Cedar Rapids ready to remove some streets, sewers in buyout areas

Now that the houses are gone, the time has come to get rid of some of the streets and sewers, city officials say.

This week, City Council will ask the Iowa Economic Development Authority to provide the city an estimated $1.6 million in federal disaster dollars to enable the city to begin to remove some of the city's infrastructure of streets, alleys, storm sewers and sanitary sewers in parts of the flood-hit Time Check Neighborhood in northwest Cedar Rapids and the flood-hit residential area next to Czech Village in southwest Cedar Rapids.

Doug Wilson, capital improvement project manager for the city's Public Works Department, on Monday said that the city's preliminary plan calls for the removal of portions of 17 streets and four alleys, with the removal apt to start in 2015.

Wilson emphasized that the removal plan remains conceptual, and as part of it, he said that the city has identified all the homes and other privately held properties that are still standing in the two neighborhoods so that any removal plan assures that streets and sewers remain to serve those properties.

The city's water distribution system will remain in place in the neighborhoods to ensure that fire protection can be provided to properties that are still standing, he added.

From the first days of the city's five-year-old flood recovery, the city's plan has been to create a first line of defense against the city's next flood disaster by using federal dollars to buy out and demolish property in the 100-year flood plain and beyond it.

With those federal dollars has come a rule that generally prohibits new construction in buyout areas in the 100-year flood plain, a fact that has had City Hall planning to create a new west-side greenway of parks and athletic fields along the Cedar River where homes and some businesses once had stood.

The sense of what the greenway will be is easy to see now as blocks of former residential property are now nearly empty but for geese, trees that used to be in the fronts, sides and backs of houses and the city's network of streets, alleys and sewers.

Linda Seger, president of the Northwest Neighbors Neighborhood Association, on Monday said her group wanted to know the details of the city's infrastructure removal plans. For starters, she said the city needed to make sure that O Avenue NW remained open and that the few property owners who chose to remain in place can still do so.

"It was voluntary," she noted about the city's buyout program.

She added that she understands that old streets with only empty lots along them will be removed as part of the creation of the greenway, but she said she and the neighbors want to hear about the latest plans.

"It's nothing more than public relations. Let us know what you plan," Seger said.

At-large City Council member Don Karr, who grew up in and around the Time Check Neighborhood, on Monday said that it's time to take steps to remove streets and sewers in the buyout area in the 100-year flood plain.

"It's going to be a park. It has to be a park. And I think it will be a real asset to that neighborhood to be a park," he said.

Karr noted that a City Hall incentive program has spurred homebuilding on the other side of Ellis Boulevard NW, and at the same time, both the neighborhood and City Hall also expect to see Ellis Boulevard NW become a revitalized commercial area, he said.

The greenway along the river will help plans for Ellis Boulevard NW, increase property values and improve the area's quality of life, Karr said.

"This gives the neighborhood an area where kids can play and where people can go and walk and exercise," he said. "I think it's going to be a huge quality-of-life opportunity."

Just this past weekend, Karr said he was reading about how a city plan in the early 1930s envisioned that the most-flood-prone working class homes in the Time Check Neighborhood would become a park stretching from Ellis Park along the river toward the downtown.

Karr suspected that the plan back then was the result of the city's second worst flood of all time in 1929 and the sixth worst in 1933.

"I imagined that they saw the writing on the wall back then," Karr said. "But then they rebuilt, nothing happened and people forgot about it. And now it (flooding) has happened again."