Former Linn County Home gets one last chance before demolition

CEDAR RAPIDS - Hold the wrecking ball and bulldozer.

The Linn County supervisors on Wednesday agreed to make a public appeal to see if anyone is willing to repurpose the one-time, 1970s-era county home at County Home Road off Highway 13 north of Marion.

The supervisors' decision is being prompted by Linn County Auditor Joel Miller, who had pushed the board to follow the procedure it typically uses and set a public hearing and publish a legal notice of the hearing before it takes an action like a building demolition.

After the supervisors' decision on Wednesday, Miller said the supervisor's willingness to set a public hearing on Aug. 26 at 10 a.m. to take public input on the future or the demise of the sprawling, multi-wing building was a start.

'They are compromising with me,” said Miller, who has butted heads with the supervisors on a regular basis on a number of issues for the last few years. 'But don't get carried away.”

Supervisor Brent Oleson said Miller had a point, and he and Supervisor John Harris said their intent is to see who might have a workable idea for the building and some interest in seeing the idea through.

The supervisors said they were open to beginning a formal process to seek development proposals for the property if a viable idea emerges. However, both Oleson and Harris called that 'remote.”

To most, the former county home building has been known as the Abbe Center for Community Care, which Abbe Inc. operated as a residential facility for the mentally ill and disabled until the company abruptly closed the facility in September 2013. About 75 residents still in the facility at the end were moved into the community from the facility, which was too costly to run, with its veteran employees with union-supported wages and benefits and too far from town to allow residents to spend much time in the community.

In the nearly two years that the building has sat empty, local law enforcement agencies have practiced drills inside of it, and an area paranormal organization has tested the premises for unusual communications.

Supervisors Oleson, Harris and Ben Rogers said the board did not decide to demolish the building without researching its prospects for a future. The cost to renovate and upgrade it made it more attractive to demolish, they said.

Oleson said the supervisors have encouraged the city of Marion to annex the property. with the idea that the city could extend city water and sanitary sewer services to the property to make it more valuable as a development site without an old building on it.

Rogers said he was looking for 'viable suggestions” at the Aug. 26 public hearing, and not simply opinions that it can still be a place of good-paying jobs, which the supervisors have heard in recent weeks, he said.

He said a group of nursing-home investors toured the building some time ago, only to conclude that the county would need to make a considerable investment in the building before they would begin to consider buying it.

For his part, Miller pointed to an assessment of the property by the Linn County Assessor's Office in 2012, which put a value on the property of more than $5 million.

He said the building needs work, but he said the private sector can be more 'creative” than the public sector, and so he said some private entity might yet step forward with an idea.

He pointed to a northeast Iowa couple who are running a shrimp farm in an old school. Who knows what ideas might emerge for the former county home building, he said.

Miller would prefer that the building get back on the tax rolls, rather than the county demolishing the building and holding on to the property.

Linn County currently owns 120-plus acres of farmland around the former county home, which provides farm revenue that the county now is giving to the Prospect Meadows organization to support the group's proposal to build a baseball complex on the property. The county engineer is also housed in a building on the site.

If nothing else, Miller said the Aug. 26 public hearing will give the public an opportunity to comment about the former county home building so people don't later say they had no opportunity, he said.

He said he compared the building to the historic, county-owned Mott Building across the Cedar River from downtown Cedar Rapids, which has attracted development proposals to convert the 115-year-old building into apartments.

Oleson said the Mott Building is connected to city services, is in the downtown area and has been built to last. None of that is true of the former county home building, he said.

The county has hired a firm to remove asbestos from the latter, and the county has been working on a proposal to seek bids to demolish it.