Was Prosser's strength also a weakness?

Clay Jones says maybe someone else could have done a better job of leading the city's flood recovery than the person who he says, by and large, led it - just-departed City Manager Jim Prosser.

"But I would like to see them try," says Jones, chairman and CEO of Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids.

"Given the extraordinary volatility of the circumstance, I think Jim actually did a yeoman's share of holding the community together during an extremely chaotic time, a very turbulent time and a time of high emotion,' Jones says. 'He was one of the few people who was a calming influence in the crowd.' Even so, Jones, the head of the city's largest employer who rarely speaks publicly on community issues, acknowledges that he and others in the city's private sector grew increasingly anxious as time churned on and too little seemed to be happening too slowly as the city worked to recover from the flood of June 2008.

Prosser was talented, but was that enough?

Or did some of his strong points actually get in the way?

The concern that those in authority were doing too little, Jones says, was not simply directed at Prosser, his professional staff and the city's elected officials. He says the same complaints were aimed at state and federal governments, too.

Jones himself made a point of telling President Barack Obama, faceto-face, of the need to help in the Cedar Rapids recovery at a White House meeting of business leaders captured on C-SPAN.

'As is always the case when you're relying on government to do the job - whether it's Katrina or here or earthquakes or Haiti or whatever you want to do - why can't more be done?' Jones says. ' ... And, yeah, I think Jim got a significant dose of that criticism from all quarters that wanted to see things happen faster.

'Now whether they could have happened faster is a separate conversation, but that's typically not what's on somebody's mind when they see immediate problems that need relief.'

Who's in charge

Dan Baldwin, who left his post in March as the president/CEO of the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, says concern about the direction and pace of the city's flood recovery surfaced in some parts of the community early after the flood.

An initial conflict arose, he says, when some in the private sector suggested that flood recovery required a 'communitywide' solution in which the private sector would work with City Hall to lead the effort. The idea wasn't particularly embraced at City Hall, either by Prosser or the City Council, says Baldwin.

'And I think there was this perception that Jim thought this was more a city disaster and that the planning and solutions would be driven by city government,' Baldwin says. 'So there was kind of a disconnect there. It seemed like there were people who wanted to get involved and wanted to be part of solutions and bring resources to it, and, correctly or incorrectly, they were made to feel it was not their problem - that the answer to all our problems was going to be driven by a city solution.

'This wasn't Jim alone, but a lot on the City Council agreed, that this was in their wheelhouse.

... They were getting tired of this suggestion that there was more could be done.'

Matter of personality

At some level, says Baldwin, it boiled down to a matter of style. Rockwell Collins' Jones gives Prosser high marks for his strong belief in the planning process and in getting people to focus on the long-term and on a vision for the city, 'rather than fighting fires, which typically happens in the political domain.' Baldwin, though, says this same quality - the belief in a methodical, multistep process of making decisions after a lot of public meetings and a chance for a lot of public input - came to be seen as detrimental in some quarters.

'Quite a number of people felt we needed to accelerate some things and deviate some because of the urgency that was on top of us,' Baldwin says, 'and Jim felt these were long-term solutions and that you wanted to make sure in your haste, you didn't lose opportunities.' In particular, he says, Prosser wanted to make sure that the city painstakingly documented its disaster damage, so it didn't lose tens of millions of dollars in federal disaster payments that the city deserved.

'So you really had this little bit of a conflict of style,' Baldwin says. 'It was a clash of styles and orientations as to how you problem-solve after the flood.' This issue would become the focal point of the 2009 City Hall election race, the result of which brought three new faces to the City Council - Mayor Ron Corbett and at-large council members Don Karr and Chuck Swore - who clashed with Prosser's approach.

Private-sector help

By late 2008, some in the private sector - including John Smith, president/CEO of trucking firm CRST Inc., where Corbett works - stepped up with private funding to create the Economic Planning and Reinvestment Corp. as a vehicle to focus private-sector energy into the community's flood recovery. Rockwell Collins' Jones and others in the private sector thought another approach was needed.

'Yes, I was an advocate for creating a position (inside City Hall) that would be laser-focused on nothing but flood recovery,' Jones says.

In June 2009, the City Council agreed to create the city position of flood-recovery director, a position to which the private sector, in an unusual move, contributed some of the funding. Greg Eyerly, who had been a manager for the city's utilities department, got the job.

Jones says Prosser liked the idea.

'In fact, what I found in Jim was a very receptive audience, because he understood his own workflow and how crushing it was at the time,' says Jones. 'He understood some of his own shortcomings, because he was in the background and because of his personality, that he may not be the best point of contact or spokesman for that.' In short order, two council members who were disgruntled with Prosser, and who thought the council had abdicated its leadership role to the city manager, argued that Eyerly should report directly to the council.

The seven-member council majority dismissed the idea out of hand.

Prosser was the boss.

Employees reported to him, and he reported to the council, the majority said.

The two council members, Monica Vernon and Justin Shields, now form a five-member majority with Corbett, Karr and Swore. Two weeks ago, the council voted to strip Prosser of oversight of Eyerly and told Eyerly to report directly to the council.

By last Monday, Corbett was announcing that Prosser and a City Council majority had reached a 'separation agreement' in which both sides accepted Prosser's resignation.

Post-disaster

Baldwin remembers a trip a handful of local leaders took to Grand Forks, N.D., soon after the June 2008 flood to see how Grand Forks got back on its feet after its flood of 1997. One thing learned there, he recalls, was that most of the elected officials were bounced from office in the next election. 'Given the circumstances and the nature of the decisions that had to be made - it was a disaster on a scale that no city in the state ever had to deal with - and so maybe that same mantra about what would happen to an elected official maybe is true with the city manager,' Baldwin says of Prosser.

'He simply had to follow his compass point and do things the way his training and his personality told him to do things,' he says, 'and it was almost a given that, at a certain juncture, it was going to lead to this.'