Corbett at Month 1 brings a populist streak to City Hall's professional management

Flood recovery here is aging – it's more than 19 months old now. But the mayor, Ron Corbett, is new. One month new.

Maybe it's just the newness.

But something has put the one-time Republican speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives at the front of a west-side union hall on two cold nights in the last six weeks to listen to the lingering confusion and still-ripe gripes of a crowd of flood victims still trying to become flood survivors.

Of course, he's not the first of the city's elected officials to meet face-to-face with flood victims. But he might be the first to think it still needs to be done now.

Corbett is the city's second mayor in the city's 4-year-old government – commonly called a “weak mayor” government – that features nine, part-time council members and a full-time professional city manager.

The CRST trucking firm executive campaigned hard and won the November mayor's election easily, in part, with a promise that the mayor and City Council, not the city manager, should be out front, leading city government.

“These are listening posts, town hall meetings,” Corbett explains his idea behind his flood forums. “Elected officials have been doing this type of communication with citizens since the first elected official, I think.

 “In this day and age, when you have Twitter and Facebook and blogging, sometimes looking into people's faces and listening to them -- for me, it's very impactful.”

"Political labels" come and go, he says, when asked if he was bringing a dose of good old-fashioned populism to a professionally managed city.

“Sometimes, elected officials can be surrounded by the cocoon of government and lose touch,” he says. “I still don't have an office at the (city's temporary) City Hall. So there isn't a place I go. So when I get up every day, I try to go out and just see people. So if that's a populist … I'm going to continue to do that. I'm going to stay grounded.”

At City Hall at Corbett's one-month mark, the mayor is generally getting nice marks from his council colleagues on certain fronts. Most, for instance, say they like how he runs a meeting and that the meetings generate a healthy debate.

But he says some council members never tire of reminding him, at the end of the day, he's just one of nine council votes. And whether he has any kind of working council majority is still an open question.

Just last week, for instance, the majority of council members opted to spend more on capital improvement projects in the next budget than Corbett was hoping to see.

Corbett calls four of the nine council members – Kris Gulick, Tom Podzimek, Pat Shey and Justin Shields – “the pioneers” because each has been on the part-time council from its start in 2006. Two members, Monica Vernon and Chuck Wieneke, joined in 2008. And Don Karr and Chuck Swore (who was on the council in 2006 and 2007) joined Corbett on the council in January.

At-large council member Podzimek, in particular, has not been shy about lecturing Corbett on what he says has been the philosophy of the part-time council before Corbett's arrival. In part, Podzimek says the past council has been willing to spend money on a “vision” for a better future and to take some political heat for it.

He and Corbett can mix it up some: Podzimek has said all Corbett wants to do is cut taxes, and Corbett has countered, saying it's possible to have a vision and want to look for budget efficiencies, too.

 “The biggest challenges have nothing do with Ron,” says Podzimek. “He came in at 100,000 feet, saying ‘You pay too much in taxes.' Now, when he's in the trenches, there's a different perspective.”

Podzimek says the City Hall trenches changed him from a tax-cutter, and he says Corbett now has him in the same trench reminding him of that.

As for style, Podzimek says Corbett's is markedly different than predecessor Mayor Kay Halloran's. Halloran, he says, was reserved and stayed back and left other council members commented first. Corbett, he says, works to shape the debate, often, he adds, in the direction he wants it to go. Podzimek says he's ready to push back.

At-large council member Swore says anybody who is paying any attention to city government right now can see that the new City Council is driving the City Hall agenda and not, he says, taking what the city manager's office puts in the council's hands.

City Manager Jim Prosser is an “excellent employee,” Swore says, but, at the same time, he says it is important that the elected council members assert themselves and bring their ideas into play. And he thinks that's what Corbett has already helped accomplish.

“I think Ron's shown he has the qualities of leadership that we've needed to strengthen this form of government” says Swore, who hopes veterans on the council don't take that the wrong way. “… I want us to take advantage of the knowledge we all have.”

During last year's election race, west-side District 4 council member Chuck Wieneke had no time for the Corbett and Swore contention that the council had abdicated its leadership role to the city manager. That hasn't changed.

A council/manager government is supposed to leave the day-to-day management of city government to the manager, Wieneke says, and he thinks some who have criticized things remember what he says was an earlier “old-buddy” era at City Hall when those with needs could easily get their way.

Corbett, Wieneke says, brings a different tone and style to the mayor's post. He says Halloran was “more laid back and quiet,” while Corbett is “much more outspoken.” Wieneke says he, too, is outspoken and so he understands Corbett well. Any good organization needs at last a couple “Type A” personalities, he says.

Wieneke, who has represents the flood-wrecked Time Check Neighborhood and has been front and center among council members on the city's flood recovery, has attended Corbett's two recent flood forums and credits him for holding them.

“I haven't heard anything new,” he says. Yet, he adds, any chance to listen to the flood victims is a new chance to try to clear up confusion and “rumor-mill” misinformation and to try to repair the distrust of City Hall.

A little piece of this same distrust of City Hall, Wieneke says, came from Corbett himself at a recent meeting when the mayor held up a two-month-old letter from the city of Iowa City to its flood victims and suggested that Iowa City had figured out a way to have less deducted from flood buyout payments than Cedar Rapids' city staff had. The Iowa City letter was mistaken.

Wieneke says he understands Corbett is new and wants to help flood victims. But couldn't he, Wieneke says, have run the letter by the city's professional staff first? “Don't make it worse until you find out,” he says.

In his own defense, Corbett says he's been given an assortment of public documents by both flood victims unhappy with city staff and by city staff, some which say one thing and others something else.

 “Thank goodness some of the citizens have time to do some research,” he says. “… I think in general most people have a healthy skepticism of government. And I'm no different.”

Corbett says he intends to challenge “the conventional wisdom” at City Hall and elsewhere from time to time. And he says that is what is doing now: As he pushes the state and federal government to modify rules so less is subtracted from the buyout payments of flood victims; and as he works to change the current city plan so those buyout payments are based on more than what was 100 percent of the pre-flood value of property.

For that, he says he's not going to sit back and assign it to the city's professional management to do the job. It's a matter for “the head of one government to talk to the heads of other governments,” he says.