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.