Embracing change

CEDAR RAPIDS - The bet is that Duane Smith will get his wish.

Smith, president of TrueNorth Companies LLC, has moved with the firm's 115 Cedar Rapids employees into a fascinating new corporate home on First Street SE - in what had been the city's public library before the historic Floods of 2008.

TrueNorth's $10-million-plus re-imagining of the flood-damaged former library is a treat to experience, and it seems sufficiently forward-looking as to make the memories of what had been begin to fade.

“One of the goals was to make that transformation,” says Smith. “We don't want this to be known as the old library. We want it to be known as the TrueNorth building. Yet we also like to preserve history. I guess we'd like to, maybe, hear it phrased, ‘There's the TrueNorth building. The old library used to be on that site.'”

TrueNorth gained attention in the aftermath of the June 2008 flood by doing nothing more than minding its own business. The firm's location at 421 Fourth Ave. SE - across from Greene Square Park and facing the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art on the park's other side - turned out to be the one that the Cedar Rapids City Council decided it wanted as the replacement site for the flood-ruined library.

TrueNorth was not looking to move, but nonetheless, it obliged the city and went looking for a new home.

Ultimately, the City Council paid TrueNorth $7.5 million for the property and relocation costs. The council then entered into a development agreement with TrueNorth in which the firm paid $250,000 for the former library, agreed to spend at least $7.5 million to renovate it and agreed to add another 50 employees over a five-year period.

TrueNorth will have spent more than $11 million on the former library by the time the company completes what Randy Rings, the firm's legal counsel, says has been “a complex opportunity.”

“What we do with a lot of our clients is really help them with their business planning, help them with their risk mitigation, and so we're used to taking complex problems and coming up with solutions,” says Smith. “And we looked at this as an opportunity more than a challenge. And we also saw it as an opportunity to make a statement for our community and show our commitment to the community and the downtown.”

The former library consisted of a rectangular-shaped first floor with a smaller triangular-shaped area as a second floor over part of the first floor. TrueNorth's transformation of the building features the build-out of an entire second floor, where most of the company's offices now are located. Most of the first floor, which housed the library's stacks, has become a 60-plus-stall indoor parking garage for TrueNorth employees.

One day, the 50,000 square feet of parking garage could become additional office space for TrueNorth or for building tenants, if and when a flood-protection system is built in the downtown and after the city adds to its public parking facilities. In total, with what is now parking area and second-floor areas that the company intends to lease out, the new TrueNorth Building has about 125,000 square feet of space, compared with 30,000 in its former building.

In the building renovation, TrueNorth has retained what had been the library's Beems Auditorium on the first floor and has built some office space on the first floor to handle in-and-out traffic. The entryway has been enlarged a bit and a portion of a second-floor conference extends into it, giving those in the conference room a sense of floating in air. The design fosters the openness and collaboration of TrueNorth's work environment, says Smith.

Yes, he says, investing some $11 million in a flood-damaged building with the river nearby comes with an element of risk.

“From a business standpoint, potentially the safer play would have been to stay where we were,” says Smith. “But we also look at the element of change and that old adage, ‘If it's not broke, don't fix it.' Our adage today is, ‘If it's not broken, improve it.' And we really embraced that.”

TrueNorth's move into its new home on Nov. 19 came 10 years to the day from when the company, which was created from three separate ones, moved into the building that now is coming down to make way for the new library.

The city of Cedar Rapids took possession of the former TrueNorth building in the first week of December, where construction on the new library is beginning and should be complete in June 2013.

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