Gulick, Podzimek pepper Corbett on hiring of Event Center project manager; 7-2 vote for John Frew; will city manager be hand-picked, too?

CEDAR RAPIDS - No one apparently is going to accuse this City Council of scouring the country to find the best pool of available competitors for a job.

Council member Kris Gulick last night said he liked event-center developer John Frew well enough, but Gulick said he had no idea how the hand-picked Frew and his firm, Frew Nations Group of Phoenix, Ariz., might stack up against other similar firms.

He didn't know because Mayor Ron Corbett and a City Council majority last night said they were eager and more than satisfied to hire Frew - who just resigned as Gov. Chet Culver's chief of staff after eight months - to oversee the $50-million-plus Event Center convention facility project as well as a $15-million upgrade of the U.S. Cellular Center arena next door to it.

Gulick and council member Tom Podzimek voted no.

How, Gulick wondered, did the council know, for instance, if the 6 percent fee that Frew and his firm are charging the city on the project was a fair one? The fee will bring in an estimated $3.8 million to the firm. Did anyone but him on the council talk to officials in Colorado or Texas where Frew had overseen similar event-center projects? Gulick asked.

Corbett said just-departed City Manager Jim Prosser had made some calls to cities where Frew previously worked, but Corbett did not have that information to share with Gulick.

Cities, Corbett emphasized, are allowed to pick a firm to provide professional services without seeking proposals from other firms, adding that it is not an uncommon practice.

“I have all the confidence in Frew Nations Group,” Corbett said. “Frew is an Iowa boy who understands how important this project is to Cedar Rapids and to Iowa.”

On a second front - the hiring of a new city manager to replace Prosser, who left a week ago as part of a “separation” agreement - Gulick had no better luck with most on the council.

Gulick made the case for hiring a professional search firm because he said such a firm can find quality candidates that would not otherwise know about the Cedar Rapids job. A search firm, as a private entity, also can keep applicants' names private until they are finalists, which encourages people to apply for such jobs. Both pluses of a search firm, he said, increase the quality of the applicant pool.

Gulick said three of five finalists back in 2006, when the city hired its first city manager, would not have known about the Cedar Rapids job without the search firm. The finalists were from Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Wyoming.

Only council member Chuck Wieneke seemed to agree with Gulick without question.

Council member Chuck Swore said he favored recruiting without a search firm, saying someone in city employment now or living in Cedar Rapids might be the person for the job. Council member Tom Podzimek agreed, saying the city didn't have six or seven months to get a city manager in place like it did in 2006.

Corbett said a city manager in Iowa has volunteered to help conduct the search for the city, and council member Pat Shey said the council might do both, hire a search firm and go recruiting itself.

After the meeting, council member Monica Vernon, chairwoman of the city's Personnel Committee, said she thought a city sometimes needed to search far and wide for someone and sometimes it did not.

“Yeah, you can go through the (search-firm) process and it takes forever and ever and ever,” she said. “And then there are just times when you see … There are certain city managers I know, who, if they said they wanted the job, I might be kind of excited.

“Sometimes you go through the whole thing. You start at Square One. On the other hand, is it the person who is standing right there?”

In approving the contract last night for the Event Center project with Frew Nations Group, council members noted that the contract requires review and approval of the federal Economic Development Administration, which is expected to - but has yet to - provide $35 million for the $67-million project.