Cedar Rapids metro area voters defeat tax extension by tiny margin

CEDAR RAPIDS - A disappointed Mayor Ron Corbett last night said he and other City Council members were still sorting out the narrowest of election defeats - by a 216-vote margin among some 32,000 votes cast - trying to decide why voters failed to approve a 20-year extension of the local-option sales tax to protect the city against future floods and to fix its streets.

Corbett had been planning to head to Des Moines this morning, hoping to report to state lawmakers that local voters had approved the tax extension - and by so doing, had done their part to help pay for a future flood protection system for the city.

He said city officials and the state lawmakers representing Cedar Rapids had worked hard to position the city to win state funding support for its flood protection plan. However, with last night's narrow defeat, he wasn't sure if that state support could vanish.

In Iowa, cities with borders that touch vote as one block in elections on local-option sales taxes. That means Cedar Rapids, Marion, Hiawatha, Robins and Fairfax voted together and defeated the measure together.

However, last night's election results weren't able to show a final tally for just the Cedar Rapids vote because 3,300 absentee ballots cast in the metro block were not broken out by city.

The votes in Cedar Rapids' 47 precincts showed a tally of 11,183 against, 10,477 for, or a margin of 704 votes against.

The unofficial absentee ballot count for the five-city metro block was 1,765 for, 1,599 against, or a margin of 166 votes.

“We put together a very thoughtful plan that protected both sides of the river and provided a way to jump-start street repairs,” the mayor said. “At this point in time, the citizens said ‘no' to that plan, and I have to respect the will of the people. It was a pretty close vote. But in the end, we didn't prevail.”

City Council member Monica Vernon called last night's vote tally “a landmark decision.”

Click here to see full results

“It was so close and it was so key and so much about our future rests on this,” Vernon said. “It's extremely disappointing. Could we have been clearer? Could we have been simpler?”

City Council members Chuck Swore and Don Karr, who watched the election results with the mayor and Vernon ad others at the RWDSU-UFCW Local 110 union hall at 526 F Ave. NW, said they would be at it this morning to figure out what to do next to ensure that the city gets a flood-protection system for both sides of the Cedar River.

“I'll get up and get to work and do something else,” Karr said. “Because we got to have flood protection.”

Swore said, “I don't think there's any question we've got to regroup, rethink and re-propose something different.”

At a gathering in a northeast side restaurant and bar last night, Tim Pugh, who headed up the We Can Do Better CR effort against the tax extension, declared, “David came out on top of Goliath.”

Pugh's group raised a couple of thousand dollars in its campaign while the pro-extension effort, called Protect Cedar Rapids Committee, raised nearly $500,000. Much of the money came from Cedar Rapids' largest employers, many hit by the 2008 flood and all with flood-impacted employees.

Pugh said his group would begin today to push its own flood-protection plan, different from the city's $375-million “preferred” plan.

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