TrueNorth site for library has council fans, but getting five of nine votes is no certainty

Mayor Ron Corbett says it's still anybody's guess as to which of three proposed sites the nine-member City Council will choose to put the new $45-million library.

For his part, Corbett on Tuesday afternoon was touting all three sites as excellent ones, giving the impression that he didn't need to have any final decision on a site go his way.

He repeatedly has said he favors the Emerald Knights' block, although on Tuesday he said he was still asking residents what their views were. A couple of Corbett's council colleagues thought he might, in the end, back the preferred site of the city's library board, the Gazette Communications block, out of deference to the library board.

The council vote surely will be a split one.

If there is a front runner, it is the one of three sites that the library board did not endorse – the TrueNorth block directly facing the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art across Fourth Avenue SE and Greene Square Park.

Council members Monica Vernon, Pat Shey and Tom Podzimek all said this week that they support the TrueNorth site, and council member Justin Shields earlier had said he liked the TrueNorth site, though he could not be reached on Tuesday.

For his part, Podzimek said he had supported the Gazette Communications site after hearing the library board's endorsement of it two weeks ago. However, he said he changed his mind when the architect of the city's widely accepted downtown plan, Lonnie Laffen of JLG Architects, Grand Forks, N.D., said last week that the TrueNorth site was the one of the three sites that had the best chance to be a special one for the library.

Council member Chuck Wieneke says he's voting for the Emerald Knights site because it is on the highest ground of the three sites and so will never flood, because it takes the least value of private property off the tax rolls and because he says it will cost the least to buy.

Where council members Kris Gulick, Chuck Swore and Don Karr will land was far from clear on Tuesday.

Swore, a new member to the council, said he's given up on his idea of rebuilding the library at its former spot on First Street SE, noting that the library board and council members many months ago decided they wanted to move the library to safer ground. Swore said he favors none of the three proposed sites, and he said he'll be listening to see who on the council can persuade him one way or another.

Karr said the matter likely will come down to cost for him, though he said, too, that he was concerned about a parking ramp proposed for the Emerald Knights site, which he said he feared would mar the view of the library along First Avenue East.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Gulick was driving to Des Moines with plans to meet with the Des Moines library director on Wednesday and to tour the Des Moines library after that. Last weekend, he visited the library in Naperville, Ill., considered one of the best in the nation, he said.

“I'm doing my own due diligence, and I assume everybody else is doing theirs,” Gulick said. In the end, he said cost has to factor in, but it won't be the only factor in his decision, he added.

Corbett on Tuesday said he understood that both Gazette Communications and TrueNorth had modified their purchase/relocation prices downward.

Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, on Tuesday said the Federal Emergency Management, which will pay to relocate the library and will pay some of the cost of construction, has said it will provide purchase cost figures to the council for its Wednesday evening deliberations. At the same time, Eyerly said that costs related to parking at the three sites could take some time to get an answer to. He didn't know if FEMA would simply use each property owner's version of costs or if FEMA had its own way of estimating a property's value.