City officials set a 'clear path' for flood-damaged city buildings

Easy to miss in the ongoing debate on what to do about City Hall is what city officials and consultants are calling “the clear path.”

A clear path is what city officials believe they now have on what to do about three key flood-wrecked city buildings - the public library, the central fire station and the animal control shelter.

For each of the three buildings, the city is prepared to replace what was destroyed with something new with the help of disaster-relief funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The news about those three buildings was one of the clear messages given to 180 who turned out last night at the third in series of city open houses on city buildings, the first of which was held in July.

The murkier issue of whether or not to build a new City Hall is a matter for another time.

Last night's session will be repeated from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. today in the Ballroom at the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel.

Among those attending last night's event was Mayor-elect Ron Corbett, who said his priorities related to the city's key flood-damaged buildings also center on the library and the fire station as well as the flood-damaged Paramount Theatre.

Last night's open house, he added, did not change his belief that the city should use the existing Veterans Memorial Building and the former federal courthouse, which the city is slated to own, for city offices rather than build a new City Hall.

City consultant OPN Architects Inc. last night spelled out those two general options for City Hall - use existing buildings or build new.

The plan for a new City Hall has been scaled back since August: the $50-million-plus building has now become a smaller, $38-million one. There is also an option for a larger building that would cost the city $32 million and Linn County $16.7 million in the county wants to join forces with the city.

Two plans to move city offices back into the Veterans Memorial Building and into the federal courthouse also would require the purchase of a suburban building or a downtown building to provide enough usable space, according to the city consultant.

Ralph Palmer, president of the Ar-Jay Center, said last night's city presentation left him with the impression that the city prefers to build new rather than wanting to restore what is already in place.

Retiree Martin Smith said he wasn't opposed to the city returning city offices to the Veterans Memorial Building as long as he was sure the city had a plan to protect the building from the next flood.

City Council member Justin Shields, who supported Corbett in the city election, thinks the city should build a new building.

“It just seems like the mentality almost that's taken over Cedar Rapids is all we want to do is put things back the way they were,” Shields said.

Former City Council member Dale Todd, who left city office eight years ago, put his thoughts this way about the Veterans Memorial Building: “We invested a lot of money in that building, in the council chambers, infrastructure, fiber optics. I'll leave it at that.”

Scott Olson, a commercial Realtor who lost a close race for mayor in 2005, said he was glad to see building options that include building something new like the library while retaining and reusing existing buildings like the Veterans Memorial Building and the former federal courthouse.

“The renovations will mean that we're not ending up with a batch of empty buildings in the downtown core that might hinder redevelopment on the private front,” he said.