Council gives up on trying to save Sinclair smokestack; too costly to save, council says, 8-0

CEDAR RAPIDS -- The City Council last night unanimously gave up on saving the historic smokestack at the former Sinclair meatpacking plant.

Council members Justin Shields and Don Karr, advocates for saving the smokestack, said it was time to take it down.

"The writing is on the wall," said council member Monica Vernon, another stack backer.

The council made its decision after hearing a report from Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, who said stabilizing the stack would require taking the top 100 feet of the smokestack apart, brick by brick, so demolition crews could take down the plant close to stack without fear of the stack falling on them.

The stabilization process, he said, would delay the current demolition of the plant, which put the city at risk of losing $1 million in disaster funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that FEMA was paying to quickly take the flood-and-fire-damaged plant down after it determined it was a threat to public safety.

Eyerly told the council that the demolition crews had now reached a point in demolition where they are in danger of being hit by the stack should it fall during the plant demolition.

He said an engineering firm had intended to enter the top of the stack on Monday to examine the inside of it. But it was too unstable, he said. Instead, he said, the firm dropped a camera into the stack.

Eyerly put the cost at $740,000 to stabilize the stack and said it now is believed to cost $1 million to restore it in addition to the $1 million in lost FEMA funds should the demolition be delayed too long to deal with the stack.

That total cost to the city could be $2.74 million to save the stack, he told the council.

Council members Chuck Swore and Pat Shey noted that their support for saving the stack had come with a caveat that local historical preservationist mount an effort to raise funds to pay for any restoration costs at a pace that would not delay the FEMA-paid demolition of the plant around the stack. That was not able to happen, they noted.