Downtown state of mind set for a boost: Construction sort of starts on new federal courthouse

It was the oddest sight this week: an end loader scooping snow off the vacant lot between First and Second streets SE and Seventh and Eighth avenues SE.

Turns out, construction has kind of started on the long-awaited federal courthouse.

Jim Snedegar, project manager at the U.S. General Services Administration in Kansas City, Mo., reports that a contractor was removing the snow so that a ground-penetrating radar study of the site could be conducted.

The study, Snedegar says, will give the GSA a three-dimensional model of everything below the ground down to about 10 feet. The GSA wants to know if there are pipes, old foundations, abandoned utility lines or whatever else below ground as it prepares to do grading and then foundation work for the new courthouse, he says.

Grading at the site won’t begin until the snow is gone, Snedegar says. Grading, he assures, will be underway in the spring.

Late last month, the City Council agreed to transfer the city-owned site to the GSA in exchange for the existing federal courthouse once the new one is open.

The new courthouse will straddle First Street SE and face the downtown. It will require First Street SE to end at Seventh Avenue SE, not at Eighth Avenue SE where it ends now. And look for that change to First Street SE soon.

The courthouse project had languished for years on the federal government’s courthouse priority list.

June’s flood damaged the existing federal courthouse in the 100 block of First Street SE, which helped make the case for funding the construction of a new courthouse. The project then received a $182-million federal earmark at the end of September.

Snedegar says the new courthouse will take three years to build. Scheduled opening is now the fall of 2012, he says.

The design concept for Cedar Rapids’ new courthouse — which is the work of Williams Rawn Associates, Architects of Boston and OPN Architects of Cedar Rapids — has been by and large in place since 2004 and awaiting construction money.

The design features a front-arcing face with a glass wall 300 feet wide and 100 feet high on the right front and a stainless-steel surface with windows on the left front. The five courtrooms are on the right and offices on the left, with judges’ chambers on the eighth story.

Ryan Cos. US Inc., with a regional office in Cedar Rapids, is construction manager of the project.

Option sales tax: This time metro area not in it together

The new state legislation that has permitted an expedited referendum on a local-option sales tax in counties declared disaster areas also changes another thing.

In a typical local-option sales tax election, state law requires that cities whose borders touch vote as a bloc. The tax does not pass anywhere in the bloc if the total vote in the bloc is against it. One city might pass it in the bloc, but they don’t collect the tax if the bloc as a whole rejects the tax. However, if the bloc passes the tax but one city in the bloc rejects it, the city rejecting the tax doesn’t collect it and doesn’t get any of the revenue that the tax generates.

As a case in point, the cities of Marion and Robins passed a local-option sales tax in 2003 but the voting block of Cedar Rapids, Marion, Hiawatha and Robins as whole voted the tax down. The 2003 vote was the one in which the city of Cedar Rapids was trying to obtain local revenue for its Vision Iowa project, River Run. Some voters didn’t like the white-water kayak course that was part of the project.

This time – the March 3 vote – is different, reports Joel Gabrielson, of the Iowa Department of Revenue.

Gabrielson notes that the new, one-time piece of legislation eliminates voting blocs of contiguous cities.

The idea behind the legislation is to help disaster areas, and in particular, Cedar Rapids. Marion, Hiawatha and Robins, who are in the voting bloc, don’t need the money for disaster recovery.

Gabrielson notes that consumers might get a little confused if they pay the tax in Cedar Rapids and drive a block and don’t pay it in Marion, which has been one reason to have metro cities vote together.