Glamorous? No. Important? Definitely

If you're hoping to witness the glamorous work of high and mighty government, this is not the place to find it.

In fact, just finding the Cedar Rapids Stormwater Commission is a little challenging.

It meets in a “training room” tucked deep within the Public Works building. Follow the red arrows. Go too far, you'll be in storage. Stumble upon what appears to be a museum of historic office chairs, you're there.

Commissioners and city staff are gathered around a square of tables. Counting me, the audience rises to four, but soon dwindles to two. It's so intimate, I feel a little awkward. It's like taking notes at a family dinner.

Commission Chair Stacie Johnson assures me there's usually more interest. Must be the heat.

But just because it's not glamorous or crowded doesn't mean these folks aren't doing important work. They really are.

What they're doing is rewriting the city's ordinances governing stormwater runoff. Doesn't sound sexy, clearly. But it could impact every new development in this town for decades.

And for the biggest urban area in the Cedar River watershed, these rules could have implications that extend far beyond the city limits.

The commission is wading cautiously into the city code, hoping to craft new rules that control the quantity and improve the quality of water running off a future urban landscape. These are the building blocks of flood prevention and clean water. Again, important stuff.

“I think there's an opportunity to make a difference,” said Carol Teator, a new commission member attending her first meeting.

But Teator also knows that citizens' hard work doesn't always become policy. She was on a task force that spent the better part of 2008 and 2009 identifying, evaluating and mapping environmentally sensitive areas in Cedar Rapids.

The task force then forwarded a set of recommendations to the City Council on protecting those areas, including incentives to encourage developers and homeowners to use good practices.

Then, not much happened. Most of the task force's good ideas ended up on a shelf.

But it's not over. Now, the task force's work could become the basis for stormwater rules designed to protect sensitive areas, such as creating development-free stormwater buffer zones in 100-year flood plains around streams and rivers.

The 90-minute-plus meeting is filled with good discussion, thoughtful arguments made and points conceded. After seeing so much dysfunction lately in the high and mighty reaches of our democracy, it is good to know, here at the cellular level, cooperation and hard work continues. Just follow the red arrows.