Eyerly reports that 130 flood-damaged homes still as mucky as the day of the flood; council wants them down

CEDAR RAPIDS - Some 130 mucky, moldy, flood-damaged homes have not been touched since the June 2008 flood even as neighbors in some instances have rebuilt next to them.

Equally as upsetting to Mayor Ron Corbett and council member Don Karr are flood-damaged commercial properties that continue to sit in a shambles.

In particular, Corbett says he can't understand why nothing has been done to the highly visible eyesore of a former convenience store at First Avenue and First Street NW where windows are broken out and gas pumps tipped over.

“It upsets me every time I drive by,” Corbett said. “Unfortunately, it's not the only property. It reminds me we still have a lot of work to do.”

Karr says one commercial building on the west side has a hole in its side big enough to drive a truck into it. “It's scary,” he told Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, at the Tuesday evening council meeting.

It was Eyerly who broached the subject of the need to demolish flood-damaged properties that now are nuisances.

His comments, though, showed a lack of carry-over knowledge at City Hall when Eyerly told the council that state law makes nuisance abatement difficult and that it may require three years of court action to take a nuisance property down.

Council member Kris Gulick then reminded Eyerly that the city lobbied hard and succeeded in the spring of 2009 in convincing the Iowa Legislature to modify a state law related to nuisances if the nuisances were the result of the 2008 flood. The modification makes it relatively simple to identify a flood-related nuisance and abate it.

However, Eyerly was not flood recovery director at the time the law was passed, former City Manager Jim Prosser is now gone and Matt Widner, the city's code enforcement chief, has been on the job only since late July. Three of nine council members, including Mayor Ron Corbett, are new, too.

On Wednesday, Eyerly said the city would take full advantage of the 2009 law and “accelerate” its push to abate the 130, flood-damaged, residential nuisances.

“The mayor and council made it pretty clear (Tuesday evening), ‘Get acquisitions and demolitions done by the end of the year.' I like that. I like those drawn-a-line-in-the-sand, hard-fast goals,” Eyerly said.

Even so, he remains perplexed that the owners of the 130 seemingly abandoned homes had either not responded to the city, or had, in some instances, simply decided not to cooperate. None of the owners of the 130 homes has put the home on the city's buyout list to be in a position to be paid 107 percent of the property's pre-flood value. None of the owners has taken out permits to renovate either, Eyerly added. A couple council members surmised that non-local financial institutions owned some of the homes.

Eyerly noted that the number of untouched homes stood at about 200 last summer when the city made a concerted effort to contact the owners to inform them that the city would get the properties cleaned out at city expense. However, each owner had to sign a letter of consent to allow the city to go on the property, and only about one in five did so, he said.

In answer to questions from Corbett and Karr about unsafe, flood-damaged commercial properties, Eyerly said the city now is beginning the process of buying out about 100 commercial properties as it continues the process of buying out about 1,300 residential ones.

As for the state law passed in 2009, the law requires the city to wait at least 60 days once it goes to court to get ownership of an abandoned, flood-damaged property. If the court then agrees the property has been abandoned, it awards ownership to the city at the existing market value of the property. The city then must deposit that sum with the court, and if the money is unclaimed after two years, it reverts to the city.

State Sen. Rob Hogg, who helped pass the 2009 legislation, said the law was designed to do something about properties “in as dilapidated a condition as they were (in June 2008) when the floodwaters receded.” He said it wasn't fair to those fixing up properties to live next door to someone who had walked away from one. Hogg said that in April 2009.