Flood recovery didn't come without its criticism of public officials

Chuck Wieneke was still new to the City Council as he went from soaked home to soaked home in the Time Check and Harrison Elementary School neighborhoods to see firsthand the damage that his constituents faced in the June 2008 flood.

In part because his council district sustained so much property loss, Wieneke became a leading voice for flood recovery on the nine-member City Council. But by the fall of 2011, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who had flown fighter jets in his day, had enough.

"I freely admit, I needed a break," the 69 year old says now. He found he was arguing with council colleagues even as questions about flood recovery continued to come at the council from the public.

"We had enough people complaining: 'You take too long and you don't care enough,'" Wieneke says of typical citizen complaints. "They didn't need me complaining, too."

By the end of 2011, he felt some in the public had lost trust in the City Council, and he says he was part of the council.

Proof of the loss of trust, he says, was the defeat in May 2011 and again in March 2012 of an effort to extend the city's 1-percent local-option sales tax, which expires June 30, 2014, to help pay for flood protection.

"For the average voter (who opposed the tax extension), mistrust of our city government is why," Wieneke says.

Wieneke says a flood disaster the size of Cedar Rapids' couldn't have come without ample citizen complaint about the speed of recovery.

"I understand the frustration," he says. "But I knew from day one, having been in government before, that it was going to take time."

Among the more audible voices of criticism about the city's flood recovery has been that of Greg Vail, who spoke out against the city's effort to extend the sales tax.

Vail, who lives today in the only house left right next to the river on First Street NW in the flood-hit Time Check neighborhood, says he long has had a "bit of skepticism" about City Hall that he says is founded in the belief that "people with power needed to be monitored and watched."

He says the large flow of federal and state flood-recovery dollars into the city "burned up" what trust he had in city government. By his way of thinking, too much of the disaster funding went to support the downtown and the friends of City Council members and for projects that allowed council members to "pat themselves on the back."

"Mistrust" of City Hall, Vail says, defeated the tax extension votes in May 2011 and March 2012 even as Cedar Rapids voters widely endorsed casino gaming for the city in March 2013.

"What does that say? That there is more trust for big-shot casino investors with a bunch of money than our own City Council," Vail says.

Like Vail, Linda Seger is a northwest Cedar Rapids flood survivor, only she says that her trust level in City Hall has increased compared to what it had been before the 2008 flood and in the early months of the city's flood recovery.

"I felt that the average citizen's opinion and concerns did not matter," Seger says. "I felt it was true that you can't fight City Hall. Many of my neighbors felt that way, too."

Seger, who now has been president of the Northwest Neighbors Neighborhood Association for much of the city's flood recovery, says her trust in city government changed when she changed.

"It took a change in me to change my trust level," she says. "I became actively involved in my city and my city government. I got to know people that I had felt were unreachable in the past."

In Iowa City and Coralville, the flood did not cause widespread distrust. The local-option sales tax passed in Iowa City and failed in Coralville in 2009, with both outcomes decided by less than 10 votes. More recent controversies over a proposed high-rise building in downtown Iowa City and Coralville's use of tax increment financing have attracted more criticism than anything flood related.

But there was discontent from certain actions.

When Iowa City officials proposed a levee on Taft Speedway, the owners of the nine homes still on that street said the city was not straightforward with its plans and so fought City Hall until this past fall, when the City Council voted against the project. The decision upset the people in the Idyllwild condominium neighborhood who would have been protected by the levee.

Mary Kathryn Wallace, who lives in Idyllwild with her husband, Doug, said the city spent four years talking about the benefits of the levee only to make a decision based on emotion. The 74-year-old said she'll never feel completely at ease in her condo, which sustained $85,000 damage in 2008.

The mandatory evacuations of several neighborhoods during the flood also caused friction. Then Iowa City Mayor Regenia Bailey said she heard from many angry people.

Some of them were at the Baculis Mobile Home Park in southern Iowa City. Karen Baculis, 69, who owned the park with her husband, David, before selling it recently, described the evacuation as getting "kicked out" of their home and office despite believing they were safe.

"They're giving you 20 minutes to get your clothes packed, your animals packed," she said recently.

Distrust is common after natural disasters as people look for understanding and possibly someone to blame.

Some New Orleans residents believed racism or prejudice against poor people influenced evacuation plans during Hurricane Katrina, a study from the University of California Los Angeles found. Many Japanese distrusted the media following a 2011 earthquake and tsunami because reporters weren't asking tough questions of companies and government officials, the European Journalism Centre reported this spring.

A national task force of community psychologists developed a manual for helping communities recover from disasters in 2010.

"Sometimes a disaster impacts all members of a community or sectors of a society equally. More often than not, certain groups disproportionately bear the brunt of the suffering and loss, magnifying these disparities," the 2010 manual states. "Inequality can lead to a sense of competition for limited resources between groups, or distrust of government authority or recovery personnel."

Interestingly in Cedar Rapids, former council member Wieneke credits candidate Ron Corbett's campaign for mayor in 2009 with helping to fuel mistrust of city government. Corbett easily won election that year over a council incumbent, Brian Fagan, by saying City Hall had embraced "a culture of delay."

By May of 2011, Corbett all of a sudden was the lead voice promoting the sales tax extension when it went down to defeat, Wieneke adds.

Corbett says his "culture of delay" campaign was not a negative one, but it was just his way of saying that the city needed to pick up the pace of flood recovery. Shortly after he took office, property buyouts began and property owners were getting 107 percent of pre-flood value, not just 100 percent that had been the plan.

"We took action on some of these issues right away," the mayor says.

Mistrust of City Hall, he adds, was not the reason for the narrow defeats of the tax extension votes for flood protection. Broader concerns about the national economy made the local tax votes hard to sell, he says.

"When you hear that constant drumbeat out of Washington, D.C., of how bad things are…," Corbett says. "So we had to deal with those national headwinds."

In her mind, neighborhood leader Seger says "flood fatigue" and voter uncertainty of how City Hall would spend the new tax revenue helped defeat the tax measures.

Corbett, who is seeking re-election, discounts that there is a level of mistrust of City Hall in Cedar Rapids other than the "healthy skepticism" that always chases local, state and federal governments.

"You're always going to deal with that," he says.

For his part, Wieneke says his year and five months out of city elected office has been the most relaxed period of time he's known for a long time.

"I think the City Council has every right to be very happy with the job it's done on flood recovery," Wieneke says. He says the flood hurt a lot of people, but the recovery has moved what he says was a stagnating city to a better place.

He adds that today's City Council doesn't deserve to be held in low esteem if it is.

"No," he says about this year's City Hall election, "I don't see anybody beating the mayor."