Will flooded areas of Cedar Rapids be redeveloped?

CEDAR RAPIDS - The city is considering its options for redeveloping buyout properties, even those inside the 100-year flood plain.

A new city map details a list of 1,383 properties - most residential, with about 200 commercial - that the city has or could choose to acquire through the flood-recovery buyout program. To date, the city has spent $77 million in the buyout effort, most of it from federal disaster dollars, city officials reported last week.

For now, the city is focusing its redevelopment energy on 439 of the properties, because these properties sit outside the 100-year flood plain and outside an area set aside for the proposed flood-protection system.

At the same time, Flood Recovery Committee members Don Karr, Justin Shields and Ann Poe are looking at 358 additional buyout properties that are in the 100-year flood plain and some that may not be in the construction zone when a flood-protection system is built.

Many of these properties sit in the heart of the Time Check neighborhood, next to Czech Village and in New Bohemia across the river. They will be prime spots for redevelopment if the city builds a flood-protection system.

Such a system would remove these properties from the 100-year flood plain.

“Redevelopment gets a lot easier and a lot more feasible for those properties (now) in the 100-year flood plain,” said Joe O'Hern, the city's flood recovery and reinvestment director.

Jennifer Pratt, a planner in the city's Community Development Department, said future building is restricted on buyout properties in the 100-year flood plain that were purchased with federal Community Development Block Grants.

One way to release the restriction is to show that a property no longer is in the 100-year flood plain. Development also can be allowed if a property owner can show local, state and federal authorities why a development can't be built other than in the 100-year flood plain. Once built there, the development must comply with flood-plain regulations, she added.

The city's buyout program also includes 146 properties in the 100-year flood plain purchased with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds. No building can take place on these properties, which will become part of a greenway along the river.

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