Iowa Flood Mitigation Board expects to decide Dec. 4 on state funds

Dec. 4 will be a significant date for Cedar Rapids' recovery efforts from the Floods of 2008.

That's the day members of the Iowa Flood Mitigation Board said they will decide whether to fulfill the city's pitch for $264 million over 20 years.

The board met Thursday at the State Capitol and heard from seven cities seeking to fund flood-protection projects from growth in state sales tax receipts.

Cedar Rapids is seeking by far the largest amount of state funds. Dubuque's request is second largest, at $98.5 million over 20 years.

Iowa City is asking for $8.5 million, while Coralville wants $9.77 million. Waverly, Winterset and Storm Lake are the other three cities that made pitches Thursday.

Cedar Rapids city officials were upbeat Thursday after their presentation. Their aim is to use the state funding to build flood protection on both sides of the Cedar River.

“It's taken a long time to get to this point, but the process is working,” Cedar Rapids City Manager Jeff Pomeranz said. “The board has given very fair consideration thus far to our proposal. A number of reasonable questions were asked today, which is fair. And I think our team did a good job of answering those. But we'll have to wait until Dec. 4 to see what the board does right in this room.”

Mark Schouten, administrator of the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management department and chairman of the Flood Mitigation Board, joked Thursday that the seven applications in front of the board is “measured in feet as opposed to inches.” He credited the communities with submitting thorough applications and noted the work his staff and the board were putting in to understand them.

He called the applications “very ambitious projects with great potential.”

Schouten estimated that if the board agreed to each city's request, about 60 percent of the allowable annual cap of $30 million in revenue would be exhausted.

“There's a lot of money before the board,” Schouten said. “The cumulative total of the applications is pretty significant. The projects are good projects, but large projects.

“I think our concern is have they been engineered and designed in a way that they're going to work. And can those increments (growth in state sales tax in each community) support the funding necessary to do the projects. I've been satisfied with the answers.”

The state board has met in Cedar Rapids once, and Schouten said he has visited Cedar Rapids a few times to help with decisions on federal funding for flood mitigation.

“It's an impressive project, it's a necessary project,” he said of Cedar Rapids' proposal. He said the flood inundation maps and aerial video of the 2008 flood presented Thursday to the board showed “what a horrible situation” the city was in.

“And it's a credit to the city to be working with a project to deal with those huge problems,” he said.

Board members asked several officials about building in flood-prone areas once flood protection is in place.

Kelly Hayworth, Coralville's city manager, noted that much of the new residential construction there would have first floors for parking and could handle water in the event of a flood.

Joe O'Hern, Cedar Rapids' executive administrator for development services, noted that much of the vacant land along the Cedar River where many of the 1,300 property buyouts took place will remain green space.

Dave Elgin, Cedar Rapids' public works director and city engineer, told the board that the experts who have helped design the city's flood protection system, including the Army Corps of Engineers, have concluded that floodwater would not heighten the river's crest below the city.

Board member Arnold Honkamp of Dubuque unearthed two items in Cedar Rapids' application that officials didn't highlight when they made it public late Friday.

The items relate to the city's request to use some funding to protect May's Island and to construct a $30 million bridge over the Cedar River south of downtown and roughly aligned with C Street SW and Memorial Drive SE.

Elgin said the city and county have taken steps to flood-proof the two buildings on May's Island - the Veterans Memorial Building and the Linn County Courthouse - but more would be done if money is available. The bridge, which has been talked about for some time, would provide another way to cross the river should the downtown spans flood as they did in 2008, he said.