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CEDAR RAPIDS – The first of an expected 1,300 or more checks for up to $10,000 have gone out to flood victims to pay for personal possessions lost in the June 2008 flood using local-option sales tax revenue. Mayor Ron Corbett and four of his eight City Council colleagues quietly delivered the first two checks [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Representatives of the city’s new Medical District, which include the city’s two hospitals and the physicians’ group, Physicians’ Clinic of Iowa, will hold two open houses this week to talk about the district and PCI’s plan to build a new medical “mall” there along 10th Street SE at Second Avenue SE. The [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Bad second impressions can go a long way to ruining good first ones. That’s the thought of City Council members Don Karr and Chuck Swore, who say they had a good chuckle recently as they left a meeting at the city’s Eastern Iowa Airport and headed back toward downtown along Interstate 380. [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — The City Council is seeking to secure $12.2 million more in state I-JOBS disaster-related funds in a statewide competition for a remaining pot of about $30 million in such funds. To date, Cedar Rapids’ city government has secured a total of $43 million in I-JOBS funds: $5 million each for the new [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS – A draft of a traffic study on the proposed closing of a section of Second Avenue SE to allow Physicians’ Clinic of Iowa to build a medical building there between 10th and 12th streets SE states that the city street system “appears” to have “sufficient capacity” to handle the PCI plan. The [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS –  Five or six truckloads of stored, wet and fire-scorched seed corn will add an estimated $175,000 to the cost of demolishing the flood-and-fire-damaged, former Sinclair meatpacking plant, Greg Eyerly, the city’s flood-recovery director, reports. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying for the demolition, now in progress, at a cost that could [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS – Art has found a friend at City Hall. The City Council this week said it will steer 1 percent of a building project’s cost into public art and other visual enhancements, a move that beefs up a current 16-year-old city policy that has been little used and allows but doesn’t require such [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Another hope at City Hall has been dashed, for now, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA has limited the city’s access to funds which the city had thought it would get for use on an “improved” or “alternate” project because of flood damage to the city’s First Street Parkade. The city is moving [...]