Jim Burke

When dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars, we should demand good accountability.

1) The financing method will make it nearly impossible to retract if we don't like how things are going.
In the April 1 LOST meeting, the mayor made it clear that if all goes well, they can start the flood portion of the project next year, in 2012.  He also stated that the project should take 2 years to build the system.  That means the construction project should complete in 2014, the same year we START to collect the tax.  In addition, the 114 or so road projects he mentioned could start immediately.  When the government funds massive projects before they collect any of the money, they bond to get the funds.  That's the government's equivalent of getting a loan.  Once the city gets money from selling bonds, it carries an obligation to pay the bond holders back.  If we don't like what the city is doing later, we could try to vote to retract the tax.  However, since bonding is involved, some people aren't sure if it's even legal to do; but if it is, the city would still have to make payments, or default on their bonds/loans.  There is NO changing your mind if this passes and they issue bonds.  They will front-load spending the majority of money they haven't even started to collect!

2) Current LOST funds have an oversight committee with no authority, and the council frequently votes in opposition to their recommendations.
I know a number of people on the LOST Oversight committee.  They admit that they have no true authority, and have concerns about a lack of information they are provided at times.  They tell me that the recommendations the committee offers the city council are typically overruled.  The committee seems to exist to make people feel secure when they only dig deep enough to know that there is such a committee.  But without authority and their recommendations overruled, what oversight really occurs with our existing funds?

Now, as we consider a 20-year extension to a 5-year tax that still has 3 years left, I hear the city will continue to try to oversee how the money is spent.  I have no reason to expect the committee to have any more power.  Worse, over 20 years, both the city council and the oversight committee will likely see significant turnover in their membership.  It's not clear what direction either will take.

Although there are more issues with the proposed Local-Option Sales Tax plan the city puts to a vote on May 3, I can only post so many issues before taking a break and looking at alternatives. So I'll switch gears.

1) Fix sewers first -- Before levees (flood) and before road sublayer work (roads)
Sewers fail in more floods than the levees do. This doesn't even count the other sewer issues that have arisen in recent years, such as the draining of Indian Creek into our city sewers, as it did for two years. Although roads could use some work on the surface, any road requiring any deeper work should have sewers checked, fixed, and in some cases, redone.

In addition to the sewer problems residential homes face, the storm sewers were often placed in bad locations in the past. If you look around the city, you'll find numerous places where water flows across an intersection to reach a drain located on the far corner. Water erodes things, including streets. If drains exist on the low end of an intersection, they should be moved to the high ends. That sounds backwards, but that keeps water from entering an intersection. Once water reaches the low corner of an intersection, it should remain in the drain channel at the edge of the street until the next intersection, where it should drain to prevent crossing. Not only does water erode our streets, but in Spring, water partially crosses the road as snow thaws, and then freezes near places people either try to come to a stop or accelerate.

2) City Council should allocate funds to priorities and away from low-priority items.
As the mayor stated at a lunch on January 11, 2011, the two main things on people's minds were flood protection and roads. When a city council member later told a neighborhood association that the city has cut funds to roads for at least 40 years, it suggested that the city council isn't representing the will of the people. Roads may not need as much work if they funded our priorities better. They can cut from areas that aren't as critical, like regular budgeting involves. This includes fixing roads. Again, surface work can start immediately, especially if there aren't issues under the surface. But if there are sewer problems, start there. If a road doesn't have strong lower layers of support, we should firm them up to have quality roads that don't break apart so fast.

3) Work on a plan to address the weakest areas of flood control.
Residents in the Time Check neighborhood said they saw water flowing in from Ellis Blvd, not from the river. The levee protects the neighborhood from even most major floods. But the levee doesn't stretch all the way to higher ground. It drops in elevation as it approaches Ellis Blvd. We need to protect the gaps in our existing flood control measures.

During the flood of 2008, the city faced a water supply issue, when the city had only one pumping station operational, with very limited capacity. It would have been good to place flood walls & gates around these pumping stations and examine the plans to power them during a flood. If we merely moved pumps to higher ground, their efficiency drops; that's not a good solution. If we don't protect them, it can lead to drama and good stories, but not good long-term operations.

4) Focus on continuous improvement, gradually.
Anything sounds good if you don't have to pay for it. Things also sound great if you can have the right away. We can build incremental improvements to our flood protection system without triggering the need for a 20-year tax. It's not so ominous to deal with large efforts if taken at a more comfortable pace. In addition, new solutions may present themselves over time. Removable flood walls haven't been around forever. Imagine if the city had spent a fortune to build permanent walls just a few years before removable walls came out. We'd stare at walls constantly, realizing we could have put ourselves in less debt by putting up some walls, then switching to removable walls for some areas that we could acquire as we could afford them. Cedar Rapids even made part of the West-side levee more robust in 2010, despite the plan to remove the levee in the city's 'preferred plan'. If the city felt the existing levee could offer more protection if it was just a few feet higher, they could have raised it for the section they improved from N St NW to the Northern-most point of the levee. After recovering from that expense, if needed, they could improve another stretch of the levee, and so on. Eventually, the entire system improves, offering a little additional protection from time to time.

This is how cities handled things in the days before FEMA, and in the days when we weren't so impulsive that we needed grand plans done today, regardless of the cost. If any tax increase was necessary in this case, it would be better to have shorter-term taxes with clear plans that addressed the most serious needs first, and that addressed issues in ways that the people support. It's easiest to gain support for a plan when people have the shock of a major disaster to drive them to impulsively support anything someone suggests will save them from future occurrences. Yet, as the years pass by, these plans would face more criticism, as people would realize th

The preparation for the next stage of flood management was not handled well.

1) Neighborhood planning meetings led people to recommend existing city plans.
The best way to get ideas from people is to let them brainstorm without first offering your thoughts. If there are some things one should consider for making final decisions, you can present that following the brainstorming process. Then you can work out final plans. But the city brought in the people providing them solutions to FIRST teach the people what they factor in. THEN the people brainstormed immediately following having their minds filled with these other ideas. Most groups came up solutions remarkably similar to the city's plans and their contractors. The city likes to say they took the input of residents to form their plan, despite using pre-flood plans.

When people offered their own ideas, such as having a community center in each of the neighborhoods in the planning process, the result wasn't what people asked for. The current plan places a city-wide center at the edge of Ellis Park, and that there won't be others. In fact, the existing Time Check Recreation Center hasn't been cleaned out since the flood. The place has been abandoned, still containing mold. Oddly enough, it's easy to clean mold off concrete walls, so it wouldn't be that hard to preserve. But the city seems to have other plans, which don't include having a community center in the center of a community.

2) Some people felt pushed out of their homes because of the city's actions.
As people regained access to their homes, the city halted the issuing of building permits for people in the flooded areas, and kept it in effect for quite a while, especially if you lived on the wet side of their 'preferred plan'. This kept some people from rebuilding, since otherwise they would break the law. People had to decide whether to break the law and save their homes, or abide by the law and let their homes sit and rot.

The city made their plan known so loudly in the months following the flood, that even non-profit organizations didn't want to help people in those households. If those homes were going to be demolished anyway, they didn't want to waste their efforts. After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the city rebuilt with no federal funds and came back stronger with the help of people doing good things for each other. But in Cedar Rapids, houses sit empty after the government slowed recovery.

3) The wet side of the city's preferred plan needs lots of work.
As the city ordered the demolition of homes, two contractors came in to perform the demolition and fill in the holes left in the ground. Kelly Demolition performed a professional job; they matched the layers of the ground, placing clay in areas where clay naturally occurs, and topsoil where topsoil naturally occurs. However, Zinser filled holes with clay to the surface. On some lots, they brought compost to top off the upper few inches. The lots with clay hold water in violation with city ordinances, and sometimes even appears to grow mold. The lots sometimes shed so much water onto neighboring lots that the neighboring lots end up with water pooling up. When you have a wet side of a levee, you normally try to have low-lying land, but also land that permeates water so some of that water can soak into the ground. Clay doesn't permeate water well, so during a flood, the river only gains the added space, not the added ability to drain as most areas would offer.

Also, if the city turns that area into green space, anyone that's ever tried to grow things on top of clay realizes the city will face mostly weeds. It will be hard to have a nice green space unless much of the damage caused to the land from the city's contracts to Zinser is undone.

With regards to the flood protection part of the LOST, there are enough concerns that I'll split it up over a number of postings. While getting to know many of the flood victims, it became clear that they had many concerns about this aspect of the tax.

This one focuses on:
What are the real flood-protection plans?

1) Only the city government prefers their "Preferred Plan".
The city will implement their 'preferred plan' if this tax passes. However, the Army Corp of Engineers do not support the plan. FEMA didn't support the moving of the library. Many flood victims I've heard from oppose the city's plan. They point to past plans the city proposed long before the flood, some of which were put up to a vote and failed in the past.

2) What if the city can't get Congress/FEMA to fund 2/3 of the plan?
Without support from the Army Corp of Engineers, which the city would only receive if the Benefit-to-Cost Ratio (BCR) over a 50-year period is at least 1.0, they cannot recommend funding a plan. The city's 'preferred plan' fails to achieve a BCR of 1.0, and thus lacks support. Having a BCR so low also puts Cedar Rapids very low on the list of priorities for disaster-related funding. Also note that in recent years, FEMA rejected funding things ranging from the $21 million Sinclair plant, to the $13.3 million 5-in-1 dam downtown, to the $5.8 million dam at Lake Delhi, also in Iowa. They don't fund every request. What happens if 2/3 of the funding doesn't materialize? The city's 'preferred plan' costs at least $375 million according to their own estimates. Will we have even higher taxes, or extend the tax for 14 MORE years, or will the city fail to protect the areas in their plan, or will they finally have to come up with an alternate plan? The plans, back-up plans, and complete funding are not defined, other than the 'preferred plan' and hoping for federal matches.

3) If the city attempts its plan with what the Army Corps can approve, the budget still falls mainly on us.
Usually, disaster prevention plans yield 35% local investment and 65% federal investment.  In this case, the city will owe most of the bill.  The Army Corps can only recommend for approval a $99 million plan, which, if approved would likely draw 65% of that cost from federal funds (just under $65 million). That's roughly 17% of the total $375 million cost of the city's plan. Normally, a city would aim to raise 35% of the cost of a project.  But in this case, the city needs to cover the 35% of the Army Corps plan, and then 100% of the $278 million plan. Even Senator Harkin questions whether Congress would consider funding the plan, since they have their own budget issues, which nearly led to government shutdowns in March & April. When 2/3 of the funding of a plan isn't even close to guaranteed, what are we signing ourselves up for?

4) The plan doesn't make sense & thus becomes expensive.
Although it's usually a good idea to allow a buffer zone alongside a river to allow flooding without damage to structures we depend upon, the location of the new levees in the city's plan appear in rather unusual locations. If you look at photos or maps of the Time Check neighborhood in the earlier days of the city, you'll find bodies of water in areas where the city proposed placing new levees. The land is actually a bit higher near the existing levees, and lower a few blocks from the river. It takes more material, thus adds cost to build a levee in such a location.

Although I've seen images in person, the only ones I find online from that era don't show the main bodies of water. But the following one shows where it fed into the Cedar River. near the rail bridge on the left side of the image on this side of the river.
Link: Cedar Rapids, 1868.

5) The most common problem during floods is the sewer system backing up.
Although some sewer funding has been approved, the main thing that fails during floods is the sewer system. Even when levees hold back flood waters, the sewers can back up, causing damage to homes. The flood of 2008 was a severe event. Although Cedar Rapids experiences floods regularly, floods rarely cause anywhere near the harm of 2008, because the existing flood protection measures offer significant protection. Even last year, in 2010, Cedar Rapids experienced what is officially referred to as the Moderate Flood Stage; only the Major flood stage is higher, and we were roughly 1 foot from the major flood stage. A few roads experience some flooding, but not neighborhoods. Although we should protect ourselves against a range of threats, perhaps we should start by looking at the sewer system. I don't recall the city's plan including any provision for sewer system improvements.

What's wrong with the Property Tax Relief part of the LOST?

1) It shifts more of the tax burden on you, the resident.
Cedar Rapids has some rather large industrial businesses. Those businesses generally pay quite a bit of property tax. However, many of them aren't affected much, if at all by a local sales tax, since many of them aren't involved in local retail sales. As these big businesses benefit from shifting the tax from the property tax to the sales tax, it means residents will pick up a greater share of the bill. It's no surprise that the Chamber of Commerce and large businesses support this tax.

2) If you don't live in Cedar Rapids, odds are your city will lose value to Cedar Rapids.
Local sales taxes tend to favor large cities, since many people living in neighboring communities shop in the city. Cities usually like such taxes because of this. Although the city benefits people living near it, many of those same people benefit the city by proving their labor. Their shopping also provides jobs in the city. It's a mutual benefit. This tax has the intention of spreading the tax base to others. By that, Cedar Rapids aims to drain money from nearby communities to fund their own projects.

3) It makes more sense to protect property with a property tax.
Flood victims were first victims of the flood. Then, many of them felt victimized by the government's handling of the flood. Sales taxes are inherently regressive. Many of the flood victims took time away from work to address their damaged homes. Their incomes went down, while their expenses went up. People that urge you to vote yes want you to help these people. Yet, their tax would takes a disproportionately high amount from the flood victims. If someone owns more land, which can benefit from protection, a property tax charges them more. If someone has flood-damaged property, the value of their property is lower, and thus they have less to protect and a correspondingly lower tax.

What's wrong with the duration of the May 3 LOST proposal?

1) It limits our ability to address future needs for 1/4 of a century.
Iowa law prohibits lower-levels of government from exceeding 2% of optional taxes, 1% each for a Local-Option Sales Tax (LOST) and a School Infrastructure Local Option (SILO). This measure extends the existing 5-year tax by an additional 20 years. That's a total of 25 years, 23 years of which remain. That means that if anything else occurs during a quarter-century period that might normally provide reason to pass such a tax, we won't be able to, since we will have already reached our limit. Imagine if a major tornado destroyed much of the city like it did to Parkersburg a few years back. We would still be focused on the river and the roads, while city buildings or other needs could go unaddressed.

2) Priorities can change over time, and this locks in today's priorities.
Couples having children today could have grandchildren born while this tax remains in effect. Priorities of a city can change too. After just a few years of adequate spending, the roads could be in great shape. But what if we need water mains or sewer replaced on a large scale? What about other priorities that might arise? Again, we will have locked in today's priorities for generations to come.

I have concerns about every portion of the LOST measure. It’s easiest to start with the funds designated for roads.

Issues I find with the Road (40%) portion of LOST:
1) Funding Long-term, Ongoing Expenses with Temporary Funds.
One of the most unwise things anyone can do is fund long-term, ongoing expenses with temporary funds. What happens in 23 years when the tax might go away, but we have become dependent on this money in order to fund roads? It’s like a family that is falling behind in debts inheriting money, and thus decides they don’t have to find a better job or trim waste from their spending. Usually, more money given to those that mismanage it just makes the problem worse.

2) Regardless of how it's written, as much as is raised for roads can be spent on ANYTHING.
The current road use fund (gas tax) money dumps into the city’s general fund; it does not remain a separate fund. This then allows the city council to allocate the funds as they wish. As admitted by a city council member at a recent neighborhood association meeting, the city has cut funding to roads for at least 40 years. If they underfunded it in the past, what makes anyone think they won’t make similar cuts going forward? Oh, perhaps the mandate that 40% of the LOST money would go toward roads? Who says that wouldn’t just replace money currently coming from the general fund? Nothing prevents the city from no longer funding road work from the general fund. So every dollar designated for roads from the LOST is another dollar they could free up in the general fund for ANYTHING they want to spend money on.

Note, I considered the over 57% cut in funding to roads in this year’s budget compared to last year that at least one local media outlet reported on in January. However, city council members put that in perspective by pointing out that FEMA funded the repair of roads damaged from the flood & the clean-up efforts (extra trucks damaged roads). That funding appeared in last year’s budget, but the funding has returned to roughly the pre-flood spending levels. Thus, although I might have argued that if roads are a priority, why are they making such deep cuts just before putting it to a vote. However, considering the evidence, I could only focus on the admission that there has been a 40-year period of underfunding roads.

3) Repair or Improvements? There's a big difference.
The city council members seem to like how they limited the verbiage to ‘existing’ roads. That way, they believe this cannot be used to build new roads, but fix what we already have. However, the verbiage doesn’t say ‘repair’, it says ‘improvements’. Most people want better roads. Thus repairing existing roads is good. But improvements could widen, add lanes, extend, or do any number of other additional things to existing roadways. If we haven't funded them well so far, improvements could make it even most costly to maintain.

4) Roads were added to make citizens more likely to vote to tax themselves more.
As identified by the mayor in January, the two main things on the minds of voters were flood protection and roads. Now, the city uses what they already know are popular issues to convince us to tax ourselves more. But if they know these are priorities of the people, then why aren’t they doing one of their primary jobs of allocating more funding to these areas and cutting more waste or low-priority items from the budget? We need elected officials that budget properly so they can't take things they know we want most to justify higher taxes.