Mayoral candidates soundoff with Downtown Rotary

The city's two front-runner mayoral candidates told the Downtown Rotary two different things:

Council member Brian Fagan said City Hall had done a good job and was headed in the right direction while Ron Corbett, a former president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce and former state lawmaker, said the city had fallen off track.

The mayoral race's third candidate, P.T. Larson - who has run poorly in 12 previous City Council elections - summed up his remarks with a question: “Are you better off now than four years ago?”

Fagan, 37, at attorney at Simmons Perrine Moyer Bergman, said the City Council has put the city government on a strong foundation and that the council needed to remain “disciplined to the vision and the strategic plan” it has created for the city.

Fagan said the city would lose its competitive edge if “we turn back” and if the city gets “sidetracked and makes decisions out of political expediency.”

The reference to “political” is to Corbett, who won seven elections to the Iowa House of Representatives in the 1980s and 1990s, though who hasn't run for elective office since 1998.

Fagan said he cared “deeply” for his hometown, and he said he viewed the mayor's job as a way to give back to the community. He called it “servant leadership.”

Fagan said he has been involved in the community the last four years in the middle of the city's flood recovery. His was not a promise in “future tense,” he said.

Asked what processes of city government he might change, Fagan said the better question was the “purpose” of government, not the process of government. The purpose is to build “one great Cedar Rapids,” he said.

Corbett, 49, vice president at trucking firm CRST Inc., promised to be “an active leader” as mayor. He said, if elected, he wouldn't “squander” the opportunity as he said he did not when he was Chamber president for six years or a state lawmaker for 13 years and, while there, Speaker of the House for five years.

He also said he would run the City Council differently, creating committees so individual council members could gain expertise on issues and so they build trust among one another. Right now, part-time council members seem to be working 40 hours or more a week, each one going to a lot of meetings, he said. Current council members themselves have called the council as it now operates “dysfunctional,” he said.

Corbett remembered what he said was Cedar Rapids not so many years ago when he said the city was seen in Iowa as on the move for innovation, culture and job growth. No so now, he said. He said it was time to get back up and start running again.

Corbett said the city once again had to adopt “the eye of the tiger” and a “can-do” attitude to attract jobs and expand the tax base. The city government's charter specifically assigns an economic development role to the mayor, and he said he intends to fill that role.

Corbett said talk of “vision” without a plan “is just happy talk.”

Larson, 52, said he would be a full-time mayor if elected. He called for an “adopt-a-block” program in which volunteers, city staff and City Council members would examine individual blocks twice a month and document what problems needed fixing and in what priorities.

Larson wanted to see more police substations and he said he would stop taking what he called the “easy way” with “million-dollar consultants.”