Eyerly leaves Cedar Rapids flood-recovery post, says much work remains

Buying a Coke from the vending machine at the temporary City Hall costs $1.25, and Greg Eyerly says he's been known when thirsty to do the opposite of what might be expected: He shows colleagues a quarter and says, “I got 25 cents, but I'm a dollar short.”

“That's kind of where we are with flood protection,” says the city's outgoing flood-recovery director. “It's like a $1.25 for a Coke, and you're a buck short.”

Today is Eyerly's last day at City Hall, ending a 19-month stint as the city's focal point and chief flak-catcher on recovery from the June 2008 flood. The recovery, he says, has made “terrific” progress but has “a long way to go.” He's leaving to take a job in the Cedar Rapids office of a national engineering firm, HDR Inc.

At his departure, one of the most important numbers he wants the public to remember is $305 million. That's about how much the city still needs to find for its $375 million preferred flood protection system - if, in fact, Congress agrees to fund the Corps of Engineers' $104 million partial plan. In the Corps' plan, the federal government would pay $67.6 million and the city would need to find the rest.

Eyerly, 46, never intended to be the city's first flood-recovery director when the City Council decided it needed one almost a year after the flood. He had moved from a private-sector job in Oregon to the job as utilities operations manager for the city in February 2008, and he was quite happy. But the flood hit four months later, he achieved success in getting the city's flood-damaged wastewater and water treatment plants back on their feet in short order, and colleagues suggested he apply for the flood-recovery post. He began the job on July 13, 2009.

Eyerly says he quickly became aware that the job was more complicated than he had imagined. There were giant categories of needs: housing rehabilitation, home buyouts, business recovery, commercial buyouts, the renovation of flood-damaged city facilities and the construction of new ones, to name a few. And each need had its own quagmire of rules and regulations at the federal and state levels.

He says it was relatively simple to work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the recovery of what he says are the city's technically complicated treatment plants. Both are considered critical services, and “they're not going to fight you over every little thing,” he says.

---- Over the course of the last eight months, though, FEMA has come to have far more questions about less complicated, less critical components of the recovery. The city and the agency now are sorting out a variety of disagreements, with millions of dollars at stake.

“FEMA gets more complicated with things that are less complicated,” says Eyerly. “... We're not going to get all that we should get from FEMA,” he adds.

Among his last chores this week was perfecting the appeal for $13.3 million in disaster funds that the city is seeking for its flood-ruined hydroelectric plant at the base of the 5-in-1 bridge.

That appeal and two others - for the former Sinclair and Quality Chef plants - involve flood damage for which, city officials say, FEMA's representatives in Iowa led them to think late last spring that they would secure a total of $36 million.

That number is now zero. Eyerly says the city learned that FEMA's regional office in Kansas City, Mo., had different ideas than the agency's representatives in Iowa.

“It's not that things changed with us and FEMA. They changed with FEMA and FEMA,” he says.

In any given week in the course of flood recovery so far, Eyerly says, an assortment of people with widely varying needs are trying to get their issues resolved at City Hall - now. That has included work on 45 major flood-recovery projects and 310 total projects involving city-owned facilities; most of those particulars have been taken care of, he says.

Eyerly says he understands the impatience. By way of example, he talks about the single pleading homeowner, standing in front of him, asking him why it takes so much time to resolve issues on one little house.

“It shouldn't take that long to do that,” an animated Eyerly says. “But really, there are a lot of ‘thats.'”

He says the city is now closing in on having bought out 800 flood-damaged properties, on its way to about 1,300.

“Last July, somebody was first,” he says. “Somebody's going to be last.”