Council chooses to build new Public Works Facility

CEDAR RAPIDS - On an 8-0 vote, the City Council Tuesday night decided to tear down a former crane manufacturing plant and office building that has housed the Public Works operations since the late 1980s and replace it with a new $35 million facility on the same site, 1201 Sixth St. SW.

In voting for a new building, the council did not discuss how it would pay for the local piece of the cost. Mayor Ron Corbett said after the meeting that officials will look to use available revenue from the 1 percent local-option tax. The same practice is being used in two other projects to replace flooded buildings, the library and the animal shelter.

The city expects to have $17 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster funds and $5 million in state I-JOBS funding to help pay for the construction of the new Public Works Facility. Construction is slated to start in late summer 2012 and be complete in two years.

Tuesday night's vote came after a lengthy presentation in which the city's professional staff, project construction manager and project architects all recommended the construction of new building over two other options - repairing the existing building, or repairing and adding to it. At above $30 million, the costs were similar for all three options.

Marc Gullickson, president of Iowa operations for Ryan Companies US Inc., the project's construction manager, said he and the architects entered their analysis of project costs without a bias toward repairing the existing building or building a new one. However, he said, he ended the analysis with a bias toward building new.

Gullickson compared the decision to those made about the future of other flood-damaged buildings: Theatre Cedar Rapids cost $7 million to renovate, for example, while building new would have cost an estimated $23 million. And the GreatAmerica Building, where Ryan's Cedar Rapids office is located, cost $22 million to build but only $4 million to get back on line.

The Public Works Facility, he said, was different in that renovation and building new would cost about the same. He called it a “no-brainer” to build a new structure, which he said would cost 25 percent to 30 percent less to heat and cool and would be far more efficient in handling the city's equipment fleet.

Dave Zahradnik, a principal with Neumann Monson Architects of Iowa City, estimated that the front-line public works employees would have 10 to 15 minutes more a day to provide services from a new facility because they won't have to waste time, as they now do, trying to maneuver equipment around the numerous columns in a former crane manufacturing plant. That alone could equate to 13,000 work hours a year with a value of $845,000, Zahradnik said.

Council members Chuck Wieneke and Kris Gulick also called the decision a “no-brainer.” Gulick said a new building would house in one facility what was spread out in more than 10 facilities before the flood.

“Logic tells you it's going to be more efficient,” he said. He recalled filling sandbags at the facility during the 2008 flood and said he learned firsthand then how “poorly designed” the old manufacturing plant was to move the city's fleet of heavy equipment around in.

Council member Pat Shey said he had hoped that the existing building might be saved, but “the numbers are just not there,” he said.

The city's Historic Preservation Commission had asked that the city repair the existing facility and not tear down what members view as a historic structure.

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