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CEDAR RAPIDS — A crowd a couple hundred strong looked on with many cheering last evening as an excavator took a giant bite out of a boarded-up 12-plex apartment building that police and Wellington Heights neighborhood leaders said had come to symbolize the worst in a neighborhood tired of crime, bad behavior and bad landlords. Acting Police Chief [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Ten years ago this summer, Don Thomas, then-Cedar Rapids Streets Commissioner and City Council member, asked the Marion City Council to endorse a paved bicycle trail that would connect the neighboring cities. That a decade has passed with the CEMAR Trail still as much an idea as reality helped prompt the Cedar [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — It’s Wellington Heights’ turn — especially for the children who live there. This old core neighborhood in southeast Cedar Rapids has combated a perception problem for more than 15 years as being a place where bad behavior surfaces and police cars converge, this in a city that nearly always can count the [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — A persistent City Hall has been trying for nearly three years to secure a status as a bicycle-friendly community from the League of American Bicyclists. On Monday, the city announced that the League has awarded the city the bronze-level designation in a rating system that runs from platinum to gold and silver and [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Four local organizations are joining forces to see if their alliance can improve neighborhoods and the housing in them and provide job-preparation opportunities for African-American youth. The organizations are Diversity Focus, the Regional Economic Development Institute or RED-I, the Four Oaks children and family-services agency and Four Oaks’ Affordable Housing Network Inc. RED-I, the newest [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Building a new downtown parking ramp costs more than the city thought, and the city is in the process of building two of them.  The City Council this week learned that the lowest of five bids for the actual construction of the new parking ramp and skywalk set to be built across [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Six weeks ago City Hall put out an absolute last call for property owners to get into the city’s flooded-property buyout program, and people heard: The owners of 111 residential and commercial properties have scurried to beat the deadline. On Tuesday evening, the City Council approved adding the final group of flood-hit [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — A city of Cedar Rapids lobbying campaign that has extended for more than a decade has led the Iowa Transportation Commission to tentatively approve full funding for a 7.5-mile extension of Highway 100 from Edgewood Road NE west and south to Highway 30 at a cost of some $200 million. A triumphant Mayor Ron [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — The city’s largest sale ever of new bond debt was a little smaller Tuesday than expected because of interest rates “close to 40-year lows,” the city’s bond consultant told the City Council last night. The city had expected to sell almost $86 million in new general obligation bond debt, but needed to sell [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — On a unanimous vote, the City Council agreed last night to head into negotiations with Penford Products Co. to see if an agreement can be reached to sell the city’s 11-acre Riverside Park to the company for its possible expansion. The most important council vote will come, likely in June, to vote [...]

Big-city mayors in Iowa hastily convened a conference call with the news media today to object to the latest versions of bills on property-tax relief now in front of the Iowa Legislature that they said would cost local jurisdictions million of dollars in local tax revenue. Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett, Iowa City Mayor Matt [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — The city’s window for candidates to apply for the city’s job of police chief will close on May 21, Conni Huber, the city’s human resources director, told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Monday. Huber said the city and its search consultant, The Mercer Group Inc. of Santa Fe, N.M., have [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — On the eve of the city of Cedar Rapids’ largest ever sale of new bond debt, Moody’s Investors Service has assigned to the city the rating agency’s top Aaa bond rating, a rating that the city has enjoyed for nearly 40 years. A top bond rating, which only Iowa City, Ames and [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — The City Council will vote on Tuesday to head to the bargaining table with Penford Products Co., an industry of long-standing here that wants to buy the city’s Riverside Park next to it for a possible expansion. The council’s vote Tuesday will finalize the terms it will try to get into a sale agreement [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Mayor Ron Corbett on Thursday confirmed that the renovation of the city’s U.S. Cellular Center arena won’t be complete in time and as planned to host the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union’s fall volleyball tournament. As a result, the city has offered the union a five-year financial incentive package if the union agrees [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — The site plan for a new Hy-Vee Food Store west of C Avenue NE and south of the proposed Tower Terrace Road NE near Cedar Rapids’ border with Robins won unanimous backing on Thursday from the City Planning Commission. The store will begin as an 80,000-square-foot one and be designed to expand [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Construction crews were busy Thursday taking the first steps to convert an old metal pole building once home to Quality Chef Foods into the NewBo City Market. “They’re working on both the inside and outside,” Mayor Ron Corbett said outside the construction site on Third Street SE in the heart of the [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — The City Council here officially has revoked its sponsorship of an upstart local firm that won state economic development incentives in 2011 and then in March had those incentives revoked. The firm, AgSugar International and now known as Vertecra, secured an incentive package worth about $600,000 from the Iowa Economic Development Authority [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Once the city’s flood-damaged Ground Transportation Center bus depot is renovated and reopens a year from now, a portion of one-way Fourth and Fifth avenues SE will convert to two-way traffic to better handle bus traffic. The change in a portion of the one-way downtown avenue grid is something downtown leaders and [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — A rendering of the facade of the city’s new west-side library branch might not make you forget the building once was a Target store. Even so, Bob Pasicznyuk, the city’s library director, on Monday said the library’s planned exterior changes will make it clear that a part of the former big-box retail store is [...]