City Manager Jim Prosser resigns

City Manager Jim Prosser has resigned.

The resignation - confirmed by Mayor Ron Corbett - comes amid pressure from at least four of nine council members. Those four, Mayor Ron Corbett, Monica Vernon, Don Karr and Chuck Swore, have made no secret that they wanted Prosser to leave.

Corbett, Karr and Swore, the three new members on the council, all campaigned last fall saying that Prosser had too much power and the City Council had given up too much of its power to him. They said the city needed less planning and more action.

Council members Vernon and Justin Shields made a similar charge last year, but they were minority voices on the last council in that regard.

The City Charter requires six of nine council votes to force the resignation of a city manager, and Corbett acknowledged on Monday that he did not have six votes to force Prosser's departure.

Prosser, who began his run at City Hall in August 2006, is expected to leave Tuesday and to get a year's salary as part of a separation package. Finance Director Casey Drew will take over as acting city manager, at least for now.

Corbett, 49, and Prosser, 58, had a first, formal meeting on Nov. 7 at the Spring House restaurant in northeast Cedar Rapids, four days after Corbett won election in easy fashion over then-council member Brian Fagan.

At meeting's end, Corbett said he would conduct a 90-day assessment of Prosser's work once he took office in January.

“I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that it's going to be a positive or negative assessment,” Corbett said then. “It has to be an honest 90-day assessment period.”

At the time, Prosser noted that he had served as city manager at Richfield, Minn., for 13 years under three mayors where he learned that it was not unusual for the city manager's job performance to turn up in an election campaign.

Prosser said his job as city manager was to serve the council and community and to help the council achieve its goals. He implied he had no interest in hanging on to the job at all cost.

“I work at the pleasure of the council, and I understand and respect that,” Prosser said then. “For me, this isn't about counting votes (among council members). It's about being effective.

“And if I'm not effective and I'm not contributing, then I shouldn't be here.”

After the first Corbett-Prosser meeting in November, council member Chuck Wieneke, who remains a strong Prosser supporter, said the last thing Prosser needed to worry about was finding another job.

“My biggest fear,” Wieneke said, “is that Jim Prosser will decide there's been enough criticism and he will just walk out the door.

“ … There are cities in the country that would steal Prosser in a minute and give him a lot more money,” Wieneke said in November.

The tension between the Corbett group on the council and Prosser has been palpable, and the move last week by the council to remove flood recovery from Prosser's duties was something of a public no-confidence declaration.

Corbett insisted that he wanted Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, to report directly to the council and not to Prosser so Prosser could concentrate on running city government and on creating new jobs in the community.

But last year's council dismissed such an idea out of hand.

Prosser has been the city's first city manager.

He left a job as a private financial consultant to cities to take the Cedar Rapids post in August 2006 after a stiff competition among a national field of city manager candidates.

In Prosser, the City Council got a professional manager who believed in long-term financial planning and in something he called ‘balanced decision-making,” concepts the majority on the 2006-2007 council and the 2008-2009 council embraced wholeheartedly.

Such would be the case now if, for instance, Brian Fagan had defeated Corbett for mayor last fall or even if Fagan had not run for mayor and succeeded in keeping his at-large council seat.

Prosser was a fan of public open houses, in which residents turned out to talk to city staff and city consultants and to review white poster boards of information about the topic at hand.

Prosser demanded long hours of his top staff since the June 2008 flood, and no one worked longer hours than he did.

Even as floodwaters were receding, he and the City Council immediately decided to bring in experienced disaster consultants to help in the city's recovery. Lessons learned from other disasters, Prosser often said, required the city to work hard to document damage so the city could ensure it obtained all the disaster benefits from the federal government it deserved.

Corbett, though, has said flood recovery has gone too slowly, and since arriving at City Hall in January, the mayor has been pushing to take quicker actions.

In Prosser's leave-taking, the city is losing Iowa's Manager of the Year for 2008, an honor given Prosser by the Iowa City/County Management Association in September 2008. Prosser never told anyone in Cedar Rapids of the award, but the association made the honor public in December of 2008.