Long-planned transformation of sandpit off Otis Road SE into lake and trail is just about here

CEDAR RAPIDS - Two mayors, five years and one flood ago, City Hall first made plans to turn an old water-filled industrial sandpit along the Cedar River into a fishing and recreational venue.

Along the way, there was a contest to name the place - it's had at least three tentative names; a designer prepared ambitious plans that called for a swimming beach and a lodge; and a plaque was created to thank donor Martin Marietta Materials Inc. and the City Council of 2005.

Next month, if all goes as planned, work on the newly named Prairie Park Fishery will be all but complete and the park will be open to the public.

You're going to like it.

Steve Krug, a landscape architect for the city's Parks and Recreation Department, points out that some of the more expensive pieces of the earlier plans for the park might have stayed in a bottom drawer. But he says the public will enjoy the parts that were always the meat of the park plan - fishing, boating, picnicking and a nearly two-mile trail around the 60-acre lake for bicycling, running and walking.

Krug says the city also plans to extend the lake trail a short distance so it connects to the Sac and Fox Trail nearby.

The park is an out-of-the-way spot off Otis Road SE, along the Cedar River out past the Cargill plant and tucked in between the river and the Cedar Valley/Rompot Neighborhood.

The park gives boaters access to a cove that leads directly into the Cedar River as well as access to the lake, on which motorized boats except those with electric trolling motors will be prohibited.

As for fishing, the former sandpit has been stocked by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources with game fish, though the lake has all the same kinds of fish that are in the Cedar River, too, thanks to the fact that the river periodically floods into the lake.

During a tour of the place last week, it was hard to tell that Prairie Park Fishery had been an industrial sandpit in its day. Most of the banks are covered in plant life and the slope of some of the banks has been softened to make the park safer and give it the feel of a lake. The high water level last week also helped obscure the spot's past life as a sandpit.

The place offers a rare mix of the natural and the industrial.

Directly across the Cedar River is Alliant Energy's Prairie Creek power plant. The Union Pacific Railroad's main east-west line runs alongside the park, seemingly in touching distance at some spots. And looming off to the northwest, across the river, is the Mount Trashmore landfill, looking much the part from this vantage point of a picturesque and green rolling hill that it hopes to be.

Krug says visitors who time their visits right can also hear the racket from Cedar Rapids Police Department outdoor shooting range just down river.

The City Council last week formally named the park Prairie Park Fishery without comment.

Krug recalls that there had been a couple of different “quests” to find the right name for the place before the current one finally emerged in pieces from a list of possible names. The sandpit's donor, Martin Marietta Materials, did not want to be in the name, and some on the City Council didn't want the word “Cedar” in the name. They felt enough in the city has a name beginning with Cedar, Krug says.

Krug says the flood of 2008 hit the place just as construction work had begun to transform it from a sandpit into a fishery. The flood loused up some of the initial grading work, left flood debris 15 to 20 feet up in the trees and put the project off the priority list. None of the damage was covered by Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster funds, he adds.

The construction price is now at $1.52 million, city figures show.