Latest version of new bus depot has taken council a year; Corbett wants it to decide on $45-million library in 2 weeks

It was almost a year ago when the City Council decided it wanted to build the city's new bus depot, called the Intermodal Transit Facility, on a piece of two-plus blocks of property between Fifth and Sixth avenues SE that now houses a Pepsi warehouse and maintenance operation.

In other words, the latest proposal for a new bus depot has been in the works at City Hall for nearly 12 months.

New Mayor Ron Corbett now says he wants to give the City Council two weeks to decide where to put a new, $45-million library.

Corbett wants to do that even though a few council members have suggested that the new bus depot and the new library might be able to share some surface parking so neither facility has to be surrounded by a mall-like surface parking lot.

However, on Friday, Paul Griffo, a spokesman for the Federal Transportation Administration in Washington, D.C., reported that the FTA has not yet given the city permission to move ahead on a purchase of the PepsiAmericas property for a bus depot.

Griffo said the FTA must yet make a “positive environmental finding” on one block of the Pepsi property as required by the National Environmental Protection Act before the city can enter into a binding contract to purchase the property. He said he could not provide a date when the FTA would make such a finding.

At the same time, Griffo said the FTA remains committed to the city's Intermodal depot project.

Apparently, though, the City Council will make a decision about the new library before it knows what it can do about the Intermodal.

However, the two projects – as well as a third one, a proposed new city hall – might be entangled a bit with the PepsiAmericas site.

Mayor Corbett, though, says not.

A year ago, the City Council vote to pursue the purchase of the PepsiAmericas site for the Intermodal, even though the council understood that the bus depot would likely tie up only part of one block while PepsiAmericas had signaled that that the city would need to buy all of its two-plus blocks of downtown property if the city needed any of it.

The council's idea was the city would find a spot elsewhere in Cedar Rapids for PepsiAmericas, a spot that actually was more conducive to Pepsi's industrial-like operation.

The city then would be able to market the extra PepsiAmericas property for private redevelopment, the council said last March.

By fall, though, City Manager Jim Prosser and a City Hall consultant unveiled a plan to build a proposed a new city hall or “city services center” on the PepsiAmericas site along with the bus depot. Maybe the Linn County supervisors could build an administrative office building there, too, was the thought.

The city election in November has thrown a couple wrenches into all that.

The nine-member council has three new members, Corbett, Don Karr and Chuck Swore,  and none of the three has an interest in building a new city hall, which first was priced at $50 million, and more recently, at $38 million.

Only council member Justin Shields has ever clearly and in public said he supported a new city hall. That was months ago.

At the same time, Corbett and Karr have said they have concerns about taking too much private property off the tax rolls for public buildings.

This thought could have a direct impact on the city's decision to purchase the Pepsi site.

The thinkig might go like this: If only a bus depot is put on the Pepsi blocks and not a new city hall, then why buy so much property in the first place?

Additionally, the Pepsi blocks sit adjacent to one of the top prospects for the site of a new library, the TrueNorth site. The idea that the bus depot and library might share some parking so each of the facilities wouldn't need so much asphalt around it, though, falls apart if the city isn't buying the Pepsi site.

Suffice to say, the City Council is trying to decide about building a new library, new bus depot and a new city hall – not to mention that some think the best site for a new Central Fire Station is one of the other two possible sites for the library – all at the same time.

However, Mayor Corbett has emphasized that the council will decide the site of the library on Feb. 24, two weeks after receiving the library board's recommendation that the library be built on the Gazette Communications block. The library board's recommendation centers on a need for 200 or more parking spaces – preferably surface parking -- and being on a spot untouched by the June 2008 flood.

At least three council members, Monica Vernon, Justin Shields and Pat Shey, have said those two criteria aren't at the top of their list as they decide where to put a library.

As for the Intermodal bus depot, it remains something of a comedy -- the city now is in its fourth different mayoral administration since Congress appropriated $9 million to build the facility.

At one point, the new mayor suggested going back, at least in the short run, to the flood-damaged Ground Transportation Center bus depot, even though the previous council voted to move the depot to a new building prior to the flood. The council did that after a consultant concluded that the GTC depot was a public-safety hazard because buses had to back out of stalls. The council said, too, that the design of the GTC depot forces pedestrians to walk on the other side of First Street SE, a street next to the Cedar River that the council thought should be pedestrian-friendly. The council also decided the city didn't need two bus depots a few blocks apart.

Griffo, of the Federal Transportation Administration, acknowledged last week what the city already has known. The city will have to reimburse the federal government some money if it does not return to the GTC depot because federal money was used to build the depot and it has not yet lived out its useful life. City Manager Jim Prosser has estimated that the return amount could be in the $1.2-million to $1.6-million range.