Dean Bowden has a new proposal for a city/county agreement on the future of Wilson Brewer Historic Park: Accept his $1 million, agree to rent the park to the park’s foundation board, and get on with it.
The eight-point proposal was presented to a joint work session of the City Council of Webster City and the supervisors Tuesday evening. Also present were attorney Doug Herman, of Lynch Dallas, P.C., Cedar Rapids, who was hired to draft the 28E, and City Manager Daniel Ortiz-Hernandez.
Jerry Kloberdanz, chairman of the board of supervisors, cut to the chase: “We know that there’s a facility there right now. It needs help,” he said.
“What can we do to get us working together?”
What ensued was a conversation that may inch closer to a solution.
Bowden, who has repeatedly offered the money to help establish a firmer future for park, suggested doing an end run around the already drafted 28E agreement that has clogged the process. Under the 28E, ownership has become a sticking point. The city owns the park. It has owned the park since the descendants of the town’s founder, Wilson Brewer, gave the homesite to the city in the 1930s to be used as a park.
But the 28E would call for relinquishing or sharing that ownership.
In past discussions, some city council members have said they do not want to relinquish that much control.
Yet, as the park has stood for many years, the city’s ownership has allowed the park to languish with little money budgeted for its maintenance year after year.
The supervisors, for their part, are trying to be more proactive in the board’s support of the towns throughout Hamilton County.
Thus is the setting into which the two government bodies sat down in the council chambers of City Hall Tuesday.
“I think everything in the proposal is doable,” Herman said after talking through the points with the combined groups.
Because the meeting was a work session, no decisions were made. But those gathered around the conference table agreed this might be a solution to what has become a deadlock to moving the park forward.
“It gives us an opportunity to get it out from underneath the city,” Mayor John Hawkins said during the meeting.
Bowden’s proposal would have the city and the county each budget $50,000 a year for five years to get the place up and running under an eventually-elected foundation board. The foundation already exists, but its nonprofit status is in need of updating. After five years, the foundation and its park would be on its own.
There are, of course, a multitude of details to work out.
That was how the meeting was left, with a verbal agreement to move forward with the Bowden proposal.
Herman will follow up with a more detailed proposal, Kloberdanz said.
“Moving forward, there are going to be winners and losers. Collaboration is the key,” Kloberdanz said. “This is the perfect opportunity to show the world that we’re all here.”
View the original article as it appeared in the Daily Freeman-Journal.
Last modified: October 18, 2023