Council eager for Event Center; silent about referendum option

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

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

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

Overlooked in the council's eagerness to secure the federal funds has been its silence about a provision of state law that allows residents opposed to sizable bond sales to petition and force a 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 the City Council has not volunteered 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 did point out the reverse-referendum option in a legal notice in The Gazette on March 27.

The reverse referendum is something of a can of worms for Corbett. He campaigned hard in the fall for letting the public vote on big building projects, rather than forcing them to collect signatures to demand such a vote.

Corbett was specifically objecting to a 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.

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

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 said, the ability of residents to seek a reverse referendum “wasn't specifically discussed” at the recent council meeting. 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.”