Downtown Disneyland: Cedar Rapids Downtown Redevelopment Plan

Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan Cliffs Notes

0:00 Alan introduces the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan and the order of operations at a city council presentation. He describes the downtown development plan as “Downtown Disneyland,” warning of poor outcomes both aesthetically and culturally. 

Visit the Downtown Cedar Rapids Vision Plan web page. 

3:36 James Klein, president of CRBT Bank and president of the downtown SSMID describes his role in the downtown development plan and recommends full approval.

5:04 Alan raises questions: should the bank behind the development plan be allowed to finance those plans? Recommends CRBT be blocked from financing development because they have too much influence and knowledge. They are unfairly positioned to profit, no matter the outcome of the businesses and projects financed.

6:56 Mayor O’Donnel introduces the proposal: to adopt and incorporate the revised downtown development plan into the larger city development plan. The mayor introduces Director Pratt who oversaw the city’s involvement in the project.

7:06 Director Pratt talks about the long collaboration between the SSMID, Economic Alliance and the City. Introduces Brad and Amanda from research firm PUMA who will present the proposal.

7:57 Alan explains the SSMID structure and the Downtown, Med Q, “The District” (Newbo/Czech Village) and newly appointed “College District” SSMIDs.

10:00 Brad and Amanda from PUMA introduce the report and describe their history in working with Cedar Rapids.

11:26 Brad and Amada introduce the working group that came together around the plan

12:37 Alan responds regarding the working group, pointing out it is all white, with an emphasis focused on business development, without representation from affiliated neighborhoods.

13:40 Alan describes how adjacent neighborhood districts are overlooked and excluded from input, including Wellington Heights and Oakhill Jackson, as well as the west side neighborhoods adjoining the downtown.

Alan addresses the city process of developing workgroups and how it results in bias, bypassing the wants and needs of actual residents in the downtown.

14:53 Amanda from PUMA describes the community survey data

15:23 Alan talks about the demographics. The research targeted suburban neighborhoods with far greater wealth than downtown residents, and 95% white respondents. They then winnowed each category to the top three responses, effectively obliterating difference from the results and falsely creating a sense of unity and cohesiveness.

18:00 Alan pulls census data on Cedar Rapids to demonstrate the manipulation of data.

20:00 Alan brings up a map of downtown to visually represent the area affected by the plan.

25:04 Amanda describes the results of the survey

26:21 Alan responds, describing how the responses represent coded anti-Black, anti-minority and anti-poverty biases in the overwhelming white majority surveyed in the research.

31:50 Amanda continues the report, highlighting the outcomes requested by the city’s white, wealthy target audience.

36:22 Brad describes the downtown physical infrastructure proposed, including river access, a “maker-space” zone for “brewing beer” and other maker activities (from the library to Mount Vernon and East of 3rd street)

37:24 Alan unpacks the survey responses on downtown outcomes

41:56 Brad describes the goals extrapolated from the survey results

42:22 Alan responds to the goals

42:40 Amanda describes the goal of activating Mays Island with a performance stage and reworking the third avenue bridge to either be more accessible, or closed and turned into a linear park (like the High Line in New York).

44:04 Amanda describes the next Catalitic project – storefront activation. They want to start with storefronts on third street and work out from there.

44:39 Amanda describes the bike pathways and rerouting of some nature trails as well as multiple options for redoing 3rd ave so it becomes a “festival street” that can be closed down for events.

45:44 Alan responds to the plan describing how these are boilerplate roadway changes that are duplicates of Portland, Salt Lake, Denver, Boulder. They don’t need a comprehensive disruptive and discriminatory development plan to make these accessible road changes.

47:02 Amanda describes bicycle and connectivity initiatives (note it connects north to bike trails and south to Newbo, but leaves off connections to east and west neighborhoods).

49:00 Alan describes how Portland Oregon hired downtown concierges to “welcome” people and keep an eye out for problems – the idea of “welcoming” can become form of policing out undesirables.

50:24 Brad describes the targeted strategies for goal 2 which would include the “clean and safe” policing of downtown.

52:02 Alan reinforces the mechanism of “clean and safe” can quickly become “biased and discriminatory.”

52:10 Brad introduces the 72 options outlined in the proposal that the city and SSMID could adopt.

52:27 City council responses begin.

52:32 Scott Olson asks about how the city will pay for maintenance of all of these infrastructure changes – cites work that is already behind.

53:29 Brad responds that it is a partnership between city and for-profit entities that work on that. He agrees that the city is behind on regular maintenance.

54:39 Alan responds to Scott Olson and Brad’s conversation – points out that this “back and forth” between the SSMID and the city is merely business pressuring the city forever to keep pumping money into the downtown, neglecting other parts of the city. Alan describes it as like the Las Vegas Strip versus the rest of Las Vegas that looks bland and stripped of value.

1:02:30 Ashley Vanorny says the downtown will get “really cute” and that redeveloping the downtown will make the city “resilient” after years of recovery from the flood and Derecho. She claims it will offer what young people want, in order to retain youth after graduation and make the city a destination.

1:05:06 Alan Responds to Vanorny stating it is a mistake to imagine the city can develop a “cute” downtown and simply bypass the results of climate change. He also suggests that the reasons youth are leaving Iowa has little to do with the Cedar Rapids downtown, and much more to do with the degradation of human rights in Iowa. Alan believes the state, under Governor Reynolds is putting money toward development with a message, “In leu of rights, we offer you amenities.”

1:15:22 Tyler Olson asks for examples of “what works” in other cities from the smorgasbord of options presented in the plan.

1:18:05 Brad responds that the partnership of SSMID, City, and Economic Alliance include the right people at the table but points out the city is not doing enough to bring in grants and other funds. He mentions the makeup of the governing body is usually more diverse, including more community partners. He points out that these plans work best when they uphold the concept of community space where everyone can come and participate in civic community.

1:21:54 Alan responds, highlighting that the EA, City and SSMID have a stranglehold on the plan focused on profit, not civic engagement. The city is desperate for tax dollars, and the SSMID and EA have falsely put forth the idea that this is a fix for their income woes.

Alan describes his interaction with Doug and Brad following the presentation and new information he gleaned from his conversation with Brad.

1:31:15 Marty Hoeger mentions he is happy to see the center being described as Mays Island rather than first and third, for example, and welcomes the expansion to the west side. He points out CR has been known as a franchise, fast food restaurant city, but the downtown represents many more local restaurants, and he sees that as an opportunity to change perception.

1:34:38 Alan shows images he took in downtown Denver when he lived there, representing highlights – interesting things, as well as kitch arts that were installed as part of a redevelopment initiative similar to the downtown redevelopment plan.

1:43:20 Ann Poe loves the plan and agrees with the goals, but wonders, despite the nice presentation and objectives, how it will be paid for. She suggests tabling the plan for now and waiting on a vote until the task force, the next step in the plan, weighs in on the actual steps out of the 70 proposed options, they want to take, in what order and with what money from local business and the city.

1:47:20 Alan evaluates Poe’s response and talks more about the role of the task force in the plan.

1:48:58 Scott Overland voices concerns about the governing body for the organization. He sees the plan as exciting and with opportunity, but wants to make sure the governing body is aligned and accountable to the various stakeholders, those that live, work, invest in, “and most importantly, visit downtown.”

1:51:43 Alan responds to Overland’s comments pointing out that because the downtown community in Wellington Heights and Oakhill Jackson was neglected in the surveys and research that we don’t even know how the community sees the boarders and function of downtown. Scott’s response is unclear – those who live, work, invest in downtown seem like one group, but those who “visit” should not be represented in the governing body. It’s important to understand them from a UX “User Experience” perspective, but not from a representational perspective. It is far more important to represent the diverse community that will be most negatively impacted if the singular financial objectives of the SSMID, City, and Economic Alliance play out to the detriment of our current ACTUAL diversity in the area.

1:56:55 Dale Todd shifts the focus from the governing body to “leadership” citing that there has been drift where the city no longer has as close a connection to the downtown as it once did. He wants to pass the proposal and “sort out the minutia later.” He points out that past plans have gotten stuck because it wasn’t clear who “owned” completion of part of an approved project, so he believes the strong leader will be important to keep the minutia on track. He wants to vote today, because, as he says, city councils change (one current member is there for his last day, having lost the election to a newcomer). He wants the document and the vote cemented.

2:00:00 Alan responds to Dale Todd. Counsellor Todd doesn’t say who or where the strong leadership should come from. Alan points out the shift from Overland’s focus on the governing body to leadership and the implied role of the city in that leadership. Dale Todd says this is an opportunity to reconnect the city with the downtown. Murdock questions whether forcing the relationship based on an imposed financial responsibility is the right way to proceed. “Hey, I like you. Let’s run up a bunch of shared credit card debt in order to cement our future relationship!”

2:03:29 Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell goes after Dale Todd a little bit, saying “with all due respect, it’s not minutia.” She believes the next phases of the plan will require creativity and innovation that the city has not yet seen and citing her phrase “cities are forever,” she believes the plan is important to create a city that “survives, not just thrives.” She praises the participation of the community saying, “You did this.”

2:07:00 Alan responds to Mayor O’Donnell. He challenges the idea that “cities are forever,” returning to the challenges of recovering from billion dollar environmental catastrophes and recognizing that the future holds greater environmental challenges, including emerging global challenges like fast moving fires. He questions whether the focus on downtown will result in the kind of collaboration, teamwork, and shared effort that future catastrophes will require during recovery. He proposes that the attractiveness of the city to others might come from investment in the people of Cedar Rapids, not in decoration.

Alan points out that a “cute downtown” is not a resilient city.

Alan recognizes that the Mayor’s comments are correct – much greater creativity and innovation skills are needed, but the city, Economic Alliance, and SSMID do not understand creativity and innovation. They require a completely different collaborative process than the manipulated research we see in the plan.

Alan Murdock believes that the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan should be scrapped because the research process was so corrupt.

He also points out that the kinds of stores in cities like Portland and Salt Lake are the face for multi billion dollar industries, and that Cedar Rapids doesn’t have the kinds of industry that make this kind of downtown investment feasible and a priority. Scott Olson and others are correct to recognize that the city will be drawn into a pressure environment that demands more and more investment above and beyond the needs of the rest of the city.

The City, SSMID, and Economic Alliance are relying on the idea of drawing in outside revenue, but they haven’t provided a clear story or profile of that visitor or patron.

Murdock points out that you can see many of the other cites that have adopted this type of plan, and that have hired PUMA to conduct their redevelopment research. Cedar Rapids is competing against all of these for draw, and all of the other cities have more scenic and natural draw than Cedar Rapids. Without ready investment capital, this plan does not look like a competitor. In the competition among “Downtown Disneylands” actual Disneyland or any of the other cities win out.

To create a resilient plan the city needs to think bigger and elsewhere. The downtown should be the result of innovation growth, not the other way around. To do that we need to empower people first.

Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan Documents

Introduction to the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Alan Murdock : Good evening, everyone. This is Alan Murdock. I run Murdock Media Productions in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I’m coming to you live on YouTube tonight. And I am recording a session that I will edit and upload to YouTube later on. Tonight, I wanna talk about the new city of Cedar Rapids downtown development plan. I’m calling it the Disneyland Downtown Plan here in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

And a lot of people may disagree with me on that assessment, but I want to talk it through and talk about some of the features of the plan, some of the risks and challenges to the community, and get some feedback on the city council members and what they said about the plan and the direction that they’re going with it. So I’m going to stream the city council meeting as part of this, and I’m going to have to jump it back and forth between my mic and the system sound. So there’ll be a little bit of delay as I move back and forth between those two systems, but we’ll get it going as much as we can.

The things to know about the city council meeting, there are two public comment sessions. For anything that’s on the agenda, there’s a comment session at the beginning before they actually discuss the item. So people can come in, if they’ve read their packet, if they’ve read the information that the city has had to present, then they can make a comment about that.

They have to sign up on a sheet in advance and then they’re able to speak. Anybody that wants to speak on issues that are related to the city, but that are not on the agenda, speaks at the tail end, after everything has been presented. And so when you’re going to city council and you wanna present, there’s a couple of different challenges.

Number one, when you speak on an item that’s on the list that they will discuss, you present before they discuss. So you don’t get to respond to what they say. And if you speak at the end, you’re not supposed to roll in things from the meeting itself to then comment on during that period. You have your topic. You’ve written down your topic. You’re supposed to speak on your topic. And you’re supposed to leave everything else off the table. So it can be challenging to get good dialogue back and forth on these issues in anything that’s close to real time.

So I want to put that out there first. The other reason for mentioning that is that I’m gonna talk about, we’re gonna play James Klein’s comment. He is the president of CRBT. That’s Cedar Rapids Bank and Trust. They have their regional bank in our area and they fund a lot of development. They’re also in agriculture and small business and other types of lending, personal home loans and things like that.

Additionally, the CRBT president is the chair of the planning committee. He’s the chair of the downtown SSMID, and we’ll talk about what that is. It’s a development program that’s sponsored by the city and supported by business owners in a specific region. We’ll dig into that further as well. So he’s gonna talk a little bit about his perspective from being inside of the process of developing this proposal.

Then he’s going to make a recommendation that the city adopt the plan. So I’m going to switch my audio over so that you can hear what he has to say, and then I’ll play his clip.

James Klein Supports the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

James Klein: Thank you, Mr. Mayor and City Council. I’m here really with four different hats on today to talk about the downtown visioning process and plan that is on your agenda today. First of all, I come to you as part of the planning committee.

So we kicked this off in the spring of this year with constituents from various areas. Went through a thorough selection plan, selected Puma, who you will hear from later, for the downtown vision plan and my experience with them has been fantastic. They were thorough, detailed and have offered us a great visioning plan for the future of downtown Cedar Rapids. My second hat I’ll put on is as the chair of the downtown Schmid (SSMID).

Our downtown Schmid (SSMID) is certainly committed to the downtown and has been part of this visioning process. And we want to coordinate with the city and accelerate some of these items in the plan as we go forward. The third hat I put on is CRBT. I’m the president of Cedar Rapids Bank and Trust. And certainly a downtown vibrant community is important to us as a community bank for the future of our city. And then my last hat I put on is as a lifelong Cedar Rapidion living here over 50 years. I remember coming downtown, and the importance of a downtown to a city is quite important.

So with all those hats, I recommend that you adopt the downtown visioning plan from Puma. Thank you.

Alan Murdock: So I have a couple questions. When we’re talking about a banker being chair of the development commission, especially the president of a bank, we’re looking at somebody who has significant investment opportunity in the outcomes that are going to happen there.

So one question that I have is the CRBT bank precluded from funding and investing in the development of this area or are they carte blanche able to lead the development, promote the development plan, fund the development plan, and then also receive the interest off loans?

And if somebody defaults, can the bank then claim that property and just resell it or re-manage it right back into the plan that they’ve been running the whole time?

It seems like a lot of power and a lot of authority and a lot of benefit to claim from being involved in leading the development effort. So that’s a question that I have for the city. I don’t know the answer to that. I will ask the city at a city council meeting.

Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan Presented by PUMA

I’m going to jump forward and we’re going to go to Jennifer Pratt. Jennifer Pratt is a director for the city and has worked closely on the vision CR plan, which is the big picture citywide development plan. She introduces Brad Segal from a company named PUMA, they are a research and development company out of Denver, Colorado that works with cities that are trying to redevelop their downtown.

PUMA has done significant research on downtowns across the country. We’re gonna look at some of that research today and I’ll talk a little bit about that.

Mayor O’donnell: In an action plan and incorporating it into our Envision CR plan, Jennifer Pratt joins us now. Jennifer, I will recognize you.

Jennifer Pratt: Thank you, Mayor and Council.

I just wanted to just first introduce Brad Segal and Amanda Canard who are from Puma Consulting who will be up making the presentation. But I just wanted to take this time to note that the city has had a long history of working with the downtown SSMID on visioning for our future and it has been great to have that framework for the future. I will say one thing unique about this plan is it does include not only the vision but the action plan component, which again, we have seen through Envision CR has been so incredibly important to make sure that we are moving these projects forward.

So again, that balance between aspirational vision, getting people excited about the future, and then the steps necessary to get us there. So with that, I will turn it over to Brad and Amanda.

Mayor O’Donnell: Thank you, Jennifer.

Alan Murdock: We have this conversation. Jennifer is making an introduction, and she talks about how the city’s been working for a long time with the downtown SSMID. That is ‘SSMID’. It stands for Self-Supported Municipal Improvement District.

These districts have to be designated by the mayor. And they draw a specific boundary around an area of the city. Anybody that’s within that area, I think they probably do an internal vote as well to confirm they want to move forward with this. And once that is up and running, everybody in the SSMID pays additional tax and that tax money is used for improvement as well as marketing of the SSMID.

Right now we have about four of them. We have the downtown district, which is under discussion during this session. We have the Med Q, which is focused on hospitals and medical services. We have another one called The District.

That SSMID is actually a combination of two sides of the river. One is the Czech Newbo area, and the other is called the Newbo Market, because there’s a market that small startup restaurants can work out of. So we have those districts, and we also have one that’s called the College District. It is associated with a couple of colleges downtown.

They’re working on designating boundaries for that SSMID. And that’s one that I want to learn a lot more about. I don’t know a whole lot about the college district. What they’re going to vote on today is the approval of the plan. They are not approving the specific actions, but they’re approving the overall game plan. And then they have a task force that’s going to carry things forward and do further development.

So let’s go ahead and listen to Brad’s introduction.

Brad Segal from PUMA Introduces the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Brad Segal: Okay, once again, it’s great to see all of council and mayor and everyone in the audience as well. We are happy to be back here. We’re gonna give you a fairly brief presentation overview of the downtown action plan. We’ve been at it since early the first quarter of this year. So this is our fourth trip to Cedar Rapids on this project. And you may recall, I had some interaction in Cedar Rapids back in 2007. So it’s been a real pleasure for me to come back after that amount of time.

Why now? Why the downtown vision and action plan? Cedar Rapids has a great history of planning and also taking care of its downtown and investing strategically in downtown and these strategic investments are really driven by these series of plans.

So this started in ’07, the last plan was in ’17. The image on the screen is from the 2017 plan. This is an update to that, looking ahead for the next five plus years, and really responding to a variety of influences, including the community’s progress in installing flood control projects, and also responding to some changes from the pandemic that are affecting not only Cedar Rapids, but downtowns across the country.

This has been a collaborative effort between the city, the downtown SSMID, and the Economic Alliance. I want to acknowledge we’ve been working with a project working group representing the different partners in this process. Also other leaders within the downtown community. I also want to acknowledge the mayor. Oftentimes we’ll get the mayor’s name and we don’t always get the mayor. But in this project we got both.

And Mayor O’Donnell was involved from the beginning, hands-on, and we are grateful for your participation and contributions to the plan. Today, again, we’ll take you through sort of a rapid-fire summary of key elements of the plan. I believe council had a chance to take a look at it. It was distributed within the last 10 days or so. And with that, I’m gonna hand it to my colleague, Amanda Kennard…

Alan Murdock: Okay, so what I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about what’s going on with this work group that they’re talking about. And I have the report with me, so I’m going to switch screen shares. I’m going to stop the screen share that I have going on. I’m going to start a new one, and I’m going to bring up their actual report.

The group that they put together includes developers and bankers… and it looks to be 100% white in terms of its demographics. We’ve got the mayor, Doug Newman is the director of the Metro Economic Alliance, Nikki Wilcox is now appointed to a new position. Nikki was in the communications area, now she’s going to direct the downtown district, and Jennifer Pratt, City of Cedar Rapids, Caleb is also with the City of Cedar Rapids.

And then these are people from the commission and developers. And this is somebody from Linn County supervisors and another from insurance. So this is kind of the makeup of the committee.

I don’t see diversity that I would hope to see. And I’m going to talk further about diversity in Cedar Rapids. It’s an area that gets overlooked because our diverse population is small, but there are districts that are adjacent to these SSMID districts that do have high diversity. They simply get bypassed in the conversation.

That’s something that I want to change in the way that the city goes about its development process and the way that they put together their work groups, in particular, because this type of work group is simply just not even going to consider diversity. So if you have African-Americans at about 8% in Cedar Rapids, these committees are just going to see that as such a small demographic that its opinion doesn’t matter, and that is not the case. They don’t do the work to gather the information from diverse communities in our area to really get the answers that they need, the insights that they need to serve diverse communities. So let’s go ahead and jump back in to the presentation.

Amanda Kennard is Brad’s co-worker and worked on this report. She put together a lot of the report components. And she’s going to talk about stakeholders that they engaged and how they got the information from those individuals.

Amanda Kennard from PUMA Presents the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Survey Results

Amanda: Thanks, Brad. And thank you for having us here this afternoon. So community engagement was a really key component of the planning process throughout. So we initially engaged downtown stakeholders. We had regular check-ins with our working group.

We also held roundtable meetings and individual interviews with key stakeholders. We then distributed an online survey which got over 1,400 responses. And I’ll go through some highlights of findings from that online survey.

Alan Murdock Responds to the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Survey Results

Alan Murdock: Okay, so I wanna talk a little bit about these demographics and I’m gonna bring up my screen share again so we can look at the report directly.

When I look at this community outreach section, some things strike me. So number one, we have 100,000 plus individuals living in Cedar Rapids. So we have 1,600 inputs collected. So we’re a little bit over 10%.

(It’s actually around 1%. The city is a little over 130,000, so closer to 1% response rate. I’m not so good at math off the top of my head!)

That seems like a good metric to be able to extrapolate data from, you know, so when we look at these stakeholders though, downtown engagement included about 150 participants in five working group meetings using round tables. And so that’s going to be an invite only kind of thing. They’re reaching out to local businesses and people that are regularly downtown, they want to collect those individual’s responses.

And then they followed up with an online survey. And the 1,414 people that responded to that survey, they really targeted that to outside of the downtown area. So they hit all the suburbs and all of the outside areas that has a higher household income. We’re looking at $60,000-plus per household, whereas when you are looking in Cedar Rapids, in the downtown area, you’re looking at least $10,000 less than that per household.

So they’re looking at those who have more money and saying, what do you want in a downtown? What’s going to bring you downtown? And they’re not surveying the people in the local area. They also did a pop-up at a blues night with about 60 participants. That’s what you see here, the outdoor booth.

Then they had open house meetings, again, 50 people, and the open house meetings that the Economic Alliance holds are poorly advertised. They don’t do a lot of effort to advertise those broadly, especially to the downtown resident community. The event information doesn’t get passed on very well. And so there’s a lack of communication about this type of event in the downtown.

When we look at this, I’m going to jump to the next slide because they’re going to talk about it in a second. When we get to demographics, we’ve got 55% in the greater Cedar Rapids downtown. These responses come from outside of downtown. So they’re really asking external people what they want to see in downtown. And then they distributed by age and income. It skewed female 61%, which isn’t terribly bad, but white 95%.

When we take a look at the actual data for our city, I’ll go ahead and share a different screen here. And in my browser, I wanna bring up the census. So when we’re looking at this, we can see that we’ve got white alone is 80% of the population in Cedar Rapids, and black or African American is 8.7%.

And then American Indian is 0.2, and Asian alone is 2.7, Native Hawaiian is 0.3, two or more is 6%, and Hispanic or Latino is 4.3%. So we’re kind of seeing white alone, not Hispanic, is 78%.

So we’re not seeing that kind of diversity represented in the survey responses, and that’s skewing the data significantly. So what they’re getting is feedback from a single population and not understanding the rest of the population. So let me bring up actually a map. Let’s go back to Google.com. And we can take a look at downtown Cedar Rapids.

And so this is kind of a collision point between the focus on revitalizing financially this whole area down here and the pressure that it’s creating on First Avenue, Wellington Heights and Oak Hill Jackson in terms of property values and who gets to live here and what that looks like.

Diversity and Development in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

This whole district this whole area right here used to, I looked at data from about 10 years ago, used to be about 40% diverse actually was a little higher than that, it was like 48 to 50-ish percent diverse. And what that means, the United States as a whole is around 40% diverse, so the downtown is or was at one point, equal or greater diversity than the diversity of the United States as a whole.

And so when you’re looking at all these other areas that are predominantly white, you ask yourself, “how is this area going to create things that are actually going to be meaningful to diverse people around the country and around the world?”

Well, Wellington Heights is the neighborhood that has that knowledge, has that community, and has that insight. And so it would make sense to center development around new ideas and new cultural connections between people in these areas rather than focusing on what do the people in the external, primarily white neighborhoods want from a downtown so that they can come in, drive up prices, and push these individuals out and break up what is actually a really viable, valid, rich, diverse neighborhood.

So those are things that I’m really thinking about. I know other people are thinking about them as well. And I know a lot of people have given feedback to the city regarding this. And so there’s a lot of, will the city listen? That’s a big question. And how do we as residents of this city press our local government to accept that information and change its development practices?

Are they locked in and are they just going in one direction or are they willing to flex and change the way that they take their approach? So I’m going to go ahead and share back to the video sequence.

Amanda Cannard: Additionally, we had a pop up at the first Blues Night in downtown back in May of this year.

And then we also had an open house meeting when we were on site back in August to present some key findings from the plan at that point. So here are some highlights from that online survey, quick snapshot of who we heard from. We heard from a lot of greater Cedar Rapids residents living outside of downtown, and also a really strong representation from employees. And then we also had a reasonable well distribution of respondents by age and income, but more females and more white respondents.

So we asked folks today what are the top three things that bring them downtown. Food and beverage was high on that list at 70%, followed by events and festivals and entertainment, so things like theaters, live music, things of that nature. Next we asked folks looking to the future, what are three words that best capture their vision for downtown in 2032.

The top two priorities were “clean and safe.” So really the fundamentals. And then from there, folks really want to see a downtown that’s entertaining, lively, vibrant, and fun.

Coded Discriminatory Language in the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

I want to talk a little bit about these slides that Amanda’s been going through. And I’m going to share the report again so that we can look at it ourselves.

So when we look at this survey, we go through these slides. So we’ve got the community outreach and the percentages, who’s being reached and so forth. Then we’ve got this more from the online survey. What are the top three things that bring you to the downtown Cedar Rapids? So we can tell from the framing of the question that they’re not actually interested in what people who are already downtown think and feel about the downtown.

They’re really thinking about who is external to the downtown and how do we get them to come downtown. That’s actually been a key question in their development plan since 2017. The question of “how do we get people to come downtown and stay downtown?”

One of the challenges, for example, when they do the farmers market downtown, people will come. They’ll walk the circuit. They’ll buy things at the farmers market. But if all the people that came down for the farmers market wanted to eat downtown, there would be so many people waiting in line that restaurants wouldn’t be able to turn booths over and feed everyone that showed up.

What I’m actually going to do now is jump forward and get to, um, the city council members and what they have to say.

The Cedar Rapids City Council Responds to the Downtown Development Plan

Mayor Tiffany O/Donnell: Council, you’re up.

who’s gonna start us off, Council member Olson.

Scott Olson Responds to the Downtown Development Plan

Scott Olson: Thank you. It’s interesting and I think it’s important that you’ve narrowed things that can be accomplished within that five-year period versus a lot of plans just so big and nothing or only certain things get done or partially done. So I appreciate that and I think that’s gonna make a difference in the vision plan. How would you rate as you’ve studied other cities?

The biggest issue as we do improvements, how do most cities fund keeping those improvements because we have an issue now that our downtown has a lot of repair work to be done.

Our downtown has declined in the infrastructure in some of these older areas. What are communities doing to make sure, as you saw the top two, “safe and clean?” And we’re far from that in my mind.

And so what are cities doing that build all these things, but if you can’t maintain them, then you just have more things to fix. So what are you seeing out there across the country?

Brad Segal: Oh, Councilman, you didn’t throw me a softball here to start, did you? No. Great question.

It’s part of what we actually specialize in is not just the pretty projects, but then how are we going to maintain all this infrastructure and all this experience. The quick answer is public-private investment. It takes both the public sector and the private sector and an ongoing commitment. I think the good news for Cedar Rapids is you have the building blocks that we usually look for.

In a community you have a SSMID which is a self-taxing agency the downtown businesses and property owners already tax themselves an extra amount To contribute to maintenance and marketing and taking care of infrastructure.

I do agree with you I think there’s some deferred maintenance downtown and I think that is beyond the scope frankly of the SSMID. So that gets into capital repair where Groups like a SSMID would work in tandem with their partners at the city to prioritize different capital improvements moving forward.

That’s that’s the most common partnership we see on maintenance and infrastructure both something like a SSMID working hand-in-hand with city.

Alan Murdock: Scott Olson asked how do we pay for this development? And what is the in this infrastructure? How’s the infrastructure maintained so he’s imagining that we’re gonna do all this construction and Then what, you know?

If the money isn’t there, if the money isn’t coming through to pay for it, then who is going to pay for it? And so Brad’s response is, “it’s a public-private investment combination.”

He said, “there is deferred maintenance.” And what he means by that is the city has not kept up on the maintenance that it should have done. “And that’s beyond the scope of the SSMID.”

So he’s saying the city has to do its part, finish developing, finish doing the paving and the things that it should have done in the first place. And that’s not the SSMID’s responsibility.

But this private partnership, private and public partnership needs to work together to make sure that the money is there.

And I have some examples of that. So in Portland, Oregon, you’ve got the Nike store downtown. The Nike store is a beautiful space. It’s a custom designed building.

Inside, you see shoes displayed like sculptures. They are inside of plexiglass rounded cases with beautiful lighting. You’ve got video everywhere. You’ve got slow motion. You’ve got interviews. You’ve got, you know, all kinds of footage. There’s millions of dollars worth of effort put into that building. And the building does not have enough foot traffic to break even.

Purchases driven by foot traffic will ever repay the cost of the development in that building alone. What Nike is doing is they have their development team out in Beaverton, so it’s just next door (the next city over), and they’ve got their downtown location.

So when people come to visit, they want to see Nike, most of them do not get to go to the Nike headquarters where they’re innovating and developing new products and testing and training and working with athletes. They get to go to the store downtown.

So this multimillion dollar store, its purpose to instill in the mind of a visitor something that is like going to their favorite museum or the best museums in the world, but it’s for the product. And so they have the Nike experience, and when they leave, the experience solidifies 15, 20, 30 years worth of shoe purchases.

And so the store’s purpose is fulfilled through online sales or through other shoe stores where Nike product is carried, or through custom shops that they go and visit to make a specific shoe purchase. And so all of these different kinds of things add up to significant value, but Nike is prepaying into the downtown to have this nice store.

They are also facilitating or participating in whatever downtown development work needs to be done.

Where are those businesses here in Cedar Rapids? We don’t have a lot of those. We have Collins Aerospace. They don’t have an interest in developing and building the downtown to put in money to sponsor a store that helps to fund the downtown and helps to support Collins through future sales.

They’re not going to do a museum downtown, they’re not interested in showcasing of all the work that they do. Most of it is private or top secret, and they want to retain their secrets. They’re working on government projects. So they are not going to be the kind of business that wants to sponsor the downtown.

So where’s that money going to come from? We don’t have innovative brands like Nike springing up out of our region. That goes to the commodity thinking that I talked about earlier. So how are we going to go about getting that money?

So Scott Olson has a really great question. And then the answer, you know, so the SSMID is gonna work with the city. So the SMID is city sponsored, but now it turns around and pressures the city to say, “Hey, we’re supposed to be the financial development district, so you have to put the money here.”

The city is already so behind on repaving roads and all the other kinds of work that they do, that they’re actually working off a spreadsheet. They have little tick marks for, when the road has a certain set of features, then and only then does it get repaired. So you can’t switch, where you can’t switch one road repair project for another.

It has to reach a certain level of damage before it gets repaired, and everything just waits in line. If something happens to a road that causes it to meet the criteria, it could move up ahead of other roads. But to me, that’s kind of kludgy and there’s not critical thinking or proactive things going on there.

But then something like the SSMID could come in and put enough pressure to move the downtown area into early reinvestment, a higher level of maintenance that would draw those resources that are already strapped, that are necessary for doing all the other work that we have to do in this city.

Does the Cedar Rapids Disneyland Downtown Development Plan Strip Mine Resources from the Rest of the City?

So I think Scott Olson’s question is really right on the money. It reminds me a lot of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas has the strip and the strip gets all the money poured into it. But if you drive around Las Vegas anywhere else, you’re looking at these tan walls on these buildings that are just being baked in the sun and it’s unpleasantly hot and it doesn’t seem, the life there doesn’t seem as vital in the rest of the town.

Las Vegas looks like all of the resources are sucked out of the rest of the town straight to the strip.

So how are we going to deal with that? Are we going to create this Disneyland downtown and then have all the money sucked out of everything that we need to do around the rest of the city?

The city’s already proposed putting in a casino along the riverfront. You know, one of the big questions that I have about the city’s investment strategy is…

So many of the things that the City of Cedar Rapids and Economic Alliance bring here are strip mining. They draw out resources. And yes, they might provide a few jobs here and there. But where’s the money going? The money is going back to headquarters. And headquarters is in Florida, or it’s in Illinois, or it’s somewhere else in the country. It’s not in Cedar Rapids.

So what we ultimately need to be able to have the businesses that would fund this downtown originate and grow from our region.

We need to focus on that innovation, and that innovation is going to come from diversity, creativity, forward thinking, getting away from the commodity mindset, and finding things that actually serve people both here and around the country and around the world. I think that we need to put our focus on that before we put our focus on rebuilding a downtown.

So what would that look like? Investment in people first.

It would be money that would be much better spent.

Ashley Vanorny Comments on the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

So the TLDR is that Cedar Rapids is about to get real cute. I’m reflecting today on a few things, and one of them is, you know, I had the opportunity to talk about Cedar Rapids, very short time period, roughly about five minutes with our strategic partners at the National League of Cities. And you know, these are major companies that are invested in working with municipalities.

And the overwhelming feedback was “Cedar Rapids sounds amazing” and I had the benefit of explaining to them, “it is!” All those things that I shared we really do have a lot of great things going on.

So you know six years ago I faced a run-off election today. Cedar Rapids has been in various states of recovering for nearly half my life and from floods and winds, of wind events.

But now, after a lot of hard work and years of hard work and strategic initiatives, even with my own terms on council, we’re finally getting to a place where we can continue that resiliency and that next phase of resiliency is optimizing our quality of life and ability to invest in our downtown and everything that comes with a bustling and vibrant downtown.

Cedar Rapids is already a really great place to call home. There will always be people who have critiques and criticisms. And we do hard things too. Everything’s happening concurrently. And I don’t know that any citizen will necessarily have the benefit of understanding how many things concurrently we are doing, that they really should be proud of the tax dollar and value that they’re getting for their tax dollars. But we are. And this is further reinforced when I talk with other, council members in cities of our size and toe to toe, they are just in awe of the things that we’re doing and not without good reason.

But this continued activation will help retain and capture the 45 and under part of our population that we continue to talk about, but not necessarily engage and retain. It will help us also recruit people to stay and grow here as well as we continue our growing city. Our possibilities, I really feel, are limitless. And through the hard work by our council and our incredible city team we have really worked through the difficulties of constant and often contiguous disaster recovery to get us to a place where our future really is exceptionally bright. I appreciate the work that you’ve put into this. Thank you.

Alan Murdock Responds to Ashley Vanorny’s Comment on the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Alan Murdock: The TLDR is that Cedar Rapids is about to get real cute. You know, that’s the Disneyland downtown plan that I’ve been talking about here. So what is it going to take for us to, you know, get past that kind of quick hit kind of thing?

She said that “the next phase of resiliency is to optimize our quality of life and our ability to invest in downtown and everything that comes with a vibrant downtown.”

So basically Cedar Rapids has been responding to flood damage, then we had a derecho that was one of the highest priced storms in the United States ever to cause damage. It listed as number two when it happened.

So, she’s saying, well, we’ve gone through these challenges and now we’re at a situation where we’re ready to invest in thriving through a vibrant downtown. But we know that things are getting worse in terms of environmental threats. You know, we have fast moving fires. We have all other kinds of challenges. So what is the next challenge that we’re going to face? Is building a downtown the best way to prepare for that? I do not know.

She said, “I don’t know that any citizen will have the benefit of understanding how many things concurrently that we are doing that they should really be proud of the value that they’re getting for their tax dollars. There will always be people who have critiques and criticisms, and we do hard things too.”

And I think that this is in response to me and several other people who have been coming and speaking at the city council and drawing out and identifying many of the challenges that are being pressed on the community and even ways that the city’s pressure under its current financial constraints have been putting additional pressure back on to residents of Cedar Rapids. I think the city feels under attack and I think some of the councillors feel under attack, but that’s not my concern.

And the reason for that is, you know, so she says, “We do hard things too,” but that should be the expected minimum, right? So the city should work hard. Everybody works hard. Here I am on a Friday night doing this recording. I’m not getting paid a single dime for any engagement that I do regarding the city, regarding the school district, regarding any of those different kinds of things. So, you know, I’m putting in additional effort myself with no return. The only return that I get is if they actually change their processes and do some things that really benefit the community.

What we need to think about is how do we work in a different way because working hard is again a continuation of that commodity mindset. In Iowa, people feel like, “I get up in the morning, I go and I, you know, detassle the corn and then I go take the seed bags and I put them on the corn so that they get properly pollinated and, you know, then I go eat lunch and then I do more of that and I go to bed and then I get up in the morning and I do it all over again.”

And that’s considered “good work,” you know, so this idea of working consistently, you know, having a very regular regimented kind of schedule that’s very Midwestern mindset. And so when we’re looking at that, is that really the right mindset for what we need downtown? I don’t think that a regimented routine is what we do need.

I think that we need new types of thinking in Cedar Rapids, and I think that we need new ways of engaging with the framework of invention and creativity. So if we can do something in this new area, I don’t think that “hard work” is the best descriptor, maybe “smart work,” maybe “innovation,” maybe “creativity,” maybe “thinking outside the box” might be better descriptors for what we need right now to generate the kinds of revenue that are going to create the companies that have the revenue to do in the downtown what they want to do.

And then in addition, we need that thinking to be done in such a way that it doesn’t negatively impact the diverse communities that are already living and working in the downtown and that already have a life carved out for themselves in the downtown.

That is an even higher bar that we need to hit. So if people feel like they are working hard and we should pat them on the back and thank them for all the great work that they’re doing, that is not the attitude that’s going to get us where we need to go.

So she also says that, “this continued activation will continue to catalyze, capture, and retain the 45 and under part of our population that we talk about, but don’t necessarily engage and retain.”

So younger people are continually leaving Cedar Rapids and Iowa as a whole. When I lived here… I grew up in Ames from the age of three. I was in New York as a child and moved at the age of three to Ames and then went to university in Iowa City. And in 2000, when I graduated with my master’s degree, I left. My spouse and I moved to Portland, Oregon, and then we moved back across the country going to various cities. And so when I think about that…

When we were graduating I was looking at the possibility of staying in Iowa, and Cedar Rapids had a program where you could actually live on the waterfront, move into one of those buildings that I described that had, you know, low cost housing and you could get forgiveness on your student loans. And looking at it, it was just like, “No. No way am I going to stay here.

You know, I looked at Portland, Oregon, and Portland had five colleges in the downtown area, and I wanted to teach art. So I had my MFA in art, and that offered the launch pad for that career. I was able to go and teach at multiple colleges, built a career, became a college dean, and moved across the country to take a number of different academic jobs.

So those kinds of things are impactful in terms of how people make a decision about Cedar Rapids or actually, “Cedar Rapids or anywhere else,” right? So “anywhere else” generally wins over Cedar Rapids when people are making that decision. Not a whole lot of people make the decision to choose Cedar Rapids to stay. And not a lot of people choose Cedar Rapids as a destination that they want to move to. And a big factor in that has nothing to do with the city, the downtown, or Cedar Rapids in particular, but a lot of it does have to do with the state.

So human rights are in a terrible situation. We have a single-minded state government that is very conservative, and they have focused on restricting and removing rights. The city of Cedar Rapids wants to make a statement that it is a welcoming, inclusive, diverse community.

But when we’re looking at…the kind of the reality of where we’re at… I stay involved with the Cedar Rapids Pride board. And when I’m talking with the board there, I see two members that are leaving in the next couple of months. And one of them is moving out of the state of Iowa. They don’t actually have a destination state, but they know “not Iowa.” And then the other is moving out of the country, specifically to a country that has some of the highest protections for LGBTQ individuals.

And so Iowa is not a place where people make a choice to go to because they get what they want or need. It is a place that they may be stuck in. It may be a place that, you know, maybe fewer options and maybe, you know, that might be for a job.

But it’s not a selected destination for people at this point. And so, you know, when the city is addressing that, instead of just saying, “Hey, we’re a welcoming place,” you know, it needs to actually take a stand against the biases that are being pushed through state government and stand up and take a position in relation to that.

Then it would begin to have the perceived commitment that would build trust for people to choose it as a destination. They could be willing to come here to help fight for those rights and for a better society. But I don’t think people are going to believe that it is a welcoming, great community given the scenario and the regulation that we have in the state right now.

Tyler Olson Responds to the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Proposal

Tyler Olson: Thank you, Mayor. And thank you for your presentation today and also the work that you’ve done prior to this to engage the community and members of the council in the draft planning and process that you came to, to put this together. I also appreciate the time and energy that the folks that you highlighted in your presentation did. And it was really heartening to see how many people responded to the different modes of opportunity for input. I think it was 1,400 maybe on the online survey or at least total that you gathered.

I thought that a lot of the data was really fascinating. The ones that you presented today, but then I guess I’ll call them deeper cuts, some of the deeper cuts that you provided as well, just to see what people like about downtown, you know, what they’d like to see improved and, you know, areas for investment and focus. So, all in all really helpful and a lot of interesting information. The catalytic projects I think are really exciting and I think Council member Olson, the elder, put it well when he, I think he said there are projects that are doable. I mean I think we, you know, there are projects that can get done.

Also appreciate the way that this plan comes together and the way that projects get done in the core of the community are typically public-private or private-public partnerships. I really like the fact that the ones that were highlighted are there to spur with some public dollars spur a lot of private activity because I do think there are willing investors that are looking for some some public partnership as well.

It always comes down then to execution, right? And how it gets done. And so I think it was the last slide where you talked a little bit about how different organizations are put together. I guess my question for you, you mentioned some options, didn’t really necessarily recommend one or another. I won’t ask you to because you clearly did not want to.

I won’t put you on the spot to do that. So I guess what I will ask you in lieu of that, kind of what do you see as, I don’t know, I’m gonna say strengths and weaknesses, but you know what I mean, like kind of what are different, how are different structures used well? Does that make sense? I mean, how do you look at it when you’re kind of comparing?

Brad Segal: Yeah, no, I appreciate the question, Councilman. I want to be clear. Two points, just to be clear on this. One is you got the right partners at the table. So you got the city, you’ve got the SSMID, you’ve got the Economic Alliance, and everyone is passionately involved with downtown. So that’s number one. Number two, we suggested that there were two options plus. There could be other options that pop out of this.

Either one works, so it’s not an either or for the community. We think that either of the options we looked at work better, and there could be a third or fourth option that would work better than what you have.
So, “What were some of the key things we were trying to improve?” which I think was part of your question. A couple things, more involvement and accountability to the downtown community, and certainly the Economic Alliance has been really responsive, at least in intent to move forward with some recommendations we had related to that.

So these downtown organizations tend to include more downtown constituents in these activations and in the planning and in the governance of how these programs are managed. So that was one area we had. And then secondly, I would say these are the two primary ones. We do go into pros and cons within the report itself.

But the second one is leverage, leverage of funding and actually the… You can call me elder, it’s okay. Are you looking over here? Is that disrespect or what’s the deal? Okay, all right. As a boomer, I want to be sensitive to these issues.

So the elder, Olson, when he was talking about the different improvements needed downtown, he requires that public-private partnership. So we do feel that the community could be more effective at leveraging additional resources. We could be raising more funds for downtown, whether it be through sponsorships or through grants or through philanthropic avenues.

Particularly now, coming out of the pandemic, there’s a lot of opportunity that we’re seeing nationally for downtown areas and particularly in the area of community building. Downtowns are uniquely positioned as the central gathering place for communities.

And nationally, I don’t know if you have this issue in Cedar Rapids, but nationally we’re polarized and it’s rare where we can bring everybody together in a place to celebrate our community. And downtown needs to be that place. And a lot of our investments, a lot of these projects are actually related to that, are bringing people downtown, bringing people together, and these are all fundable to your earlier point. These are fundable activities.

And back to your organization question, and I’ll end it there, is we feel that we could be more effective, you could be more effective in Cedar Rapids in securing additional funding for many of these ideas that are in this plan.

Tyler Olson: Okay, I appreciate that. I think the, and it sounds like the SMID board is taking on this question. You mentioned a task force that they have.

Brad Segal: There’s a nodding head from the SSMID chair.

Tyler Olson: Yeah, some nods back there. And I appreciate that.

I think that’s, I guess, an important question for the board to answer as to how they think the best way to proceed. Because I said, I think there’s some exciting ideas here, and it’s going to, you know, that and some other things are going to make a difference in how it gets executed. And so answering that question will be an important one.

Alan Murdock responds to Tyler Olson’s Comments about the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Proposal

Alan Murdock: That was Tyler Olson and Brad talking about how we make choices about what features are going to work within the overarching plan. Brad responded that they have that in the plan. How do you make it work really is the bottom line question. And Brad’s comment was the organization needs to include more people in the community, so he’s implying that there’s generally a more diverse pool of people involved in governance.

He said, “You’ve got the right people involved at the table,” but he also implies that there could be greater diversity in the makeup of the board and the community that’s working on this endeavor. He said, “You could leverage more resources,” thinking outside of the box in terms of grants, sponsorships, philanthropy.

And so philanthropy would be support for museum exhibits. Philanthropy could be nonprofits that are working in the downtown area and activities that could elevate and amplify those nonprofits.

So right now the project is really driven by developers asking, “How do we make money through this downtown?” And Brad’s comment is, “You need to think about how this downtown makes an activation.” And he does this gesture.

What he is talking about is how a downtown can work as a civic space to bring many people from many different backgrounds together. But that doesn’t work if you over manage the space and turn it into this kind of commercial Disneyland. And that is my core criticism of this entire plan, is it doesn’t think about who the people are and how do the people actually engage and what does community look like in this new downtown? It just looks at how snazzy it is and how fun it is and how cute it is and how, and how much money it’s going to make and how it’s going to ‘revitalize’ and create this you know ‘cycle of profitability’ and growth and development the city has been chasing that same thing for decades.

When they put in a convention center, when they, you know, redevelop malls. They’re constantly looking for the thing that’s going to make Cedar Rapids happen. And the ‘thing’ that’s going to make Cedar Rapids happen are the ‘people’ that are already here, already engaged in doing interesting things. That’s the bottom line. And that’s not the answer that the city wants to hear. They have never wanted to hear it.

And I don’t think they will ever want to hear it.

We’re gonna need to, I believe, turn over the city council, eject the city manager, find a new city manager that has a different approach and mindset about things. And it may also extend to city attorney because a lot of the behaviors of the city seem like they are only looking at the legal minimum. Like, can we do it, can we get away with it?

“Well, the city attorney said it skims the line, so we’re gonna do it.”

That is not a high quality ethical position that leads to creating trust. So that’s why they’re getting the kinds of feedback and criticism that they are receiving.

Let’s take a look at the report from Brad.

So I stepped out of the meeting. I was actually on the list to speak at the tail end of the presentations that day. But when this presentation wrapped up, generally the people involved in a high value presentation like this, they go out into the hallway and they just chat each other up. So I followed Doug, who’s the director of the Economic Alliance out and then I met Brad out in the hallway and he and I had a good conversation and Doug just kind of slid off to a different conversation because he doesn’t want to deal with me… even though I’m a member of the Economic Alliance, which he heads, but Brad was in tune with my comments, especially about coded bias in terms like “clean and safe,” and he mentioned a national report his company has been doing for years, and he asked me to email him so he could send the report.

So I’m going to jump over to my PDF and share that. Okay. So let’s take a look at global trends.

And let me get it enlarged for you. OK, so this is the report that Puma put together. And it is collected from data all over the country. And when I spoke with Brad, he and I emailed back and forth a couple of times. And he said that the city of Cedar Rapids faces all of the challenges that are in this report. Most cities are facing these challenges. And he said Cedar Rapids is facing all of them.

Changing American demographics: the structure of talent and labor, and the types of matches between jobs and what people want and are capable of doing, lifestyles, what work is going to look like, what job sites are going to look like, how consumers are going to behave, are they going to go to physical places to shop, are they going to shop online, how do they engage, are they looking for ‘experiences,’ or are they looking for ‘things’?

Housing crisis: That is gonna be a big one in Cedar Rapids because we already have a strapped housing market. And he highlights that putting development pressure in a downtown area does change the pricing scenario for this region because our downtown is our highest diverse population with the lowest income.

The risk is that the plan results in destabilizing people that are already getting by but not thriving. And so the question becomes, “How do we activate and elevate our diverse community to strengthen it so that the diverse community remains in the downtown area and has the resources to grow and thrive in the downtown area?”

And so this housing and its relationship, the pricing and development pressures are a big deal in this area. Disruption is a big area in all of this. Public health and safety, finding community in a polarized age. And one of the things that Brad mentioned is he said, “Well, you guys aren’t that polarized. It’s great. You got such consistent feedback across….”

Yeah, but that’s because the Economic Alliance screens the process and put researchers in a channel that’s going to get the answers that they wanted in the first place from the community that they’ve targeted. And that community is a monoculture in and of itself.

And so the researchers didn’t push the barriers, the boundaries. Something that I was told by Brad was, “Oh, yeah, the Economic Alliance put us in contact with the intermediaries that are working with the immigrant population.”

I’m like, I’m not sure. “Did you talk with the immigrants themselves? Because when you actually get beyond the intermediaries, you’re going to get a different story. And you’re going to get actually what the experience of living here is.”

That’s not a key message that the Economic Alliance in the city has really pushed to explore and to promote. So we have such little input in the data that I don’t think that the report actually could even approach representing what a diverse population would want out of a downtown development plan. I just don’t think that it has anything going for it in that regard.

The pandemic is the great accelerator of change in downtowns: Demographics remain favorable, but can’t be taken for granted. So you actually have to do some. development work. Most of the downtown’s most pressing challenges will require local and regional problem-solving. Homelessness, crime, housing affordability, and this pressure that’s on our diverse community. That right there is kind of the heart of the problem that it hasn’t even been, the surface of this problem hasn’t even been scratched by the Development Commission.

or the SSMID or Any of the government officials that are working on this? And so when I look at it, those are the challenges that I see going on with this data.

Marty Hoeger Responds to the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Mayor O’Donnell: Councilmember Hoeger,

Marty Hoeger: I guess I would just add So in 2007 when you were here, I would assume that the geographical borders today are much different than they were in 2007.

So it excites me is to look at Mays Island as a centerpiece of our downtown versus a border and see the growth onto the west side. The second thing is then when you look to the south and you look at opportunities to like lot 44, which is crossing over 8th Avenue and into the new bow and the Czech village district to kind of make everything accessible.

So it’s not just about a four or five block area in the downtown, even going up into the medical district, incorporating all of those areas into how do you collaborate all of their different identities. The second thing I would say is what I caught interesting was historically Cedar Rapids may have been known as kind of a franchise restaurant city.

And then if you look at what brings people downtown and it’s the food and beverage, I would guess to say that a large percentage of food and beverage is locally owned. And that really is something to say about our community and how we support locally owned. So it excites me and it really, I do think and I appreciate that.

I would call it kind of low-hanging fruit that we can accomplish immediately And then go after some of the big things ticket items with public and private partnerships. So thank you very much. Appreciate everybody’s help on this.

Alan Murdock Responds to Marty Hoeger’s Comments About the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Alan Murdock: Marty Hoeger’s comments He likes that Mays Island is the center, so shifting the center of downtown from kind of the library area to the center of the river. So we’ve got the Mays Island is in the middle of the river. And that allows the city downtown plan to extend onto the west side. And so Hoeger likes this opportunity to expand into lot 47, which is on that side of the river and treat this area as broader than it has been historically treated.

He also says that Cedar Rapids was known as more of a fast food capital. You know, lots of strips with quick food chains and franchises. And the downtown is mostly made up of local food, local restaurants, and emerging kind of culinary scene. And he likes that.

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These are other downtown shots at night.

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But the idea here is as a custom artwork, you said you might pay five grand or 10 grand to install one or a series of these kinds of things. And then of course, they’ve got maintenance and upkeep on that. And that raises the question of where is this money going to come from?

You put all of these exciting little play interactive things, but something like that breaks down and all of a sudden the charm of this little alleyway has disappeared, you know, and they might’ve put in several hundred thousand dollars in redoing just the entrance to these little restaurants and bars to make it interesting.

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So, you know, they’re just painting that so the pipes and everything are the same and you know, it just becomes Instagram ready spaces right that’s the idea.

Here’s the graphic that you see on the corner right where that alley is and You know so this black square and they are doing things with the black background and then you go into this little alley where all this kind of stuff is going on and it’s interesting so…

It’s delightful and quick and playful, but does it have staying power? Those are the kinds of questions that I have about that. And I think Hager’s comments are interesting because they kind of highlight a different way of thinking about and looking at what that might, how that might play out in the overall flow of the city.

So Ann Poe is next. I’m going to stop and switch the audio over so we can hear what Po has to say.

Ann Poe Responds to the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Mayor O’Donnel: Council Member Poe.

Ann Poe: Yeah, thank you Mayor. First of all, I wanna start off by thanking Brad and Amanda and Jennifer from our team. I love this vision plan and agree with the goals that you’ve set out along with the action items. As I look through the packet and I go through all these action items, it’s really wonderful. And I agree also with the catalytic projects and understand that these projects will help energize our downtown, which is exactly what we’ve asked you to come forward with.

Because, because this is a Schmid, it’s appointed by the mayor, it’s a commission of the city, and because the city helped pay for this vision plan, I think we owe it to ourselves to see what the task force comes up with. You know, what kind of formal structure you’re looking for.

Because again, as I look at all these wonderful action items and goals, there’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of work to do, not just in the long term, but within the next year. So I guess my question would be, who’s going to do that work? Because there’s a lot to get done. And to Marty’s point, it’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, but it still has to be done, and it still has to have some accountability because of the amount of time and resources it’s gonna take just to get that low-hanging fruit accomplished, getting some of that accomplished, I think.

And I’m not so sure that the current structure has the ability or the capacity to do it. So I’m really looking forward to what the task force has to say and what they think, how they think we can get this done in a timely fashion.

We just need to get it implemented, right? And that’s what Jennifer had said was, this can fit very nicely within the city’s plan, strategic plan. And so I wanna get it done because so many of these things I love and I agree with and I can see how they’re gonna help. But I gotta know how it’s gonna happen. And that’s really important when you think about that public-private partnership.

I’m just a little concerned at this point to provide a resolution without knowing how we’re going to get this done. And at this point, Mayor, I’m kind of at the point where I think we should just kind of table it and wait to hear from what the task force has to say. We, you know, let’s see where we’re going to go with this and before we put a full resolution on our plate. But I love the work. It’s not about the work. I agree with it. I just want to know how we’re going to implement it.

Brad Siegel: Thank you, Mayor. If I could respond quickly to that. Councilwoman, I think that’s all legitimate. It’s a legitimate concern. It is ambitious. There’s a lot of stuff in there. Do be assured the partners, we’ve been talking to the partners throughout this process and they’re continuing to look at these and certainly, you know, Jennifer or the manager could respond to this, but we’ve been talking to the city, we’ve been talking to the alliance about near term, “What do we do?” So we’re not waiting.

We’re not waiting for a task force report that might be months from now. So there are, to your point, there are several sort of low-hanging fruit items in there that we’re helping the parties identify that they could be working on now. And in my sense is the partners are prepared to move forward now while they also concurrently figure out the longer-term structure issue.

So there’s sort of a desire here to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Ann Poe: Yeah, and I could appreciate that. I do appreciate that. So it kind of begs the question, how is this gonna get paid for?

Alan Murdock responds to Ann Poe’s comments on the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Alan Murdock: What is it gonna actually look like? What is it gonna take to get it done? And she proposes actually tabling a vote and waiting for the task force, which is the next phase. This report includes a series of recommended implementations.

So now there’s gonna be a task force and the task force is going to take that and they’re supposed to break out a series of recommendations.

It’s hard to tell if this is just completely theatrical or if this is posed legitimate position, but somebody’s gotta go out and say, well, “What if we just table the whole thing? What if it’s too big? What if it’s too much? What if we just hold off and listen some more and see what the task force comes up with?”

And I think that is an interesting position because Poe is also very interested in what is it going to cost and what is it really going to look like? She wants to see the reality before she puts her credit card down basically. So theatrical or not, I think that it is an important position and one that is possible to do something with here.

So the next person to talk is Scott Overland. And I wanna play his because he gets into the question, “What is the governance structure gonna look like?”

So Poe presents, maybe we table this whole thing. Overland says, what is the governing body gonna look like and how is it gonna work? And things get more interesting from here.

Scott Overland Comments on the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Mayor O’Donnell: Council member Overland.

Scot Overland: Thank you, Mayor.

As I read the plan and of course we had our meetings with you earlier.

My basic takeaway was it’s an exciting plan and without repeating too much what some of the others have said, it’s doable. But the other thing is it’s flexible because I’ve been of the opinion for a long time that downtowns are never finished. And I’ve lived in Cedar Rapids long enough to go back to when some of the gentlemen in this room were young people and we were tearing down and clearing blight in the downtown area.

and that goes back to maybe 1990 or so. And the downtowns traditionally have to evolve as things are thrown at them. And if we go back 20 or 30 years ago, we never would have guessed that we would see all the people that are moving into the downtown area. Many people thought, well, that’ll never happen, but it is, and it’s happening rapidly here. And so I think the important thing that we have to do is set up a governing body that reflects the people that live, work, and invest in the downtown area, and also most importantly, that visit downtown for various reasons.

And I’m not here to suggest how that ought to work, but I think it’s important that governance is not only accountable and accountable to the funders making it happen, but also accountable to the various stakeholders that are operating in the downtown.

It’s great to have goals, but you also have to measure, are you reaching those goals? Not so much on a five and ten year basis, but on an annual basis. And quite frankly, some of those will probably change as time goes by, and new things will come up. But at the same time, I think with the governing body, it needs to be folks that are all on the same page, that see what the goals are and are doing active measurement to make sure we are getting there and figure out what the obstacles are.

So in the long run, I’m extremely optimistic. I think as I read a lot in Wall Street Journal about other communities, we are nowhere in a bad situation compared to a lot of communities around the country. They talk about, well, this will take 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. And I think we have a tremendous opportunity to improve our downtown area to this point where years ago we would never have dreamt it.

So I think the report is outstanding and I look forward to continue evolution of it. Thanks.

Alan Murdock Responds to Scott Overland’s Comments on the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Alan Murdock: Overland, you know, says the plan is flexible and doable, but his area of interest is what the governing body is going to look like that is set up to represent the people that live, work, and invest in that downtown area. And then he says most importantly, that visit downtown. And I think that there’s a split here.

So people that live, work, and invest are one group. And then the demographic that spends is largely the visitors. So if people live and work in the downtown area, let’s say you have an apartment and you have a job, both in downtown, you’re receiving benefits from that. But you’re not the primary consumer. The primary consumer is somebody that’s coming in from one of these other areas that they’ve identified that they’ve targeted.

And that’s a different, it’s not, we don’t want the consumer demographics to be represented in terms of the governing organization, but we do want good research into what the wants and needs of a demographic to whom we’re presenting this downtown offer.

Right, so we need to do market research on who is going to come and visit and work and play in downtown. But we also need to do a separate kind of research and that has to do with representing the people that live, work and invest in the downtown. So those are again, three different unique demographics and they, as I’ve said before, the people that live closest to downtown haven’t, they haven’t even scratched the surface of having conversations with them.

I suspect that if you interviewed people in Wellington Heights and got enough participants in Wellington Heights and Oak Hill Jackson to be a statistically significant sample, that you would find very different answers, even if you asked for people to describe the boundaries of the downtown. Whereas, what are the main features of downtown?

Cedar Rapids and where do you go downtown? If you opened up and opened into the question, a lot of people might say, well, “First Street is downtown” in areas that would be considered five or eight blocks from downtown in relation to the city council’s model. So we don’t even know what attitudes and beliefs are about what the function and role and place and fit of downtown really is for those that live here.

The city has a pattern of drawing its borders very tightly. So when they say “live and work,” I have a question about that because I want know if Scott Overland is saying, okay, well, “the borders are this map that we’ve created. And if we put up an apartment building within that map, that somebody that lives there and somebody goes into that map… and takes a job, now they work there. If somebody else buys a property across the line, they don’t invest or live in the downtown because they are one block over.”

So in terms of how this is being perceived and who the constituents are, I’ve got big questions about that. I think that they should broaden the scope of constituents in terms of downtown residents.

To be broad in defining downtown residents, to extend into this fuller circle that goes into the West neighborhoods and into the East neighborhoods and up First Avenue and in toward Mount Mercy College. And when you start to then look at this larger group, you’ve got high diversity and you’ve got a variety of opinions, beliefs, attitudes, lifestyles.

And you’ve got LGBTQ individuals, and you’ve got many cultures represented. And so then you start to gather real data about what the people that live and work and engage their lives wholly in the downtown region really want.

So I think Overland’s idea is good, but I don’t think that he has thought through the way the research has been conducted and what the boundaries are and what the boundaries could or should be in order to get the answers that he’s looking for. I just don’t think that the data is there to be able to do that.

So Dale Todd is next up. I want to hear his thoughts because he is the representative for the region that I live in, which is southeast Cedar Rapids

Dale Todd comments on the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Dale Todd: It’s been a pleasure to work with you guys. You brought in a nice perspective, and I think it was a healthy revisit of the plan and existing plans.

I’m less worried about structure when I revisit past plans and past initiatives. For me, it really comes down to the leadership of that structure. And I think you have to fundamentally address, at least in my belief, and I’ve been sort of an outsider looking at it, but there’s been a gradual disconnect between council and downtown in terms, not necessarily in terms of the vision, but of the implementation and the day-to-day operation.

I look back at Cedar Lake, that was 10 years. It came out of the 2017 plan. And so it took 10 years actually to get to the point where you’re actually implementing. And I’ll go back to, I remember a time probably 1999 where the fourth street tracks. There was a plan. The plan had been done for the landscaping and to create the pathway along the tracks.

But there was no determination in terms of who was gonna implement it. And it sat on the shelf until somebody got chewed out for it sitting on the shelf and then it got done. And so I, while we’ve got a lot of great things going on downtown, at the same time, it’s still pretty fragile, if we really wanna be honest with ourselves. And so I appreciate task forces.

But I think a lot of this stuff is things that could be done in an afternoon by sending some people in a room and trying to figure out who’s gonna take what piece of this. Ultimately, council, we’re going into a budget session here soon, so it’d be nice and healthy to at least have some of these discussions prior.

And so I’m sort of more in favor of approving the plan now and dealing with the minutiae who’s going to operate it and ultimately drive it. Because councils change, so do downtown businesses. But you have to have that living document and you need to get that on the books now and really make a solid commitment with a timeline in terms of who’s going to drive it. And so I’m more in favor of having that discussion sooner rather than spending a significant amount of time and resources to having it out over time, getting it done now. But thank you for your help.

Alan Murdock responds to Dale Todd’s comments on the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Alan Murdock: We’ve got Dale Todd’s comments and he said that he’s less worried about the structure. And so he’s countering Overland and he also counters Poe because he says he basically wants to move it to a vote and then he wants to work out the details later and basically use the task force to sort out what is it going to look like, and he wants to get it moved forward.

So he highlights the importance of the leadership. Overland talked about the governing body and Todd agrees, but he raises the question, “Who is the leader and who’s driving this?” He feels that there’s a gradual disconnect between the city council and the downtown. And he feels like, it seems that he feels like this is an opportunity to reengage the city with the downtown.

My question in regarding, as it regards that comment is, is it really a good idea to build
that connection on a set of fiscal responsibilities?

So you’re gonna vote to put money into this plan and the city’s going to partner with the SSMID. And if the SSMID fails to come through on money, then the city’s gotta come through on the money. So basically put the money down first and then because now you’re obligated, it’s gonna force the city to reengage with the downtown. I don’t like that, I think.

If you can’t get a city council to plan and work with and engage the downtown district, maybe we have the wrong people. Maybe we need a new city council. Maybe we need a new city manager. Maybe we need new leaders in the economic alliance and the people that are doing this whole kind of development plan in the first place. They’ve repeatedly done the same thing where they exclude anybody that’s different from the opinion that they’re looking for.

Economic Alliance operates outside of the requirements of the city, so the city is required to meet regulatory requirements in terms of access and disability and diversity and rights and so forth, but an independent nonprofit organization has no responsibility in that area. So the city outsources to the Economic Alliance.

The Economic Alliance can violate things that the city would otherwise have to follow and the city would take a lot longer and have to be more meticulous in terms of its processes. So I think we’ve got the wrong players. Brad thinks that they’ve got the right organizations and right people on there. I think we’ve got the wrong people leading each of the organizations. I don’t think that the people have the knowledge, capacity, and willingness to do anything that is not already biased toward their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs.

So the mayor is gonna contrast with Todd and it gets a little spicy for a second here at the end. So I’m gonna stop again, let’s get the mayor’s comments and then we’ll wrap up.

Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell Responds to the Cedar Rapids Downtown Development Plan

Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell: All right, with all due respect, Council Member Todd, it is not minutia. It may be potentially one of the most important things about getting this plan done. The organizational structure of this is extremely important and I know I voiced my you know thoughts on that in front of multiple rooms. It’ll be a part of multiple conversations coming going forward. It is extremely important to making this happen and be successful.

If you believe cities are forever, which you hear me say all the time, then a healthy, vibrant, relevant downtown is really the difference between a city that survives and one that just thrives. Our city right now is electric.

If you’ve been around lately in every quadrant, there are reasons to celebrate and reasons for every quadrant to be optimistic and so excited for the future. And a point of personal privilege regarding this plan, I wanna first and foremost thank the men and women on this council. I think you’ve just heard an example of of how we think, how we deliberate.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen this plan. There are conversations that have been gone on for months about this plan. I am so proud to work alongside you with this as a priority. You put your money where your mouth is.

Downtown is a priority. It has been and it will be continuing for this council. City teams, most notably city manager Pomerantz, director Pratt, the hours that you spend on this, your passion is contagious for this.

And I think, you know, what’s most important is you. And I mean you out there, not just in the gallery, you watching, you in the community, you drove this. You saw the results of those surveys. That was crystal clear. That was you. This is a plan that is for you and by you. I’m grateful that our community cares that much.

To the downtown Schmid and the 2001 development group for their financial support alongside the city to make this thing happen and actually get it in motion. It’s because of those actions and stepping up that we are here today. And it really is exciting. And it is just the beginning.

The devil is always in the details. This is an innovative, creative, and fairly involved, doable, but yes, involved plan. And it’s going to require innovation and creativity that we haven’t seen and we don’t see right now.

What got us to this point isn’t gonna get us, I believe, to where we need to go, which is why these future conversations about organizational structure are gonna be critical, I believe, to the success of this plan. And I certainly look forward to having those conversations about what will ultimately lead us to success. And I’m hoping we’ll include you, Brad, in those conversations going forward.

I also wanna assure everybody that you have the full commitment of this council, certainly of this mayor, to make sure that we get this done. It’s been a long time coming.

The time is now to make this happen. And I look forward to all the great things happening, not just downtown, but certainly in every quadrant. So if we have no other comments on that, I’d like to adopt the resolution.

Do I have a motion?

So moved councilmember Olson.

Do I have a second? Councilmember Van Ornie.

All those in favor say aye. (In unison, “aye” from all members).

Those opposed say no. (Silence)

And this motion carries. Thank you.

Alan Murdock: Mayor Donnell says that the structure and the plan are extremely important to make the plan successful. She cites her quote that she likes to say that “cities are forever.” Whether cities are forever or not is very open question.

Given the environmental crises that this city is faced and that other cities are facing, the fires that we see up in Canada, when those fires reach Iowa, all bets are off. I think that there are going to be real challenges to cities when global climate change has even further impact than it has had so far.

The mayor says that “innovative and creative skills that we haven’t seen and don’t see right now are necessary to make this happen.” She said, “What has got us to this point won’t get us to where we need to go.” And so the mayor is thinking about, you know, what are some other skills? What are some other ways of working and thinking that are going to get us to a future plan?

But I don’t think that the future plan… So if the skills aren’t here… to get to the future plan, I don’t think that the future plan has been successfully mapped. And I keep coming back to this question about the public space and the civic qualities of a downtown center. I don’t think that the task force that has been put together is committed to that. I don’t think they’re even interested in it.

I think they are interested in quick way to bolster property values and generate cash flow. And I think those are the bottom line for everybody that’s on that committee. So I am going to take a wait and see kind of approach, but I think that, you know, I do think that the mayor is right about needing a different approach than what we see in the Midwest right now.

And I don’t think that there are a lot of people that have experience with creativity and innovation that also have the knowledge and skill especially in areas like branding and You know creating a cultural story that sticks that’s powerful, you know….

When I talk with the city about story I spoke the other night Tuesday night and I told them that their stories are going to remain weak because they are unwilling to commit to the conflict elements of the story.

In a story arc you’ve got an inciting incident and the inciting incident is the thing that changes the status quo. So, if the status quo was just business development and then we started having environmental crises and we’re going back to more business development, that is not actually an inciting incident creating a change in a new pathway.

It’s actually a reversion, ignoring of the critical change that’s happening in the world and burying our heads in the sand and saying, well, we’ll just do business as usual and we just need to get a vibrant downtown and that’s going to get the cash flow that we need to fix the stuff. But worse things are coming down the pipe in the area of the environmental catastrophes that this region has experienced.

I actually think that the innovative thinking, it shouldn’t be focused on how we revitalize the downtown. It should be thinking about how do we create cultural systems that actually enrich and build people up and generate capacity? Because we’re going to need all hands on deck.

If we were to get something worse than the flood and worse than the derecho, what would that look like? How would people come together? You know, in the derecho, people came together at first to help clear streets. But then after that, it got to a point where it was a grind and people just kind of like went in their houses.

We were still during COVID. You know, they went back into their houses and everybody buckled down and they dealt with their insurance and they dealt with their damage to their home. And it didn’t have the collective qualities of people coming together that occurred in the first weeks when the electricity was out and when roads needed to be cleared and when lots of wood needed to be cut and moved.

All of that communal spirit disappeared when the hard work hit in came to bear. And I think that if we can develop, what does a resilient community look like? A resilient community that does not look like a cute downtown where people can go and shop. That is not a resilient community.

A resilient community is one where the people actually have the knowledge, skills, and resources to come together and support itself with no external additional revenue flow. Everything that is being discussed is framed by the question, “how do we get people from out there to come in here to spend their money so that we can have what it is that we want,” which is, it’s really undefined. It really hasn’t been described as to what that downtown should look like.

“It should look like lots of people coming to the airport, going downtown, shopping, staying in a hotel, going to a concert and spending more money and then staying another night and then going back to the airport and leaving.” I guess that’s what the picture looks like.

I don’t have, they haven’t given us a story of who it is that comes downtown, what it is that they do downtown, why they chose this downtown instead of Disneyland, Fort Lauderdale or Disneyland Seattle or Disneyland Portland or Disneyland, DISNEYLAND you know, I think there’s lots and lots and lots of cities.

Even the research that was presented by Puma, it highlights all the cities that they’ve worked on. People could go to any one of those cities and get this delightful downtown experience. And the only difference would be which shops and stores and restaurants and so forth are offered there.

So is making another one of these Disneyland Downtowns going to create a resilient Cedar Rapids? I don’t think so. And I think the plan to create a resilient Cedar Rapids has to think bigger and actually in a different direction. The downtown should be the result of the innovation, not the precursor that hopes it will generate and draw innovation to Cedar Rapids.

Everything about this plan is going backwards and is going backwards in the same way that previous development plans have gone in Cedar Rapids. I don’t see them changing their structure, their pace, or where it is that they want to go.

Any last thoughts, Kitty? Any last thoughts? Just meow. Is that it? We’re just going to end with a meow? Meow. It’s okay. We can end with a meow.