Ice Arena Floor Fix: Was community zeal to be better partly to blame?

 

Long-open sores and deep-tissue bruises that resulted from the financial surprises that came with building the city’s Ice Arena did heal at some point after the arena opened in January 2000.

In recent days, though, the memory of the hurts came back a bit as the City Council approved spending $395,000 to replace piping and the concrete floor in the hockey arena. The contractor also can qualify for up to $20,000 more if he meets a target date this summer for construction completion.

Several comments reached City Hall seeking to find someone to blame for the need to fix the floor – the arena’s second sheet of ice does not need repaired – just eight years after it was installed.

Dave Elgin, the city’s director of public works, points out that warranties extending out eight years don’t exist, and, in fact, for the specialized piping work at ice arenas, warranties typically run a year, he says he has learned. The city has insisted on a 4-year warranty on the new piping and concrete floor, he notes.

Elgin, though, reminds people about the uncommon way in which the city’s Ice Arena was built. A guy with a hockey team approached the city, at the ready to move his team here if only the city could put him in a new arena within a year. The City Council took him up on the offer, a move which necessitated setting aside the usual planning, design and bidding process. Instead, the city used a “design-built” approach with a hand-selected contractor. The design was crafted even as construction began.

All of this brought surprise costs along the way, which drove the projected bill for the building up by a few million dollars. Additionally, the arena opened for the city’s RoughRiders hockey team in January 2000 on a temporary floor. At the end of the first season, refrigerant pipes embedded in sand were dug up, retrofitted and placed in a new concrete floor.

Scott Schoenike, the executive director of that company that manages the city’s U.S. Cellular Center, Paramount Theatre and Ice Arena, has reported that connectors in the piping have failed since the retrofit, resulting in flaws now in the hockey arena’s ice.

The first two lease holders, including the original owner of the RoughRiders, since have moved on, with the city left with responsibility to hire its own manager for the building.

 Even so, Schoenike argues that the arena is an ongoing asset — a must community asset for any city trying to broaden its shoulders.

In truth, the arena came to be in a flurry because of us and because of a recurring need for Cedar Rapids and hundreds of other cities to want to be what they are and more. That’s why cities have Chambers of Commerce, isn’t it.

The offer of a new attraction, a hockey team in a new arena, was a community resume-builder that no city Cedar Rapids’ size would have let go by the way.

Schoenike makes a compelling argument when he points to the dozens of adult amateur hockey teams, among others, that use the arena, often playing games deep into winter evenings. Some of those teams are comprised of professional employees of the city’s major employers, employees who have been recruited to work in the city from places where playing hockey as kids is as common as ice freezing early and hard on outdoor ponds in winter. The adult amateurs have their kids playing at the arena now, too.

Fixing the floor is being paid from revenue derived from the local tax on hotel and motel stays, Schoenike notes.

 

 

 

Iffy carp can’t slow August opening of city’s newest recreational venue

As luck would have it, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources this week posted a brand-new fish advisory, this one for the Cedar Valley Urban Fishery — the former industrial sandpit given the city a few years ago with a hope it could become a getaway just down the Cedar River from downtown.

The good news is the DNR advisory applies only to the common carp in a body of water the agency reports is home to a large diversity of fish.

The advisory is the result of DNR tests of bottom-feeding carp and catfish in the proposed urban fishery in 2005 and 2006, tests that turned up elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. PCBs, banned in 1979, are industrial chemicals used in electrical transformers and capacitors and in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications.

Paul Sleeper, a DNR fisheries management biologist at Lake Macbride in Johnson County, calls the agency’s advisory “a minor one.” It limits the eating of carp to one meal a week, but it does not require the posting of signs around the fishery, he notes.

Why carp in the old sandpit turned up with PCPs is not clear, Sleeper says, because carp in the Cedar River, which overflows into the sandpit at times of high water during the year, are not tainted.

This week’s DNR advisory was noted by city officials, but it put no crimp in the construction schedule for the urban fishery.

Loren Snell, the city’s construction engineering manager, says the $1.46-million construction of the fishery began late last year, took a hiatus for the worst of the winter weather and is up and running now. To date, grading work has begun and about 90 percent of the necessary tree removal has been complete.

“We’re trying to leave the nice ones,” Snell says, adding that the designated trail path has been shifted a bit to save trees.

In the months ahead, the work will include the creation of an island in the lake, two boat ramps, a number of fishing stations, a parking lot and an asphalt trail about 11/2 miles in length around the lake. The construction deadline is Aug. 15.

One idea had been to run a piece of the trail under the Union Pacific Railroad tracks to connect to the existing Sac and Fox Trail, but the idea, for now, has proven too costly, Snell says.

A hurdle yet to be leaped is the city’s purchase of land providing access to the urban fishery from Otis Road SE. The city believes it assumed an existing easement into the fishery, but wants to buy the land to make the entrance permanent. Negotiations and mediation with the property owner haven’t worked to date. As a result, Rita Rasmussen, the city’s senior real estate officer, reports that the city is readying to go to court to condemn the land for a public purpose.

The DNR’s Sleeper says the DNR has stocked the urban fishery with channel catfish, northern pike and large-mouth bass. Every kind of fish that is in the Cedar River is in the old sandpit, he says.