Cedar Rapids mayor reflects on his first year in office

One of the great City Hall dust-ups in the decade before the Flood of 2008 centered on a city handout to help replace a tiny, aged grocery with a shiny, specially designed, neighborhood store in a highly visible spot in the 1500 block of busy First Avenue NE.

It took years of back and forth before the City Council finally mustered a majority in September 2001 to back the new Hy-Vee Food Store with a $900,000 incentive, a decision which Ron Corbett, then president/CEO of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, had pushed to get done.

“You either give them a little help and help stabilize property values in the neighborhood or you tell them to go pound sand and the neighborhood deteriorates,” Corbett says. “It was an easy choice for us.”

Flash ahead nine years, and there was Corbett in recent days at the First Avenue Hy-Vee, drinking coffee with plenty of cream, visiting with patrons and talking about his first year as mayor.

Good ideas and public investment can work out, he said.

Just a month ago, Corbett and his City Council colleagues agreed to do what makes the City Hall investment in the Hy-Vee store seem quaint by comparison: They bought the city's only downtown hotel, the long-struggling, 30-year-old Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel, from its creditors for $3.2 million with a plan to spend up to $25 million in public dollars to renovate it.

The hotel sits in the middle of the city's $75.6-million Convention Complex project, and the mayor said the time to act was now. The city, he said, can't have a new convention center and a renovated U.S. Cellular Center arena tied to a failing hotel.

A downtown hotel and Convention Complex, like a key neighborhood grocery store, are crucial assets to the community, Corbett said.

“I can't imagine Cedar Rapids without them,” he said.

At the end of his first year at City Hall, Corbett has his critics, including some of the city's flood victims, who say that the city should complete the buyout of some 1,400 flood-damaged properties before it focuses on downtown revitalization and replacing or renovating flood-damaged city buildings.

To the criticism, the part-time mayor - who turned 50 in October, is a project manager at CRST Inc. and has served as a Republican speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives in years past - said, “This is the hardest job I've ever had in my life.”

“But just because you hear we're working on a riverfront amphitheater project or parking incentives for Rockwell Collins to move employees downtown doesn't mean buyouts have taken a back seat,” he said.

As for the city's flood victims, Corbett said he and his council colleagues managed to up the buyout payments to 107 percent of a property's pre-flood value; fought long and hard so certain other state and federal payouts to flood victims weren't deducted from the buyout payments; and crafted a program to use local-option sales tax revenue to give flood-impacted homeowners up to $10,000 each and renters up to $4,000 each for lost possessions.

Yet, he still gets criticism.

“Any elected official has to have thick skin,” he said. “But the fact that they can still feel comfortable criticizing me, they still have their voice there.

“ … And every once in awhile, when I'm feeling down or being hard on myself because I'm not doing enough, it seems the good Lord finds a way of bringing up my spirits.”

To prove the point, he pulled out his BlackBerry and scrolled though e-mails. He had run into an elderly couple with their daughter at a restaurant a few nights earlier, he explained.

“I just want to thank you for taking the time to shake my dad's hand last night,” said Corbett, reading the daughter's e-mail to him. “He talked about it the whole way home. He was a flood victim. … He gets a little confused at times, but he sure knew who you were. You're doing a great job. Thanks for making his day.”

Corbett called it “a keeper.”

A little more than a year ago now, Corbett easily won election over a well-liked City Council incumbent, Brian Fagan, in a campaign in which Corbett said City Hall had come to embrace “a culture of delay.”

Upon taking office in January, Corbett mobilized a working majority on the nine-member council and took off with it. He said early accomplishments included a buy-local program, a decision not to build a new City Hall and the hotly debated selection of a site for the new library. By April, City Manager Jim Prosser, who had been a leading figure in the community's flood recovery, left, to be replaced in September by Jeff Pomeranz, plucked from the suburb of West Des Moines. When asked about the change, Corbett limited his comments to Pomeranz.

“Jeff has a can-do spirit,” the mayor said.

With a year in office, Corbett said the city now knows where the new library, central fire station, animal shelter and riverfront amphitheater will go as renovations on the seats of city government, the Veterans Memorial Building and the former federal courthouse, are about to start. At the same time, he said the city has leapt a key hurdle with the Army Corps of Engineers and its plan to build a first phase of flood protection for the city.

Corbett said the city has had good success at finding funding partners for its flood-recovery, and the list of acronyms of agencies and programs providing help is a long one - FEMA, HUD, EDA, I-JOBS, CAT, REACT and LOST. There also have been contributions from the Hall-Perrine Foundation of Cedar Rapids and the city's largest employers.

But there is money yet to find. For starters, the city has made a commitment to come up with $23 million more for the $75.6-million Convention Complex. There is the $25-million hotel renovation. And $35-million local match for a first-phase of a $100-million flood-protection system, which ultimately could cost four times that much. Revenue from the hotel-motel tax might help with the Convention Complex; revenue from the hotel might help with its renovation; and the city is asking the state to divert the growth of state sales tax collected in Linn County to the city to help pay for flood protection.

In the year ahead, Corbett lists six priorities: Find money for flood protection. Fix city streets. Continue buyouts and demolitions. Launch and find funds for the city's flood-recovery building projects. Attract jobs. Balance the city budget without raising property taxes.

Come April, what was perhaps the Corbett-led City Council's most questioned decision of 2010 will turn to reality. Second Avenue SE between 10th and 12th streets SE will close to make way for the Physicians' Clinic of Iowa to build a new medical “mall” with the help of city incentives.

“I think there has been a lot of news this year,” Corbett said. “And as I tell people, we're going to continue to make decisions and you're not going to be happy with every one of them.

“But I'd rather have you upset with me for making decisions than having you upset with me for not doing anything.”