Beyond Promises

“Beyond Promises” is a memoir of sorts by Ron Corbett, who became the youngest speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives and who now is finishing up his eighth year as mayor of Iowa’s second largest city, Cedar Rapids. In the late 1990s, Corbett was considered a possible Republican candidate for Congress or governor. Then he surprised many and resigned from the Legislature so he wouldn’t have to spend so much time away from home and his growing family. He headed the local Chamber of Commerce for six years, a period in which he led a community campaign to rebuild schools, another to redevelop the Cedar Rapids riverfront and a third that brought professional management to Cedar Rapids city government. Corbett’s tenure as Cedar Rapids mayor coincided with the city’s recovery from a devastating flood in 2008, the costliest natural disaster in Iowa history. Can someone who was a leading Republican voice in much of Iowa reclaim statewide prominence and be elected governor? In 2017, that’s the elephant in the room—the unstated question lingering in the backdrop of “Beyond Promises.” This book is Corbett’s first-person account of where he came from and what shaped him, as well as a chronicle of doing, not simply promising.

Ron Corbett has been in the public eye in Iowa since he first won a seat in the Iowa House of Representatives in 1986 at age 26. A Republican, he won seven House elections and served in the Legislature for 13 years, the last five as House speaker. He remains the youngest person in Iowa to hold the speaker's job. He left in 1999 to head the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce and to be home full time to help raise his five children. He was a prominent community figure and coalition-builder in his six years at the Chamber. In 2009, he was elected Cedar Rapids mayor with a pledge to speed up the city's recovery from a flood in 2008?a disaster that ranks as the worst in the state's history. Now in his eighth year in the non-partisan job of mayor, he has played a key role in the community's comeback. Outside of City Hall, he operates Engage Iowa, a conservative think tank he founded in 2015. A Newton (Iowa) High School graduate, he holds a bachelor's degree in business from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. He was a star running back at Cornell and continues to hold several rushing records at the school. Rick Smith grew up in western Pennsylvania not far from Ron Corbett's boyhood home. Like Corbett, Smith has spent his adult working life in Iowa. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Iowa. Smith worked as a news reporter for The Gazette in Cedar Rapids for 32 years before retiring at the end of 2015. He covered local government and local politics for the last half of his Gazette career, including reporting and writing about the city's 2008 flood disaster and recovery.