Replacement for Cedar Rapids’ Time Check Rec Center apt to be in or next to Ellis Park

The flood-damaged Time Check Recreation Center, slated for demolition, likely will be replaced by a bigger facility in Ellis Park or next to Ellis Park, the consensus of a City Hall-appointed site selection committee seemed on Tuesday to suggest.

One advantage of building the new recreation center in or next to Ellis Park is that it can serve as a first phase of a larger, longer-term City Hall plan to build a recreation and community center complex called the Multigenerational Community Life Center at Ellis Park, council members Don Karr and Chuck Wieneke on Tuesday told a City Hall-appointed site selection committee of which they are a part.

The site selection committee decided Tuesday to conduct a benefit-cost analysis of a total of five northwest Cedar Rapids sites as the possible new location for a replacement for the Time Check Recreation Center, which was inundated with flood water at its spot at 1131 Fifth St. NW in the June 2008 flood.

Three of the sites to be studied are in Ellis Park; a fourth is right next to the park at Q Avenue NW and Eighth Street NW; and the fifth is between Ellis Boulevard NW and Ninth Street NW and I and J avenues NW.

The three Ellis Park sites consist of the former chipping green area next to the Ellis Park Golf Course; an area near the ball diamonds; and an area near the tennis and basketball courts.

Committee member Whitey Campbell, president of the Northwest Neighbors, said the members of his neighborhood likely would prefer the site for a replacement recreation center between Ellis Boulevard NW and Ninth Street NW because it is the site most in the center of the Time Check Neighborhood.

The committee agreed to include the site in the benefit-cost analysis, but committee members did not seem to favor its chances as being the site that ultimately will be picked.

Wieneke said it made no sense to build the new recreation center at a spot on Ellis Boulevard NW that was under 11 feet of flood water in 2008.

“I was there. I'm sorry, but I've seen it once,” Wieneke said.

Campbell and Karr, who grew up in the Time Check Neighborhood, had a back-and-forth exchange about whether or not Ellis Park was part of the Time Check Neighborhood. Campbell said it wasn't, Karr said he always considered that it was. Campbell wasn't sure youngsters in his neighborhood would use a recreation center in or near Ellis Park, while Karr said his bicycle took him to Ellis Park often when he was coming of age.

At one point, Campbell conceded that the site next to the park at Q Avenue NW and Eighth Street NW would be one neighborhood youngsters could get to. But he noted that the site often was one that was hit be flooding, to which others on the committee said the recreation center building itself could sit on a higher part of the property.

Wieneke tried to make a case for the former chipping area site in the park next to the golf course, though Julie Sina, the city's parks and recreation director, and others doubted that the site was expandable for needs 20 and 30 years from now.

One advantage of the park sites is that they already are owned by the city, and at least some of the site near the park apparently also is owned by the city.

Committee member Amy Buelow, president of CR Neighborhoods, asked if the city was trying to replace the Time Check Recreation Center with something similar or with something different. She thought it should go in the general area where it had been if the goal was to replace the neighborhood center. She liked that its former location was close to a school.

Wieneke, though, thought that the goal could be to replace the Time Check center in short order while preparing for it to be part of a larger facility in the future.

The five sites were recommended to the citizens committee after an analysis of 11 sites by the project management team from Ryan Companies US Inc. of Cedar Rapids.

Ryan's Nick Ruden, project manager, now will proceed with a full cost-analysis on each of the five sites, an analysis that then will be presented to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for review. The City Council ultimately will pick the site with FEMA paying an amount equal to the least-expensive site.  A similar process is under way for the new Central Fire Station and new animal control facility and has been completed for the new library.

In October, the site selection committee suggested sites for review and adopted criteria that it wanted the sites to meet. The committee, for instance, wants the recreation center to remain in northwest Cedar Rapids, to sit outside the 100-year flood plain and to be on an expandable site.

At the October meeting, city parks and recreation staff members suggested that they would like a new Time Check Recreation Center to be more than what it is replacing. Specifically, the staff members said they would like the new recreation center to be large enough to allow the city to close the Ambroz Recreation Center at 2000 Mount Vernon Rd. SE and large enough to house the city's Parks and Recreation Department. Nearly all the users of the Ambroz Center drive to get there and so would be able to drive to a new Time Check Recreation Center, they said.

Disaster funds from FEMA will help pay the cost of the new facility, and City Council members have said they want to use some of the city's local-option sales tax revenue to help pay the cost of any land purchases for the project.