Wetlands discovery adds $50,000 to fire station cost

The discovery that the site of the new west-side district fire station is part wetland will delay the start of construction and require the city to build a new wetland elsewhere.

The property at Edgewood Road and Crestwood Drive NW doesn't look like a typical wetland, Greg Buelow, the Fire Department's special projects coordinator, said Thursday. However, the pre-construction environmental analysis that's required for any public project identified about a quarter of the 2-acre site as a protected wetland under the federal Clean Water Act.

Officials now must take into account the project's impact on the wetland, and Buelow said they will do that by getting permission from the Army Corps of Engineers to build a larger wetland elsewhere in Cedar Rapids. The mitigation work will add about $50,000 to the $2.8 million project cost, he said.

Construction on the district fire station was to start this fall, but now the work will begin in the spring. The completion date of August 2013 - the same time as the new Central Fire Station at 713 First Ave. SE is expected to open - won't change, Buelow said.

Al Frohlich, regulatory project manager for the Corps of Engineers at its Rock Island District office, said a site that typically does not hold standing water can still be a wetland if it has wetland vegetation, soils and hydrology. The Edgewood and Crestwood site is at the bottom of a hill, so it most likely obtains its wetness from surface runoff down the hill, he said.

The new west-side and central fire stations will replace the former main fire station at 222 Third St. NW, which was damaged in the Floods of 2008, as well as an east-side district station at 1424 B Ave. NE. Buelow said the new facilities will improve the Fire Department's average response time around Cedar Rapids.

He called the wetland issue a glitch, not a problem.

“The reality is that we have to do things right,” Buelow said. “Would we rather not have a wetlands issue to deal with? Yeah, absolutely. But it hasn't derailed the process at all.”