John Levy, key City Hall disaster consultant, says he can finish up this month

CEDAR RAPIDS - Disaster-consultant John Levy - whose initial $475-an-hour cost gained some notice soon after the June 2008 flood - and the City Council apparently will part ways at the end of the month.

Levy on Wednesday said he has submitted a letter to City Manager Jim Prosser notifying him that he can finish up work on his latest contract with the city by month's end.

“You know what, there's a new (mayoral) administration, they might want to go a different way, and I'm OK with that,” Levy said. “I understand how those things go.”

He said he would stay on through the end of his contract at the end of June if the council wanted him to do so. But he added he would be surprised if that was the case.

Three new members on the nine-member City Council, Mayor Ron Corbett, Don Karr and Chuck Swore, have particularly expressed an interest in ending Levy's contract. They have suggested that he has not moved on flood recovery at a fast enough pace.

Corbett has said as much as Levy said on Monday: That a new administration can see things differently from the one before it. Corbett also has said that some of what Levy has been doing for the city most recently has been taken over by city staff.

At last Wednesday's council meeting, the council, in fact, had been slated to discuss ending Levy's contract. Instead, the council tabled the matter, and the council's four-member Procurement Committee took up the issue at a meeting on Monday.

At the Monday meeting, Prosser and other top city staff said Levy had delivered on his contract with the city. Swore, the committee chairman, said he would defer to Prosser's wishes. But that was Monday.

Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, did note that Levy had come to “rub” the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wrong way, so much so that the city staff would “scrub” Levy's input and present it to FEMA themselves. Eyerly also said that Levy's cost for construction management services, for now, was coming in at a higher rate than the rate set out by FEMA standards.

Levy arrived Cedar Rapids with disaster experience from Hurricane Katrina even as floodwaters were receding here in June 2008.

The city quickly hired him and has awarded him new contracts in October 2008 and July 2009. A Michigan resident, he initially worked for a firm called Globe Midwest, but in October 2008, he created his own company, Base Tactical Disaster Recovery.

The city can't routinely end his current contract without a 30-day notice.