Architect to Study New Linn Community Center

By Dick Hogan
The Gazette
October 11, 2007

CEDAR RAPIDS - Convinced Linn County residents need a new and better place to play, the Fifteen in 5 PLAY Committee has lined up an Illinois architect to complete a nine-month, $117,900 feasibility study for a state-of-the-art community center for Cedar Rapids/Linn County.

All that's needed is a OK from Cedar Rapids for $60,000 in funding -- money that's been set aside -- and finding the final $20,000 needed to pay for the study by Williams Architects of Carol Stream, Ill.

Linn County supervisors on Wednesday approved $30,000 toward the study. Cedar Rapids is expected to approve its contribution soon. Another $10,000 was donated by AEGON.

PLAY -- Planning Lifelong Activities for You -- grew out of the Fifteen in 5 community priorities set in April 2005. A new community center ranked ninth on the list of the 15 things Cedar Rapids residents said they would like to see done within five years.

"Size, money, location, are part of the study," said PLAY committee member Myrt Bowers, director of the Witwer Senior Center.

The committee plans at least three public forums for input about a community center, she said.

PLAY's Phil Wasta of CedarRapids called the community center crucial to the area's future recreational needs.

"Of ideas collected, the community center idea constituted the second-most number of ideas so we feel the community wants it," he said. "When you look at communities our size, they have much better facilities than Cedar Rapids has."

Among the thoughts of current committee members are these possibilities: The Senior Center would move into a wing of the new center from the downtown Witwer Building. It could replace the small and outdated Ambroz Recreation Center and the indoor Bender Pool. It perhaps could include an indoor water park and a hydrotherapy unit with zero-depth entry, something not now available in the area.

PLAY committee members visited community centers in a number of communities to get a sense of what is possible. The biggest centers Bowers saw were about 185,000 square feet; the operators told her they wished they'd built those larger.

"You'd be amazed at the development that went up around these centers," she said. "It can be an economic hub if you design it right. We're looking at all of Linn County. People in other communities would indeed come in for this. We're going to meet with (city) councils in other (Linn County) towns."

Added Wasta: "The preconceived notion we've already got a location in mind couldn't be further from the truth."

Location, he said, would be part of the study.

The study will also project who would use the center, how people could get to it and other factors.

"The study is about what people really want. Everybody is tired of seeing studies," Wasta said. "The unfortunate reality is you have to have information like that to move forward with public funds. Even AEGON, which said they prefer to invest in bricks and mortar, said they realized the study is the first step."

A structure of such scope will not be cheap.

Asked about possible ways of funding, Bowers noted the private-public partnerships being seen across the Midwest. Madison, Wis., she said, has a center that leases space to an insurance company.

"We just need to see what it should look like in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in Linn County," she said.

A local option sales tax also has been mentioned as a possible funding source, Wasta said.

Williams Architects has considerable experience in developing community centers. Wasta said it's critical the firm list items in priority order and present them in phases. "We want to build a village," he said. "We want to build it in pieces. Let's build a campus, not a structure that's a huge facility from the get-go. It would be my dream that dirt could be turned within three to four years."