By William Smith
If life were a movie, Jon Billups would have pulled out a magically prepared proposal from his sleeve to introduce himself as Burlington’s new mayor.
Instead, his first action as mayor last month was to swiftly help kill an unpopular proposal — moving the Burlington Steamboat Senior Center from Jefferson Street to the vacant cafe space inside The Burlington Depot.
It only took a few public minutes for the council to defeat the measure, far less than the time it took Billups to research and plumb the issue after being elected mayor by his fellow council members.
“That’s what city business is. It’s not glamorous,” he said.
Billups said the proposal to move the seniors to the depot was crafted from only the best intentions. Besides facing a $70,000 plus roof repair (which is figured into the city budget), the drafty old building is expensive to heat and cool, and the Des Moines County supervisors have pulled financial support.
“We weren’t trying to force them to move. We were trying to assist,” Billups said.
The assistance wasn’t wanted, which Billups discovered upon visiting the senior center himself. Through the seniors were too polite to make a public fuss about the move, it didn’t sit right with any of the membership.
“I asked them to put together a membership meeting so we could address all the concerns, so they could make a fair vote,” Billups said.
They did, voting down the move to the depot 22-0. Billups publicly relayed the news to the council at the next work session, and the council unanimously voted it down at the next meeting.
Though he’s happy the city avoided doing any harm in that case, he is disappointed it got so far without the city getting proper input from the seniors.
“Communication is something the city needs to work on,” Billups said.
Billups has taken improved city communication as his main charge, often answering questions and clarifying city positions in protracted Facebook conversations with citizens. He relishes the chance to have those conversations in person, but that is difficult to do at such sparsely attended council meetings.
Like mayors before him, Billups would like to see those empty audience seats filled with interested residents.
“The population of Burlington is shrinking,” he said. “We have all these skilled positions, and no one to fill them.”
Billups believes that population decline could soon reverse, given the extensive downtown redevelopment and $17 million worth of TIGER grant money being poured into Jefferson Street and the riverfront over the next few years.
“We all pay into those grants, so I think it’s my job to get as much as that money back as possible,” Billups said, regarding the TIGER grant.
Much of the grant is focused on redeveloping the riverfront, which was flooded for more than six months last year. Forecasters with the National Weather Service have said there will be more major flooding this year, thanks to the overly saturated ground.
Sandbag barriers held back the bloated Mississippi River for more than 180 days with the assistance of the incomplete flood wall on the riverfront, then finally gave way to a flooded downtown. The floodwall itself never failed.
“I think the flood wall performed admirably,” Billups said.
Like many residents, Billups’s gaze upon the Mississippi River is tainted with consternation. A boater himself, Billups practically lives on the river due to his job at Bluff Harbor Marina. He has long taken issue with the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have allegedly pooled the water around Burlington through the lock and dam system, making the river unnaturally high.
“We’re talking a few years before it (the flood wall) will be done,” Billups said.
That constant flooding had always been a headache for the Friends of the Depot group as well, which disbanded in the wake of the proposal to the move the senior center to the depot. The group, which Billups said renovated the depot from “a hallway to an actual building,” preferred the depot stick to the original plans — a white boxed cafe space.
Again, Billups said, it was another case of poor communication by the city.
“I didn’t know they (Friends of the Depot) were upset with the idea of moving the senior center to the depot,” Billups said. “I feel bad. That’s something I should have picked up on.”
Billups was part of the Friends of the Depot group himself for about six months and hopes to see the group come back together. He credited Friends for making the building feasible for possible tenants in the first place.
“We would not have had the depot in the condition it is without Friends of the Depot,” Billups said. “That being said, the goal is to fill that building on the north and south ends.”
Billups said there could still be a cafe, or business offices, or a coffee shop.
“There were a lot of businesses that wanted to follow the senior center (to the depot),” he said.
Then there’s the shuttered 123-year-old Cascade Bridge, which promises to be an issue beyond Billups mayoral run. However, it’s an issue he believes the city can resolve, and not just through the demolition of the bridge without replacement.
Billups mentioned a federal BUILD grant, similar to the TIGER grant, that could help pay for either a new bridge or a rehabbed bridge. At one time, he said, Cascade Bridge was included in the TIGER grant, but the city had to take it out to make the grant more focused. Burlington was only one of two cities in Iowa to win the grant.
“There’s a windfall around 2023 or 2024 with money coming off the city books,” Billups said, suggesting that would be the time to fund a Cascade Bridge project.
Those are just the concrete problems facing Burlington. More abstract worries, such as the city's crime rate and inferior housing, are decades-long issues that will take time to improve.
But Billups always has been a consistent plodder, spending exponential amounts of sweat equity in exchange for incremental improvements. As he said, no one outside a Hollywood film ever claimed city work was glamorous, just monumentally important.
“I’ve never shied away from hard work,” Billups said.