New Mayor Corbett misfires with incorrect document provided by flood victims unhappy with city staff

One of the three new faces on the City Council, Chuck Swore, isn't all that new. Swore was on the council in 2006 and 2007, was defeated in the District 4 race in 2007, and now is back as an at-large council member.

At least one thing with Swore hasn't changed: He thinks a city council can be too cautious and, so, can accomplish too little. He still jokes that he's a fan at times of what he calls “ready, fire and aim.”

Maybe that's what another of the three new members on the nine-member council -- Mayor Ron Corbett -- was thinking near the end of last week's council meeting in a discussion about the complicated federal and state rules that come in to play for the some 1,300 flood survivors waiting for the city to buy out their properties.

Corbett launched off with an announcement that he had a copy of a letter that the city of Iowa City had sent to those awaiting a buyout in Iowa City, which Corbett said showed that the city of Iowa City was giving its flood victims a better buyout deal than the city of Cedar Rapids was.

Specifically, Corbett said the letter showed that the city of Iowa City would not subtract from the final buyout payment up to $25,000 in down payment assistance that flood victims who had purchased other homes earlier had gotten from the state Jumpstart fund. Cedar Rapids is subtracting the down payment assistance.

“Cedar Rapids seems to have interpreted it differently,” Corbett said. “… What if we side with them (Iowa City)?”

Subsequent to the meeting, Corbett reported that the city of Iowa City letter was written two months ago, on Nov. 16, by Doug Ongie, a community planner and flood buyout specialist with the city of Iowa City. Ongie is handling some flood-recovery duties for Iowa City.

On Friday, Ongie acknowledged that the letter he authored on Nov. 16 is incorrect and was written at a time when the interpretation of rules was shifting back and forth.

Ongie said the city of Iowa City is following the regulations and calculations of the Iowa Department of Economic Development related to buyouts like other cities in Iowa. Earlier Jumpstart down payment assistance to those getting buyouts is subtracted from the buyout payment, Ongie said.

One way to put it is that Corbett fired before aiming when he brought up the city of Iowa City letter and, in so doing, was suggesting that Iowa City's city officials were taking better care of their flood victims than Cedar Rapids' city officials -- including the council's chief employee, City Manager Jim Prosser -- were.

At last week's council meeting, Corbett prefaced his revelation of the Iowa City letter by acknowledging that he's getting input from all aides. He said he's getting information from his own city officials even as he has core group of flood victims providing him with documents to support their own version of the city's flood-recovery record.

The Iowa City letter was a kind of ‘gotcha' document provided to Corbett from outside of City Hall that didn't prove to be what it was.

Flood recovery is now more than 19 months old, and there must be thousands of documents that have surfaced in the bureaucratic swampland as federal, state and local officials have tried to implement what they would say is some kind of fair, consistent and responsible flood recovery.

The city's third new City Council member, Don Karr, also last week waved a document that also has been in the hands of flood victims and purports to indicate that the city of Cedar Rapids initially intended to get the city's flood victims 110 percent of the pre-flood value of their property in the buyout program only to later settle for 100 percent.

Jennifer Pratt, the city's development coordinator, explained to Karr and the council that the document in question was produced early in flood recovery as the state of Iowa was trying to determine the possible size of the disaster across the state. The city identified buyout properties and put pre-flood values into the state's spreadsheet, which automatically calculated the loss at 110 percent of value, Pratt explained.

Later, cities in Iowa had to make an analysis of their own situations and submit a buyout plan to the state. At that point, the Cedar Rapids City Council concluded that that Cedar Rapids' pre-flood assessed property values were accurate. This, the city submitted its plan, which now has been approved by federal and state officials, to seek funds based on 100 percent of pre-flood value even as most other Iowa cities are seeking more.

It wasn't clear last week if Pratt's professional explanation mattered to Karr or to the flood victims who had helped provide him with paperwork. And lost in it all is that the City Council, not city officials, oversaw the process and voted to approve it.

Council member Chuck Wieneke, who has been on the council since before the June 2008 flood, has said recently that no member of the council, prior to now, had advocated publicly to provide flood victims with more than 100 percent of the pre-flood value for their properties.

At the insistence of the city's new mayor, Corbett, the council now has decided to see if it can build a case -- which it didn't believe it could build last year -- and try to offer more than 100 percent. The council will seek to convince state and federal officials to let the city amend its buyout plan if it can make the case for something more than 100 percent of value.