Cedar Rapids looks to improve Ellis Boat Harbor

As lasting an image as there is from the June 2008 flood here is the one of the litter of cabinlike boat houses after they washed down river from the Ellis Boat Harbor and smashed into the train bridge outside the Quaker Oats plant.

Three years later, the harbor is in the midst of rebuilding - getting back fundamentally to what it was, a community of 130, semi-permanent boat homes plus some slips for house boats, but with many newer boat houses and with most of those that had fallen into disrepair before the flood now gone.

“What is really cool, is since the flood, there are a lot of brand new people down here and a lot more new people interested. That's what we want,” Jim Kaas, a boat house owner and member of the Cedar Boat Club and Harbor Association, said on Thursday.

In the spirit of a new day for the harbor, City Hall has hired a consulting firm that specializes in harbors and marinas to help the city identify and plan for harbor improvements and to help it develop a business plan for how to pay for them.

Edgewater Resources, St. Joseph, Mich., spent the day Thursday in Cedar Rapids meeting with city officials, the city's River Recreation Commission, representatives of the Harbor Neighborhood Association and the Cedar Boat Club and the public.

“We need to decide, are we going to leave the harbor as it is or are we going to make it better,” Julie Sina, the city's director of parks and recreation, said this week. “The status quo is not what we're about. We need a plan so we can make it better.”

Don Steichen, president of the Harbor Association, on Thursday said the city's willingness to study the harbor is welcome news to the harbor community.

“This study proves the city is serious about the harbor as well as Ellis Park being a focal point of the city and a destination point for everyone in Eastern Iowa,” Steichen said.

At an afternoon meeting Thursday of the city's River Recreation Commission, a candid Greg Weykamp, principal and president of Edgewood Resources, said the Ellis Harbor has needs that would cost money to remedy.

“There's no easy answer here,” said Weykamp at the meeting's end, forecasting what his firm might say about the harbor and its needs when it completes its feasibility study in October or November.

“A half-million-dollar fix and we can cut (boat house) rates, it's not going to be that,” he said.

He said that fees charged to lease slips in harbors and marinas in the Midwest can average $1,300 to $1,600 a year, and he noted that the city of Cedar Rapids charges about one-fourth that amount. The boat house fee for a local resident is $370 a year.

Over the years, City Hall and the owners of boat houses in the Ellis harbor have had an uneven relationship, a fact noticeable at Thursday's River Recreation Commission meeting. For instance, commission members - most own boat houses in the harbor - noted that their annual slip fees were paying the $32,000 cost for the Edgewood Resources study.

Jeff McLaud, a commission member and boat house owner, presented Weykamp with his own proposal for how the Ellis harbor can be improved. In his plan, McLaud recommended that the city expand the harbor for boat houses into Robbins Lake just upstream and next to the harbor.

Carl Cortez, a commission member, boat house owner and an at-large candidate for City Council, agreed this week about extending the harbor into Robbins Lake, which he said is about a foot deep and “full of mud and goose poop.”

“(With the expansion), you'd have all kinds of slips to rent, and from the response we've gotten after the flood, it would not take very long to fill it up,” Cortez said. “And for every 24 feet (for another boat house slip), it's another $370 a year for the city.”

Edgewood Resources' Weykamp said expanding the harbor would require the city to secure permits from the Army Corps of Engineers, which he suggested is not necessarily the easiest thing to accomplish. He said another idea, which would not require an expansion of the current harbor, would be to place additional boat houses outside the inner, protected harbor, and then move them into the protected harbor during the winter.

In the aftermath of the 2008 flood, it was not clear that the Ellis boat house community would survive. Not only were many of the homes destroyed or damaged, but the city learned that the community had been in violation of demanding state dock rules. At one point, the City Council decided to let the community sort the future out with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

City Council member Don Karr, who spent a lot of time in the Ellis harbor boat house community growing up and whose family owned a boat house there for years, said on Thursday that a anti-harbor sentiment did emerge after the flood for a time among some who thought the harbor community had become an eyesore in recent years and so “wanted to get rid of it.”

Boat house owners Kaas and McLaud both acknowledged that some of the houses in the harbor had fallen into disrepair before the 2008 flood, and McLaud said the flood helped to rid the harbor of those boat houses.

Kaas helped lead an effort by the harbor community that resulted in the Iowa Legislature exempting the Ellis harbor from the state DNR dock rules and returning the harbor to the city's purview.

“I always knew this place would be back,” said Kaas.