4 years after flood, C.R. government offices return downtown

CEDAR RAPIDS - Starting today, if you're looking to do business with the city of Cedar Rapids, head downtown and look for the signs proclaiming “City Hall.”

Nearly four years after the Floods of 2008 pushed city government out of its former headquarters in the Veterans Memorial Building on May's Island, those operations are coming back downtown to a new home - the 82-year-old former federal courthouse at 101 First St. SE.

The prominent exterior signs are a first for Cedar Rapids. In the 80-plus years that government offices were housed down the street at Veterans Memorial, city officials say, there were no such indicators.

Another first? Mayor Ron Corbett will have his own city office.

“My office has been my car,” Corbett, who began his term in 2010, said last week. “I don't even have a desk” in the temporary city hall.

The transformation of the old federal courthouse into a new City Hall was not in the original plans, City Manager Jeff Pomeranz acknowledged Friday during a tour.

No, when he was hired in the summer of 2010, City Hall was slated to go back into the Veterans Memorial Building - which has an odd floor plan and an auditorium in the middle that makes it difficult to get from one side of the building to the other - with some offices spilling over into the old courthouse.

However, Pomeranz said, it quickly became clear that the old courthouse had plenty of room for all of Cedar Rapids' central administrative offices.

“So we pulled our architects together and we determined this would be a phenomenal site for a City Hall for Cedar Rapids,” he said. “And over the last year, it's really been exciting to see this building take shape into not just a historic building, but one that suits the needs of a modern city and a modern office environment.”

By and large, the same offices that had been in the Veterans Memorial Building will be in the new City Hall, with the addition of the Housing Services office. About 100 employees had worked in the Vets building, and the new facility will contain about 120 with room to expand, said Sandi Fowler, special assistant to the city manager.

$10 million renovation

Fowler, the city's lead staff person on the project, said the cost of the renovation of the 67,000-square-foot, three-story building with usable basement and attic storage has been about $10 million.

She said the project obtained $3.3 million in state I-JOBS funds, $2.1 million from a special Iowa legislative appropriation, $3.5 million from state and federal historic tax credits and $200,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to replace flood-damaged contents. Another $1.1 million is being paid out of revenue from Cedar Rapids' 1 percent local-option sales tax, and $300,000 more is coming from the sale of city bonds.

But that's not all the public money that went into the building.

The U.S. General Services Administration has reported that it spent $7.2 million to replace heating, air-conditioning and mechanical systems and make other flood-related repairs to the old courthouse before handing over the riverfront building to the city in August 2010. And the city did not get the building for free, but rather through a property swap that required it to spend $1.3 million to buy land for a new federal courthouse, plus another $745,000 to prepare that site for construction, the GSA has said.

Even so, Pomeranz said the value of the new City Hall in the old courthouse could be $70 million or more because of the quality and historic nature of the building.

Corbett said the city saved a considerable amount of money by using the old courthouse and not building a new City Hall, as a previous City Council had considered.

“From a taxpayer standpoint it was a no-brainer,” he said. “From a historical perspective, it was a natural move. It is a beautiful building and very fitting for the second-largest city in the state of Iowa.”

In taking over the historic courthouse, officials had to take steps to preserve many of the building's features, including the marble in the bathrooms; the bookcases and lights in the former chief judge's chambers; and the giant third-floor courtroom, in which the council began holding its meetings more than a year ago.

Using the building

Offices most heavily used by the public - the City Clerk's Office, the Treasury Office where city utility bills are paid, and the Housing Services Office - all are on the first floor.

The 120 city employees in the building will use the underground parking ramp on May's Island, and the city will pay the monthly fees - a change from before the flood. Since the 1,100 city employees working in other locations don't pay to park, Fowler said, officials decided it was unfair to make the downtown workers do so.

The public will have access to on-street parking spots around City Hall, with a few short-term spots at no charge for those who need to run into the building and come right out.

Dee Baird, president/CEO of the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance, said it was nice to see city government returning to downtown.

“It's another milestone for flood recovery,” she said. “It's great to see a historic riverfront property re-purposed.”

Pomeranz said city employees who have been working in a leased building in a northeast Cedar Rapids office park - FEMA has paid about $30,000 a month in rent while the city has covered the utilities - are glad to be coming back downtown.

“We've been in temporary quarters for four years, and we're just very pleased to be in a permanent city hall, one we can be very, very proud of,” he said. “And we think this is a great expression - being in downtown, being on the river - of our faith in the future of Cedar Rapids.”

Meanwhile, renovation continues on the Veterans Memorial Building on May's Island. The Veterans Memorial Commission plans to use some of the space for veteran-related programming and an expanded veterans museum.

Fowler said the city also intends to use a couple of floors, including the former council chambers, for board and commission meetings and other needs.