Council excited about Event Center, silent on information to those who might oppose $17 million in local funds for it

CEDAR RAPIDS - A $35-million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is slated to pay a big chunk of the cost of a new Event Center convention facility here, is seemingly so close that the City Council can taste it.

On Tuesday, the council will hold a public hearing followed by its vote of support that will enable the city to sell $17 million in local tax-supported bonds to help pay for the $50-plus-millon Event Center.

No local funding to help, no big federal check to pay the majority of the center's cost.

“It's make or break,” says Mayor Ron Corbett of the need for the federal grant.

Lost, though, in the council's eagerness to approve a local bond issue to help secure the federal funds has been the council's accompanying silence about a provision of state law that allows residents opposed to sizable bond sales to collect signatures on a petition to force a citizen vote - called a reverse referendum - before such a bond sale can proceed.

At this late hour, anyone so inclined has until Tuesday to collect 2,353 signatures - 10 percent of the total who voted in the last city election - to force a citizen vote, a fact that City Council has not volunteered to talk about in recent weeks.

In fact, the council had a lengthy discussion about the bond sale at its March 16 meeting and not once mentioned the possibility of a reverse referendum. City Hall, though, did point out the reverse-referendum option in a legal notice in The Gazette on March 27.

The reverse-referendum matter is something of a can of worms at the three-month mark of Mayor Corbett's term at City Hall because he campaigned hard last fall for letting the public vote on big building projects rather than forcing them to collect signatures to demand such a vote.

Last fall, though, Corbett was specifically objecting to a new piece of legislation, now law, which allows councils in disaster areas to approve big building projects without a citizen vote. Such projects are subject to a reverse referendum requiring a petition with signatures equal to 20 percent of the local residents who voted in the last presidential election. Under that provision, a reverse referendum in Cedar Rapids would require 13,331 signatures.

But the $17 million bond vote on Tuesday is not based on that new law but on a long-standing section of Iowa law related to urban renewal projects, a section that requires far fewer signatures - in this instance, about 11,000 fewer - on a reverse-referendum petition.

Corbett on Thursday said he campaigned against the new law because the last City Council appeared as if it were quietly planning on using the law to build a new $38 million City Hall using property-tax dollars, a project Corbett opposed and the new City Council has now dropped.

The proposed $50 million Event Center and associated $15 million upgrade of the U.S. Cellular Center arena already has secured $15 million in state I-JOBS funds for the arena and will have $35 million in federal funds to go with local money, the mayor stressed.

He also said he has made it clear in public since taking office that the Event Center project was important and that he hoped to use hotel-motel tax revenue, not property taxes, to pay off the bond debt.

Granted, Corbett acknowledged, the ability of citizens to seek a reverse referendum “wasn't specifically discussed” at the recent council meeting. But he said he's been talking up the Event Center at dozens of appearances, explaining that the city is poised to get $50 million of outside help for the $67 million convention center and arena upgrade.

“‘And yes, we have to come up with a local match,' I tell people,” he said. “And I'm getting an overwhelming majority saying, ‘Yes.' People understand you can't have something for nothing.”

Corbett is well aware that Commerce Secretary Gary Locke will be in Iowa City today to announce federal grants similar, though smaller, than the one Cedar Rapids is expecting for the Event Center.

Tuesday's Cedar Rapids council vote to provide $17 million in local money must come if Locke is to make his way to Cedar Rapids with good news in the weeks ahead, the mayor said.

In 1998, voters here emphatically rejected a local-option sales tax - 69 percent to 31 percent - to finance a potpourri of projects led by a $19 million convention center to be built next to the city's U.S. Cellular Center arena.

That was then, says Mayor Ron Corbett.