Two Chucks on City Council see Go Daddy differently; one criticizes Corbett, the other calls for a new parking ramp to support new downtown jobs

CEDAR RAPIDS - The two Chucks on the City Council were worlds apart but equally exercised Friday about the prospects of bringing as many as 500 jobs from Internet firm Go Daddy to a downtown still limping from the June 2008 flood.

An angry council member Chuck Wieneke called his own City Hall news conference to vent, saying Mayor Ron Corbett should not be offering incentive packages to the likes of Go Daddy without first having input and a vote from the nine-member City Council. Wieneke said any offer Corbett was proposing to Go Daddy - the firm founded by former local businessman Bob Parsons and well promoted by race car-driving beauty Danica Patrick - was “invalid” for now.

Meanwhile, council member Chuck Swore dismissed Wieneke's assertion out of hand, saying Wieneke “just isn't used to getting things done.”

Instead, Swore, who knew all about the Go Daddy negotiations, implored the City Council and the downtown business community to stop talking and to get busy building a new $15-million parking ramp on Second Street SE so Go Daddy employees, should they come downtown, were sure of a place to park.

The new ramp also is needed to support the new $160-million federal courthouse, which will open in late 2012, and to act as a carrot to bring other employers into the downtown, Swore said.

Swore said a proposal to build a Great America II Building along the river next to the existing Great America building will be helped if a new ramp goes up. The new ramp, he added, is also needed because the aged, flood-damaged First Street Parkade is slated for demolition in the near future.

“We got to get the new ramp funded, we got to get somebody to starting drawing the design,” Swore said. “That parking is going to be needed for lot of development activity down there.”

Mayor Ron Corbett on Friday was still standing from the hit thrown at him by Wieneke, and he, too, said that the city needed to accelerate plans to build a new parking ramp to support his push for bringing more employees to the downtown. He, too, mentioned the prospects for a Great America II building.

Corbett and the council have included the parking-ramp project among a list of 14 projects to which they may steer $21 million in federal disaster funding the city will get for “alternate” projects because it cannot use the flood-damaged former Sinclair and Quality Chef plants. Corbett also has said that the federal General Services Administration, which is overseeing the courthouse construction, may have some funds to spend on a parking ramp.

At his news conference Friday, council member Wieneke said he was more concerned with the way Mayor Corbett was going about trying to get things done than the things he was trying to accomplish.

He said the City Council should discuss and vote on matters before the mayor makes promises and offers to a prospective new business like Go Daddy.

The Go Daddy matter hit the news on Thursday after Hiawatha city officials complained that Corbett had come in with an “11th-hour offer” in an attempt to “submarine” plans for Go Daddy to locate in Hiawatha.

Wieneke said, “I probably would not have made the offer” to Go Daddy in competition with Hiawatha.

The Go Daddy flap is the second time in a week in which Wieneke expressed displeasure with Corbett. Wieneke said he learned from the media last week that Corbett intended to ask the City Council to make a bid to buy the city's only downtown hotel, the long-struggling Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel, from its creditors. The council approved the idea, 6-1, on Tuesday with Wieneke casting the “no” vote.

Corbett on Friday pointed out that city officials in Hiawatha made public the city of Cedar Rapids' bid to get Go Daddy to bring 500 jobs to downtown Cedar Rapids rather than to Hiawatha. And Corbett said the hotel plans were made public by someone else. He had not intended to make it public until he talked to every one of the eight other council members, he said.

Wieneke acknowledged on Friday that the city's City Charter specifically assigns economic development to the mayor.

For his part, Corbett said negotiations with private firms about locating in communities are usually confidential matters. He said in this instance, he, his council colleagues, Kris Gulick and Justin Shields, and Allan Thoms, interim city manager, all met with Bob Parsons, founder and CEO of Go Daddy, recently to discuss a possible bid from Cedar Rapids to steer Go Daddy's jobs away from Hiawatha and to downtown Cedar Rapids.

He said he had discussed the negotiations with seven of nine council members, but simply had not gotten to Wieneke.

At one point Corbett called the effort a "Hail Mary pass," but on Thursday, he said someone could end up in the end zone after all.

Corbett said, too, that any final offer to Go Daddy has yet to be formalized, and when it is, it will involve a public-private effort to get Go Daddy downtown. It won't be a matter of simply handing over public tax dollars, the mayor said.

In his first five-plus months in office, Corbett has pushed ahead on his agenda with something of a certainty that he has the backing of a majority of council members on key matters. Council members Monica Vernon, Justin Shields, Chuck Swore and Don Karr have comprised that Corbett working majority.

“All I'm trying to do is open the door and see if Go Daddy is interested,” the mayor said on Friday. “Now I've got one of the council members saying the offer is invalid. Why is he doing this if he really cares about jobs and about revitalizing the downtown? I can come to only one conclusion: He's trying to undermine me as mayor of Cedar Rapids.”

Council member Swore said he was “disappointed” with Wieneke's comments.

“If Chuck Wieneke can go out and do something progressively on his own and come back and say, ‘Here's what we ought to do,' great,” Swore said. “He doesn't have to tell me ahead of time.”

In the end, every council member will have a chance to vote on any Go Daddy offer just as council members did on the hotel bid, Swore said.

He said former City Manager Jim Prosser brought potential deals to the council in the past, now the mayor is out working on it.

Corbett said he hopes to go to Arizona, where Go Daddy's Parsons lives, in the days ahead to try to “hash out” the details of Cedar Rapids' offer to Go Daddy.

“When I say ‘we, we want Go Daddy to come downtown and create 500 jobs,' I mean the community,” Corbett said. “We have to rebuild the downtown.”