Mayoral candidate Ron Corbett -- A Profile

Mayoral candidate Ron Corbett says the city's government is not working well and is not working as intended, and he says he has the experience in government, business and community leadership to get City Hall back on track.

Corbett, 49, the father of five, says he is as much about the future as the present and says a community must do more to reach its vision than talk about it.

“You have to keep your eye on tomorrow, but you have to address the realities of today,” says Corbett, vice president of trucking firm CRST Inc., “and today we have some big challenges.”

A 1983 graduate of Cornell College in Mount Vernon, where he achieved All-American status as a football running back, Corbett is not one to pass up a football metaphor.

“The vision is to win the Super Bowl,” he says, “but you still have got to play the first game, and you've got to start winning some games and making progress. And we're not.”

Corbett says he wants the city to move faster on flood recovery for homeowners and small businesses. He wants the city to spend less time talking about which new tax it will impose, and he wants it to work harder to keep and attract businesses.

The city, he says, has lost companies and needs to replace them. He wants the city to reprioritize spending, and he'd start by cutting the use of out-of-state consultants. He favors buying and hiring local.

He also wants to take steps to reduce crime.

“We have way too many people unemployed,” he says. “Flood victims feel like they've been ignored. Small businesses are hanging on by a string. They need some help from their government, otherwise they might not be here 10 years from now.”

Amy Johnson Boyle worked with Corbett at the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce and says he is “visionary and very, very good at building bridges, building consensus.”

“He has the unique ability to boil down lots of differing opinions into simple items,” says Johnson Boyle, vice president of community relations and major gifts at St. Luke's Health Care Foundation. “And then when it comes to getting the job done, he is tenacious and determined. He will accomplish a task in the best possible and most efficient possible way.”

Beyond that, she calls Corbett “a good man.”

“He really has friends and allies from all walks of life,” she says. “He has a way of making people feel comfortable.”

Corbett listens as his chief opponent, council member Brian Fagan, labels him as a partisan and a “professional politician.”

Corbett, a Republican who served 13 years in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1987 through May 1999 - the last five as Speaker of the House - notes that he hasn't run for political office for 11 years.

He left the Iowa House in 1999 with a fifth child on the way to take the job of president/CEO of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce. His six-year tenure at the chamber - he left there in 2005 for his current job at CRST - was one of high community visibility.

Corbett calls himself a “coalition builder,” something the chamber job was all about and something he says the city needs now.

During his tenure, he says, the chamber took a lead role in helping to package a scaled-back school bond request that voters approved. He helped secure Vision Iowa dollars, money that ultimately was not used when local matching dollars were not forthcoming. He led the citizen petition drive in 2004 to change the city's form of government. As voters were preparing to vote in June 2005 on that issue, he came up with the idea for a Fifteen in 5 planning initiative to achieve 15 ideas in five years.

Corbett says he senses some “buyer's remorse” about the city's change in its form of government, but he says that's because the government, which features a part-time council and full-time city manager, has not worked as it was designed to work. The City Council, he says, has “abdicated” its leadership role to the city manager.

Much of the current vision for the city's future, he says, came out of community planning efforts ahead of the application for Vision Iowa funds and for the Fifteen in 5 initiative. That vision includes a riverfront amphitheater, a year-round farmers market, a Third Street SE arts and entertainment district and the redevelopment of the Sinclair meatpacking property.

“Do you think I'm going to forget all that stuff?” he says. “That I'm going to take the vision and just say, ‘The heck with it; we're in the mud of today?' ”

Cedar Rapids, Corbett says, historically has been a progressive city and a center for job growth, innovation and culture. That's changed now, he says.

“The reality is we need a plan to get this town back on track,” he says. “We have too much vacant property and too many lost businesses in this town, and people are hurting, and they feel like their government is not paying attention to them.

“And the consultants come marching in with their pretty poster boards and shower the City Council with all these compliments - ‘You guys are so enlightened, you are on the cutting edge' - and blow a bunch of smoke up at them. And meanwhile, average citizens, asking to solve basic grievances, are ignored.”