Cost pressures city to look at moving back to flood-damaged GTC bus depot

CEDAR RAPIDS - The reality of cost could be putting pressure on the City Council to return the city's bus depot to the flood-damaged Ground Transportation Center - at least for now.

The council on Tuesday will take up the future of the bus depot, which now runs out of modular buildings in a city parking lot at Second Street and 12th Avenue SE.

Brad DeBrower, the city's transit manager, on Monday noted that it will cost the city an estimated $8 million to purchase two-plus blocks just off the downtown owned by Pepsi Americas, a block of which the council had wanted to use to build a new bus depot called an Intermodal Transportation Facility (ITF). The $8 million also would cover Pepsi's relocation expenses, DeBrower reported.

However, only about $1.4 million of the $8 million cost would be covered by a Federal Transit Administration grant to build a new ITF, DeBrower said. The rest of the $8 million for the Pepsi site would have to come from local funds or from elsewhere.

Pepsi has said it needs to sell all of its property just off the downtown if it must move its maintenance and warehousing operation. It was last year's council that picked the Pepsi property as the future site for the ITF, and it was that council that, too, was thinking of building a new city hall on some of the Pepsi property.

The new council, though, has decided against building a new city hall, so it's not clear what the city would do with the rest of the Pepsi property if it buys it and uses one block of it for the ITF. It could hold the rest of the land for redevelopment.

In addition to the price tag for the Pepsi property, the city also will have to pay the Federal Transit Administration as much as $3.5 million if the city permanently stops using the GTC depot as a depot because the federal agency paid to build it about 25 years ago.

With the amount of what the city would owe to the Federal Transit Administration factored in, DeBrower estimated that building the ITF would require the city to pay 40 percent of the total cost instead of what had been expected, 20 percent.

Before the June 2008 flood, the council had decided to leave the GTC depot and to build a new ITF with a $9-millon federal grant, money the city has had now for nearly a decade.

Before the flood, the council said moving out of the depot and turning it into private-sector office or commercial space made sense for three reasons: It didn't make sense to build a new bus facility near an existing one as had been the plan; the existing GTC depot was unsafe because it required buses to back out of parking stalls; and the existing GTC depot stood in the way of the city turning First Street SE into a pedestrian-friendly street along the river.

At the council meeting on Tuesday evening, DeBrower said he will want to address several “passenger, pedestrian and traffic safety issues” if the city bus operation returns to the GTC depot.

 Mayor Ron Corbett and council member Don Karr are two of the nine council members who earlier suggested it might make financial sense to get back into the GTC space, at least in the short term. Such a move would be better than continuing to run the bus depot out of modular buildings, Corbett and Karr have said.

In a memo to the council, DeBrower notes that he Federal Transit Administration has not found any environmental impediments to building an ITF on the Pepsi property.

At the same time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has concluded that the flood damage to the GTC depot is well below 50 percent of the value of the property, so the city can proceed with FEMA-paid flood repairs at the GTC site if it chooses, DeBrower's memo to the council states.

He said Monday that FEMA would allow money set aside for GTC repairs to be used on a new ITF facility if the city doesn't make the GTC repairs. The amount of the FEMA funds is $1.48 million, both he and Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, reported.