Tax Increases Are A Needed Part Of Recovery

I am not thrilled about  more new taxes. The local option tax is key in obtaining funds from the State.  How do I reconcile the two previous statements? 

If we are asking for  money from the State then we must  first attempt to help ourselves as a city.

There is  very little room in the  current budget to begin recovery. We have lost  3%  of our property tax base. Employees of  various agencies are  spending 60-80% of their time on flood related issues. They are not able to focus on day to day operations.

From what I heard from the budget meeting last night the City Manager is  making information available to the City Council members as quickly as possible.  There are many variables which remain unknown.

The theme I heard over and over again was that we are waiting on monies from several sources, included proposed incentives from Washington.

We need to start looking at the cold , hard fact that we are ultimately  responsible as a city for the bills that are coming due from the flood. FEMA money will help. There is a lot of talk about huge amounts of money coming into Cedar Rapids but we cannot count on that.