Mayoral candidate Fagan tells Gazette editorial board that it's not time to retreat to a 'professional politician'

There's hardly a person running for the Cedar Rapids City Council who doesn't mention that the city of Dubuque landed a new IBM facility and its 1,300 new jobs and Cedar Rapids didn't.

Mayoral candidate Brian Fagan, an at-large City Council member, told the Gazette editorial board on Thursday that IBM picked Dubuque because that Eastern Iowa city had made a commitment to “quality of life” community investments like sustainability and historic preservation that make companies like IBM want to locate there.

Fagan said the current Cedar Rapids City Council has built the foundation for a similar kind of commitment, and he said he is afraid the community will take a step back to “the politics of the past” if mayoral candidate Ron Corbett is elected mayor.

Fagan says the idea of sustainability -- adopting policies and practices that build  a community thoughtfully for future generations -- has been dismissed out of hand by Corbett as a passing "fad."

Fagan, 37, an attorney with Simmons Perrine Moyer Bergman, said Cedar Rapids voters overwhelming voted to change to a council/manager government in June 2005 with the idea that a professional city manager would run the day-to-day operations of city government while part-time council members would set policy.

He said he voted to hire City Manager Jim Prosser in 2006 and he said Prosser has given the city government and the community exactly what it wanted, expert leadership that has sought out the “most-innovative,” “most cost-effective” “best practices” in use in government across the country.

Voters, Fagan said, didn't want “professional politicians,” they wanted professional management and “citizen” council members.

The jab at politicians was intended for Corbett, who served 13 years in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1987 to 1999, the last five as House speaker. Fagan also lumped Corbett in with the third mayoral candidate, P.T. Larson, 52, who has run unsuccessfully 12 times before for City Council.

By Fagan's count, Corbett and Larson together had run for elective office nearly 20 times.

“So I know I'm outgunned,” said Fagan, who was the top vote getter in the 2005 City Council race, his first.

Fagan said Corbett was accustomed to the “closed door” of Republican Party meetings in the Iowa Legislature and closed board meetings at the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, which Corbett headed up from 1999 until 2005. He now is vice president at CRST Inc.

Fagan said he is the one with four years of experience in the city's new council/manager government, one that he said featured plenty of debate and disagreement all played out in the open for the public to see.

It's not time of a “newcomer” to City Hall and “the politics of the past," he said.

Fagan said he believes the current City Council has done a good job at a time of a flood disaster and a national economic downturn that have come as the city has worked to put its new form of government in place.

“I stood for this community and helped it and its residents through that challenge,” he said. He said he ran and won a City Council four years ago with passion and ideas for his hometown. Now he has four years of council experience, too, he said.

He said the council has made strides in neighborhood revitalization with a new model that joins the forces of code enforcement, police officers and building and fire inspectors in one initiative. Violent crime is down 22 percent this year and property crime down 11 percent, he said.

In answer to a question, Fagan said it “doesn't make sense” for city government to reoccupy the yet-to-be-renovated and flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building, which has been home to City Hall for 80 years. He said the historic building would be renovated in any event, and he said it could be used for other things. He said the building had space limitations and was not a good place to put “critical” city services in case there was another flood.

Fagan said he favored a new government services center, which he said he hoped the county might yet agree to share. A city consultant put the cost of a new building at more than $50 million.

Fagan said a new government services center didn't necessarily have to go into a new building. It might end up in an existing building other than the Veterans Memorial Building. He mentioned the Town Centre building in downtown.