New City Manager Jeff Pomeranz at a June news conference to announce his hiring (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

Jeff Pomeranz, the city’s new city manager, is at his duty station.

The 52 year old, who left the city manager’s post in West Des Moines to take the Cedar Rapids job, said Monday morning that he arrives in Cedar Rapids with a “lot of things occurring right now,” and, when asked, he singled out issues with the Federal Emergency Management Agency as ones of “great concern to the city.”

One of the FEMA-related issues is a complication related to the replacement of the city’s flood-damaged library with a new one on a new site.

With the help of FEMA’s Iowa representatives, city leaders have said they thought they understood the FEMA funding process for flood-damaged public buildings and that FEMA was on board with providing some disaster funding to help the city purchase the site for the new library, which now houses TrueNorth Companies across Fourth Avenue SE from Greene Square Park.

Last week, though, FEMA said it now has concluded that the site is too costly, and it has suggested that the city consider a less-costly option — tearing down the former library and building a new one on higher ground there so as to provide some protection against another flood.

Mayor Ron Corbett said the city intends to build the library as it now has planned for seven months, on the TrueNorth site. Meetings with FEMA are ahead.

In a 15-minute interview Monday morning, Pomeranz said among his first tasks on his first day at City Hall will be to talk to each of the city’s nine City Council members. He also has a meeting scheduled with one of them, Corbett.

Pomeranz repeated what he said in a lengthy interview a month ago in West Des Moines: He said he is not coming to Cedar Rapids with any intention of changing any of the city’s top staff members.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “That’s not my goal, and I’ve certainly never received any guidance to that effect. I look forward to working with the staff. Everybody starts fresh from Day 1.

“That’s what a leader does. He works with a team. And I’m not coming in with a plan for change of staff. If changes occur as they inevitably do in organizations, then that’s a process that occurs over time. But that’s not my goal, that’s not my plan, and it’s not the way I want to start Day 1. It’s really pulling a team together and moving the community forward.”

Pomeranz, married with two children at the University of Iowa, has moved to Cedar Rapids and is living at the Bottleworks loft condominiums near downtown.

Hired in June, he has been in and out of Cedar Rapids over the last three months as he has finished up his duties in West Des Moines.  He attended a ribbon-cutting on Saturday at the city’s new urban fishery and recreational trail, called Prairie Park Fishery.

Video interview