Will metro voting block hurt Cedar Rapids' chances to extend sales tax?

Nine months after the June 2008 flood, 59 percent of Cedar Rapids residents agreed to put a 1 percent local-option sales tax in place for 63 months to principally help in the city's flood recovery.

The vote tally back then was 12,982 for, 9,018 against.

Now, with the flood 31 months in the past, the question is this: Will at least a simple majority of the city's voters be willing to extend the tax for 20 more years in a May 3 special election?

Something, too, will be different now from 2009.

Back in 2009, the city of Cedar Rapids won a special exception from the Iowa Legislature that permitted the city to stand or fall on its own in the sales-tax vote.

This time, as required by state law, the city will vote as part of a metro block of communities with the approval of the tax extension dependent on the vote of the entire block, not just of Cedar Rapids.

Cedar Rapids, Marion, Hiawatha and Robins are part of the block because all have borders that touch. (Mount Vernon and Lisbon also vote as one block). In recent years, Highway 151, which runs between the borders of Fairfax and Cedar Rapids, has been considered sufficient boundary to keep Fairfax out of the metro block. The Linn County Board of Supervisors is discussing whether that is still the case.

Of note, in the 2009 vote, all three other cities in the metro block defeated the local-option sales tax even as Cedar Rapids was approving it by a wide margin.

The vote in Marion was 2,227 to 2,048 against; in Hiawatha, 522 to 441 against; and in Robins, 290 to 281 against. Fairfax, by the way, approved the tax, 237 to 119.

In the scheme of things, the tax would have passed in 2009 in the block even though Marion, Hiawatha and Robins voted against it because the Cedar Rapids majority in support of the tax, 3,964 votes, far exceeded the 710 more no-than-yes votes in Marion, Hiawatha and Robins.

The City Council, which called for the May 3 special election on a 7-0 vote on Tuesday evening, says the city needs the tax extension to pay part of the cost of a system to protect the city from another flood disaster. The council also intends to use half of the tax-extension money - which will generate about $380 million in total over 20 years for Cedar Rapids at the current rate of collection - to fix the city's streets.

Mayor Ron Corbett has said he did not anticipate that Cedar Rapids would ask the Iowa Legislature this go-round for another special exception so that Cedar Rapids' push to raise money for flood protection wouldn't be defeated in a close vote because what Marion, Hiawatha and Robins might do.

Communities in a metro area and in the county around it are inextricably entangled with the local-option sales tax because most of the spending and the sales-tax collection actually occurs in the retail center. A state formula then dispenses the revenue, sending communities in the county outside the retail center that have the tax in place part of the revenue collected in the county's retail center. The formula acknowledges that residents of those communities are spending some of their money in the retail center.

Every jurisdiction in Linn County now has the sales tax in place.