Corbett to seek council control of flood-recovery director this week

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 report directly to the council.

Corbett also wants to hire a 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, Corbett said 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 4-year-old city government is referred to as a “weak-mayor” form 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 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. 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 council. It has failed to give the city manager, city attorney and city clerk goals and objectives and performance evaluations.

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

Council members Monica Vernon and Justin Shields tried last March to have the flood-recovery director report directly to the council, but that effort failed on a 6-3 vote. At the time, Gulick, who sits on the board of the Iowa League of Cities, reported that “very few” of the experts on council/manager government he'd talked to thought it was a good idea to have two bosses making demands on city staff at the same time.

The makeup of the council has changed since then.