Corbett will ask council to have Prosser focus on jobs, leave flood recovery to Eyerly and the council

CEDAR RAPIDS -- Mayor Ron Corbett will ask the City Council this week to shake up the top management at City Hall in a step that will strip City Manager Jim Prosser of his key role in the city's flood recovery.

In what Corbett calls a “realignment,” the mayor will seek to have Greg Eyerly, who holds the position created a year ago of flood-recovery director, stop reporting to Prosser and, instead, have him report directly to the council.

Corbett also wants to hire a new flood-recovery “advocate” to deal with flood victims in less of a “bureaucratic” way as the city proceeds to buy out some 1,300 flood-damaged homes and other properties.

Under the realignment plan, Prosser no longer would work on flood recovery, but would focus on economic development and adding jobs to the community as he continues to run the day-to-day operation of city departments.

In an interview late Friday afternoon, Corbett says his proposed realignment is not a “major reorganization” of city government in violation of the City Charter.

Instead, by having Eyerly report directly to the City Council and not to Prosser, the council will get better results on what Corbett says are his two top priorities -- jobs and flood recovery.

“I think we can put a little more muscle behind flood recovery if Greg reports directly to us, and Jim focuses on economic growth and really starts to change the (City Hall) culture so people know, ‘We're open for business,'” Corbett said.

“I just see this realignment as a good step,” the mayor continued. “This doesn't mean that Greg is going to be at a higher pay grade, or that we're bastardizing the council/city manager form of government. It's about getting results for the community.”

The city's four-year-old city government is referred to as a “weak-mayor” form of government because the elected officials are part time and the city manager is a full-time chief executive. The government is designed to have city employees answer to the city manager, council member Tom Podzimek said.

The 11-page City Charter specifies only that the city manager, city clerk and city attorney work directly for and report to the City Council, though one of those three, City Attorney Jim Flitz, has said the charter permits the council to have the flood-recovery director sidestep the city manager's oversight, Corbett reported.

Podzimek said he thinks the City Council would violate the City Charter if it takes resources away the city manager's office and spends them some other way.

“I think you've disobeyed the charter,” Podzimek said. “You're overthrowing the government.

“ … So you better start by rewriting the charter. Let's not have somebody go to jail over this.”

Council member Kris Gulick said the City Council hasn't done a good job to date of managing the three employees who report directly to the City Council as set out in the City Charter. The council has failed to give the city manager, city attorney and city clerk goals and objectives and then performance evaluations to measure how they are going to meet those, he said.

“What organization would add more people to the bosses (in this case, the City Council) if they haven't done a real good job of managing the three they already have?” Gulick asked.

Corbett said a majority of the nine-member council will approve his request for a management realignment, a council majority, which, no doubt, will start with the same five votes that approved the council's hold-the-line-on-taxes budget two weeks ago on a 5-4 vote. That majority consists of the three new council member, Corbett, Don Karr and Chuck Swore, and council members Justin Shields and Monica Vernon.

Vernon and Shields tried a similar move last March to have the flood-recovery director report directly to the council after they had spent some months saying they felt the city manager had too much power and the council had been too willing to give up its power to him.

On a 6-3 vote, though, the council dismissed the idea of having the flood-recovery director report directly to the council. At the time, Gulick -- he sits on the board of the Iowa League of Cities -- reported that he had talked to a variety of experts on council/manager governments, and “very few” thought it a good idea to two bosses making demands on the same city staff at the same time.

Corbett - who campaigned last year that the city manager had too much power -- said keeping Eyerly under Prosser might have made sense last year. At that point in time, he said Eyerly was collecting a lot of data and completing “worksheets” used to make the city's case to the Federal Emergency Management Agency about specific flood damage to city buildings and infrastructure.

“But now we're at decision-making time,” Corbett said. “And I think it's important to have him report to the council. I believe, in my 12 short weeks as mayor, that the majority of the council feels that the flood recovery pace needs to be picked up.”

Corbett said he has talked to Prosser and Eyerly about his idea to realign Prosser's assignments and to make Eyerly report directly to the City Council. Both have agreed to the switch, Corbett said.

Council member Gulick said Prosser “would do whatever the City Council desires for him to do.”

Council member Vernon said the council brought Prosser on board in August 2006 as the city's first city manager to run the day-to-day operation of the city. The Corbett-proposed realignment will let Prosser focus on the management of the city, she said.

As for flood recovery, she said there is a lot of information that the council needs to know, and sometimes the transfer of that information has not been done in a timely way, she said.

Back in 2004 and 2005, the city's Home Rule Charter Commission debated if the city should have a so-called weak-mayor government or a strong-mayor one, and the commission chose the former with a full-time city manager to be the city government's chief executive. Seventy percent of the city's voters endorsed the commission's weak-mayor recommendation in a June 2005 referendum.