CEDAR RAPIDS — But can you ride your bike or walk your dog on it?

That’s the angry question coming from Cedar Rapids’s neighbors as that city proposes to shift $1.44 million in federal transportation dollars dispersed by the Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization to fund a new section of skywalk in its downtown.

Each year, the CMPO has about $4 million in federal gas-tax dollars to divvy up among metro area transportation projects. And historically the planning organization has used a rigorous ranking system of projects to plan long term as cities in the metro area as well as unincorporated Linn County have competed to secure a piece of the funding for their own individual street and road projects.

Two years ago, the Cedar Rapids majority on the CMPO Board caused a stir when it voted to steer 80 percent of the CMPO’s grants to trail projects, including bike lanes on streets, leaving only 20 percent for street projects.

The move was opposed by metro area cities such as Hiawatha and Robins, which said they depended on CMPO funds to help with their street projects.

However, Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett led the trails push, saying it was time for the metro area to expand and improve its network of trails as a way to enhance the metro area’s quality of life to attract and retain employers.

Now the Cedar Rapids majority on the board wants to shift funds to a section of a downtown skywalk, prompting Linn County Supervisor Brent Oleson of Marion and representatives from the suburbs in the metro area to say a skywalk is certainly not a street and it’s hardly a trail.

“You’re not going to be able to ride your bike on it. You’re not going to be able to walk your dog on it,” Oleson, a trails advocate and a member of the CMPO board, said on Wednesday. “Where is this 80-20 formula?”

He said the city’s attempt to fund a section of skywalk — from the new parking ramp across from the convention center to the US Bank Building on Third Street SE — with CMPO funds is a money grab because the city is subverting the CMPO process of ranking projects competitively before voting on which projects should get funded.

Oleson said the city of Cedar Rapids has come to view CMPO funds as its “piggy bank,” and he said nothing can be done about it because 13 of the 23 CMPO board votes are Cedar Rapids votes.

In years past, a few of the Cedar Rapids representatives on the board have been non-city employees. But all 13 now are either City Council members or city employees.

The city of Marion is sufficiently upset with the proposed skywalk funding that the Marion City Council last week passed a special resolution to declare its opposition to using CMPO funds for a section of downtown Cedar Rapids skywalk.

The Marion City Council resolution states: “The city council finds that such a use of CMPO funds will not improve the metropolitan area’s trail system, which benefits the general public of all metropolitan communities, but will instead be limited to enhancement of pedestrian traffic to only one business district of only one of the metro communities.”

Marion City Council member Cody Crawford on Wednesday said he brought the matter up to his council colleagues because “it rubs me the wrong way.”

Crawford, who has served on the CMPO board and now is a Marion alternate to the board, said his understanding of past CMPO practice is that once a community member decides not to use CMPO funds for a project approved by the CMPO board, the funds go back into the organization’s pot where all the communities then can compete to have their projects funded with it.

Philosophically, he said the CMPO board is a place for the metro communities to work on the regional transportation grid, and “this project has no regional significance to that regional infrastructure.”

Dave Elgin, Cedar Rapids public works director and a longtime Cedar Rapids member of the CMPO board, said Wednesday that Cedar Rapids’s skywalk proposal shifts CMPO-approved funding from street and sidewalk improvements that the city had intended for 33rd Avenue SW.

Elgin said the CMPO board in the past has voted to allow member jurisdictions to take money from one approved project and shift it to another, and at its meeting on Thursday, the CMPO will be voting to approve the shift of streets funds to the downtown Cedar Rapids skywalk project.

Elgin said the cold, snowy winter prompted a number of calls to city officials from residents who wanted the city’s downtown skywalk system to allow those who park in the two ramps next to and across from the city’s new convention center to be able to connect to the rest of the city’s system.

At the same time, the new skywalk link will allow the rest of the system to connect to the convention center, hotel and arena next to it.

Suddenly, he said, the skywalk project jumped to the top of the City Council’s priority list, while the council decided that the 33rd Avenue SW improvements could be put off into the future.

“As far as the other communities are concerned, if we spent the money on 33rd Avenue SW, they wouldn’t have the money anyway,” Elgin said.

He said the Cedar Rapids metro area sends about $50 million to the federal government in federal gas tax a year, and about $4 million now is coming back for use by the CMPO.

Elgin said he understands that some suburban members of the CMPO didn’t like it two years ago when the Cedar Rapids majority on the board shifted 80 percent of the funding to trails.

He also said he understands that the priority for the cities of Hiawatha and Robins is to build Tower Terrace Road, which Elgin said one day also will be a Cedar Rapids priority — but it isn’t now.

Elgin said some had suggested that the proposed skywalk link might be considered an elevated, urban trail, but he said it really isn’t a trail because the city doesn’t intend to allow bicycles on it.

At the same time, more pedestrians than bicyclists use the Cedar River Trail through the downtown now, and the skywalk similarly will serve pedestrians and will help complete a system that gets people from the city’s bus depot to the convention center.

“I’m not going to call it a controversy,” Elgin said. “It’s a difference of opinion and a difference in priorities for those communities (who oppose the skywalk funding). I understand that.”

Cedar Rapids’s Corbett on Wednesday said he was reminded of late last year when the metro area cities worked together to renew the 1-percent local-option sales tax for 10 years to help with street projects. But for Cedar Rapids’s willingness to propose and then to push the tax extension, cities in the metro area would have far less money for infrastructure projects than they will beginning July 1, he said.

He added that Linn County, which extended the sales tax in 2012, also would have much less money because the amount of tax revenue from the sales tax dramatically increases for every jurisdiction in the county when Cedar Rapids has the tax in place.

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