City works to do what it can to coordinate buyouts with demolitions

CEDAR RAPIDS - The City Hall hoo-ha this week over the demolitions of flood-damaged homes seems to have quieted into compromise.

One of the concerns, expressed by Mayor Ron Corbett and council member Don Karr, centered on the fact that the city was demolishing homes before actually buying them out.

Corbett acknowledged this week that one of the challenges facing the city is that it's faster to tear down houses than it is to complete the real estate transactions to buy them out.

Nonetheless, Corbett suggested and City Manager Jim Prosser agreed to try to move the 281 homes at the top of a new demolition list up the buyout list to make it more likely that homes are bought out before they're demolished.

Corbett made the point that the city long has promised that an owner can back out of a buyout until the actual closing, but the mayor said it's hard to back out when the home has been demolished.

Karr pointed out that the city had yet to take down about 50 of the most flood-damaged homes, which are considered too dangerous to enter and were on last year's demolition list. The city reports that 139 of those homes came down last year, and Karr acknowledged that none of those have yet to be bought out by the city.

Prosser indicated to Corbett that the city can turn its attention to those homes on last year's list and to homes not now on the demolition list that are being bought out first to make way for a greenway along the river designed to flood.

The homes on the latest demolition list are ones the city has determined to be an “imminent threat” to health and safety. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay to demolish homes with that status. FEMA also is paying to demolish homes too dangerous to enter.

Karr has questioned whether some homes slated for demolition might not be in good enough shape to be saved and renovated, and some neighbors in the Time Check Neighborhood agree.

Corbett, though, speculated that, in the end, most will be demolished in any event.

According to the city, 10 of the “imminent threat” homes are in the greenway area; 130 are in the so-called construction area where a levee and related infrastructure could go; and 139 are among homes farther from the river that earlier were deemed “beyond reasonable repair.” The location of two others was not noted.

City staff members have said that owners of homes on the list have given an earlier written approval and a more recent verbal approval for the demolitions, though Corbett and Karr have said they've talked to some who have said they could not recall earlier written approvals.