City puts off facilities open houses to after the election; future of co-location seems iffy

City Hall will wait six weeks, until Nov. 17 and 18, to once again ask residents to weigh in on the future of the city's key flood-damaged buildings.

City Manager Jim Prosser this week said postponing open houses slated for early October had nothing to do with the Nov. 3 city election.

Instead, he said the city needed more time to “refine” its information about the options for a number of city buildings, including City Hall, the downtown library, central fire station and public works facility.

The election aside, the change in plans also comes at a time when the City Council's latest effort to discuss the co-location of government services in shared buildings seems to have been rebuffed once again by Linn County and the Cedar Rapids school distict.

Council member Tom Podzimek, the council's liaison to the co-location talks, said on Tuesday that he heard no support for co-location from the county and school district at a meeting a week ago.

“I'm not optimistic that we will be sharing functions of structures,” Podzimek said.

 Council member Brian Fagan, a candidate for mayor, said Tuesday he's not convinced that co-location might not still get some traction, though the idea didn't seem to have much backing this week as both the county board and school board addressed their own flood-damaged buildings in public meetings.

“That's what people are talking about with me and that's what they'd like to see,” Fagan said of co-location. “They recognize this could be in the taxpayers' best interest and the community's best interest.”

With the postponement of the city's next round of open houses, residents will have to wait until after the Nov. 3 election to get a better feel for whether City Council members want to build a new $50-plus million City Hall or if they want to return City Hall to the flood-damaged Veterans Memorial Building on May's Island. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will help pay for some of the cost of renovation, but it will pay nothing for a new City Hall.

No one on the council - six of the nine seats are on the Nov. 3 ballot - has made it clear publicly which City Hall option he or she prefers, though co-location sometimes has served as a euphemism for building a new building.

Mayoral candidate Ron Corbett repeated this week that the city should use existing city-owned buildings, and not build a new City Hall. The city also is slated to take ownership of the existing federal courthouse just down the street from the Veterans Memorial Building, which also might be used for city offices, Corbett said.

City Manager Prosser said putting off the city open houses will give the city a chance to incorporate the county's and school district's emerging building plans into the city open house so taxpayers can get an idea what all three entities might be seeking even if co-location doesn't work out.

Prosser said the city's options for a City Hall now may focus on a centralized plan that would require a new building and a decentralized plan that would use existing buildings like the Veterans Memorial Building.

He added that city officials are discovering that returning to the Veterans Memorial Building may cost more than they had expected. He said the building also may have less usable space than the city thought as well.

Podzimek predicted that the City Council would make decisions about the Central Fire Station and the downtown library first, and he suggested that a decision on the future of City Hall likely can wait.