Allies looking to continue work transforming Cedar Lake

CEDAR RAPIDS - Advocates for the transformation of Cedar Lake just north of downtown Cedar Rapids have found new friends that matter.

The Linn County Board of Supervisors on Monday agreed to join forces with the Cedar Rapids City Council and Alliant Energy in signing a memorandum of understanding with Friends of Cedar Lake. The memorandum is to create a Cedar Lake committee to identify potential future ideas for the 115-acre lake and develop a plan to bring some of the ideas to reality.

The Cedar Rapids council will approve the memorandum today. Alliant owns the lake.

'This is a big step forward,” Mayor Ron Corbett said on Monday. 'We're trying to work together to take this underutilized asset and make it into something everyone can be proud of.”

Supervisor Linda Langston, chairwoman of the county board, said Monday the agreement among the parties formalizes a willingness of the parties to work together. No one is committing money at this point, she added.

'I think there is broad agreement in the community that people would like to find some public use for Cedar Lake,” Langston said. 'It certainly can be way more attractive than it is.”

Former Cedar Rapids council member Dale Todd, a founder of Friends of Cedar Lake, on Monday called the agreement with the city, county, Alliant and his group a 'historic moment.”

'We've had a hardcore group of about 30 supporters who have spent the last year and half trying to figure out exactly what is going on with the lake,” Todd said. 'We reached a point where we needed to go to the next level, and you simply can't without the city, county and Alliant. Now we're there.”

Langston said two members from each of the four entities will sit on the joint committee.

Todd said a first task will be for the committee to review previous studies about the lake and its environmental challenges.

Corbett said 'hopefully” the committee will work out how the lake and the area around it will be used in the future and how and when the lake's ownership may be transferred from Alliant into the public domain.

Alliant spokesman Ryan Stensland has said that Alliant is open to sitting down and talking about Cedar Lake, its impact on the utility and the lake's future ownership.

It makes sense to 'chart the future” of the lake, Linn County Supervisor Brent Oleson said on Monday. He noted it is encircled by the city's popular Cedar River Trail and is visible to all who pass it on Interstate 380.

Oleson said the Cedar Rapids downtown has seen investment in the MedQuarter medical district on its east and Kingston Village to the west. There's no reason that 'environmental reclamation” can't take place at Cedar Lake to the north of downtown and the Mount Trashmore landfill to the south that is as 'exciting as the economic investment,” he said.

Alliant had used Cedar Lake to provide water for its Sixth Street coal-fired power plant, which was damaged in the flood of 2008 and is now closed and in the process of being demolished.

There is uncertainty about the environmental issues associated with the lake. For a number of years, residents have been cautioned to limit how much fish they eat from the lake because of levels of chlordane in the lake.

In addition, the Cedar Rapids council will have to decide in the months ahead if it wants the city's flood control system to protect the lake from flooding. Friends of Cedar Lake think the protection is necessary to prevent the lake from silting in.