Assessing Cedar Rapids' recovery after 3 years

CEDAR RAPIDS - Two truths stand tall at the three-year mark of the city's 2008 flood, said Mayor Ron Corbett.

The first: “Your” city's giant disaster soon is forgotten, lost in the sentiment of newer disasters like the recent tornado in Joplin, Mo., or the current flooding on the Missouri River.

The second: It takes seven to 10 years to recover from disasters of the magnitude of Cedar Rapids' 2008 flood.

“A lot of times communities want to deny that,” Corbett said of the recovery time. “But the reality is, we haven't broken ground yet on our new library, and it will take two years to build it. It just takes time to put all the funding and all the stuff together.”

The city's recovery effort has been under way, he said, since the day of the flood, and most of it has been focused on human needs - supporting people, getting people back in their homes, helping small businesses.

He argues that the recovery's pace now has “accelerated” at the three-year mark as the physical evidence of recovery has become more visible to the public. The major demolition work in the neighborhoods and now in the downtown at the Convention Complex site are two examples, he said.

City Council member Monica Vernon said any assessment of the city's recovery three years after the flood must start with the giant issue of flood protection.

Vernon said constituents have talked to her constantly about flood protection since the May 3 vote in which voters by a tiny margin - 221 votes among about 32,000 cast - turned down a plan to extend the city's 1 percent local-option sales tax for 20 years to provide local matching funds to help build a comprehensive flood-protection system to protect both sides of the city from the Cedar River.

Vernon said the city still needs flood protection and so needs to figure out how much local funding that a majority of local residents will be willing to support. Maybe the May 3 vote should not have included funding to fix streets, maybe it shouldn't have been for 20 years, she said.

“I think we have a thoughtful community, and with flood protection, people are thinking it through,” she said. “And you got to put your faith in the people.”

Mel Andringa, co-founder of Legion Arts and a leading presence in the city's New Bohemia district along Third Street SE, and Linda Seger, president of the Northwest Neighbors neighborhood association, said the city's three-year mark of flood recovery finds promising developments in both of the neighborhoods.

“It is booming,” Andringa said about the street and renovation work in New Bohemia, with none of the renovation more dramatic than that at Legion Arts' CSPS building, at 1103 Third St. SE.

Even so, Andringa, a board member of the non-profit Southside Investment Corp., said the neighborhood needs to attract more business investment that will bring people to the neighborhood during the day and not just to restaurants and nightspots at night. In northwest Cedar Rapids, Seger said 75 percent of the flood-hit homes have been repopulated three years after the flood, with a diverse group of new residents, many with children, in the mix.

“Life goes on, and you have to focus back on your family, friends, relationships,” Seger said. “A lot of people here are feeling better physically and emotionally, even if many continue to struggle financially, as they do everywhere.”

Doug Neumann, president/CEO of the Cedar Rapids Downtown District, calls the city's progress at the three-year point of flood recovery “a mixed bag” even as he said that, by his math, the city's disaster recovery “far outpaces” all national benchmarks for disaster recovery. He estimates Cedar Rapids recovery will take 10 years.

“But things are on the right track. We're on pace to do a quarter century of core neighborhood development in five years,” Neumann said.

Chuck Wieneke, the west-side City Council member who represents the Time Check Neighborhood and other areas hit hard by the 2008 flood, said the city's flood recovery in the neighborhoods has gone slower than he or anyone else at City Hall has wanted.

But he said it still has gone well and has been handled fairly. He points to one measure: the city has completed 1,000 of some 1,300 buyouts of flood-damaged properties at the three-year mark of the flood, with complications related to liens on properties slowing down the process for the last couple hundred homes, he said.

A central task ahead, he said, is to put a system of flood protection in place that protects all the investment that has been made over three years in homes and businesses and public property to make sure an event like 2008 doesn't damage the city again.

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