Bob Bruce Radio Experience treats us to one last back-and-forth with mayoral candidates

In the final mayoral forum of the 2009 campaign, candidate Ron Corbett said Friday, if elected, he will ask the City Council to put City Manager Jim Prosser under a 90-day assessment “to see how he performs.”

Corbett's chief opponent, Brian Fagan, called Prosser a city employee who, like every city employee, must meet certain expectations. Fagan, an at-large City Council member, said he wants to see Prosser do more to fix city streets and to better enforce the city's building codes. But having said that, Fagan noted that Prosser was named the state's “City Manager of the Year” a year ago for all his hard, effective work.

The third mayoral candidate, P.T. Larson, who has run unsuccessfully for the City Council 12 times before, said he, if elected, would ask the council for a vote on Prosser's future with the city, and he said he would vote to let him go.

The three mayoral candidates went back and forth on the Bob Bruce Radio Experience on WMT-AM from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday, with the discussion growing most heated around who is running city government, the city manager as Corbett contends, or the council as Fagan says is the case.

Corbett, 49, vice president at trucking firm CRST Inc., pointed to what he said was Prosser's effort of late in private meetings to push to have the city's new public library built in conjunction with a new City Hall in a move that Corbett said some on the City Council and the library board know little about.

Fagan said it is the City Council that is asking Prosser to explore such a co-location, and Fagan noted that city consultant OPN Architects Inc. has participated in such library/City Hall projects. Another council member has said those projects have been in Monticello and Ankeny.

Corbett shot back saying that Fagan and others are bound and determined to build a new $50 million City Hall no matter what it takes. Fagan said a new City Hall didn't necessarily mean a new building, and he pointed to the private-sector building on the site of the former Killians department store downtown as a possible place that city government might occupy. Fagan said he still thinks Linn County is interested in joining forces with the city.

Corbett said he opposed building a new $50-million City Hall and he opposed tying up the construction of the new library with talk about a new City Hall. Corbett said city government should go back to the flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building and the nearby federal courthouse, which the city is slated to take ownership of.

Corbett talked again about what he says has been a “culture of delay.” Fagan said the council has avoided “panicky, short-term thinking” that he said would have cost flood victims in the city money and would have left the city in “the long-term poor house.”

Fagan said complicated federal and state rules have required the city to thoughtfully proceed so he said the city isn't giving local-option sales tax money out only to see the recipients have to pay it to the state and federal government as a “duplication of benefits.” Fagan, too, said the city's investment in consultants is allowing the city to recoup at least $75 million more from the federal government in flood-damage payments than it otherwise would have.

Corbett said he wasn't sure the $75-million figure could be substantiated, and in any event, he thought the city's own flood-recovery director might be as responsible as anyone for getting the money.

Larson, a registered Republican, picked on Corbett, at one point saying Corbett, a Republican, was using flood victims as props in a television ad and at another point saying Corbett was running a “Republican-style” attack campaign.

Corbett said the people who were in his adds were supporters and real people with real flood-recovery issues that the city had not addressed.

Larson said the city wasn't guilty of a culture of delay, but of a “culture of decay” because of the poor condition of city streets.

The election is Tuesday.