Council picks up tab for Highway 100 ramps

CEDAR RAPIDS — City Council members Tuesday night denounced the Iowa Department of Transportation for its decision to stick the city with the entire $5.6 million cost of adding two ramps to the $200 million Highway 100 extension project the city sees as vital to the growth the road is expected to bring.

Nonetheless, council members then unanimously voted to assume responsibility for the cost of the ramps, which will provide access to Highway 100 from 80th Street SW just north of Highway 30 and from Highway 100 to 80th Street SW just south of Highway 30.

Council member Scott Olson said the city could see a population jump of some 30,000 people on its western edge in the years to come because of the Highway 100 extension. He said it would be 'very shortsighted' if the council did not add these two ramps to the project.

Olson and council member Monica Vernon said the DOT was incorrect in concluding that the new ramps would serve local traffic — not regional traffic — and so the cost of them needed to be absorbed by the city.

Rob Davis, the city's engineering operations manager, told the council that the ramps were part of an earlier DOT design of the Highway 100 extension, but then were dropped in May 2013.

Davis said the City Council needed to act now or lose its chance to get the ramps built as part of the project.

Olson said the council was confronted with the ramp funding issue on the very night it was approving the city's first new comprehensive plan since 1999. In part, the plan addresses how the city expected the area around the Highway 100 project to develop.

The new comprehensive plan, called EnvisionCR, took nine months to create with the help of consultants and with public input from some 500 people through open houses, online comments and outreach to high school students and local development interests.

The plan introduces a new approach to land use that promotes mixed-use development and provides greater flexibility to developers, the city's development staff, the City Planning Commission and the City Council in achieving quality development.

The plan is centered on seven guiding principles: achieve a unified vision; live healthy; strengthen neighborhoods; keep business vibrant; connect the city; embrace the outdoors and streamline services.

Olson said he was on the steering committee for the planning process, and he said he did the same thing in 1999 for the last plan. The last one ended up in a big book that no one could afford to buy, he said. He said this one is online for everyone to see, which makes it easier to use and amend.

Olson said the city should continue to lobby the DOT in hopes it will amend its decision on the cost of the Highway 100 ramps. City Manager Jeff Pomeranz had asked the DOT to pay half the cost, but without success.

Council member Justin Shields said he was voting to assume costs of the ramps but wasn't happy about it.

Davis said the city's spending on the ramps will start with $400,000 in design costs. Construction work will come over the next few years, likely in two phases.

Shields complained that the DOT is eager to tell local communities what it won't let them do — his reference to the DOT's threat to turn off the city's revenue-raising, traffic-enforcement cameras. But the DOT vanishes when it comes to providing support for ramp access to Highway 100, he said.

'I'll vote for it, but I don't like it.' Shields said.

View the 190-page Cedar Rapids comprehensive plan