maintain the gauge at Palo.

The annual operating and maintenance cost for the Cedar Rapids gauge is split between the city and USGS, with the city paying 40 percent and USGS 60 percent.

Residents can see readings from the gauges at http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ia/nwis/rt

(On Wednesday, readings were available on the USGS Web site for all three gauges. On Thursday, the two new gauges had been removed from the Web site’s map, but will return.)

The two new river gauges and a renovated Cedar Rapids gauge are seen by public officials as crucial in better forecasting what the Cedar River is up to.

The Cedar Rapids gauge failed as the river’s flood crest approached Cedar Rapids last June. And there were no gauges in place immediately upstream to help read the river.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oakhill Jackson/New Bohemia creates its own neighborhood redevelopment corp. despite City Hall-endorsed one with $1.5 million in public money

City Hall two weeks ago orchestrated the creation of a non-profit Neighborhood Development Corp. and, it turns out, a neighborhood can create one of those corporations, too.

That is just what has happened.

Eight people sat in a conference room at Horizons family-services agency, 819 Fifth St. SE, on Thursday morning and created the Oakhill Jackson New Bohemia Neighborhood Development Corp.

In the creation, the eight elected officers: Dale Todd, president; Scott Jamieson, vice president; Michael Richards, secretary; Fred Timko, treasurer.

Board members also in attendance were Chuck Hammond, Peggy Whitworth, Mel Andringa and Ed Young Jr.

Todd is a former City Council member, past president of the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association, and currently an associate of Des Moines developer Jack Hatch, who has plans to build the Oakhill Jackson Brickstone Apartments along Sixth Street SE.

E. Scott Jamieson is the CEO of the Horizons family services agency; Richards is president of the Oakhill Jackson Neighborhood Association; and Timko is president/CEO of Point Builders Inc. and developer of BottleWorks Loft Condos, 905 Third St. SE.

Hammond is CEO at Raining Rose Inc.; Whitworth, retired former director of Brucemore; Andringa is co-founder of Legion Arts; and Young is enterprise manager at the African American Museum of Iowa.

The new non-profit entity has come to be because its board members say they want to get redevelopment moving in the flood-damaged Oakhill Jackson Neighborhood — it contains the New Bohemia arts and cultural district. City Hall hasn’t gotten such redevelopment moving, the board says.

The new board of the new corporation — the name is so long it’s tempting to settle for OJNBNDC — is well aware of the other neighborhood development corporation, the City Hall-endorsed Neighborhood Development Corp., which the City Council created on March 25.

And the new group is well aware, too, that the council has funneled $1.5 million in state funds to the corporation it has endorsed. It is money that will be used to pay a director, Carol Bower of Des Moines, to set up an office here and begin to look at buying up property for redevelopment with a focus on commercial redevelopment.

But so what, the new neighborhood corporation’s members say.

After its meeting Thursday morning, Jamieson said the neighborhood’s own development corporation can work in concert with whatever or whoever is working to help the city recover from the 2008 flood.

But he said the neighborhood’s own upstart corporation can bring “clarity” to the job at hand and get the work started without waiting on City Hall. The corporation can benefit the City Council and is willing to take the council’s help, but it doesn’t need to depend on it, Jamieson said.

Raining Rose’s CEO Chuck Hammond said the new group believes “we’ve got to do something else.” “There are significant needs unmet,” he said.

Jamieson’s helping-services agency employs 90 people in the neighborhood and Hammond’s company employs 65 there.

On Thursday, the board said it wanted to position itself to qualify for federal and state funding as a local nonprofit group.

The board also took steps to make improvements at what has been known as New Bo Park, which sits to the south of the BottleWorks Loft Condos and the WaterTower Place condominiums next door.

The board will assume ownership of the park for now while BottleWorks will make improvements to it and maintain it. BottleWorks’ Timko said the development budget for the loft condos includes money to fix up the park.

The OJNBNRC also committed to a neighborhood cleanup of stray glass and nails, and will call on local AmeriCorps members to help out.

One route to property-tax relief for flood victims closes; still can qualify if 65 or older or totally disabled and have income below $20,031

They wanted to. They did it. But they can’t, Gary Jarvis, assistant Linn County Attorney, told the Linn County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday.

The upshot: Owners of flood-damaged property, for now, will face property-tax bills based on the pre-flood value of their properties, and they also will face a county tax sale of their property in June if they don’t pay the tax bill.

Jarvis told the supervisors on Wednesday that their decision last week to suspend the property taxes of flood victim Dana Spore of Cedar Rapids was an incorrect one. He said the particular section of state law on which the supervisors relied limits such tax suspensions to those 65 or older or those totally disabled. The intent of the longstanding state law is to not force the elderly and totally disabled to lose their property for not paying taxes. The unpaid taxes are then recouped when the person dies and the property is sold, Jarvis said.

After Jarvis’ presentation, the supervisors reluctantly rescinded the tax suspension they had granted a week before.

Jarvis recommended that the supervisors watch and wait as the Iowa Legislature finishes its session in the next couple of weeks to see if state lawmakers will provide some property-tax relief for flood victims.

Supervisor Linda Langston said the supervisors then will have time to revisit the property-tax matter to see if they want to adopt some sort of tax abatement procedure for taxes due later this year.

The supervisors are in no rush to make any big moves because the tax revenue of cities and schools as well as the county are tied to any decision by the supervisors to abate property taxes. State law puts these decisions in the supervisors’ hands.

Langston said one good thing about granting last week’s tax suspension, which has now been rescinded, is that several people contacted the supervisors who qualify for a suspension of property taxes because they are 65 or older or are disabled.

Unpaid property taxes send a property to the Treasurer’s Office tax sale in June. Investors pay the taxes, collect interest on the amount and then can assume ownership of the property if the owner doesn’t pay the taxes and interest within two years.

Empty, flood-damaged Roosevelt may begin its return to life within a month

Renovation of The Roosevelt in downtown Cedar Rapids is readying to begin, developer Sherman Associates reports.

The former hotel turned apartment complex in the heart of downtown has been out of commission since the June 2008 flood.

Jackie Nickolaus, Sherman Associates vice president in Urbandale, Iowa, says that Sherman Associates finalized its purchase of The Roosevelt in December for $2.2 million.

She said that financing for the renovation should be in place by the end of April, and renovation of the building will begin immediately after that. Much of the funding is coming from federal affordable-housing tax credits, though the City Council also is providing some financial incentives. The council will address its loan commitment to the project at its April 22 meeting, Nickolaus says.

Sherman Associates’ renovation plan will turn some of old hotel’s small, efficiency apartments into larger ones and covert what had been commercial and office space on the second floor into apartments. The first floor will remain commercial space.

In total, the building will have 96 apartments, 90 of them designated as affordable.

Sherman Associates, headquartered in Minneapolis and a prolific developer and property manager, was the first to come to Cedar Rapids and use the term “work force housing” in place of affordable housing.

Income guidelines for affordable housing requires that someone have a job, and the guidelines are broad enough to apply to many people in the work force, Sherman Associates and the City Council now repeatedly point out.

Nickolaus says the first tenants should be back in The Roosevelt within six months of the start of construction. She adds that Sherman Associates is now negotiating with two first-floor commercial tenants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Linn County gave a flood victim, it apparently must take back

The Linn County Board of Supervisors this week agreed to suspend the property taxes of a Cedar Rapids flood victim based on a provision in state law.

Next week, at the advice of the Linn County Attorney’s Office and its reading of the state statute, the supervisors are apt to rescind the suspension, Lu Barron, board chairwoman, and Linn County Treasurer Mike Stevenson said Friday.

As the supervisors recently have discussed flood victims and their property taxes, Stevenson has noted that the county suspends property taxes each year for 750 or so homeowners based on a state law that permits suspensions for those over 65 or those disabled who meet certain income guidelines.

This week, though, the supervisors accorded Dana Spore of Cedar Rapids a tax suspension because she is a flood victim, not because of age or disability.

Barron on Friday said the County Attorney’s Office now has concluded that the provision of the particular state law on tax suspensions does not allow the county to extend it to someone who does not fit the age or disability criteria.

As a result, Barron said the supervisors next week — probably at their Wednesday morning meeting — will revisit the entire tax-suspension matter and see what other state laws exist that might have some bearing the property taxes of flood victims.

“We need to address this,” Barron said. “We can’t let this go.”

For now, though, the need to rescind Spore’s tax suspension will come as a disappointment to Spore and others.

Upon hearing the news about Spore’s tax suspension this week, other flood victims called the supervisors and the Linn County Treasurer seeking like suspensions of their property taxes.

The suspension is attractive to many flood victims who face paying property taxes on flood-damaged homes they cannot live in and likely will never be able to live in again. Particularly upsetting to the victims is that the taxes continue to be based on the pre-flood value of homes. That’s because Iowa’s property-tax system bases current taxes on earlier valuations, flood or no flood.

Without a suspension or tax abatement, homeowners who can’t or don’t pay their property taxes will face interest penalties and see their homes put up for tax sale in June. They could lose the home in two years if they then don’t pay the owed tax and the interest by then.

Scott Labus, the city of Cedar Rapids’ assessor, this week said his office’s new assessments of the city’s flood-damaged residential property found that it has lost $138.5 million of its value to the flood.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chaffins hails from eastern Kentucky.

Updates on waste water sludge, municipal garbage: farmers will miss the sludge; horizon still holds the dream of burning sludge/garbage to produce energy

Greg Eyerly, the city’s utilities operations manager, wasn’t sitting on a bar stool drinking mai tais a 6 o’clock Friday evening.

No, he was gushingly talking about the $1.8-million fix of the flood-damaged incinerator at the city’s waste water treatment plant on Bertram Road SE near Highway 13. It’s an emergency fix, an interim repair, paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief funds. The repair is expected to hold the fort for three to five years as the city studies what is to come next.

Getting the incinerator up and running will have two significant ramifications: The city will no longer need to truck any of its biosolid sludge to a landfill in Illinois at great expense. And it will not need to use its best option, applying the sludge as fertilizer to farm fields, nearly as much.

Eyerly says the city likely will always put some of the sludge on farm fields during times in which the incinerator is down for maintenance. Farmers, by the way, have stood in line to get the stuff, 200 semi-truck loads or 100 tons of which the waste water plant produces each day. Land application, though, comes with uncertainty, Eyerly says. In fact, the city has had to stockpile the sludge in various spots out in the country this winter for use when fields are suitable for working.

Eyerly reports that the city continues to move ahead with plans to study the feasibility of burning sewage sludge and municipal waste to produce energy. The City Council has approved a $1-million study of the issue.

The waste-to-energy idea, in fact, has been much in the news in Cedar Rapids as local elected officials and community leaders imagine what might come to the rescue of the flood-wrecked steam system that had inexpensively served the downtown, Quaker and Cargill and other industries near downtown, the hospitals and Coe College before the June 2008 flood.

At last report, the city’s lobbyists were trucking a plan to build a $200-million waste-to-energy plan around Congress while city leaders also were working the Iowa Legislature for money.

No one has said much about either for some weeks.

Meanwhile, St. Luke’s Hospital and Coe College have one plan and Mercy Medical Center its own plan to find federal money to build their own steam systems.

At the same time, too, the city of Marion, armed with a state grant, has embarked on a $150,000 study of a waste-to-energy technology called plasma arc. A Marion-centered group of enthusiasts called WasteNotIowa have been promoting plasma arc for five or so years, ever since the local solid waste agency proposed and then did expand its landfill on the edge of Marion.

The second piece of waste news is coming from the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency and that Site 2 landfill.

Karmin McShane, the agency’s director, this week reported that the agency has taken initial steps to tap methane gas from the closed cells at the landfill to produce electricity.

Building the system of pipes and generators will provide electricity for the equivalent of 1,800 homes. Revenue from electricity will pay off the investment needed to set up the system in five years, McShane says.

First post-flood victory for new ‘affordable’ replacement housing: Cedar Pond Townhouses to go up on a part of what had been Chapman Fun World

Neighbors out along Wilson Avenue SW near Williams Boulevard and Westdale Mall lost out this week on their attempt to block the construction of 90 rental units on about 11 acres of land.

Part of the site used to be home to the Chapman Fun World, but for opposing neighbors, the fun is long gone. Some 224 people signed a petition against the development, called Cedar Pond Townhouses.

The 6-2 City Council vote in favor of the development clears the way for the first newly built, affordable rental housing to be built to replace affordable housing lost in the June 2008 flood.

Much has gone into City Hall’s effort to do just that, build more affordable housing, since the first months after the city’s flood disaster.

The City Council created a Replacement Housing Task Force last September and then it successfully lobbied the federal government to increase a key federal funding tool – federal tax credits – for the state of Iowa.

The Cedar Pond development will use tax credits and some local financial incentives for much of its funding. For the tax-credit financing piece, private investors pay money upfront for a housing project’s construction and, in turn, have their federal tax liability reduced.

The upfront money allows the developer to take on much less debt, and, as a result, the developer can and must keep rents affordable. At Cedar Pond, only those earning at or below 60 percent of the average medium income for Linn County can rent the units.

The opponents made good arguments on Wednesday evening about potential problems with water runoff from the proposed development and about traffic problems that already exist in the area.

District 5 council member Justin Shields — this is his council district — was convinced. He said the site was too wet for the development. And he said he had heard before how a developer’s engineers were going to take care of everything, and then they do not.

But in these discussions about affordable housing, a central concern, too, is just who might live in affordable housing.

It’s clear it’s an issue, not so much by what opponents say, as what proponents and the developer say.

In this instance, Greg and Candace McClenahan, of EverGreen Real Estate Development Corp., Prior Lake, Minn., are the developers, and Candace McClenahan emphasized to the City Council and to the opponents in the audience that people who live at Cedar Pond must have jobs so they can pay up to $570 in rent and $78 a month for utilities each month for a two-bedroom apartment and $670 and $101 for utilities a month.

There is even a new term — work force housing — for these kinds of developments, which Mayor Kay Halloran used to express her support for the project. Given the affordable housing lost to the flood, this is “new housing for our work force,” she said.

Council member Tom Podzimek took exception to neighbors who called the rental development incompatible with the area.

“Affordable housing doesn’t seem like an incompatible use,” he said.

At the end of the day, the opposing neighbors had a tough case to make, in large part, because an early development on the same site had been given approval a few years ago. And that development had three-story buildings, not two-story ones, and it had 38 more rental units.

The McClenahans also came along with a plan at a good time when the City Council was eager to replace some of what the 2008 flood destroyed. And the McClenahans spent much time refining their plan and scaling it back as they worked to please the city’s Replacement Housing Task Force. Task force member Ben Henderson told the council just that on Wednesday evening.

Two members of the City Planning Commission also came to the council meeting to explain why the commission earlier had backed the project.

Chris Dostal, a 2005 City Council candidate, was among neighbors arguing against the development because of the traffic nightmare that he said already exists on and around Wilson Avenue SW. But the timing of that argument wasn’t the best either: the city’s multimillion-dollar viaduct project on 33rd Avenue SW will be ready for traffic in the fall and should reduce traffic on Wilson Avenue by a third, a city engineer said.

Cedar Pond now heads to Des Moines to secure tax credits from the Iowa Finance Authority. This comfortable territory for the McClenahans: They’ve built 11, regulation-heavy, tax-credit projects in Iowa and Minnesota in the last 12 years.

Three other new, new-construction, tax-credit projects have been proposed for Cedar Rapids since last September. One intended for the former Ellis Golf Course chipping area has been abandoned in the face of neighbor objections. A second at 1100 O Ave. NW is opposed by neighbors and has gotten a lukewarm reaction to date from the City Planning Commission. A third project, planned for the Oak Hill Neighborhood has yet to secure tax credits.

Cautionary letters from Army Corps and state of Iowa suggest a City Hall not in idle, but one pushing to open doors for flood-disaster help

Two letters with a similar cautionary tone arrived at City Hall in the last few days. One was from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; one from the Iowa Department of Economic Development.

As much as anything the letters portray a Cedar Rapids City Hall unwilling to sit by and wait for state government or Uncle Sam to show up with big bags of money on the day or time upon which they decide.

Instead, the letters suggest that Cedar Rapids city government is testing the limits and the rules and working to convince the federal and state governments to use some creativity to try to give the city of Cedar Rapids the ability to buy out flood-damaged homes faster than the rules now allow.

The city’s central request is that it be allowed to use an expected large infusion of Community Development Block Grants to buy out 550 or so flood-damaged homes that now sit in a proposed construction area where the Corps is expected to build a new levee system and where it is apt to need space to move some streets and to add a series of pumping stations.

The federal rules now say that those property cannot be bought out until the Corps has its flood-protection feasibility study approved, which isn’t expected before June 2010.

What City Manager Jim Prosser is pushing for is for the city to have the ability to use CDBG funds from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development to buy those homes out, and then to have the Corps reimburse the city for those funds (or give the city credit toward money it must provide as a local project match) as the Corps moves ahead with its levee-building project.

“I would like to make you aware that the Federal Government does not encourage land acquisition” prior to the completion of the Corps’ feasibility study and the Corps subsequent notice-to-proceed agreement with the city, Ron Williams, acting chief of the Corps’ Partnership Support Branch, Rock Island, Ill., says in a letter to the city.

Williams then talks of the “risks” to the city. Chief among the risks is that Congress at the end of the day might not fund the city’s proposed flood-protection system. In that event, there would be no Corps’ money to pay for the buy outs that might already have occurred.

At the same time, Michael Tramontina, director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development, writes to Cedar Rapids’ Prosser on a related front about the city’s plan to use city funds to pay for disaster housing relief with the anticipation that CDBG funds will be coming to reimburse the city.

“We share the goal of providing assistance as quickly as possible to eligible applicants,” Tramontina states. But he continues: “The decision to use city funds until the federal funds become available … is a risk-benefit decision for the city to evaluate.”

On Tuesday, Prosser said the letter from the Corps and the letter from the Iowa Department of Economic Development represent bureaucracy in a good sense at work. The letters put the positions of the state and federal agencies down on paper, which Prosser said helps document the issues that need resolved.

The heart of the problem, he said, is that federal programs used in disasters –- by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — are not designed for the quick actions that are needed and that people expect in a disaster.

In particular, Prosser said the city is attempting to make the case that all of the money involved is federal money whether it is CDBG funds that should be available quickly or Corps funds that won’t be available for some time.

The argument, he said, is that the federal government will save considerable money by using CDBG funds in the near-term to buy out homes in the construction area instead of waiting for the Corps to complete its flood study in the next 15 months or so. And Prosser said it also makes good public policy sense to buy out homes more quickly. Why keep people in an ongoing “indeterminate state?” he asked.

Prosser said the city is pushing ahead with “policy papers” on the matter and will be asking Gov. Chet Culver to get directly involved. Some legislative changes in Washington, D.C., might be required to allow an exception to the Corps of Engineers’ current protocols, he said.

“Certainly, they are looking for us to make a case on why there should be exceptions,” Prosser said. “The bigger problem is we’re asking them to do stuff they haven’t done before. It’s not like they are necessarily philosophically opposed to it as much as they don’t have a system in place to support the urgency that we’re pushing ahead with.”

Just a week ago, FEMA announced its willingness to provide funding support for the demolition of more than 300 more flood-damaged houses that the city has concluded are too unsafe to enter. The city is currently in the process of taking down a first group of 72 homes at FEMA expense, but it required the city to make the case to FEMA before the agency agreed to add the larger number of homes to the demolition coverage, Prosser said.

The exceptions the city is now pushing for on buyouts in the proposed levee construction zone is similar to the FEMA decision on demolitions in that it requires the city to make a case to get its way.

“Although with the buyouts, the stakes are much higher, the dollar amounts are much higher and the creativity approach is pushing the limits of what the federal government has done before,” Prosser said.

He said the federal government is willing to allow for certain property acquisition in the building of a highway even before the final approval for the highway project is made.

That model is one the city is trying now to push for buyouts to make way for a levee.

Cedar Rapids diverts a part of its arriving temporary flood protection system to Fargo; ‘We don’t have a crisis today and they do’

The city of Cedar Rapids had signed the contract, made the order and expected an initial delivery Tuesday of a temporary flood control system called Hesco “Concertainers.” The Conertainers are lined metal baskets, which can be deployed and filled with sand at times of high water.

Instead, the city agreed with the manufacturer to divert Cedar Rapids’ supply of Hesco baskets to Fargo, N.D., which is now being confronted by a major flood of the Red River of the North.
Craig Hanson, Cedar Rapids’ public works maintenance manager, says it was an easy call and the neighborly thing to do.

Hanson said Fargo currently is at major flood stage and is facing a river that may reach a record flood level. Meanwhile, the Cedar River at Cedar Rapids is flowing at a level of about five feet, far below any flooding threat for now.

“The right answer is to be neighborly and to help another city in need,” Hanson said. “We don’t have a crisis today and they do.”

Hanson said the Cedar Rapids sentiment was little different on June 14, 2008, the day after the Cedar River crested at record flood stage in Cedar Rapids, when the city still was able to send 50,000 to 70,000 sandbags to Iowa City to help against flooding there.

In turn, the city of Cedar Rapids has received much support from outside in coming to grips with its flood disaster, he said.

The city has purchased two different systems to provide the city with some temporary flood protection should the Cedar River act up again.

In addition to the Hesco baskets, the city also has purchased a product called a tiger dam, which are bladders that get filled with water to add height to the existing levee system.

The tiger dams arrived last week.

The city’s plan is to use tiger dams to protect the Time Check area and the Hesco baskets to protect downtown and Czech Village areas should flooding threaten the city again.

The temporary systems give the city an additional two feet of protection, raising the protection to 24 feet or four feet above what had been the record flood in Cedar Rapids until last year. In June 2008, the river climbed to 31.12 feet.

State’s disaster chief says of local frustration: flood victims want to be first for funds while federal agencies rush to be last to hand it out

The world inside the City Council chambers often finds residents frustrated and critical of what they say are flaws in the city’s flood-recovery effort.

But there is a world outside of those council meetings as the top dog at the state’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division reminded people when he talked at last week’s council meeting and during a talk at the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce.

David Miller’s most striking point was this: That there is a rush by local communities and by every flood-affected individual in those communities to be first in to obtain disaster relief. At the same time, the federal agencies with most of the money to spend on disaster relief are rushing as hard as they can to be the last one in.

“It’s a race to see who is last,” Miller said of the federal government.

The Homeland Security chief’s point was that federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration and the Department of Housing & Urban Development all want to make sure they aren’t paying money before someone else is. What has private insurance paid? What did SBA pay that FEMA doesn’t have to pay?

It is for this reason that the federal government is so interested in “duplication of benefits,” Miller said.

That means, he said, that the federal government will always be checking, if not upfront, then along the way to make sure it is not paying benefits someone else has, too.

Miller reminded people, too, what FEMA representatives said from the get-go: that disaster-relief programs are not intended to “make people whole.” The programs, he said, aren’t an insurance policy. They’re designed to pick you off the ground.

In 1993 when floods hit Iowa hard, the state of Iowa sustained $163 million in damage to public buildings and infrastructure. In 2008, the damage at the current tally is $1.18 billion.

“This disaster is huge,” Miller said. By his count, the 2008 hit to public assets ranks fourth in the nation’s history.

Complicating disaster relief, he went on, is “the problem of cash flow.” The federal government prefers to pay as the work is done; the big check isn’t in the mail first, Miller said.

“If you want to know why people are upset, that’s it,” he said.

And Miller said local cities and counties can be forced to return money if they don’t “mix and match” federal funds correctly, making sure that they are following rules on environmental protection, lead-paint, historical review and more.

What has become a cliché, he said, is, nonetheless, true: “Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint.”

In Iowa after the 1993 floods, he said it took communities five years to recovery from flooding and nine years to put new flood-protection systems in place.

Miller advised cities like Cedar Rapids to get moving on its small public facilities projects, which are defined as those in which there was less than $60,900 damage. FEMA will pay most of the cost of those repairs upfront, he said. Small projects, he said, can get the federal dollars flowing into a community.

For now, the city of Cedar Rapids has submitted 51 small flood-damage projects to FEMA and 146 large ones.

To date, too, he said FEMA has approved $271.5 million in repairs for Cedar Rapids public projects, with FEMA slated to pay 90 percent of the cost and the state of Iowa, 10 percent. To date, less than 10 percent of those funds have arrived, the state’s Miller said.

Miller noted that the state of Iowa has needed to create a new entity, the Rebuild Iowa Office, to help the state get a grip on the 2008 disasters. The state, he said, did not have adequate staff numbers or expertise to do the job along.

“At the state, we hired consultants,” Miller said.

With flood forecast for Red River of the North, Cedar Rapids official assures new temporary protection systems here will be at the ready if Cedar River acts up

The Red River of the North is acting up again as melting winter snow and forecasts of rain are forcing Fargo and Grand Forks, N.D., to think anew about flooding.

Those paid to think about flooding in Cedar Rapids appear to be following the latest from North Dakota. Which isn’t surprising. After all, Cedar Rapids city officials, who are working to help the city recover from its June 2008 flood, have paid a great deal of attention to Grand Forks since June and to how that city recovered from its flood in 1997.

Late Friday afternoon, Craig Hanson, the city of Cedar Rapids’ public works maintenance manager, took time to update the public on temporary flood protection systems that the Cedar Rapids City Council in recent weeks voted to purchase.

The systems consist of water-filled bladders, called tiger dams, and Hesco wire baskets, which are filled with sand.

Hanson said the tiger dams purchased by the city arrived on Thursday.

On Tuesday, the city finalized the purchase of the Hesco baskets, some of which will be shipped as soon as this coming Tuesday.

The tiger dams and the Hesco baskets will give much of the city’s flood-prone areas an extra two feet of protection, increasing the protection to 24 feet, or four feet above what had been the city’s record flood until last year. In June 2008, the river reached 31.12 feet.

The plan is to deploy the tiger dams in the Time Check Neighborhood in northwest Cedar Rapids and the Hesco baskets on both sides of the river through the downtown and at Czech Village.

The city has amassed 200 truckloads of sand at the former Sinclair meatpacking site in southeast of the downtown for use in the Hesco baskets, Hanson said.

He added that the city has 49 pumps at the ready, seven more than at the time of the June 2008 flood.

The city’s updated flood-action plan calls for city crews to mobilize the new temporary flood protection systems when the forecast calls for the Cedar River to reach 20 feet at the gauge in the river above the Eighth Avenue bridge.

The temporary system cost a couple million dollars and may never be used by the time the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers builds a new permanent flood-protection system here. That could take eight to 15 years.

Up north, it took Grand Forks 11 years to get a new flood-protection system in place, a system that is expected to nicely protect Grand Forks from water that is now rising on the Red River. Across the river from Grand Forks is East Grand Forks, Minn., where city officials on Friday were putting a system of removable flood walls in place.

The current flood-protection plan for Cedar Rapids calls for removable flood walls to protect both sides of the Cedar River in downtown Cedar Rapids and at Czech Village.

In truth, it didn’t take the Red River in North Dakota to focus the attention of Cedar Rapids city officials. Just a couple weeks ago, the Cedar River reached 10 feet, the level at which the river first starts minor flooding here on a couple streets.

Twenty finalists now become 24 for nine-member Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee; neighborhood assn. v.p. drops out

The City Council pared the list of 71 applicants for the nine-member Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee down to 20 last week, and on Monday, the council increase the list of finalists to 24.

Added to the list were Markell Kuper, Jerry Gillon, Patrick DePalma, Nick Cappussi and Joseph Michalec Sr., while Jon Galvin, vice president for the Northwest Neighbors Association, withdrew his name from the list.

Each council member reviewed the 71 applications and each ranked applicants one through 20, and then those rankings were thrown together to come up with the finalists.

Each of the 24 will have a 7-minute interview with council members on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. The nine members will be in place by April 1, when the local-option sales tax is collected.

Those named previously are Jeffery Beer, Stephen Hammes; Gary Ficken; James Powers; Elizabeth Hladky; James Sattler; Patrick Courtney; Sandra Skelton; Robert Untiedt; B. Larry Johnson; Heather Schoonover; Don Boland; Richard McArtor; Jeff Palmer; Marvin Dale Hedgecoth; Oran Teat; Jon Galvin; John Gruca; W. Scott Jamieson; and Charles Watkins.

Council members picked the finalists, in part, with an eye to those who could bring expertise in accounting, finance, construction and disaster recovery.

Council members also said they were looking for representation from those affected by the flood.

The heads of neighborhood associations have pushed to get representatives from their groups on the oversight committee. Northwest Neighbors’ Galvin, though, has now dropped out of consideration.

Council members have emphasized that the Oversight Committee’s role is to check and see that the council has spent local-option sales tax revenue as the council said it would prior to the March 3 vote approving the tax.

Ninety percent of the revenue is to go to housing-related flood relief and 10 percent to property-tax relief.

The tax is expected to bring in $17 million to $18 million a year for five years and three months.

Good news for library lovers: New downtown library looks in the offing; and plan is for library to open a temporary downtown space by June

Library lovers had a good week in Cedar Rapids.

On Thursday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency confirmed that the library board and city officials were right: The downtown library took a tougher hit from the June 2008 flood than FEMA first has suggested. In fact, the flood caused extensive enough damage -– equal to 58 percent of the library’s value -– that FEMA now will support the building of a new library.

The library board must ask FEMA now for approval to build in a new location, which Susan Corrigan, the president of the nine-member library board, said she favors.

Many library supporters, Corrigan noted, have a strong affection for the existing library building on First Street SE, but she said she doesn’t want a library at that spot to go through a devastating flood again. And she said that has been the sentiment of the library board.

A second piece of good news for the library this week is the way Iowa Sens. Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley and Congressman Dave Loebsack came to the library’s defense. The three elected officials fired off letters to FEMA protesting the agency’s decision not to pay the library for expenses related to the library’s temporary operation at Westdale Mall.

A FEMA spokesman in Cedar Rapids on Thursday noted that the FEMA decision has been appealed.

The library board’s Corrigan cautioned this week that FEMA’s favorable damage assessment on the downtown library does not mean that a new library will be going up any time soon. It took nine months to convince FEMA to see the library’s damage the way the library board and City Hall saw it, and it will take more time to wade through the FEMA funding process before a new library is ever built, she said.

Corrigan said the new damage finding at the library clears the way to build new on the existing site, but the library board will have to make a request for permission to build on a new site.

With much negotiation yet to come, Corrigan had another piece of good news. She reported that the library board will open a temporary library in the downtown, likely by June.

The location will be in a space formerly occupied by the Art Cellar Co., 221 Third St. SE. She said the interim library operation there would be similar to the library’s Westdale Mall branch before the library expanded there after the flood.

Corbett lambasts ‘culture of delay’; calls for fix of City Hall; labor, vets turn out; Councilman Shey there, too; calls Corbett ’status quo’

Mayoral candidate Ron Corbett on Thursday morning stood outside the empty, flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building/City Hall and called on city government to repair the building and return to it.

In so doing, Corbett said the city would honor the veterans for whom the building stands as a memorial and it would put local workers back to work.

Nearly 100 labor union members and veterans stood to listen to Corbett speak, but surprisingly, no one from the local electronic media was on hand to record the event.

Turns out, the Linn County Board of Supervisors had summoned the media to the flood-damaged federal courthouse just down the street, a building that the supervisors have their eyes on for the possible future location of the county’s juvenile court operation.

In any event, Corbett had props, TV cameras or no TV cameras.

He held up one of the familiar “We’re Back” signs that have gone outside many buildings that were damaged by the June 2008 flood and are now open and back to life. Only Corbett’s sign had a circle with a line through it, signifying that the Veterans Memorial Building is not back on its feet. He then ripped the circle off so the sign said, “We’re Back.”

“This is why we need a new game plan for Cedar Rapids, a game plan that shows leadership and says, “We’re back.”

Just 10 days ago, Corbett –- vice president at trucking firm CRST and former president/CEO of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce and former speak of the Iowa House of Representatives -– attracted every media outlet when he formally kicked off his campaign for mayor.

He spoke without nearly all of them on Thursday.

In his remarks, Corbett took exception with the City Council’s plans for a six-to-nine month study focused on the prospect of building a new government building to house city government and perhaps “co-locate” other jurisdiction’s offices in the new building or at the same site.

“Does the city really want to build a new Taj Mahal dedicated to government?” Corbett asked. “The least expensive plan is to rebuild and move many of the functions of city government back into the Veterans Memorial Building.”

Of course, what most know as City Hall is the Veterans Memorial Building, which was built in the 1920s to honor veterans even as it became home to City Hall.

Corbett said placing City Hall on an island in the middle of the Cedar River made perfect sense in the 1920s and keeping it there makes sense today.

“Many years ago this site was chosen for city government because it was a neutral site between the communities of Cedar Rapids and Kingston,” he said. “That decision brought people together and still does today. This memorial and home to city government has served us well. It is time to reach back to that same unifying spirit.”

Corbett said the current City Hall administration has been given the approval to spend $24 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief money to bring the Veterans Memorial Building back to life. Instead, he said, city leaders have set the matter aside to spend many, many more months exploring the idea of building a new facility somewhere else.

At the end of the day, the city must restore the Veterans Memorial Building in any event, he said, and he said the city should do it out of respect for veterans and to get people in down economy back to work.

“The culture of delay is hurting everyone,” Corbett said. “It is time to get on with our lives.

“We have 7,900 people in this county unemployed. We have laborers in the construction trades that stand ready to work. Unfortunately, we have a City Council stuck in a culture of delay. … We are losing an entire construction season. The delays have to stop.”

Ray Dochterman, business manager of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 125, said his appearance at Corbett’s event on Thursday was not yet an official endorsement of Corbett for mayor. But he said he invited 50 members of his union to come out and listen to Corbett, and 50 members showed up.
Dochterman liked that Corbett was talking about turning federal dollars into jobs.

“You know we’re a little short of jobs right now,” he said.

Scott Smith, president of the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Building and Construction Trades Council, was on hand Thursday, too, to hear Corbett.

“He’s got some good ideas, and I think he’s looking to take charge and get work going here that needs to be done,” Smith said. “It’s been nine months since the flood, and there’s not a whole lot of progress.”

George Hammond, a long-time member of the city’s Veterans Memorial Commission, said veterans just want the city to use the federal money to bring the building back to life whether city government returns to it or not.

“All we want is the building back,” Hammond said.

Standing on the edge of the crowd was City Council member Pat Shey.

Later, after the Corbett speech, Shey said he was “disappointed” with Corbett what Corbett had to say. He called it advocacy for the “status quo.”

Shey said the council is still negotiating with FEMA over the amount of damage to the building even as the city begins a public participation process to help figure out what is the best future use for City Hall.

“I cannot recall any discussion about building a Taj Mahal,” Shey said. In fact, he said no one has advocated building a “new” structure for city hall.

Long-in-coming help for flood-hit landlords is on the way

Help is nearly here for landlords of flood-damaged properties.

The City Council this evening is expected to hire a local firm, Transitions Made Better Inc., to administer housing rehabilitation funds for landlords with flood-damaged properties.

Paula Hinzman Mitchell, supervisor in the city’s Housing Services office, said the city expects the state Department of Economic Development to begin to release Community Development Block Grant funds to help flood-affected landlords soon once the city has its program to administer the funds in place.

To date, more than 500 landlords with a total of 874 rental units have applied for help from the program with the cumbersome name, Rental Rehabilitation – Small Projects Disaster Recovery Assistance Program.

Hinzman Mitchell said it would cost about $22 million if each of the units received the maximum rehabilitation award of $24,999. An additional $12,500 per unit is also available to cover added project costs, which include lead-based paint remediation in instances where it is necessary.

Landlords have been agitating for housing rehabilitation help for many months as both state Jumpstart funds and federal CDBG funds have come into the city for homeowners and small businesses.

The landlords have argued that they were a major provider of affordable housing in the city’s flood-damaged neighborhoods and that getting their properties renovated was the quickest, cheapest way for the city to reestablish affordable housing lost in the June 2008 flood.

“Certainly one of the goals of the CDBG program is to provide decent affordable housing, and so this activity will be consistent with that overall major goal,” Hinzman Mitchell said.

The landlord program is open to those with seven or fewer rental units, and the assistance will come in the form of five-year forgivable loans.

Hinzman Mitchell noted that city had invited several entities to submit proposals to administer the landlord assistance program, but only Theresa Bornbach, president of Transitions Made Better Inc. in Cedar Rapids, submitted a proposal. Bornbach has experience administering state Jumpstart funds for local businesses, Hinzman Mitchell said.

The firm will receive an administrative fee of up to 2 percent to administer the program.

Keith Smith, president of Landlords of Linn County, told the City Council last night Bornbach has earned his respect in the way she has advocated for small businesses during the flood recovery. He said landlords were confident Bornbach would “meet our needs.”

Bornbach is founder/CEO of Corridor CoWorks Inc. and The Corridor Institute, and she is a former Alliant Energy vice president.

City, county contributing to one private-sector effort on flood recovery while private sector contributes to second effort in City Hall

The private sector’s interest in helping with flood recovery got another boost this week.

The Linn County Board of Supervisors has agreed to contribute $20,000 to the Economic Planning and Redevelopment Corp., an upstart private-sector initiative created in Cedar Rapids to help with local flood recovery.

For one, the Linn County board’s contribution should help comfort Cedar Rapids City Private-sector help on flood recovery: City, county contributing to one business-led Council member Chuck Wieneke, who has suggested that the council take back its $50,000 grant to the EPRC if the county wasn’t willing to contribute.

Earlier, the county board had tabled the matter.

On Tuesday, Lu Barron, chairwoman of the Linn board, said Tuesday that the board first wanted to get a better feel for the EPRC’s plans and mission before it contributed to the effort. On a unanimous 5-0 vote, the board now is satisfied, Barron said.

The public support for the EPRC makes it a private-public partnership, though the push for its creation came from some local business leaders displeased with the pace of flood recovery in the city. John Smith, president/CEO of trucking firm CRST International Inc., is chairman of the four-person EPRC board.

The EPRC’s director is Doug Neumann, who also holds down a post with the Downtown District.

In the last two weeks, the EPRC’s still-new role got pushed into the background a bit as yet a second, private-sector initiative surfaced in hopes of helping City Hall better deal with the city’s flood recovery. In this second effort, which is being promoted by Rockwell Collins, local business interests have offered to pay to support a new city flood-recovery manager inside of City Hall not outside of City Hall where the EPRC is operating.

Fund-raising for the City Hall position reportedly is underway even as the city and now Linn County are spending public dollars to pay for the first private-sector initiative, the EPRC.

The EPRC’s Neumann and the EPRC board have said that the EPRC will be out chasing federal grants and private grants that the city and county are not.

“I sincerely appreciate that the county supervisors have recognized the value EPRC can have in helping find funds for flood recovery and in helping accelerate progress on the many redevelopment projects we need to revitalize this great community,” Neumann said Tuesday of the county board’s funding support.

Linn County’s Barron said the EPRC and the private-sector-supported flood coordinator inside City Hall may have efforts that overlap a bit, but she said she sees the two positions as working together.

Linn supervisor Linda Langston and Monica Vernon, Cedar Rapids council member, are on the four-member EPRC board of directors.

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.

Two additional gauges expected this month to better predict rises in Cedar River upstream from Cedar Rapids

Two additional, automated river gauges should be in place in the Cedar River upstream from Cedar Rapids this month, reports Ken DeKeyser, the city’s storm water management engineer.

A lack of gauges and the failure of a key one in downtown Cedar Rapids just upstream from the Eighth Avenue bridge hurt the ability of the National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey to report just what was happening to the Cedar River last June as it flooded Cedar Rapids.

On Monday came proof of how wildly forecasts of the river can move, particularly, as the city’s Craig Hanson said, in March and April when rains can be heavy, creeks feeding the Cedar River can flash flood and river levels can fluctuate dramatically.

Both Hanson, the city’s public works maintenance manager, and Steve Hershner, the city’s utilities environmental manager, both noted Monday that the river forecast at 8 a.m. Monday had been for a crest of about 8 feet. Four hours later, the prediction had jumped to 12.76 feet, they noted. By evening, the prediction had dropped to 12 feet, right at the city’s earlier flood stage and long cry from the 31.12 feet of last June.

On Monday, though, it was clear some things hadn’t yet changed from last June as Hanson was reviewing the latest National Weather Service data and making reference to river readings in Waterloo.

The river typically reaches a crest about a foot below what the crest is in Waterloo, Hanson was saying.

That standard wisdom fell apart last year, of course, as heavy rains and flash flooding between Waterloo and Cedar Rapids played the central role in the flood disaster that hit Cedar Rapids.

In recognition of that, Cedar Rapids and the flood-hit city of Palo just to Cedar Rapids’ northwest were quick to pony up funds to get the USGS to install two new river gauges, one near Palo and one near Vinton upstream from Palo.

Cedar Rapids’ DeKeyser has told the Cedar Rapids City Council that the city would find a way to get the project funded if some of the partners weren’t willing to participate.

In recent days, he reported that Linn County and Vinton have agreed to share in both the cost of the gauges and the annual fee to operate them, while the city was still waiting to see if the Duane Arnold Energy Center and the Benton County Board of Supervisors would join in.

The total cost of installation is $34,000, or $5,700 for each of six entities should all participate. USGS pays 40 percent of the $29,000 a year in operating costs with each of the six entities paying $2,900.

DeKeyser said each jurisdiction will sign an agreement with USGS, and USGS on Monday reported that the matter is still in the works. USGS and DeKeyser both said the gauges should be in place this month.

As for the gauge near the Eighth Avenue bridge in downtown Cedar Rapids, DeKeyser reports that it has been replaced with updated equipment that provides an early warning if battery backup power isn’t working.

A failure of battery power caused the gauge to fail in June just as the Cedar River crest was approaching Cedar Rapids. As a result, the National Weather Service, the USGS and the city of Cedar Rapids lost track of the river’s rise as it leaped eight to 10 feet higher than expected.

City’s flood-action plan kicks in: Cedar River expected to reach a tame 12 feet by Thursday, though sewer plant is hustling to avoid any challenges

Believe it or not:

The National Weather Service predicts that the Cedar River at Cedar Rapids will crest at 12  feet on Thursday afternoon, which is the level of the city’s basic flood stage and above the 10-foot stage at which the city’s flood action plan begins to kick in.

The predicted 12-foot crest, issued last evening, is an improvement. At late afternoon, the crest was expected at 12.76 feet.

On any given year, these levels would not draw much of a note.

But it is only nine months since the catastrophic June 2008 flood, when the river reached 31.12 feet, and people are apt to pay attention, Craig Hanson, the city’s public works maintenance manager, said Monday afternoon.

Hanson said there is no general cause for concern.

Nevertheless, he reported that city crews and contractors on Monday were scurrying around because of concern that waters even approaching a relatively low height of 13 feet could cause new problems to the city’s Water Pollution Control facility. That facility is still on the mend from extensive damage caused by last year’s flood.

Hanson and Steve Hershner, the city’s utilities environmental manager, reported that the problems facing the plant are two-fold.

Firstly, a sewer line along Prairie Creek has a hole somewhere along it and the line has been taking in creek water since the heavy weekend rains. Hanson ordered a portion of J Street SW closed Monday because quick raise of water had forced Prairie Creek out of its banks.

A second issue is an open section of sewer line in main sewer interceptor line, which is being renovated near the Water Pollution Control plant.

Too much river and creek water infiltrating into a sewer system designed to carry waste water potentially could overwhelm and damage the city’s main pump station at the Water Pollution Control plant, Hanson and Hershner said.

“We’re taking steps to manage all the flow into the system,” Hershner said.

Both Hershner and Hanson noted that the river was expected to crest at about 8 feet when the two of them arrived at work on Monday morning.

By noon, the projection for the crest had jumped to 12.76 feet, a change dramatic enough that both mentioned it.

Cedar Rapids’ flood-management action plan kicks into gear when the river is expected to reach the 10-foot stage, which is expected to happen at 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Prior to last June, the city’s flood-action plan was designed to protect the city against a river height, as measured on a gauge up from the Eighth Avenue bridge, of 20 feet, which had been the record flood level prior to last June when the river climbed to 31.12 feet.

With Monday’s rising water, Hanson said no one has called the city Public Works Department to express concern, nor should they call, he said.

Hanson said heavy rain on ground that is still partially frozen and that was already saturated from last year is prompting the rise in creeks and rivers.

He noted that March and April typically bring a lot of fluctuation in water levels in Iowa.

Hanson said the city will close Otis Road SE when the Cedar River reaches 10 feet.

At 11 feet, the city starts pumps on Ellis Road NW west of Edgewood Road NW.

At 11.5 feet, water begins to affect Osborn Park on the river’s east side below the 14th/16th Avenue bridge.

At 13 feet, water begins to enter the street under the 12th Avenue bridge between the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library and the Penford Products plant. But that road has been closed since last year’s flood, Hanson noted.

Alliant COO Protsch talks about life after low-cost downtown steam, about the new world with Obama, about a proposal for a $200-million biomass plant

It was a little telling when Brian Fagan, mayor pro tem of the City Council, quickly looked into the audience at Friday’s State of the City speech when asked about the future of what had been a low-cost steam energy system for the downtown and vital industries and others nearby.

And Fagan drew plenty of chuckles when he saw Eliot out there and asked if he wanted to take the question on.

Eliot is Eliot Protsch, the chief operating officer of Alliant Energy, the utility which had provided that cheap steam from its aged and now flood-damaged and disabled Sixth Street Generating Station.

Amy Reasner, the local attorney who was moderating the event, wasn’t sure if the State of the City speech was designed to have those in the audience help define the city’s current situation.  But in any event, Protsch came to the stage and took to the microphone.

In short, Protsch put it this way:

There might be a solution for the “very large industrial customers” located near the plant. But customers in the downtown and even farther from the Sixth Street plant will need to look for another solution.

“I believe at the end of the day, what I just asserted to you, will end up being where we find ourselves in Cedar Rapids,” Protsch told the audience of about 300 gathered in The Ballroom at the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel.

He added a caveat: “… absent a very large subsidy from somewhere, with the emphasis on very large.”

In an interview at the end of the Friday event, Protsch broke the issue down this way:

The 100-year-old Sixth Street Generating Station worked to provide low-cost steam to eight large users and another 200 smaller ones in and around downtown because the plant had few capital costs and it burned relatively cheap coal without any giant burden required for emission controls.

In fact, it was sufficiently cheap to burn coal to boil water to produce steam that piping the steam through an old, inefficient, poorly insulated and sometime-leaky piping system didn’t matter much.

All that changed with the June flood, which disabled the plant.

Now Alliant and its customers, he said, face two choices, neither attractive.

Protsch said the coal alternative would require huge capital costs — $52 million to retrofit the plant and likely $150 million or more in the years ahead to add emission controls to it to meet the changing and emerging environmental regulations. The capital costs, which would be built into the utility rates, make the idea unworkable, he said.

The natural gas alternative is different: It doesn’t require high capital costs upfront, but he said the cost of natural gas is both higher and more volatile. Suddenly, producing steam with natural gas has a much higher cost, and one too high to be able to ship steam great distances through an old, inefficient piping system. Short of digging up downtown streets and replacing the steam pipes, this idea won’t work, he said.

Protsch said Alliant has been telling smaller users, including all of those steam users in the downtown, that they should look at another solution for their steam needs. Many customers already have converted to their own systems, he said.

“I believe they all should be looking hard at that,” he said. “Because absent -– again absent a big subsidy from somewhere –- I just don’t think it’s going to be economic for anybody to restore the steam service the way it was burning coal.”

The story could be different for large industrial users like Quaker and Cargill –– Alliant continues in ongoing discussions with them, he said — next to the Sixth Street power plant. He thought “a natural gas facility of some sort” could work for them. Alliant wouldn’t have to be part of that solution, but “we’d like to be,” he said.

“Mostly, we want our customers to put in the most efficient steam production capability that they can so that they remain viable,” Protsch said. “So that’s our goal. Whether we have a role in it or not is less of an issue.”

For some months, there has been much discussion at City Hall, from local legislators and from Alliant itself about the lobbying effort in Washington, D.C., and in Des Moines and even at City Hall to find some kind of short-term and/or long-term subsidy to solve the downtown steam matter.

Asked about that, Protsch said Alliant representatives were in Washington, D.C., in recent days was being discussed with Iowa’s Congressional offices about the building of a $200-million power plant that would burn biomass to produce energy in and near the downtown.

Protsch noted that such an idea had been studied in the past.

If any such federal grant would surface, he suggested that it would be made to the city of Cedar Rapids, who then might lease land from Alliant to build such a biomass facility.

“We’re open to that,” he said.

For those looking at the big national and global energy future, Protsch said they need look no further than Cedar Rapids.

“Look at Obama’s budget bill,” he said. “It’s got carbon trading. Coal generates more carbon than natural gas, and you’ve got to build that into the cost.

“This is a microcosm of national energy policy, right here in Cedar Rapids. Because it’s an economic analysis associated with burning coal, biomass or some other fuel versus natural gas.

“It’s a microcosm of putting energy production closer to where it is utilized or moving energy greater distances either in a pipe or wire. It’s a manifestation old infrastructure being replaced by new infrastructure with vast differences in capital costs …”

In short, it isn’t good news in any event for those who had loved the low-cost steam from the disabled Sixth Street Generating Station.

It will cost too much to retrofit the Sixth Street Generating Station and add emission controls – Protsch doubted the small plant could win any environmental waiver — to burn coal.

And it cost too much to pipe more expensively produced steam from natural gas though an old, inefficient system of pipes.

“Absent” some big subsidy, Protsch repeated along the way.

Mayor’s speech downtown is a reminder that all is not well there

A mayor’s annual address on the condition of the city is generally an upbeat affair with a focus on the accomplishments in the year past and the ones sure to come in the year ahead.

That was the case on Friday when Mayor Kay Halloran and Brian Fagan, mayor pro tem, spoke at the League of Women Voters of Cedar Rapids/Marion’s annual State of the City luncheon.

This year, though, it was hard not to feel how far there is yet to go in the city’s recovery from the June 2008 flood, a recovery that must come in the midst of a troubling national economic downturn.

Friday’s event was held in what over the years has become the lone downtown venue for such gatherings: The Ballroom of the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel.

The hotel is in bankruptcy and being run by an interim hotel manager, and for more than a year now, the hotel chain that owns the Crowne Plaza moniker has threatened to withdraw it from Cedar Rapids only downtown hotel.

The previous owner of the hotel had been required to upgrade the building to keep the Crowne Plaza name, and, in fact, much of that work was completed, reports Patrick DePalma, chairman of the city’s Five Season Facilities Commission. The rooms still need new TVs, and, more to the point of the mayor’s Friday speech, there is still a need to upgrade the hotel’s Ballroom, DePalma says.

One of the typical routes to The Ballroom is through the entrance to the U.S. Cellular Center, which is joined to the hotel. You walk in the center’s lobby and head up the towering escalator to the next floor to get to the hotel lobby and The Ballroom. But the escalator has been out of service since the machinery that drives it took on water in the June flood.

Nearly nine months after the flood, there surely are some who, hiking up the stationary escalator steps, aren’t wondering if the city’s recovery from the flood will ever come.

The city’s Facilities Commission oversees the city-owned event center and it plays a role in the hotel because the city owns the land and air rights for the hotel.

The commission’s DePalma says he’s tried to impress on the city the need to get moving on fixing the flood damage to the U.S. Cellular Center’s lobby and to the escalator there. He says the work is dependent on funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and he says City Hall controls the schedule on which of the many flood-damaged city properties gets fixed first.

“We’ve talked to the city and said, ‘Let’s get this done,’” he says. “The work that needs to be done is fairly minor in terms of how much it would take and how much it would cost compared to (other projects).”

DePalma says the city’s first focus in the downtown is to fix elevators in damaged parking ramps.

“We understand that,” he says. But he says he hopes the U.S. Cellular Center comes soon after.

“Any pressure you can put on them,” DePalma says. “It’s not a difficult thing to take care of. But I can’t hire a contractor.”

Under consideration, he says, is doing away with the escalator and replacing it with an elevator and a staircase.

The public now can ride the elevator next door that leads into the hotel lobby on the second floor.

For whatever reason, the audience was a little smaller this time for the mayor’s annual address. The League of Women Voters put the count at about 300, down about 60 from the year before.

Six of nine City Council members did not attend to hear their council colleagues, Halloran and Fagan, speak. Council member Justin Shields was on hand.

The center of the city’s government has been operating out of an office building in a northeast Cedar Rapids office park since the flood. The council holds its formal Wednesday evening meetings in an auditorium nearby on the AEGON USA campus. The flood-damaged City Hall downtown remains empty and awaiting renovation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fix of flood damage to beloved Cedar Rapids trails not expected for months

It was nice and warm enough Wednesday to start thinking about the Spandex shorts and a first bicycle ride of the year.

Go easy.

Dave Smith, the city’s parks superintendent, reports that major flood damage on sections of both the paved Cedar River Trail and the unpaved Sac & Fox Trail isn’t apt to be repaired until late summer at the earliest.

Sections of both trails are being used and have been since the flood, but it will be months before someone can traverse the full extent of either trail, Smith says. In fact, the city isn’t “recommending” use of the Sax & Fox, though that isn’t stopping some.

Both trails are in the same boat.

The city’s damage-assessment consultant has come up with a cost estimate of damage as has the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That process will result in FEMA’s decision for reimbursement to the city to make the repairs. The city will then seek bids and a winning contractor will do the work.

As for the Cedar River Trail, Smith says users can and have been able to use the trail from its northern end at Hiawatha through the downtown. Users then must move into the city’s Park and Ride lot at Ninth Avenue SE where the new railroad bridge is going up, before they can continue on the trail to just south of Czech Village.

It is the next mile of trail, though, that remains closed. At one point, the trail was ripped up for the removal of a flood-damage bridge that crosses the river at the former Farmstead plant. Farther on, the river bank is washed out right to the trail edge, with debris and a fence collapsed on the trail. Once the trail begins to gain some height, it is fine all the way to the southern end south of Ely Road.

This summer, Smith says, should see a fix of the damage and also extend the southern edge of the trail to 76^th Avenue SW.

As for the Sac and Fox Trail, Smith says pretty much the entire trail was flooded. There are several places where flood water has left mud and debris and has caused blowouts and deep cuts in the trail. In addition, the pedestrian bridge just north of Mount Vernon Road SE remains collapsed and in Indian Creek. The bridge needs to be pulled out and its supports rebuilt before the bridge can be reset or replaced.

The Sac & Fox is an unpaved trail, or as Smith says, “It was a primitive trail and now it’s real primitive.”

Smith says the city is “not recommending” the trail’s use, but some are using stretches of it, and some don’t mind the additional challenge, he says.

Water-filled bladders and sand-filled baskets to provide temporary flood protection; but cost too great to protect New Bohemia/Oak Hill

The City Council moved ahead to purchase a temporary flood control system to protect many of the flood-prone parts of the city to some degree until permanent protection is in place.

The temporary system, which will cost $6.6 million for materials and mobilization if needed, will be available this flood season.

The council approved the concept of a temporary system a few weeks ago, but wanted to hear more about why it was too expensive to protect the lowest-lying area along the river, the New Bohemia/Oak Hill area.

Last night, the council agreed with consultant Stanley Consultants Inc., Muscatine, Iowa, that it did not make sense to spend an additional $3 million to protect property valued at about $2 million below Eighth Avenue SE on the east side of the river in what is New Bohemia/Oak Hill.

Council member Brian Fagan suggested that maybe that area could be the first to see the coming permanent flood protection when it is built in the years ahead.

The temporary system features a product called a tiger dam, in which water fills bladders, and a product called a Hesco Concertainers, in which sand is used to fill plastic-lined mesh baskets.

The latter was used in Johnson and Des Moines counties last year.

Once the flood forecast is for the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids to reach 20 feet, the city will mobilize the temporary protection. It will protect Time Check, Czech Village and both sides of the river downtown to a river stage measured at a downtown river gauge of 24 feet.

The city twice has had flood water reach 20 feet in its history. The only time it was higher was last June, when the river reached 31.12 feet.

Protecting to 24 feet will protect 830 homes and $21.3 million in property value, consultant Jim Kill, of Stanley Consultants Inc., Muscatine, Iowa, told the council last night.

Kill called that “a good ratio” between the cost of temporary protection and the amount of value being protected.

He said the ratio “validated” the council’s earlier decision to protect to 24 feet. 

Stealth ‘Condition of the City’ address has Halloran assuring city is ‘open for business;’ Fagan says city’s flood recovery will be a model for the nation

Without prior promotion, Mayor Kay Halloran and Brian Fagan, mayor pro tem, last night gave a Condition of the City speech, saying the city is working to recover from disaster in a way that makes the city better than ever.

The speech was part preview: Halloran is scheduled to reprise her comments at a public forum on Friday.

In PowerPoint-aided comments, Halloran last night forewarned Cedar Rapidians that “times will be difficult” in the city for the next few years as the city works to recover from the 2008 flood.

At the same time she assured that the city is “open for business” and she promised that she and her council colleagues will be “vigilant” on spending and continue to work to bring about an even more cost-effective, customer-friendly city government.

SEE http://gazetteonline.com/Assets/pdf/ConditionofCityPPT.pdf

 

Halloran said, too, that the city will continue to work hard to change “very draconian” state policies that she said force cities to be too dependent on local property-taxes. Those taxes “gouge” the city’s businesses and residents and will “cripple our city” as it works to recover, she said.

 

Fagan said the state of the city’s condition is a tale of two cities – a city before the flood and a city recovering from a flood.

Fagan recalled the images of last June, calling them “difficult” and at the same time “inspiring” and “representative” of the giving and generosity of Cedar Rapids.

Fagan said the city’s needs and costs remain “staggering,” and he put the cost of recovery at between $2 billion and $5 billion. For housing needs alone, the city needs more than $200 million to fix, buyout, relocate and rebuild housing, he said.

In citing the dollar figures, Fagan addressed head on the frequent criticism often heard about the City Council’s use of consultants that have and are providing the city with what Fagan called “expert guidance” in the flood recovery.

He put the cost of consultants at about $5 million, defended the spending and said the expertise was the city’s best way to ensure that Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery is “the best recovery this country has ever seen.”

Fagan, too, talked about the city’s plans to make sure it renovates or rebuilds some 300 flood-damaged public city buildings and facilities in the best way it can for future generations.

He made reference to a comment last week from a Linn County supervisor, who suggested that the city was pursuing wants and not needs as the city talked about the possibility of building new facilities. It meets a public need to study rebuilding options to see what best serves customers and what is sustainable, efficient and affordable for the long term, Fagan said.

In the city’s flood recovery, Fagan singled out several high points: the public-private effort that saved the city’s water supply; the city’s ability to get its waste-water treatment plant back on line quickly; the city’s ability to get a flood-protection plan in place in four months. The speed of the latter two accomplishments was unrivaled in the nation, he said.

Fagan said the last eight months has brought some “incredibly tense times” and plenty of “vigorous debate” at City Hall and throughout the community.

For all of it, the city will come through the recovery a better city, he 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.

Council ready to take yet another step to assure the distrustful

It looks like the City Council is sufficiently eager for voters to pass a local-option sales tax to help with flood recovery that the council will bite its collective tongue and again try to assure people who think the council can’t be trusted to spend the tax money correctly.

At its meeting this evening, the City Council will approve a resolution that specifies that 90 percent of the revenue from a local-option sales tax will be used “for the buyout, rehabilitation and relocation of flood-damaged housing.”

The tax is expected to generate about $18 million a year for the city in each of five years and three months that the tax will be in place should voters approve it on March 3.

Earlier, the council voted to use 90 percent of the tax revenue for flood relief and 10 percent for property-tax relief. The council-approve language on next Tuesday’s ballot reflects that earlier vote. Of the 90-percent of the tax revenue to be used for flood relief, the ballot language says the revenue will be used “for the acquisition and rehabilitation of flood damaged housing caused by the flooding of 2008, and matching funds for federal dollars to assist with flood recovery or flood protection.”

The language was designed to give the council some flexibility to use the money in the unlikely event that federal dollars, for instance, take care of more of the housing relief than the council now anticipates it will.

However, council critics were sure that meant the council would use the money in ways other than flood relief.

At last week’s council meeting, council member Justin Shields fumed about public distrust in the council and its intentions for the sales-tax revenue. At Shields’ insistence, the council, from member to member, assured that the money would be used to address the city’s couple-hundred million dollars in flood-damaged housing relief.

City Hall, then, issued a press release on Friday.

Earlier, the council voted to create a nine-member citizen oversight committee to oversee how sales-tax revenue would be spent.

Still people were questioning the council.

So tonight the council will pass a new resolution.

At last check, no one is calling for oversight committees and new resolutions to be passed by the Linn County Board of Supervisors or the city of Marion, for instance, both of which will also bring in plenty of tax-revenue should the ballot measure pass in those cities on Tuesday.

An unusual event: Recent state legislator Staed and even Downtown District’s Dusek stand up in public and praise City Council

Recent state legislator Art Staed of Cedar Rapids stood out in a crowd the other night for saying a seldom heard thing: That the mayor and City Council have been doing a great job.

It seems worth noting, because at events where the public gets a chance to speak –- week in, week out at City Council meetings, for instance -– the sentiment often is that the council and mayor are a bunch of bums.

“I don’t know where you’ve been,” Staed told a crowd of about 100 who had turned out Monday evening at a forum sponsored by The Gazette on the local-option sales tax.

He said the mayor and council had been “working their tails off for this city” ever since the flood eight months ago.

Staed had sat on his hands for a time, listening to others in the crowd beat up on City Hall and say they didn’t trust the City Council to spend the $18 million or so in the city’s share of annual sales-tax revenue responsibly.

Then he popped up to speak.

Staed said he couldn’t understand how people could show up at a public forum and essentially call elected city leaders a bunch of “liars.”

He said it was vital for the city to pass the sales tax to show the federal and state governments that the city is “doing something for ourselves.”

One suggestion had been that getting the Iowa Legislature to pass an income-tax surcharge for cities like school district can do would make for a less-regressive tax than a sales tax.

“That’s crazy, sitting around waiting for the Iowa Legislature to pass an income tax (surcharge),” Staed said.

Earlier at the forum, Peter Fisher, a University of Iowa professor or urban and regional planning and a researcher for the liberal Iowa Public Policy Project, said the regressive feature of the sales tax is really erased in the Cedar Rapids instance because so much of the tax is targeted for flood-damaged homes, nearly all of which had been owned by those with modest incomes. The tax also will go directly to creating jobs to renovate and replace the housing, Fisher said.

Fisher said he didn’t think the Iowa Legislature was likely to pass the income tax surcharge.

After Staed sat down the other night, Jon Dusek, president of Armstrong Development Co. and board member of the Downtown District, got up and agreed that the City Council had been working hard. At the same time, Dusek noted that he had sent the council a recent letter urging them not to raise property taxes by 14 percent as the city manager’s preliminary budget had proposed. The council has since sent the budget back for fixing.

Jeff Schott, former long-time Marion city manager and now program director at the University of Iowa’s Institute of Public Affairs, joined Fisher and others on the Monday evening panel. Schott noted that many Iowa cities have turned to a local-option sales tax because of a lack of ways to raise revenue other than property taxes.

The Gazette’s forum on the local-option sales tax issue brought out a nice crowd of 100 or so on a cold Monday night.

Those in attendance included people who see the tax as vital to help in the city of Cedar Rapids’ flood recovery and those who hate the tax.

Every jurisdiction in the county is voting on the tax on March 3 except four of them that already have the tax in place: Bertram, Central City, Coggon and Prairieburg.

Monday’s event actually was held over the Cedar Rapids border in Marion, though all the questions were about Cedar Rapids.

The crowd was sufficiently diverse that it drew healthy applause at some points from the tax haters and from the tax supporters.

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?

Distrust of City Hall seems part of the subtext of approaching local-option sales tax vote

It’s probably fair to say it couldn’t be otherwise. That is, a distrust of the City Council and City Hall in general.

After all, the city is trying to come back from a multibillion-dollar disaster in the middle of a near national depression in a nation that has seen dozens of other natural disasters in the last year. Everybody and his or her brother is competing for vital federal disaster money.

Making it all better yesterday just is an impossible task.

Even so, a level of distrust of City Hall has become quite apparent as residents in the city prepare for a March 3 vote on a 1-percent local option sales tax.

All the major players in the city are on board behind the tax, the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, Hawkeye Labor Council, Downtown District, Next Generation Commission, the chairman of the Economic Planning and Redevelopment Corp. and on and on.

There’s also a well-represented coalition of people and groups out campaigning for passage of the tax as something called Vote YES! For Our Neighbors.

The supporters see the tax as vital local help for the city’s flood recovery, and they passage as sending a vital signal to state and federal lawmakers that the city is doing all it can itself to contribute to flood recovery.

Nonetheless, the Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement of the sales tax came with a caveat: The Chamber insisted on the creation of a community oversight committee to guide how City Hall would spend the tax revenue. Vote YES! For Our Neighbors did, too.

The suggestion had the feel that, without such oversight, City Hall might not do the right thing and, without it, City Hall might actually louse up the tax’s chances for passage.

The City Council enthusiastically created such an oversight committee, which will be in place by April 1, when the tax begins to be collected if it is passed March 3.

But the distrust doesn’t end there.

Just this past week, representatives of Vote YES? For Our Neighbors spoke to The Gazette’s editorial board as they, no doubt, have been speaking to other groups around the community. The representatives said they still wanted more from the City Council. They wanted the council to pass a binding resolution that specifically promised that all the sales-tax revenue intended for flood relief would be spent for flood relief, and specifically for the purchase and rehabilitation of flood-damaged housing.

No matter, that the City Council’s voice was featured in a front-page story in The Gazette on Monday in which members promised to spend the revenue intended for flood relief on flood-damaged housing. No matter, that the council, member after member, declared the same thing at its meeting on Wednesday evening. No matter that the council-approved language on the March ballot pretty explicitly says as much.

A distrust expressed during the public comment period of the Wednesday council meeting prompted council member Justin Shields to anger. He said he couldn’t understand how the council could make its message any clearer.

That it needed to make it clearer became apparent on Friday when City Hall’s communications operation issued a press release based on the council’s Wednesday meeting with the headline “City Council Confirms Housing Buyouts & Rehab Priority.”

The news release pointed out the precise language the council on Feb. 3 approved for the March 3 ballot. It states that the tax revenue will be spent this way:

– 10 percent for property tax relief.
– 90 percent for the acquisition and rehabilitation of flood damaged housing caused by the flood of 2008, and matching funds for federal flood dollars to assist with flood recovery or flood protection.

Nonetheless, look for the council to create a council resolution next week that it can vote on anyway.

Interestingly, no one fought harder than council members to get a change in Iowa law so that the council could set a local-option sales tax vote in expedited fashion on March 3 and so that the tax could begin to be collected in expedited fashion on April 1. The special state legislation also does not tie Cedar Rapids’ vote to the block of metro cities, which is usually the case in local-option votes.

Demolitions of flood-wrecked homes in New Bohemia moved too fast for history

History matters.

The city of Cedar Rapids is being reminded of that and of just how particular the federal government can be about the past.

The reminder came after the city demolished six flood-wrecked properties in what in recent years has come to be known as the New Bohemia area along and near Third Street SE south of downtown.

After last June’s flood, all six properties were among the 71 that the city tagged with a purple placard in the city’s worst-to-best color system that went from purple to red to yellow to green. A purple placard signified that the property was too dangerous to enter, and so needed to be demolished.

Among the first of the purple properties to come down were six in The New Bohemia area, which – with the help of City Hall – gained national historic stature in recent years as the Bohemian Commercial District. This was the spot to first house immigrants from Bohemia in what today is the Czech Republic who had come to Cedar Rapids in the latter 19^th Century to work nearby in what then was the Sinclair meatpacking site.

What the city has come to learn is that it shouldn’t demolish anything in a nationally recognized historic district without first following federal rules related to the historic recognition.

Those rules are part of the National Historic Preservation Act.

In order to comply with the rules of the federal act, the city is among parties that have signed a memorandum of agreement with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, an agreement which requires that information on the historic aspects of the six demolished properties be collected and recorded for future reference.

In addition, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to fund an intensive historic survey of the remaining parts of the Bohemian Commercial District to verify if structures should retain their National Registry eligibility. The FEMA-funded survey also will determine if a National Historic District exists across the Cedar River from the Bohemian Commercial District in Czech Village where the heart of the Czech commercial activity eventually moved.

Vern Zakostelecky, a long-range planning coordinator for the city of Cedar Rapids, said a historic status for Czech Village will give the district access to grants it otherwise would not have access to.

Zakostelecky said the six demolished properties which now will get an historical accounting were at 1308 Second St. SE, 1312 Second St. SE, 1013 Third St. SE, 1019 Third St. SE, 211-213 13^th Ave. SE and 1221 Third St. SE.

City Assessor still working to value flood-damaged property; here’s a window into how it’s done

City Assessor Scott Labus reports that it’s not been easy coming up with assessments for the city’s flood-damaged property.

He hopes to have the job complete in early April.

In his newsletter, which he calls ViewPoint, Labus provides some insight into how he is going about trying to come up with fair numbers for those with flood-damaged properties.

It’s eye-opening for every resident because the value of all the property in the city matters to every single resident. A drop in value once place — and, hence, a drop in the amount of property-tax revenue coming from that place — could increase the burden on property elsewhere in the city.

Labus reports that his office began confronting what the flood would do to the city’s property value even as the flood was hitting last June. At the flood’s crest, Labus arranged to take aerial photographs to identify exactly where the flood reached.

He then used the city’s GIS mapping system to pinpoint which properties were affected by flood water. In total, his office found some 2,700 parcels with actual structural damage, he says.

His office hired two additional appraisers, and in October, his enlarged staff began visiting all the damaged properties to come up with an estimate of valuation loss for each property. To determine the size of each property’s valuation loss, the assessor takes into account the general economic climate in the affected area by looking at sale prices and trends. Now the office is heading back out to revisit each property again before arriving at a final, new valuation.

For homes in which the structure is a complete loss, the valuation of the property will be the value of the land minus the estimated cost to demolish the property, Labus reports.

Flood-damaged homes that have been restored, he adds, won’t necessarily see an increase in valuation from the pre-flood level once the adjustment is made for the overall economic health of the flood-damaged neighborhood.

The downtown is the city’s most concentrated area of valuation, and the basements and first floors of many downtown buildings were flooded. Labus said about 50 percent of the value of a first floor derives from the shell of the building and 50 percent from the interior.

Commercial valuations also are based on the net income a parcel produces. The assumption for now is that rental income for most first floors will be lost for an entire year, Labus says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who knows.

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

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

Wall Street Journal and now CBS News take a fresh look at the progress of city’s flood recovery

The lamentations from city and community leaders have been growing increasingly urgent in recent weeks and months. Not enough federal-funding support is getting to Cedar Rapids to help it recover from last June’s flood, the leaders have been pleading. The fear is the city’s flood recovery has dropped from view.

 

The message may be getting some traction on the national stage.

 

Just this Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal featured a story on the city’s struggles since the flood. The Journal reporter was in Cedar Rapids on Jan. 30, at one point riding with council member Jerry McGrane and Linn supervisor Linda Langston in McGrane’s pickup as they toured flood-damaged neighborhoods.

 

SEE the Journal story;

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431814390771265.html

 

Word came Friday that veteran CBS News reporter Dean Reynolds will be Cedar Rapids on Monday to get his take on the state of the city’s recovery.  Keep an eye out for Reynolds’ report. 

‘You bet you’ farmers are interested in waste-water treatment sludge

The vital incinerator at the city’s Water Pollution Control facility has been in disrepair since the flood, a fact that has forced the facility to find something else to do with the plant’s daily output of biosolid sludge.

For some years, the city has directed some of the sludge to area farmers for use as fertilizer at times when the incinerator has been down for repair.

Now, nearly all of it is going to farmers. In fact, farmers have been eager to take the stuff off the city’s hands, Steve Hershner, city utilities environmental manager, reports.

The sludge issue is coming up at City Hall on Wednesday as the council approves spending up to another $150,000 to landfill the sludge in the next year.

The council resolution updates a previous one that made $100,000 available for the landfilling of sewage sludge.

Hershner says the city likely will be forced to landfill sludge when farm fields are too wet in early spring to land apply the sludge.

The local solid waste agency has decided it does not want to use up space in its landfills for the sludge, so the city must spend more to haul it to Milan, Ill.

Land application costs the city only about 45 percent as much as hauling the sludge to an Illinois landfill. It’s about $25 a ton for land application, $55 a ton for landfilling, Hershner has said.

In recent months, farmers at about 40 sites have stepped forward to make their ground available for city’s sludge, and Hershner acknowledges that the city has received a “limited” number of complaints from neighbors.

At the same time, he has pointed out that the Cedar Rapids plant’s sludge is different than most waste-water treatment plants’ sludge because most of what the Cedar Rapids plant treats is waste from the local agricultural industries. About 80 percent of it is.

Most of the Cedar Rapids material was grown on the farm and, with land application, it returns to the land, Hershner says.

He notes that the repair of the sludge incinerator is expected to be complete in March, which will allow the city to begin to burn sludge again. Until then, the city must either land apply or landfill.

“When you’re in waste water treatment, you’re going to make biosolids and you got to have a place for it to go every day,” Hershner says.

Longer range, the city is undertaking a study to see if it might make sense to burn sludge and municipal garbage to create energy.

State development chief says unraveling “mystery” necessary for fair share of fed’s disaster relief

Michael Tramontina, director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development, was in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday and stopped by The Gazette for a chat.

It’s nice to see a genuinely enthusiastic guy. He was reading the front page of the Tuesday Gazette, excited about the prospects of the federal stimulus package providing funds to upgrade the nation’s electrical delivery system. Such investment will get Iowa’s wind power to market and help the emerging wind power industry in the state, he said.

He imagined, too, that the federal government might find money to build an ethanol pipeline to get Iowa’s ethanol speedily to market.

But Tramontina stopped by to field questions on the federal government’s delivery of disaster relief funds to the state, and in particular, the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development’s delivery of Community Development Block Grant funds to Iowa.

Tramontina said the latest stab at quantifying the state’s unmet disaster needs are $900 million in housing assistance, $900 million in assistance to business and then some untold amount for public infrastructure.

He didn’t think all the losses that Iowa businesses sustained to disaster in 2008 would ever be recovered.

Most interesting was Tramontina’s discussion about the amount of CDBG money that Iowa has seen to date.

It has become something of a statewide and Cedar Rapids-wide truth that Iowa has not gotten all the CDBG funds it should have from the federal government.

In the shortest of shorthand, Tramontina noted that the federal government dispensed $85 million and then $72.5 million to Iowa from an initial disaster relief allocation made on June 30. The money has now arrived.

A second Congressional appropriation at the end of October called for spending $6 billion on disaster relief, with about one-third of it to be allocated in short order.

One great thing had changed from June 30 and Oct. 30, Tramontina said: Only a few states were included in the first pot of money; now more than 30 are as a result of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, wildfires in California and much more.

He said HUD nicely explained to the state of Iowa some months ago how they determined which states would get what from the first Congressional allocation for disaster relief last summer.

In the second allocation, in which Iowa is slated to receive $125 million of the first $2 billion of $6 billion in relief, the formula for allocating the money is what Tramontina calls “totally a mystery.”

SEE who got what at http://www.hud.gov/news/release.cfm?content=pr08-179.cfm

To date, Iowa has not received any of the $125 million in the second allocation, thought Tramontina said the federal procedure is moving ahead on that. He said HUD must publish a Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA), the state must submit an action plan for its share of the funds, and then HUD approves the plan and begins to make funds available. The NOFA has not yet been published, but it is expected to be shortly. Iowa intends to file its action plan with HUD before that.

Tramontina used the analogy of an ATM machine. HUD doesn’t simply write Iowa a big check, but it puts money aside for the state. The state then accesses it, case by case, he said.

Any decisions about how the remaining $4 billion in disaster relief will be parceled out to states remain in the future.

Tramontina said Iowa’s Congressional delegation, including its senators and Congressman Dave Loebsack and Bruce Braley, are working hard to make sure that the HUD formula used for the next $4 billion in relief uses factors that are fair to the state of Iowa.

Asked what the state of Iowa was doing to lobby Iowa’s Congressional delegation about HUD’s CDBG money, Tramontina said, in truth, “They don’t need to be lobbied.”

“The Congressional delegation is working real hard,” he said.

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.

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.”

Just ask Kyle Skogman: Building homes for flood victims can turn a guy misty-eyed

It was nice seeing Linda Beltz and Kyle Skogman together this week.

Beltz is a housekeeping supervisor at Mercy Medical Center; Skogman, president of Skogman Homes.

The two were showing off a new home in the city’s old Oak Hill Neighborhood, a place which has long been in decline.

Beltz, who lost her former home to the June flood, was moving into the house that Skogman’s company built.

She couldn’t have looked happier, standing in the home’s hallway, explaining the upstairs laundry area and the great lengths Skogman had gone to make sure she qualified for the mortgage. Skogman was standing there, too, a little misty-eyed.

 “We were looking at some way to try to help out,” Skogman explained earlier in the week. “There were so many people who had lost their houses and needed some type of affordable option.”

Beltz’s home is one of 15 homes that Skogman Homes is putting up in one corner of Oak Hill. It is an initiative that is being helped by a creative, generous incentive from City Hall designed to bring Oak Hill back to life.

The City Hall incentive shaves about $40,000 off the cost of the home, so people who wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage on a new home can. Beltz qualified, with the help of disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to become a 58 year old with a new, 30-year mortgage.

“It’s OK,” she says. “I’ll just have to work a few more years.”

Skogman reported that he has been over at the group of new Skogman houses going up in Oak Hill almost daily since construction started just over three months ago. Beltz has been there, too, watching her new house go up, piece by piece.

“From my standpoint, we just felt … when you talk to these people and all they’ve gone through, it was very important that this be a real positive situation for them,” Skogman said.

At the first, it didn’t look like the Skogman idea would work even with the city incentive. Most who lost homes in the flood were of modest incomes or fixed incomes and many owned their older homes outright. Finding people willing to take on a new mortgage and then to qualify for one has not been easy. It still isn’t.

In fact, the city’s Replacement Housing Task Force has credited Skogman with the long hours he’s put in visiting major employers who employ flood victims and explaining his house-building ideas. The new homes aren’t exclusively for flood victims, but to date all that have been sold have been sold to flood victims.

Skogman’s plan is to finish 15 homes here in Oak Hill and then to see what City Hall has in mind next. With the help of incentives, he might build 10, maybe 20 more homes here in the next year or so.

He’s convinced there will be plenty of demand once the city buys out the hundreds and hundreds of flood-wrecked homes that it intends to buy out to make way for new levees and flood walls. The city hopes to have some money to do that this year.

Until then, you might want to drop down around this corner of Oak Hill, along 12^th Avenue SE between Ninth and Eighth streets SE. Take a look.

Skogman thinks what is happening here might be a model for what is to come in the other flood-hit neighborhoods in the city.

“I have got to believe that over the next four or five years there’s going to be quite a number of homes taken down,” he said. “And there’s going to be empty blocks of lots (just like in Oak Hill) that are going to need replacement housing.

“And that is certainly different than what builders like us have typically done.

“… It’s been a good experience for us. And, hopefully, as the city moves forward, we’ll be able to share with them things that work and the problems we’ve run into. Because the community obviously is going to need lots of houses built where lots of houses are taken out.”

In recent months, there has been some news coverage about out-of-town developers who are experienced in building affordable housing using a fairly entangled federal tax credit program.

One of three proposed projects has been set aside, another is having difficulty from neighbors and a third is on hold.

“One thing we didn’t want the city or community to think was that it would take somebody from out of town to come in and build replacement housing,” Skogman said. “Having been here for 60 years, and being the largest builder here, it would have been embarrassing.”

Grass roots on sales tax is calling itself VOTE YES! For Our Neighbors

A grass-roots group – VOTE YES! For Our Neighbors — will stand in the flood-hit Time Check Neighborhood at 2 this afternoon to rally support for the 1-percent local-option sales tax. The tax measure is on a March 3 ballot.

Gary Ficken, a business owner and president of the Small Business Recovery Group, and Dale Todd, former City Council member and a former neighborhood president, are co-chairmen of the effort.

Friday morning, Ficken said VOTE YES! has broad support from the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, local labor unions, Access Iowa, the Next Generation Commission, an assortment of flood victims and others.

“It looks to be a pretty good cross section of folks,” Ficken says.

The central focus of the VOTE YES! campaign, he says, is getting flood victims back into permanent residences.

“We need to help get them back with their lives. We’ve got people hurting that we’ve got to take care of,” Ficken says.

No time is a good time for a new tax, but he said the sales tax is needed. It’s a proof that the local community is doing all it can for itself, which will help secure more federal and state dollars, he says.

Like Thursday’s endorsement of the sales tax from the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, VOTE YES! recommends that an oversight committee be created to help City Hall decide how to spend the revenue that comes from the tax. It is expected to generate $18 million to $23 million a year, city officials have estimated.

Ficken says the oversight committee would bring some consistency to the distribution of the sales tax revenue because the committee would be in place for the 5-year life of the tax, if the tax is passed. In that 5-year period, City Council members might change as city elections come and go.

Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce backs option sales tax; calls for oversight to help City Hall spend the money

The Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors on Thursday unanimously endorsed the 1-percent local-option sales tax on the March 3 ballot.

Allen Witt, chairman of the Chamber’s board, said about 30 board members participated in the vote. He also said the board had polled some of the 1,600 business members of the Chamber, and that the poll showed “strong” support for the tax.

In Cedar Rapids, the City Council will use 90 percent of the revenue from a local-option sales tax for flood recovery, 10 percent for property-tax relief if the measure passes..

“The Chamber understands this is part of our effort of neighbor helping neighbor and it is a critical time in our history,” Witt said last night.

He said the sales tax will provide revenue for the city’s acquisition of flood-damaged homes and for future flood protection. The tax also will help the city make the case for federal and state funds because it will show the city is doing what it can to help itself, he said.

The endorsement comes with a caveat: The Chamber board also calls for the creation of a community oversight committee to monitor the distribution of the sales tax revenue in Cedar Rapids if the tax passes.

Witt called that oversight committee a “strong recommendation,” though he noted that the state of Iowa collects the tax and distributes to the governing jurisdiction. In this instance, the city of Cedar Rapids would have to agree to such a community oversight arrangement.

Witt said the Chamber board also supports Vote Yes for Our Neighbors, a grass-roots group that has formed to promote the local-option sales tax in Cedar Rapids. Gary Ficken, a businessman who is president of the Small Business Recovery group, and Dale Todd, a former City Council member, are leading the grass-roots group.

Local Jumpstart office upbeat; new infusion of state, federal money enough to meet commitments

Gov Chet Culver is in town this afternoon to open a new Rebuild Iowa Office office and, no doubt, to talk about the $56-million disaster-relief bill he signed earlier in the week.

City Manager Jim Prosser says the city expects $20 million of the amount, with $10 million going to the local Jumpstart office.

The local office is a city operation, and the city has contracted with two nonprofit agencies to run the place.

The $10 million in new state Jumpstart money coming to the local office is the amount the office reported it needed just a week ago. The state money is particularly helpful because it has fewer strings attached to it than more plentiful federal funds, called Community Development Block Grant money. In fact, some needing housing assistance here would have had to go without but for the new infusion of state Jumpstart money.

Doug Nelson, who is running the local Jumpstart office as project manager for the Affordable Housing Network Inc., was feeling pretty good Thursday about the office’s mission.

Not only is the office getting $10 million more from the state – Nelson said it’s actually $9.6 million – but the federal government also has committed to allocating $18.8 million in CDBG money, up from $13.5 million.

In total, the local office now has a total of $35 million, an amount that Nelson says will satisfy most of the office’s commitments to date.

“I feel really comfortable where we’re at from a funding perspective,” Nelson said.

Understand, the office is following a formula that only pays part of what homeowners with flood damage need to repair a house or buy another one if it is beyond reasonable repair. The office also pays mortgage assistance on damaged homes that owners aren’t yet back in.

The local office’s work has been slowed not only by a lack of funds but also by the pace at which the funds were being made available.

The slowdown was coming, in part, because of the need for the state of Iowa to check funding awards against payments made to homeowners earlier from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and private insurers.

Sufficiently slow has the checking process been that the City Council last week loaned the local Jumpstart office up to $6 million to help get checks flowing to contractors rehabilitating homes and  for downpayment assistance for owners whose flood-damaged home can’t be repaired.

Nelson said the office will begin using city money by Friday or Monday. He said the office also had a new pot of $1 million in federal cash to make payments.

City Hall critic Carol Martin admits opposing local-option tax is “tricky”

Carol Martin, the best-known critic of City Council spending over many years now, is no longer a constant presence at City Council meetings. But she did show up at the noon on Tuesday to hear for herself the council case for a local-option sales tax.

Without pause, the council said the city needed the extra tax revenue to help meet hundreds of millions of dollars in unmet needs associated with flood recovery. Property taxes, the city’s principal revenue source, can’t carry a bigger load, and federal and state funds aren’t going to be enough, council members said.

Council members, too, asked residents to consider the 1-percent sales tax, not as a new imposition, but rather as another way for residents to give as they already have for flood recovery and for the good of the whole community.

“As a city, I do believe there is an obligation that we have to work with the community and to help our neighbors as we did during the flood — with dignity, determination and discipline,” council member Brian Fagan said.

It is an argument that Martin appreciates.

“It’s kind of a tricky situation because no one wants to have flood victims suffer any more,” Martin said a few hours after Tuesday’s noon meeting.

Nonetheless, by late Tuesday afternoon, she was already mobilizing her network of City Hall skeptics to oppose the March 3 vote on the 1-percent sales tax.

Martin said she feared that the sales tax revenue – between $18 million and $23 million a year, city officials estimate – would not get to flood victims, and in any event, she said the length of the taxing period – 5 years and 3 months – was too long.

Martin also noted layoffs in the city and she said it was a particularly tough time to impose a new tax. She said she might feel differently if she thought the city was watching its spending.

“But they keep spending money like it’s going out of style,” Martin said. “Show me how you’re being frugal with our money, especially now.”

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.

Council sends city staff to the wood shed over buyout letter; Read the letter for yourself

The City Council has gotten an earful in recent days from property owners apt to have their properties bought out in the future because they are will be in the way of the city’s proposed new flood protection system of levees and flood walls.

What got the phone ringing at City Hall was a letter — see it at http://gazetteonline.com/assets/pdf/voluntaryacqstrat.pdf — to these owners seeking signatures to allow permission for JCG Land Services Inc., of Nevada, Iowa, to enter on to their property.

To some homeowners, the letter was unclear and seemed to be seeking permission to allow some unknown company to invade a property to prepare for buyouts that the city has not yet committed to.

Jon Galvin, vice president of the Northwest Neighbors, fired off a letter to City Hall telling it to take care of first things first: Buy out the properties, and then worry about the rest.

Council members across the board acknowledged that the letter was less than artful, and council member Brian Fagan asked city staff to write a new, clearer one. There was the suggestion, too, that staff run a draft of such letters past a few citizens to see how the letter might be improved before launch.

Council member Tom Podzimek said the letter caused citizen headaches while a clearer letter would not have.

“This isn’t anything harmful,” Podzimek said of what the city is asking in the letter. The letter, he said, only makes it seem so.

The letter seeks to get permission from property owners so surveyors and geologists and others can walk on property to conduct tests needed to build a new flood system. Having to find a property owner – particularly when most of the properties are not inhabited – at the time the work is being conducted would add months to the work, city staff added.

Of the 750 or so parcels so far identified as ones slated for possible buyout in the future, 192 are in an area closest to the Cedar River that is proposed to become a greenway.

To date, 157 owners in the proposed greenway have signed buyout agreements with the city, 22 have declined and 13 have not been located.

Another 554 property owners likely will be subject to buyouts because they are in an area identified as a possible construction area for levees and  flood walls.

A third group of property owners also may have their homes bought out: Those are ones whose homes are beyond reasonable repair and are outside the proposed greenway or construction area.

As the city pursues federal money, the hope is that some will arrive to be used to buyout homes more quickly than had been thought, city officials have said. 

 

City Hall doesn’t help itself on the consultant-bashing front

City Hall might have done a little better job on the timing of amendments to its contract with one of the city’s principal consultants, Sasaki Associates Inc., Watertown, Mass.

The contract includes at least 10 other professional firms that are working alongside Sasaki in the development of the city’s flood protection system and, now, on a neighborhood planning process.

The Boston-area firm has been a presence in Cedar Rapids since the June flood.

These things cost money.

That was clear in mid-December when the City Council amended Sasaki’s earlier contract with the city, adding $2.487 million to it and bringing the total to $3.943 million.

There was a news item about that.

Well, again this week, the council amended the contract, adding another $300,000 to it. The new amendment brings the total to $4,243,736.

The council agenda noted that total contract price in December. This week, the council agenda just noted the $300,000 figure.

Life was much different in the spring of 2008 when the City Council held a competition among riverfront design teams and selected Sasaki to create a downtown riverfront improvement plan for the city. Sasaki had done such work in Indianapolis, Cincinnati and many other places, and as council member Pat Shey pointed out at the time, Sasaki had just won a first-place design award for its work at the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics.

The cost of the Sasaki contract at that time was $150,000. Then the June flood arrived.

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.

Mayor Halloran tracking Statehouse voting, says council poised to call a March 3 sales tax vote for ‘flood recovery’

Mayor Kay Halloran on Tuesday evening said the City Council is at the ready to set a vote for March 3 on a 1-percent local-option tax to help with flood recovery. A portion of the money raised — between $18 million and $23 million a year — will go to lower property taxes, she said.

Any move by the council to set a March 3 referendum, though, is contingent on the Iowa Legislature passing a special piece of legislation that set aside some timing issues to allow for an expedited vote on the local-option sales tax issue. Cedar Rapids legislators, Sen. Rob Hogg and Rep. Tyler Olson, are trying to steer the bill to passage.

The law would apply to cities in every county in Iowa that has a disaster declaration. But most cities in Iowa don’t need any help. They already have the tax in place. Only six county seat cities — Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Des Moines, Adel, Indianola and Ida Grove — don’t now have a local-option sales tax.

After last night’s City Council budget session, Mayor Halloran was looking at her Blackberry phone to check on the votes in the Legislature. The Senate had passed the measure and had sent it on to the Iowa House, city staff members had reported to her.

Halloran said Gov. Chet Culver has told her he intends to sign the legislation into law if the Legislature passes it.

Halloran emphasized last night that the local-option tax in Cedar Rapids will be used for flood recovery and reducing property taxes.

For now, those property taxes are slated to jump in the new budget year beginning July 1 as the city tries to balance a budget with lost revenue from flood-damaged properties and new costs associated with flood recovery.

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. 

Can City Council ‘steam team’ solve steam issue for industries near downtown, the hospitals, Coe College and the downtown? Is a city power plant in the offing?

At council member Monica Vernon’s urging, the City Council last week created a four-member “steam team” to try to see if City Hall might help salvage a low-cost steam utility for industries near the downtown, the downtown itself, the city’s two hospitals and Coe College.

The council has expressed worry about the future of steam system before, but has little action to show for it.

Vernon – fresh off a lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., with council colleagues Justin Shields and flood victim Jerry McGrane – said more action than talk would be in the offing.

But it was McGrane, known as a specialist in neighborhood and housing issues, not utility issues, who stepped out and provided a glimpse of what might be coming.

McGrane reported last week and repeated at the council meeting that federal officials told the Cedar Rapids contingent during their visit to D.C. that federal dollars might be available for a new city-owned municipal steam power operation, particularly one that might be on the cutting edge environmentally.

Let’s wait and see.

It was back in September that the council first commented publicly about steam when some members contemplated subsidizing steam rates. The council had learned then that Alliant Energy had told steam customers dependent on the utility’s flood-damaged Sixth Street Generating Station that it would provide steam from temporary boilers this winter for four to five times the previous cost.

Suffice to say the customers can’t endure such a price hike for long. Some building owners in the downtown already have abandoned Alliant’s steam system, installing their own boilers to provide heat.

In early January, Alliant announced that it had not reached an agreement with its eight large customers – which include Quaker, Cargill, the two hospitals and Coe College — to provide steam for next winter. Steam is used for heat, sterilization and industrial processing.

However, last week, Alliant announced to the City Council that it had met with the eight big customers again with a new offer that was now under consideration by the customers. The new offer would provide steam for the next three to five years at rates significantly lower than the current ones but still significantly higher than the rates that the customers had paid prior to the June flood.

At the same time last week, though, Coe College and St. Luke’s Hospital told the council that they both were considering Alliant’s new offer even as they were heading out to try to secure $4.65 million in federal money to build their own steam operation.

Coe and St. Luke’s both said they still were interested in a solution that would provide reasonably priced steam and that would keep the existing group of steam users together.

Alliant representatives said the value of the utility’s latest offer to the large customers is that it would keep them together and the steam infrastructure in place to buy some time for a longer-term solution to be found.

One idea that the City Council wants to investigate is the burning of municipal solid waste and sludge from its waste-water treatment plant to generate energy.

The council has given approval for a $1-million study to see if it makes sense to burn solid waste and sewage sludge to generate power.

As for the council’s steam team, its members are Vernon, McGrane, Shields and Pat Shey.

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.

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.

Library looking at Armstrong Centre spot for temporary downtown home

The Cedar Rapids Library Board told the City Council on Thursday evening that it is eager to establish a “low-cost,” temporary presence in downtown Cedar Rapids as it and the city sort out whether to fix or replace the flood-damaged downtown library.

The library has expanded its presence at Westdale Mall for now, but board member Dennis McMenimen told the City Council of the library board’s interest in getting something set up downtown.

McMenimen noted that the library has a dedicated clientele of downtown residents, and he pointed to the Geneva Towers residential complex as one source of those customers.

One suggestion, he said, was to locate in a first-floor area of the Armstrong Centre.

After the meeting, he and Phyllis Fleming, another library board member, said the Armstrong Centre is one a couple places the board is looking at downtown. Fleming said the spot in the Armstrong Centre is one that formerly housed the Art Cellar Co., 221 Third St. SE.

The thought is the library could circulate about 40,000 items a month from a space of about 5,000 square feet, the City Council’s budget notes on the library stated.

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.

New downtown home for Green Square Meals, Witwer meals program being readied for late February

After some starts and stops, work is well underway on converting a downtown building into the home of Green Square Meals and a temporary home for the Witwer Senior Center’s meals program.

The Ecumenical Center, which provides space for a group of helping services agencies and others, also is moving into the building at 601/605 Second Ave. SE.

Scott Olson, who is on the Ecumenical Center’s board of directors, reported on Friday that the center is readying to take up residence in the 601 side of the building in mid-February.

Olson said the all-volunteer Green Square Meals, which cooks and serves an evening meal Monday through Friday for the needy, is planning on serving its first meal in the new kitchen and dining area on the 605 side of the building on Feb. 23.

Meanwhile, Myrt Bowers, director of the Witwer Senior Center, on Friday said her operation is planning on cooking and serving its first lunch in the building on Saturday, Feb. 21.

The Witwer operation will prepare and serve lunch seven days a week from the site and also prepare lunches to deliver to homes in Linn County and at a meals site in Lisbon.

In addition, Bowers said she is making plans to secure funding so that the Witwer Senior Center can serve a daily breakfast at the site. It might take five to six months to secure the funds, she said.

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Bowers said. “… I think we’re going to be able to fill a need, and I’m very excited about that.”

The Witwer Senior Center’s previous home in the Witwer Building downtown was damaged in the June flood and the center does not have plans to return there.

Bowers estimated the center’s meals operation could remain at the new spot at 605 Second Ave. SE for three to five years. The long-term plan is for the center to become an integral part of a new community and recreation center. That idea is one of the goals of  the community’s Fifteen in 5 initiative.

Like the senior center, Green Square Meals has been operating at a temporary site since the June flood. The program had operated out of the city’s Greene Square Park building for years, but the City Council in March of 2007 told the meals program to move so the city could demolish the building. The building, which took in a little water in the June flood, is empty and still standing.

Olson, a commercial Realtor, played a central role in arranging the sale of a building that formerly housed the Ecumenical Center’s offices to provide money to help purchase the 601/605 Second Ave. SE building, in which he had an ownership interest. Olson also has played a role with others in rounding up donations of materials and labor for the Second Avenue building’s renovation.

Green Square Meals will operate from the site for $1 a year.