Fagan running for Cedar Rapids mayor

At-large council member Brian Fagan starts his campaign today to be the city's next mayor.

Fagan, 37, an attorney at Simmons Perrine Moyer Bergman and the youngest of nine council members, said Thursday he was eager to run on his City Council record. The mayor pro tem said the current council has built a solid foundation for the city's future and has established momentum to help the city get there.

“I just don't want to walk away from this,” he said.

The move by Fagan, anticipated for months, will give a city in the middle of flood recovery a choice between candidates inside and outside City Hall. Ron Corbett, 48, trucking firm vice president and former state lawmaker, has been in the race since March.

“Certainly, I've been in the trenches (of city government) the past four years,” Fagan said, “but what this is about is the vision for Cedar Rapids. We have to take care of today, but we also have to make sure that we're paying attention to those quality-of-life issues that make this a place where companies want to locate, where people want to live and work, and where there's an extraordinary quality of life.”

Fagan said he understands that some remain frustrated with City Hall nearly 14 months into recovery, but he said the city now faces a great opportunity to be not just “better than ever, but better than any other.”

“I recognize and know that it's so hard to talk about that when people have lost so much,” Fagan said, “but it's important that we remember that we are not returning to the status quo.

“There are so many great things happening for Cedar Rapids. I have great aspirations for my hometown, and I believe I'm the best person to be mayor, to make that vision a reality, to expand the realm of possibility.”

In announcing his candidacy three months before the Nov. 3 election, Fagan is taking a different tack than Corbett. Corbett said this week that he has raised more than $60,000 in his 5-month-old campaign. Fagan believes the public doesn't expect local elections to be long or expensive.

“Votes win elections,” not money, he said.

Corbett has coined a slogan, “culture of delay,” in saying the City Council has done too little.

The current City Council, Fagan said, developed a preferred flood protection system in 120 days and sent it off to the Army Corps of Engineers “in record time.” In the next 116 days, the council created a plan for neighborhood and commercial reinvestment. It now is in the process of creating a master plan for the city's flood-damaged public facilities.

All, he said, has been done with much public participation.

He called the approach “methodical and disciplined.” He defended the city's reliance on an assortment of outside experts, which he said has been necessary to ensure the city gets fairly reimbursed for flood damages from the federal government.

Fagan, 398 26th St. SE, is single and the youngest of nine children. He is a 1990 graduate of Regis High School, a 1994 graduate of the University of Iowa and a 2001 graduate of Drake University Law School. He has a master's degree in international political economy from Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

Fagan worked as a staff member of then-Republican Congressman Jim Leach from 1994 to 1998, and he served as a law clerk in 2002 and 2003 for then-U.S. District Court Judge Michael Melloy, who now is a federal appeals judge.