COOK- Presented with three options for the flood-damaged Cook Public Library and a need for an immediate response, Cook City Council members on Thursday chose the only one that appeared to make sense – building a new city library on land outside of the flood plain.
Library director Crystal Whitney, with support from library board president Eric Trip, reviewed options for the library that were requested by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), options outlined in an engineering analysis complied by SEH.
The first, a $273,000 rebuild to restore the 77-year-old building to its pre-flood condition and without any modifications for flood proofing, wasn’t really an option at all. Cook’s flood plain ordinance doesn’t allow reconstruction of buildings in the flood plain without floodproofing measures.
However, the estimate provided a base for the second option, an estimated $1.7 million retrofit of the library to make it resistant to future floods. That plan called for an exterior flood wall to be built around the library, rising two feet above the calculated 100-year flood height. The interior would have been gutted to install a new flood resistant concrete floor and other flood-proofing features.
But as Whitney confirmed with FEMA representatives in a Thursday afternoon phone call, Cook would only receive double the amount of the basic rehab, or $546,000, leaving the city to somehow come up with an additional $1.2 million for the project. And since the building would still be in the floodplain, the city would have to carry flood insurance on it costing $10,000-$12,000 a year, Whitney said. And with this option, the library would still need a previously identified new roof and HVAC system at a cost of $190,000. The library has a grant that will cover half the cost of those items.
Under the third option, the one ultimately chosen by the council, FEMA and the state of Minnesota would pay to have a brand-new building built on property outside of the flood plain. And while the estimate from SEH for doing that was between $1.7 and $2 million, Trip told the council that FEMA wouldn’t give them a dollar amount to aim for.
“I tried to get a number, even just a general number, and they would not give us a number,” he said. “They simply said that it needs to be reasonable, and that the feds would provide 75 percent of the cost and the state would provide 25 percent of the cost.”
Whitney said it was clear what option FEMA preferred.
“They pretty much told us that this is what we should go for, because they don’t want a building in the floodplain, period,” Whitney said. “We must prove that the cost is reasonable and cost-effective and more beneficial than the other options. We can include in that cost the demolition, the land purchase, and any of the building costs – SEH has built some of that in and some they did not. We don’t have a spot anywhere, so that would be something that we’d have to figure out.”
Whitney also suggested that it could be possible under the “reasonable” rationale to consider designing the building to provide new space for city offices.
“We don’t have to just use this as a library,” Whitney said. “With this option, we could have a multipurpose city building, meaning we could get City Hall out of flooding danger.”
Council members responded favorably to the suggestion and acknowledged that an option that would be fully paid for was clearly the best choice given the huge cost of the alternative. But when asked if they had any additional time to get more information about the multipurpose concept, Whitney’s response was a firm no.
“We literally just got off the phone hours ago with a very long FEMA call,” Whitney said. “They want to know how the city wants to proceed – they need to know this. They wanted to know it yesterday, so we need to decide.”
While the council unanimously approved pursuing the option for a new library building, Whitney reminded them that since FEMA would be providing the majority financing for the project that they would have the final say on what direction the project will go. But Whitney felt that getting the building out of the flood plain, the closeness in cost between the two viable options, the opportunity to relocate city business functions to a location free from the threat of flood, and removing the need to pay thousands of dollars annually for flood insurance would all work in the city’s favor when determining the reasonableness of the proposal now to be more fully developed.