City seems to settle on new downtown spot for bus depot; other building decisions linger

City Hall apparently has decided to put the proposed new Intermodal Transit Facility on the block bounded by Fifth and Sixth avenues SE and Fifth and Sixth streets SE.

The block is one of two - plus a portion of a third block - that the city has said for many months now it wants to purchase from PepsiAmericas. The Pepsi operation has a warehouse, maintenance facility and parking lot on the three adjacent sites.

The exact block of the PepsiAmericas property on which the new transit facility is to be built is disclosed in a City Hall bid document in which the city is seeking an environmental assessment of each of the three PepsiAmericas parcels.

The city has continued to say it is in negotiation with PepsiAmericas to purchase the three sites in an arrangement that the city hopes will result in PepsiAmericas relocating elsewhere in the city.

One option shown to the City Council last week would put the new downtown library on the second PepsiAmericas block, which sits between Fifth and Sixth avenues SE and the railroad tracks and Fifth Street SE. The offices of TrueNorth sit between this parcel and Greene Square Park, and one option would be for the city to try to purchase the TrueNorth site and add that block to the block-square Greene Square Park. The new library then would face two blocks of park with the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art looking back at it.

As recently as last week, a city consultant was still talking about the possibility of building a new City Hall and placing it on one of the PepsiAmericas parcels.

The public will get a chance to see the building options at open houses on Nov. 17 and Nov. 18.

This is the third in a series of open houses focused on the city's key flood-damaged buildings. The first was held in August.

The city has been trying to build a new Intermodal Transit Facility for more than a decade. It secured the last installment of  $9 million in federal funds for the project eight years ago.

The new proposed location is the project's fourth one. The facility nearly was built on Second Street SE, just two blocks from what then was the existing Ground Transportation Center bus depot. Council member Pat Shey said it didn't make sense to build a new transit facility so close to another one, and a consultant and Shey's council colleagues agreed.

The council now has decided to incorporate the city bus depot into the new Intermodal Transit Facility and see what else the GTC space, which was flooded in June 2008, might be used for.