Floodplain question raised at new jail discussion

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Round seven. Members of a citizens committee tasked with making a recommendation regarding a new Floyd County jail will likely have another design concept to look at after members of the county supervisors weighed in on the topic Monday morning.

The committee has been looking at various options for a new jail and Sheriff’s Department since May, and at a meeting earlier this month settled on a design recommendation to present to the county board.

That concept was the sixth design the citizen’s committee has looked over, and was a $12.7 million modified version of a single-floor jail and office plan that had been the first one presented by Prochaska & Associates, the Omaha-based architectural and planning company that is consulting with the county on the project.

Supervisor Linda Tjaden has been chairwoman of the citizen’s committee, but until Monday the other two supervisors, Doug Kamm and Mark Kuhn, had not been taking part in the committee’s work.

Voters of Floyd County will need to approve the sale of bonds to finance construction to build a new jail, and it will be up to the supervisors to decide if or when they put it to a vote.

A Prochaska representative was making a presentation Monday morning on the different options the committee had gone through when Supervisor Kuhn raised the question of how the building would be located regarding floodplains.

Joe Classe, a Prochaska vice president and architect who has been creating the preliminary designs so far, said the design that the committee had agreed on was outside the 100-year floodplain, but that parts were within the 500-year floodplain.

Building in the 500-year floodplain “is done all the time,” he said. “In fact you have buildings all around town that are in the 100-year floodplain.”

Kuhn, who was a state legislator representing the Charles City area from 1999-2011, said he was a member of the Rebuild Iowa/Disaster Recovery Committee of the Legislature after the devastating 2008 floods.

That committee recommended that no “critical infrastructure” — including law enforcement facilities — be built within the 500-year floodplain, although he said the entire Legislature did not approve that recommendation.

Supervisor Chairman Kamm said, “The thing to remember about floodplains is that they were drawn arbitrarily. A few loads of dirt would have gotten you out of that 500-year zone years ago.”

Classe said of all the designs presented so far, only the first, originally presented at a citizens committee meeting in June, kept the new building construction completely out of the 500-year zone, but that design doesn’t include some of the things committee members talked about for later designs, such as handicapped-accessible restrooms and an elevator serving each floor of the courthouse.

Members of the citizens’ committee had hoped to get approval for a bond referendum from the supervisors in time for a March vote, but Kuhn said he didn’t think that would be possible.

He suggested waiting for a vote until the general election in November 2018, when more people usually participate than in a special election.

Classe said it’s up to the county when it wants to hold a bond referendum, but the longer it waits, the more construction costs will increase.

Other decisions that still need to be made include whether the law enforcement dispatch center, currently located in the Charles City City Hall and run by the Police Department, would be moved to a new law enforcement center.

So far all the plans for the new jail have included space for a dispatch center, although the county and city are still working on deciding if it should move, said Tjaden. That decision may be made at a joint meeting of the Communications Board and the 911 Board that will take place in December.

The supervisors took no action on the jail proposals Monday.