Column -- Open House Overload

It was easy to get disoriented among the placards at Tuesday's city facilities open house.

In no time at all, you're sucked into a vortex of placards on the future of City Hall, many depicting the Veterans Memorial Building being sliced into multicolored layers like a big computer-generated wedding cake. All around that sliced stone cake were graphs and big numbers. Square feet.

Tax dollars.

Once you've mastered a chart, you're rewarded with dozens more.

“If this were a lawsuit, the jury would be confused,” said Bud Kudart, open house veteran. You can tell. He's got that placard stare.

There is plenty to stare at, roughly one placard for every man woman and child in the city. OK, actually there are 126, but that's a new open house record. They should commission a commemorative placard.

Placards illustrated options, options and more options for dealing with flooded city facilities, from City Hall on down to animal control and city parks. Every one is slick, glossy and loaded to the margins with factoids, graphics and artistic renderings. These are the dreams your tax dollars inspired. If there's such a thing as consultant porn, I'm looking at it. People wandered around and wandered some more. “The arrows on the floor are a godsend,” said Tamara Glise, the very pleasant interim director of the Cedar Rapids Public Library. I'm dropping breadcrumbs.

The library's corner of the maze is very popular, and really should win best use of special effects.

It has cool illustrations of what a new library looks like at three potential locations, two along First Avenue and one south of Greene Square Park.

I could see myself in the picture, walking from the white box where I work, across the gray car-less street, through the park's manicured digital grass and into the new library.

I bet these drawings excited others, too.

“We've actually had a lot of folks with questions about parking,” Glise said. Well, sure. Parking can be exciting.

I worry people are getting information overload. But Kudart, a former state senator, also pities the City Council, which distills all this into policy. “I have sympathy for anyone who is serving on the council,” he said.

Sure, because these charts and graphs are actually battle lines. Pies show that a new city hall would cost a lot more money upfront than moving back to May's Island.

But bars say returning to old would cost a lot more than new over time. So do we grab the cheap pie or heed the bars' predictions? If I could answer that, I'd be one excited consultant.

¦ Todd Dorman's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.Contact the writer: (319) 398-8452 or todd.dorman@gazcomm.com