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.
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