Council members: Experts' work on the city's downtown should contribute to library debate

The recent work of planning and design experts for which the city and community have paid considerable sums should not sit in a bottom drawer as the City Council works to decide where to build a $45-million dollar library, members of the council said Thursday.

With that in mind, two firms who participated in that work are being asked to weigh in on the location of the library, according to council member Monica Vernon.

One of the firms, JLG Architects, of Grand Forks, N.D., authored a 2007 study of the downtown that remains something of a planning bible for the redevelopment of the downtown.

The other, Sasaki Associates Inc. of Watertown, Mass., was first hired by the city just before the June 2008 to help plan for the redevelopment of the downtown riverfront, and after the flood, served as a central player in planning for flood protection, riverfront redevelopment, neighborhood rebuilding and the city's new parks and recreation master plan.

“I think we need to go back to people who have worked with us on the city plan,” council member Monica Vernon said on Thursday. The city's three new council members, which include Mayor Ron Corbett, aren't familiar with all of the planning work that has come before, Vernon said.

She also expressed an interest in contacting the Urban Land Institute, of Washington, D.C., which sent a team of urban planners to Cedar Rapids last year at no cost to the city to provide advice about downtown redevelopment.

Vernon's comments came in response to the Wednesday evening meeting of the City Council at which the city's library board and library director explained why they favored building a new library on the block now occupied by The Gazette and KCRG-TV9. The library representatives also explained why the Gazette Communications block was better than two other options, the block referred to as the Emerald Knights site between Seventh and Eighth streets SE and First and Second avenues SE, and the TrueNorth block, across Fourth Avenue SE from Greene Square Park.

Vernon on Thursday said the library board did a good job of sorting through the issues of parking, pricing, construction timing and protection against future flooding as it focused on what's good for library patrons.

However, the City Council, which makes the site decision, must take into consideration other factors not so easy to quantify even as it is addressing the needs of library patrons, both she and council member Pat Shey said on Thursday.

Shey and Vernon said the new library likely will be the most significant city building built in their lifetimes in Cedar Rapids, and great thought and care needs to be taken on its placement so it captivates people, draws people to the downtown and, as importantly, serves to drive private-sector investment around it.

Vernon said what is absent from the library board's work is the concept of “city planning.” She said she wants the experts who have worked for the city and know it well to try to measure what interplay a library location might have with the area around it.

“It happens with people,” Vernon said. “If I sit next to someone and we hit it off, the whole will be greater than the sum of those parts. If we're separated and never meet, you don't get that explosion of energy.”

Mayor Ron Corbett, who spoke out during the mayoral campaign last year against what he said was City Hall's overuse of consultants, said on Thursday he wasn't interested in asking “consultants” about the library location now that the library board had done so much work.

However, council member Kris Gulick agreed with Vernon and Shey that it doesn't make sense to pick a library location in a “vacuum” without understanding how it fits into the bigger downtown picture.

Gulick pointed to the JLG Associates plan of 2007 and noted that the council and downtown interests both lined up behind it.

Bringing the firm in now is good from a land-use planning standpoint both for the downtown and for the location of the library, Gulick said.

“It's reasonable piece of information everyone on the council should want,” he said. “We're making a 50-year decision here, and those are hard to make.”