At-large candidates have plans for C.R.’s future

CEDAR RAPIDS - Bad streets were a shared and recurring theme during an hour long forum Tuesday night for three candidates running for an at-large City Council seat.

Justin Wasson, 23, a recent Iowa State University graduate, got a chuckle when he mentioned that council member Tom Podzimek - who is not seeking re-election Nov. 8 to the at-large seat he now holds - once declared that he had bicycled on every road and street in Cedar Rapids.

“I feel for him because some of those streets are pretty bad,” said Wasson during the event at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.

KCRG-TV9 news anchor Bruce Aune, who moderated the debate with Gazette editorial page editor Jeff Tecklenburg, noted to start the night that Podzimek recently said he wanted to know what candidates were for - not what they were against.

However, Carl Cortez, 66, a retired IBM service technician, immediately said it was difficult not to be against some of the decisions the City Council has been making.

He said he remembered a time when Cedar Rapids was known as “The Parlor City,” but he said the city had lost its luster and needed to find a way to get it back.

He and Wasson repeatedly criticized the current council for doing too much for downtown and for investing too much in downtown projects, like the Convention Complex, hotel, amphitheater and library, at what they said was the expense of the rest of the city.

But Ann Poe, 58, who worked for nearly three years as the post-flood community liaison for the state's Rebuild Iowa Office, said being an at-large City Council member meant supporting “one positive community,” including the downtown.

“You can't have a good apple if the core is rotten,” said Poe, adding that much of the post-flood investment is going downtown because that's where many of the damaged public buildings are.

In general, Wasson and Cortez were critical of the post-flood decisions at City Hall, while Poe said the part-time council did a good job “without a handbook” in a $6 billion disaster. She said she was proud of the community's accomplishments since the flood.

Wasson, who said his bachelor's degree in finance will help him at budgeting time, said the city needed to “get back to the basics” - which he defined as roads and public safety - and “quit raising taxes on people.” The city can't expect to see economic development unless it cuts taxes to encourage businesses to invest here, he said.

Cortez said he has found people angry at all levels of government, and he said they feel like they pay local property taxes but don't see anything in return. He suggested that people in areas that were unaffected by the flood are sick of hearing about it and are looking to see City Hall pay attention to their neighborhoods.

Wasson and Cortez were critical of the city for buying the long-struggling downtown hotel from its creditors to renovate in concert with the new Convention Complex. Yet both criticized the city for not buying the long-struggling Westdale Mall from its creditors.

None of the candidates said the city should forget about building a flood-protection system.

Poe said she supports a petition drive now under way to ask voters if they want to extend the local-option sales tax for 10 years with all the revenue going for flood protection. A vote on May 3 to extend the tax for 20 years for flood protection, streets and property-tax relief was narrowly voted down.

Cortez thought the city could build a flood protection system with basic flood walls much more inexpensively than officials' preferred plan, while Wasson said a system should be built over time from existing property-tax revenue.