Demolition of former Linn County Home moves ahead

CEDAR RAPIDS - To satisfy critics, the Linn County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday held a public hearing to see if anyone could make a convincing case to save the 39-year-old former county home from demolition.

No one did, the supervisors concluded.

In fact, the supervisors changed their mind, and on a 3-2 vote, decided not to spend $2,000 to obtain a new appraisal of the 128,000-square-foot building at County Home Road and Highway 13, another step that had been designed to quiet critics.

Supervisor Brent Oleson, who had voted for the appraisal last week, changed his mind and said that critics needed to 'deal with facts” that emerged at Wednesday's public hearing. He said it is too impractical and costly to try to renovate the building, which most recently had been the Abbe Center for Community Care residential facility before it closed two years ago.

Oleson said he wasn't going to 'waste” any money on an appraisal to 'satisfy people who hope and dream but have no plan.”

During the public hearing, the supervisors heard from Craig Bradke, director of corporate compliance for Abbe Inc., who said the building had been a perpetual maintenance challenge in the years that Abbe occupied it. He talked about roof, ductwork, piping, flooding, windows and other issues.

Bradke said it likely would be 'impossible” to try to once again use the building for health care because new regulations require bathrooms in every room or every other room, a standard which the current building with its 200-plus rooms is not able to meet.

Even so, he said Abbe's presence in the building didn't end two years ago because of maintenance issues. 'The way the world wants to deal with mental health,” which cut referrals by half to Abbe's residential program in favor of smaller facilities located in town, forced the closing, he said.

Jim Angstman, a Marion real estate agent, said he toured the county building twice with different interested parties to see if the building might accommodate senior housing. He said he concluded it would cost less to build a new facility on the site than to renovate the existing building.

Kevin Kula, a rural Coggon resident who helped push the supervisors to conduct Wednesday's public hearing, said the supervisors might be able to attract a user to the former county home building if they would seek proposals. He said the supervisors should use financial incentives on the building it now it using for the proposed Prospect Meadows baseball complex next to it.

Supervisor Jim Houser asked Kula directly if he would be willing to spend his own money on the building after what he had heard about the condition of the building and the cost to renovate it.

The supervisors said the well that provides water to the building is from the 1950s and the building's water system is in disrepair.

Linn County Auditor Joel Miller, who also pushed for Wednesday's public hearing, said pipes inside the building had broken because heat and water had been turned off without draining the interior pipes.

Garth Fagerbakke, the county's facilities manager, said the heat and water were turned off when the supervisors decided some time ago to demolish the building. With what has become a long-pending demolition, it didn't make sense to drain pipes, he said.

Cindy Howe of Marion, who said she had worked at the Abbe Center for Community Care, said the building still had potential for use to help the homeless and others in need.

Supervisor Linda Langston said the location of the building north and east of Marion would make it hard to get homeless people to and from the facility.