Tiny Bertram won’t let farmer leave

BERTRAM - Worry about sewage plant odor has prompted this 300-person town on Cedar Rapids' eastern border to get its way with its big-city neighbor.

Bertram Mayor James Drahos said Tuesday that both Bertram's Planning and Zoning Commission and the Bertram City Council now have voted against local farmer Larry Ditch's request to de-annex 91.3 acres of farmland from the city of Bertram so he can move it next door and into Cedar Rapids and sell it to the city of Cedar Rapids and its sewage treatment plant.

The city of Cedar Rapids has offered Ditch $1.346 million or $14,750 an acre for the 91.3 acres of cropland. However, Cedar Rapids has conditioned the purchase on Ditch's ability to de-annex the property from Bertram and to move it into Cedar Rapids. Buying the property as it sits inside Bertram would have required the city of Cedar Rapids to win approval from Bertram city officials to build on the property and, more specifically, to expand its sewage-treatment plant there. That approval isn't likely.

Mayor Drahos said that Bertram city officials, who have been discussing the Ditch request to leave since last summer, voted to keep the Ditch property in Bertram because they fear that one day the city of Cedar Rapids would expand its sewage treatment plant at Highway 13 and Bertram Road SE onto Ditch's property and, so, closer to Bertram.

Drahos said he understood that Cedar Rapids city officials have said they have no intent now to expand the treatment plant. But he said that is today.

'Obviously, the city of Cedar Rapids can't tie the hands of future generations as far as limiting what the city of Cedar Rapids does with the property it owns,” Drahos said. 'Obviously, the last thing that Bertram would want to see is the sewage plant moving closer to town, directly west of town.”

Ditch declined to comment.

Steve Hershner, Cedar Rapids' utilities director, said Tuesday that the city viewed the offer from Ditch as a chance from 'a willing seller” to buffer the city's sewage treatment plant from the property around it. The city isn't going to buy property in another city, he said.

Hershner said the city has excess property at the sewage treatment plant now, but he said he couldn't rule out some expansion of certain pieces of the facility's operation onto the Ditch site someday in the future.

In recent years, the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency board has discussed moving the agency's compost operation next to the sewage treatment plant from the base of the agency's Mount Trashmore landfill south of downtown Cedar Rapids. However, Brent Oleson, Linn County supervisor and the agency board's current chairman, has said that the agency's long-term master plan calls for the compost operation to stay put.

Back in 2003 and 2004, Larry Ditch's 91.3 acres next to the Cedar Rapids sewage treatment plan sat in unincorporated Linn County when the city of Cedar Rapids thought about annexing it into the city. Ditch opposed the idea and asked Bertram to annex his property into Bertram to protect him from Cedar Rapids.

Bertram quickly agreed, which sent Bertram's western boundary leaping across Highway 13 to touch Cedar Rapids' boundary.

Subsequently, Cedar Rapids lost a bid to stop the annexation into Bertram at the state's City Development Board, a defeat Cedar Rapids took to Linn County District Court before giving up the fight in 2004.