Shey first Cedar Rapids council incumbent to announce a re-election bid

CEDAR RAPIDS - Let the City Hall campaign season begin.

Third District council member Pat Shey on Tuesday announced that he will seek re-election to his third four-year term on the City Council.

The 54-year-old Shey, an attorney, a former state legislator and the owner of a green insulation company, Sage Companies Inc, is the first candidate to formally announce his intentions in a year in which six of Cedar Rapids' nine council seats are up for a vote.

"It serves everybody to let them know I'm running, and if people want to run against me, fine," Shey said.

Mayor Ron Corbett, who is among the six council members up for a vote, has said he will seek re-election, but he has not formally made an announcement.

Shey said he is running for re-election at a time when the city is in good shape, flood recovery is nearing completion and private investment is now following the recovery's public investment.

"I feel a sense of excitement," Shey said. "The library is going to be coming on board along with the hotel, the convention center and the amphitheater."

Along with those public investments, he pointed to private investment in New Bohemia and in the area directly across the Cedar River from downtown, which the City Council is calling Kingston Village.

"I'm very pleased, especially given that five years ago we had a big flood," Shey said. "Flood protection remains an issue. But I look at the private investment we're getting now."

Shey, of 501 Knollwood Dr. SE, is one of three council members who has been on the council since the city's first nine-member, part-time council took over in 2006. The first couple years required the council to hire the city's first city manager and to reorganize city government, and then the flood hit, he said. The council has had to do a lot of reacting; now it can take some initiatives, Shey said.

He said he wants to continue to focus on strengthening neighborhoods in the city and he predicted that repairing city streets will take center stage at City Hall in the next few years.

Shey counted as accomplishments the city's new landlord-tenant ordinance designed to reduce the number of nuisance properties, the city's strong cash reserves and the council's ability to contain property-tax increases.

The toughest council decision, he said, was buying the downtown hotel, which is now in the midst of a major renovation as is the arena attached to it. The new convention center is going up next door.

"I don't think any of us would have said four years ago or eight years ago that we were going to be in the hotel business," Shey said. "But I believed, and others on the council believed, that the hotel was probably going to go dark at some point. And we could sit with an albatross there in our downtown, or we could take steps."

Shey and his wife, Nancy, have three children, two in college, one at Washington High School.

District 3 is comprised of part of southeast Cedar Rapids and a smaller portion of southwest Cedar Rapids with small pieces of precincts reaching into northwest and northeast Cedar Rapids.

In 2009, Shey, who held an at-large council seat at the time, chose to run against District 3 incumbent Jerry McGrane. Neither won a majority of votes in a three-person race, but Shey won the runoff against McGrane.