Will Corbett establish a working council majority or will he be just another vote?

At-large council member Tom Podzimek says the City Council's working majority - what he calls a “pragmatic core” - is “without a doubt” going to change now that Mayor-elect Ron Corbett and newly elected at-large council members Chuck Swore and Don Karr will be joining the council fold on Jan. 4.

Podzimek said the current nine-member council has embraced to a person a vision for Cedar Rapids as a progressive, vibrant community that invests for future generations. And he said he's not sure how that will square with what Podzimek said was Corbett's campaign call for “cheap property taxes.”

“OK, let's lower them,” Podzimek said. “Let's get rid of the Police Department. That'll lower them. … Maybe this will just send the city into a death spiral, I don't know. It's going to be fun to see how this plays out.”

Corbett, who spent the better part of Thursday in a City Hall orientation with Swore and Karr, said he has no interest in creating a majority on the council and ignoring those who are left.

At the same time, Corbett acknowledged that Swore and Karr endorsed him in the mayoral campaign as did current council members Monica Vernon and Justin Shields.

“I certainly think there is a new coalition that has resulted in the last election, and that is the five of us,” the mayor-elect said. “But just because there is a new nucleus, that doesn't mean that the other four are excluded. That doesn't make them outcasts.”

Corbett, vice president at trucking firm CRST Inc. and a former state lawmaker and former president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, said he knows every member of the new City Council well, and he said they know him well.

He said he thinks his central campaign message was more about the pace of council decision-making, and he said he intends to try to replace what he called “the culture of delay.”

“I don't know what people took offense to in the campaign,” he said. “But we're going to make some decisions.”

At the top of his agenda are decisions about where to put a new library and central fire station and to put to rest, for or against, any plans to build a new City Hall.

“They're still spending a lot of time and resources trying to push the idea of a new city hall,” Corbett said. “I hope we don't build a new city hall. But if a majority on the council wants it, they'll have a chance to vote on it. I want to put it to bed.

“We need to get this town moving again. We need to focus on creating jobs and helping flood victims out.”

At-large council member Pat Shey - who in a runoff vote this week defeated Corbett-backed Jerry McGrane for McGrane's District 3 council seat - on Thursday said the three new faces on the nine-member council are going to change the council dynamics.

“But I also recognize there's a big difference between campaign rhetoric and governing,” Shey said.

Shey called Corbett a “strong leader,” but he said Corbett will join the council as a weak mayor because the city's form of government is a weak-mayor form of government in which the mayor is just one of nine votes without veto power. “That's just the reality,” he said.

Shey said the current council often was considered to have a 6-3 split, with Vernon, Shields and McGrane on the outside. He called that a myth. Of 1,025 votes cast in 2009, only three had 6-3 splits, he said the city clerk reports.

He said he is “bristling” at the suggestion that the new council will have a 5-4 split. Instead, he predicted that a pragmatic working majority with a “progressive bent” will emerge.

For his part, Podzimek said he'd be willing to give Corbett and the changed council some rope and see what they do with it.

“Sometimes people hang themselves and sometimes you let the horse run and you take off in a new direction,” he said.