Election doesn't make pursuit of flood funding any easier

No one has ever suggested to the city that its fight to find funds for a new flood-protection system would be anything but a “heavy lift,” Mayor Ron Corbett said Wednesday.

As a result, Corbett said a new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives intent on cutting federal spending and a new Republican governor and new Republican majority in the Iowa House of Representatives intent on doing the same with state funding doesn't change the fact that the city has to work hard to secure funding to protect itself from future flooding.

“Flood protection isn't a partisan issue,” the mayor, a Republican and former speaker of the Iowa House, said on Wednesday. “We've known all along that we're going to need both Republicans and Democrats at the federal level and state level.”

Corbett said heads of key committees in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Iowa House now will be Republicans, not the Democrats who have been in place during a time when the city has secured substantial federal and state disaster funding.

“But our approach is to protect both sides of the river and to try to garner partisan support to do it,” the mayor said.

In two weeks, Corbett will lead a city delegation to Washington, D.C., to participate in a presentation of the Army Corps of Engineers' flood-protection study for Cedar Rapids to the Corps' Civil Works Review Board. The board's approval of the study's recommendation to protect just the east side of the river in Cedar Rapids is a necessary first step in getting the project in line to be funded by the U.S. Congress.

In tandem, Corbett said he and other city leaders will be meeting with Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, the presumptive new speaker of the Iowa House, and newly elected governor, Terry Branstad, to try to win legislative and gubernatorial support for the city's proposal to divert the growth in revenue from the state sales tax collected in Linn County to help fund the city's flood-protection system.

Corbett floated the sales-tax proposal - the city terms it the Growth Reinvestment Initiative - before a gubernatorial debate in Cedar Rapids last month. Outgoing Gov. Chet Culver endorsed it and Corbett said incoming Gov. Branstad expressed support for the concept.

“We did not get a lot of major opposition from legislative leaders,” the mayor added.

He noted that Branstad was governor during the 1993 flood disasters in Iowa, “so he's familiar with what the people on Cedar Rapids have had to endure the last two years.”

Paulsen, who represents legislative precincts in both Cedar Rapids and flood-hit Palo, knows “how important it is to try to protect yourself from flooding in the future,” the mayor said.

Corbett was speaker of the Iowa House from 1995 thorough the 1999 legislative session working with Branstad as governor the first four of the five years.

"We worked well together," Corbett said of Branstad. "… And I hope that will continue in the new role I play as mayor of Cedar Rapids."