Outdoor riverfront amphitheater and outdoor ice rink on May's Island are features of emerging parks plan

may be a bit lost in the continuing debate over the future of City Hall, but city officials also are rethinking the city's park system even as they consider the future of the city's key flood-damaged buildings.

At this week's city open houses, residents also are getting to see the “preferred” option for the city's park system that city officials say has emerged from two previous public-input sessions with residents.

Once approved in some kind of final form by the City Council, the new parks master plan is expected to feature, among other amenities, a new 5,000-seat downtown riverfront amphitheater next to the Police Department on the west bank of the Cedar River.

As she prepared for Tuesday's open house, Gail Loskill, marketing manager for the Parks and Recreation Department, said the riverfront amphitheater was the single best-supported amenity in all the public input on parks. She said the venue is apt to be “fast-tracked.”

The amphitheater, the seats of which will face the river, will feature grass between the rows of seating and will be designed to flood, she said.

Also planned for the riverfront area will be:

a downtown promenade on two levels stretching from Interstate 380 to Eighth Avenue, with the first level closest to the buildings built first and the second level, lower to the river, to be built after the proposed flood-protection system of removable flood walls in the downtown is in place.

a pool of water with spray jets that converts to an outdoor ice skating rink in winter on what is now the May's Island lawn between the Veterans Memorial Building and the Linn County Courthouse.

a greenway with ball fields and a skate park along the river through the Time Check Neighborhood as flood-wrecked homes are bought out and demolished.

a section of urban beach and a wetland area along the river in the New Bohemia/Sinclair packing plant area.

 Loskill said the high-cost Multigenerational Community Life Center - part recreation center and part community center - remains in the park plans for the Ellis Park area, though she said work needs to be done before the $82-million facility is built.

The plan also calls for an indoor recreation venue at Jones Park and a lodge at Noelridge Park that could add a gymnasium and other indoor recreation space over time.

Loskill said the plan meshes the recreational services provided by the indoor Bender Pool and had been provided by the flood-wrecked Time Check Recreation Center into the Multigenerational Life Center.

The plan calls for the city to turn its major parks - Ellis, Cherry Hill, Jones, Bever and Noelridge - into what Loskill calls “destination parks.” The city will look to develop partnerships with users and neighborhoods for the upkeep of smaller parks and special-use parks, and it will naturalize certain parks so the city can limit upkeep in them.

Loskill said surveys nationwide show that the way a city uses its green space can work to attract companies and employees to a community as much as the quality of its schools.

 “It's going to be ambitious, but it's visionary,” she said of the city's parks plan. “And we think it will have the potential to shape the future of Cedar Rapids.”