City moves forward on Second Street parking ramp

City Hall is moving ahead with plans to build a 500-space parking ramp on Second Street SE between Sixth and Seventh avenues SE, according to city documents. It's not clear where the up to $15 million is coming from yet, acknowledges Doug Neumann, president/CEO of the Cedar Rapids Downtown District.

In December, the city asked architectural and engineering firms to submit qualifications in a competition for the city contract to provide architectural and engineering services for the new multistory parking ramp.

The specifications for the project state that the new ramp may include retail space on its first level.

Neumann said he will sit on a City Hall committee to review the proposals.

Time and again over the last year, the City Council has placed the Second Street SE parking ramp at or near the top of a priority list of projects that it wants to fund.

The council had hoped to secure as much as $36.4 million in disaster funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because the city cannot reuse three flood-damaged, city-owned properties - the former Sinclair and Quality Chef plants and the hydroelectric plant at the base of the 5-in-1 bridge. However, FEMA has said the city is not entitled to those funds in a decision that the city is appealing.

The council has said it wants the new parking ramp in place by the time the new federal courthouse opens in late 2012 so that courthouse personnel can use the structure.

However, the U.S. General Services Administration, which is responsible for the new courthouse's construction and operation, has said some of the courthouse employees will park on site and the rest can park on an existing surface parking lot across Eighth Avenue SE from the new building or elsewhere.

In any event, the city will have fewer parking spaces in the months ahead as it demolishes three existing parking ramps - the city-owned First Street Parkade as well as two parking ramps between First and A avenues NE and Second and Third streets NE that will make way for the city's new convention center.

The Second Avenue SE site was purchased by the city in recent years as it prepared to build the yet-to-be-built Intermodal Transit Facility with a 500-space parking ramp on the site. However, the City Council decided it didn't make sense to build a new transit facility at the Second Avenue SE site, which was just two blocks from the existing Ground Transportation Center bus depot. Then the flood hit in June 2008.

The council now has decided not to return the bus depot to the flood-damaged Ground Transportation Center and it has decided to build the Intermodal without parking ramp in the block between Fifth and Sixth avenues and Fifth and Sixth streets SE. Much of the funding for that project is still unidentified.

The Downtown District's Neumann on Monday said the city continues to try to find funding for the Second Street SE parking ramp, and he said the hope is that completing the architectural and engineering work for the project with local funds will position the project to secure non-local funding.