Jim Burke

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