Corbett’s first month — a populist push

Flood recovery here is aging - it's more than 19 months old now - but the city mayor, Ron Corbett, is new. One month new.

It's a job in which the one-time Republican speaker of the Iowa House has twice stood in front of a west-side union hall on two cold nights, listening to the lingering confusion and still-ripe gripes of flood victims.

A job that had him last week in front of an antsy arts community worried about a cut in hotel-motel tax support. One that found him chit-chatting with customers the other day at The Breakfast House on Sixth Street SW.

Is the city's professionally managed government getting a dose of old-fashioned populism?

“In this day and age, when you have Twitter and Facebook and blogging, sometimes looking into people's faces and listening to them - for me - it's very impactful,” says Corbett, 49.

“I still don't have an office at the (city's temporary) City Hall,” he says. “So there isn't a place I go. So when I get up every day, I try to go out and just see people. So if that's a populist ... I'm going to continue to do that. I'm going to stay grounded.”

Among most of his council colleagues, Corbett seems to be getting favorable marks on certain fronts. Most, for instance, say they like how he runs a meeting and that the meetings have generated healthy debate.

But Corbett says some council members never tire of reminding him, at the end of the day, he's just one of nine council votes. And whether he has any kind of working council majority is still an open question.

Just last week, for instance, the majority of council members opted to spend more on capital improvement projects in the next budget than Corbett wants spent.

At-large council member Tom Podzimek, in particular, has not been shy about lecturing Corbett on what has been the philosophy of the previous council - in part, to spend for the vision of a better future and to take some political heat for it.

“The biggest challenges have nothing do with Ron,” says Podzimek, 52. “He came in at 100,000 feet, saying ‘You pay too much in taxes.' Now, when he's in the trenches, there's a different perspective.”

At-large council member Chuck Swore says anybody who is paying attention to city government right now can see that the new City Council is driving the City Hall agenda and not, he says, taking what the city manager's office puts in the council's hands.

City Manager Jim Prosser is an “excellent employee,” Swore says, but, at the same time, it is important that the elected council members bring their ideas into play. And he thinks that's what Corbett already has helped accomplish.

“I think Ron's shown he has the qualities of leadership that we've needed to strengthen this form of government,” says Swore, 67.

Council member Chuck Wieneke, 65, who represents the flood-wrecked Time Check Neighborhood, credits Corbett with holding the two flood forums. Any chance to listen to flood victims, he says, is a chance to clear up questions and “rumor-mill” misinformation and distrust of City Hall.

However, a little piece of that same distrust, Wieneke says, surfaced at a recent council meeting when Corbett held up a two-month-old letter - from the city of Iowa City to its flood victims - and suggested that Iowa City had figured out a way to have less deducted from flood buyout payments than had Cedar Rapids. It turns out that's not true.

Wieneke says he understands Corbett is frustrated because flood victims are frustrated. But couldn't he, Wieneke asks, have run the letter by the city's professional staff first?

In his defense, Corbett says he's been barraged by documents - some of which say different things - and that he intends to challenge “the conventional wisdom” at City Hall and elsewhere from time to time.

He says he'll keep pushing on buyouts, trying to get flood victims the maximum help possible.

It's something he won't assign to the city's professional management. It's a matter, he says, for “the head of one government to talk to the heads of other governments.”