The Corbett-led council at 3 months; is 'Ready, fire, aim' a good description of it?

CEDAR RAPIDS – All but gone from City Hall these days are the white poster boards of project information that came to adorn a series of public open houses, which were something of a trademark of the former City Council and City Manager Jim Prosser.

In recent weeks, council member Monica Vernon, the mayor pro tem of the new City Council, said she'd seen enough poster boards and planning studies for now. The time had come to implement plans, she said.

This call to action has become the centerpiece of Mayor Ron Corbett's first three months in office, and in that time, he's mustered a solid working majority – Vernon, council member Justin Shields and the three new council members, Corbett himself, Don Karr and Chuck Swore.

The mayor points to these victories:

The council quickly has picked a site for the new library. It's figured out a way to pay flood victims 107 percent of pre-flood value for their homes, not 100 percent. The council is moving city government back into the Veterans Memorial Building and the nearby former federal courthouse. And it is not building a new, $38-million city hall. In the meantime, the city budget is holding the line on property-tax increases for commercial and industrial owners.

Council member Chuck Swore, who sits in the middle of the Corbett majority, also has called for the council to plan a little less and act a little more. He calls the philosophy – “Ready, Fire, Aim.”

Council member Tom Podzimek, who remains a fan of “strategic planning,” says Swore's philosophy is alive and well in the Corbett-led council, and, he adds, there's been some misfiring.

Vernon, one of Corbett's staunchest allies on the new council, acknowledges, too, that “Ready, Fire, Aim” has resulted in a couple of second thoughts and some changes of heart.

Case in point, say Podzimek and Vernon, is the support that the consensus of the council expressed at its meeting two weeks ago to close the major arterial street, Second Avenue SE, between 10th and 12th streets SE at the request of Physicians' Clinic of Iowa. PCI has chosen the site for a new multimillion medical “mall,” which is to become part of the city's newly created Medical District between the two hospitals.

Podzimek says the Second Avenue closing surfaced on the council agenda out of nowhere, and within a few minutes, the council, with just a few questions, expressed general support for accommodating PCI's wishes.

“What we have now is ‘ready, shoot, aim,'” Podzimek says. “Bring anything up.”

Vernon says she started to have strong second thoughts about the idea of closing Second Avenue SE as she tried to sleep in the hours after the council had signaled to PCI to plan for the Second Avenue SE closure.

The next day, comments came fast and furious from the public to her City Hall e-mail account and to local online news sites. The vast majority said the council was crazy to consider closing a stretch of Second Avenue SE.

Vernon now says she's not “unequivocally opposed” to closing Second Avenue SE, but she says her comments at the council meeting were “more positive than they probably should have been.”

Both she and Podzimek now point to the comment made by council member Kris Gulick, who noted that city consultant JLG Architects has cautioned against closing streets.

The closing of Second Avenue now sounds far from a done deal.

In a way, the Second Avenue matter is not unlike the $540,000 that Corbett and a council majority seemed at the ready to spend to outfit each of the 54,000 Yardy carts in the city with a local man's anti-tip invention. The public outcry against the idea prompted the council, on a 6-2 vote, to yank the spending out of the budget.

Vernon also points to the council's decision to implement a “buy-local” resolution, which gives significant preferential treatment to Cedar Rapids businesses on purchases not dictated by state and federal rules.

No sooner had the resolution passed than the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, whose members the resolution was designed to help, objected on behalf of its metro-area members outside the city limits. The city of Marion asked for a modification, too.

“I think we were aiming at Minnesota, and smacked Marion,” Vernon says. She hopes to see the resolution modified.

Council member Chuck Wieneke calls Mayor Corbett “a great politician” and he says part of Corbett's approach is to “step out and do something.”

“You got to admire it,” Wieneke says. “He's doing some good things. But I don't always agree with how it gets done.”

Wieneke, too, said the council's quick, public discussion on closing Second Avenue SE gave “the total impression” to PCI that the council supported closing the street. But it's not a done deal yet, says Wieneke, who adds that he needs to see cost estimates and more information from traffic engineers.

“If I were PCI, I'd have an Option A and an Option B,” he says.

Mayor Corbett, who does not have an office at the city's temporary city hall, says he's out in the public a lot, and by and large, people tell him that they are glad the council is making decisions even if they don't always agree with all of them.

As for “ready, fire, aim,” the mayor calls it council member Swore's “little cliche,” and he says it is not a good description of the work the new City Council has done in its first three months.

“I think the steps we've taken have been pretty thoughtful and I think we've laid out a plan,” Corbett says. “If you're trying to get out of me that we're a knee-jerk council, I don't buy that one bit. We're making decisions. Could we have waited another four months to pick a library site? I suppose you could.”

As for the Yardy issue, Corbett says the council majority -- he was not with it - listened to public reaction and dropped the spending from the budget.

“So we have our ear to the ground, listening to what the people have to say,” he says.

Corbett still thinks closing a stretch of Second Avenue SE is a fair trade off for the investment PCI intends to make in the city's new medical district. But he knows some on the council have had second thoughts.

“Maybe I should ask if they (council members) have buyer's remorse to the initial green light (they gave). Then let's flush it out now,” the mayor says.