Key flood consultant and City Council part ways

Disaster consultant John Levy - whose initial $475-an-hour cost gained some notice soon after the June 2008 flood - and the City Council apparently will part ways at the end of the month.

Levy on Wednesday characterized his leave-taking as a resignation, though it was something a majority of the council had wanted.

Levy said he notified the city in writing that he can finish up work on his latest contract with the city by month's end.

“You know what, there's a new (mayoral) administration, they might want to go a different way, and I'm OK with that,” Levy said. “I understand how those things go.”

He said he would stay on through the end of his contract at the end of June if the council wanted him to do so, but he would be surprised if that was the case.

Three new members on the nine-member City Council - Mayor Ron Corbett, Don Karr and Chuck Swore - have particularly expressed an interest in ending Levy's contract. They have suggested that he has not moved on flood recovery at a fast enough pace.

Corbett has said as much as Levy said on Monday: That a new administration can see things differently from the one before it. Corbett also has said that some of what Levy has been doing for the city most recently has been taken over by city staff.

At last week's meeting, the council, in fact, had been slated to discuss ending Levy's contract. Instead, the council tabled the matter, and the council's four-member Procurement Committee took up the issue at a meeting on Monday.

At that meeting, City Manager Jim Prosser and other top city staff said Levy had delivered on his contract. Swore, the committee chairman, said he would defer to Prosser's wishes. But that was Monday.

Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, did note that Levy had come to “rub” the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wrong way - so much so that city staff would “scrub” Levy's input and present it to FEMA themselves. Eyerly also said Levy's cost for construction management services, for now, was coming in at a higher rate than that set out by FEMA standards.

Levy arrived in Cedar Rapids with disaster experience from Hurricane Katrina even as floodwaters were receding here in June 2008.

The city quickly hired him and awarded him new contracts in October 2008 and July 2009. A Michigan resident, he initially worked for a firm called Globe Midwest, but in October 2008, he created his own company, Base Tactical Disaster Recovery.

The city can't routinely end his current contract without a 30-day notice.