Mayor Halloran's run at City Hall nears end; she gives herself a B or B+; hopes Corbett isn't too 'authoritarian'

Mayor Kay Halloran's four-year term at City Hall is closing out next week - she will preside over her last formal council meeting tonight. And with the last meeting, there is little dispute that the last 18 months of her time as mayor have been tough ones that would have challenged anyone.

Even friends have put it to her this way: “Gee Kay, you never signed on for this flood.”

“And my response has been, ‘When you put your name on a ballot, you sign on for whatever shows up,'” the 72 year old says.

Steeled from years of government service to withstand the criticism that comes with elective office, Halloran gives herself a grade of B or B+ as mayor as she prepares to hand the part-time mayor's job in name only to Ron Corbett.

In a recent interview from her artfully designed modern home on the edge of the Wellington Heights Neighborhood, Halloran, a former state legislator, former state executive and retired Cedar Rapids attorney, recalled that she ran for mayor four years ago because she thought her training and experience in government would help get the city's new government with a part-time council and full-time city manager off the ground.

    After her election win, she said her intent was “to guide and direct” those new to elective office “without having a heavy hand on the tiller.”

Flash forward four years, and Mayor-elect Corbett, in his successful campaign over Halloran-supported Brian Fagan, says Halloran made a mistake by insisting that she was only one among nine on the council.

In his eight-month mayoral campaign in which he won a landslide victory over council member Brian Fagan, whom Halloran supported, Corbett said Halloran made a mistake by, according to him, insisting that she was only one among nine on the council.

“I don't need to be the biggest,” Halloran said. “ … I didn't want it to be (all about me). It was about a City Council which collectively could and did make policy decisions for the city.

“ … The idea was to give everybody (on the council) an opportunity to see how big the horizon was for municipal government, and to let the rest of us know the things they felt the most competent and passionate about.”

Cedar Rapids is still getting used to its city government, including some in the community who over the years, Halloran said, had grown accustomed to tossing their weight around the corridors of City Hall.

In the previous city government, the city had five full-time commissioners, who doubled as administrators and council members. And it was not uncommon, Halloran said, to be able to go from office to office at City Hall to secure three votes for something before it made its way to a public vote. That's not true now, and not everyone has liked it, she said.

“I've lived in this town long enough to know both kinds of government,” she said. “ … Now instead of five council members, they have nine from a lot of different perspectives.”

Among the silliest of allegations, the mayor insisted, has been the one made by Corbett and others that City Manager Jim Prosser, the city's first city manager, runs the city not Halloran and the council.

“I know he's been accused of running the city and all that sort of nonsense,” she said of Prosser. “In spite of the accusations, I think he's terribly professional, and most of the other council members do, too. He's very experienced and extremely competent. He knows his role, he does it well, and he doesn't stick his nose beyond his own role.”

Over the four years, the City Council has had a few contentious 5-4 votes - closing the Greene Square Park building to the Green Square Meals program was one of them - and in one instance Halloran said one council member, who she declined to name, stopped talking to her for six weeks. But then that ended.

“We had more work to do,” she explained.

Over four years, Halloran was the council member who said the least during public council discussions on issues. In fact, she said little. Instead, she saw her role as something of a conductor, orchestrating the comments of others.

Even so, Halloran was at the heart of a working council majority that has been progressive, has been willing to take on debt and add new taxes to make improvements and has talked tirelessly about a vision for the future. She and the others have asserted that enhancing the quality of life here is the key to making Cedar Rapids matter for the future.

Halloran, who from the first day on the job was committed to working full time in the part-time mayor's job, admitted that she began to sleep much less after the June 2008 flood. It was in those first months of long meetings after the flood in which Halloran was caught dozing to some ridicule by CBS 2's news. She sought medical advice, was diagnosed with sleep apnea and the problem vanished. She still sleeps with a therapeutic mask so she can get her sleep, she said. A more recent bout with early-stage breast cancer, for which her post-surgical radiation treatments are now over, convinced her not to seek re-election.

Halloran dismissed the notion of “a culture of delay,” a traction-grabbing creation of mayoral candidate Corbett who said the council hired too many consultants to plan too much and decide too little.

Halloran said she helped create “a culture of deliberateness” at City Hall, not one of delay. It was an approach, which involved hiring a lot of consultants, to make sure that the city wasn't wasting time and money on hasty and bad decisions.

“Those who know how always work for those who know why,” she said, quoting an unnamed former legislative colleague. “We didn't know the how – whether it was saving the wells or fixing the wastewater treatment plant – but we certainly knew why.”

West-side council member Chuck Wieneke said any judgment of the Halloran years must take into account that it was a time of a form of government in its infancy slammed by a major natural disaster.

“I think the lady was a mayor at a very rough time in this town,” Wieneke said.

He said much of what Halloran did was behind-the-scenes work, using the political capital she had built up over many years to get the attention and help from the state and federal government.

“It's the type of things that people don't see or understand,” he said.

East-side council member Pat Shey said he appreciates that Halloran “was always adamant” that she was one of nine, and that in the city's new form of government the mayor doesn't have “superpowers.”

“So she was very inclusive of all of us to bring our issues forward,” Shey said.

Early on in her four-year run, Halloran also made it known that any “sacred cows” of the old setup – Shey cited police helicopters as one example – were sacred anymore, he said.

“It was kind of that aah hah moment. It was an important step in our first budget where we got away from this notion that we had this agreement among certain department heads that certain things wouldn't be touched.”

For her part, Halloran thinks she has accomplished a central goal of leaving the city's new form of government on a healthy footing.

“Of course, I'll miss it,” she said. “But that doesn't mean I'm walking away.”

She said she wants to focus her attention on improving the federal government's responses to disaster recovery and on policies related to immigration.

Mayor-elect Corbett said Halloran likely has faced the biggest challenges of any mayor in Cedar Rapids history.

“I hope she leaves office feeling that she did her best,” he said.

Halloran, who was defeated by Corbett in a race for the Iowa Legislature some years ago, said her approach as mayor has been “participatory,” and she said she hopes Corbett's isn't overly “authoritative.”

Six of nine council members from the current council will remain when she leaves office on Jan. 2, and she said she thinks those six will make sure the city doesn't “backslide” once she and council members Brian Fagan and Jerry McGrane are gone.

“And we're going to lean on them to make sure it doesn't happen,” she promised.