Linn County, Cedar Rapids focus of national study on resilience

CEDAR RAPIDS - The National Academy of Sciences and its Resilient America Roundtable is focusing on Linn County and Cedar Rapids for the next two years as part of a pilot project to develop a strategy for how disaster-hit communities learn and prepare for what else might come.

On Tuesday, the ResilientAmerica project conducted an all-day workshop at the Cedar Rapids Convention complex where leaders from local government, business and the non-profit sector met to discuss the lessons learned from the flood of 2008 and from the recovery from it.

Linn County Supervisor Linda Langston, immediate past president of the National Association of Counties, said that the Linn County and Cedar Rapids community was selected along with Charleston, S.C., for the pilot study from among a number of cities across the country.

'There is some realization that Cedar Rapids and Linn County did very well post-flood, ”Langston said. 'Can we understand why? Can we understand how we could have done better? What ultimately makes a resilient community?”

Cedar Rapids City Manager Jeff Pomeranz told the workshop that communities confronted by disaster need to have leaders who 'persevere” through the anger that can be directed at them by those impacted by disaster and through the anxiety that can come in working with complicated Federal Emergency Management Agency rules.

Pomeranz said local anger showed its face in Cedar Rapids when local voters in May 2011 and again in March 2012 refused to extend the city's 1-percent local-option sales tax to help pay for flood protection.

Even so, city leaders pushed ahead to secure state funds and to position the city for federal funds to pay for a big portion of the cost of flood protection, he said.

Dee Baird, president and chief executive officer of the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance, told the group that the city's leaders 'don't know what we don't know,” and she said the two years of work that is part of ResilientAmerica project will give the community a chance to stop and think what could happen in the future and how to be ready for it.

Langston said the Resilient America Roundtable will continue to work with workshop participants on Wednesday and then will return in January and February to continue the process.

The goal is to develop a strategy for dealing with disasters than can be shared with communities across the nation, she said.