New Waterloo City Hall will relieve departments currently 'stacked like sardines'

“There’s no one that is comfortable within this building,” Capt. Aaron McClelland said. “There are so many challenges with the building.”

But after a City Council decision in December, all city departments will move from two municipal buildings on Mulberry Street to the former Courier building at 100 E. Fourth St.

“We’ve heard this from multiple officers, senior officers: This move to this building is the biggest thing for the police department ever to happen,” Chief Rob Duncan said.

The move comes after the city conducted an assessment of all of its buildings in 2017. The second-most troubled building was City Hall, with the Waterloo Convention Center being the worst.

Waterloo Mayor Quentin Hart said consultants advised the city should not invest any more money in City Hall and build a new one instead.

To tear down and rebuild a new City Hall on the same property at 715 Mulberry St. would cost about $18.8 million, according to Noel Anderson, the city’s community planning and development director. It would cost $11.9 million to rehabilitate City Hall along with the Carnegie library annex building. The Carnegie building at 626 Mulberry St. holds the community development, housing, code enforcement and human rights departments.

Instead, the City Council voted 5-2 for a property swap — trading the two city buildings for the former Courier building. The city will grant developer Rodney Blackwell $6.2 million to fix up the city buildings and return them to the tax rolls. Councilmembers Dave Boesen and Steve Simon voted against the agreement.

Anderson said Blackwell intends to invest at least $14 million in the projects. He has four years to begin construction on one of the buildings after the city vacates the property. The second building must be under construction within 12 months after that.

Along with the economic development grant, the city will give an annual tax support grant for the property taxes Blackwell pays for his newly acquired buildings. After the completion of each phase, there will be a 70% tax rebate on each building for 15 years.

The city also approved issuing $10.5 million in general obligation urban renewal bonds for the City Hall project. The money will come out of the downtown tax increment financing district.

Money from the TIF is paying for a $420,000 agreement with Invision Architecture for architectural design and engineering services. The contract anticipates construction will cost about $6.85 million.

Costs would consist of renovations to the first floor for the police department, as well as the second and third floors for city offices and council chambers; reconfiguration of heating and cooling, plumbing and electrical systems; and security upgrades.

“It was more cost efficient to move to this building instead of building a new one, but also consolidate the Carnegie annex,” Mayor Quentin Hart said. “This building probably would be better served as a commercial (or) residential property than full-fledged city operations.”

The first department being designed and constructed is the police department. The city’s biggest department, at 138 employees, currently has officers working on top of each other.

“The entire place is compartmentalized, there’s no open space. Everything is little and it’s boxed in,” McClelland said. “We’ve got people stacked in like sardines in every space we have. The construction is failing in the building. Sometimes when it rains outside, it rains inside.”

Last year, part of the roof failed and flooded the police department, destroying thousands of dollars worth of equipment, as well as causing concerns about mold exposure. Towels still line the windowsills in some of the offices to soak up water.

Apart from the cramped offices, hallways are barely are wide enough for a grown man and interview rooms are outdated. The women’s bathroom was fashioned from a makeshift closet. Officers also share a bathroom with any civilian visiting the police department. The halls and rooms are so narrow, anyone with a wheelchair or walker has to use a bathroom on the second floor or basement by taking the elevator.

The building was constructed in the 1950s as a bomb shelter in a time when threat of nuclear war loomed large. Jamie Knutson, the city engineer, said the building is designed the way it is because it is constructed with concrete and steel, making it difficult to remodel.

“The nicest way to say it is this building is outdated. It was designed for a different era, you know, back in the ‘50s, and it just doesn’t fit for openness, for transparency,” Knutson said. “Unfortunately, it’s been chopped up so much and being remodeled over the years, as far as changing offices and all of that, it’s just inefficient space.”

Creating new offices within the confines of the building also affected heating and cooling systems. When pipes were rerouted, blueprints were not always updated.

The police chief says the lackluster conditions play a part in an officer’s morale at work. Duncan said former Chief Joe Leibold did a survey on what officers wanted changed. The number one thing officers wanted was different facilities.

“If they’re not proud of where they’re at, I think it’s hard to be proud of anything else,” McClelland said. “We’re doing the best we can. I mean, we paint when we need to paint. We try to spruce up what we need to spruce up.”

“We weren’t proud to bring people in here,” he continued. “It was like, you brought people in from other departments … and they would walk in here and you just have to be like, ‘Yeah, this is what we got.’”

He never thought a new department was possible. The city began working on a project to move the police department’s main door to Mulberry Street to better serve the public. That, along with reconfiguring the adjacent mayor’s office, would have cost about $1.6 million.

“To have the opportunity to (move), even though there’s going to be challenges, I think for the police department, it’s a big deal,” McClelland said.

Courthouse renovations

Across the street from City Hall, the Black Hawk County Courthouse had its share of renovations last year, and that continues into 2025.

The county is in its final phase of reconstructing some of its public-facing departments. The Treasurer’s Office is gutted and will be completely remodeled to better serve residents, Rory Geving, the county’s maintenance superintendent, said.

The new area will resemble a Department of Motor Vehicles office, with a queuing system and a lobby. Residents will sign in and get a number, then wait until their number is called. County Treasurer Lynda Hintzman said her department sees 150 to 350 people per day on average. That number significantly increases during tax payment time.

While the first floor office is under construction, the treasurer’s office is operating out of the courthouse basement.

The county’s elections office was reconstructed to increase efficiency before the 2024 election. Karen Showalter, the county auditor and previous elections manager, said in the 2020 election, there were 900 people in line at one point. People lined up on the second floor and were backed up in the stairwell onto the first floor. The line continued outside and wrapped around the building.

The new elections office opened just in time for the November general election. Showalter said with the previous layout, the office’s equipment and files were spread across six different places in the courthouse.

“With the remodel, we were able to take our processes and think through the flow very methodically,” she said. “Coming off the largest election we’ll ever have, we did a good job in that planning process.”

The auditor’s office also was revamped and mirrors the elections office with new sunlit offices, ADA-compliant counters and storage.

Along with renovations at the courthouse, the county is in the process of reorganizing the public health department at the Pinecrest Building, 1407 Independence Ave. The project will update and reconfigure the public health clinic and offices and the Department of Human Services. The space currently used by county’s veterans affairs office will become the new health clinic. Veterans Affairs will move next door to the former Exceptional Persons Inc., 1210 Idaho St.

Geving expects that project to be completed sometime in May.