DAVENPORT, Iowa – In the spring, Credit Island Lodge was slammed with flood waters. Since then, mud sat on the ground of the building, desperately in need of clean-up.
Davenport Parks and Recreation decided to call professional cleaners after this flood and went with a bid for $20,000.
“We have never had it professionally cleaned before,” says Tubbs. “But we also never had a 90-day flood before.”
But the lodge isn’t the only place on the island still awaiting clean-up. Sand piles are scattered throughout the inland from when it was the bottom of the river back in the spring.
“We’ve seen more sand on this flood event than we have in the past,” says Davenport Parks and Recreation Director, Chad Dyson. “So, we have quite a bit that our crews are having to remove from the interior of the island and push them out to the shorelines, so it can have its sand back that it left.”
Meanwhile, clean-up at the lodge has taken months, but if Parks and Rec want any reimbursement from FEMA they have to meet their guidelines.
“Those guidelines tend to slow things down,” explains Tubbs. “Here we are three or four months after the water is down and this what we still have because we want to make sure we have our I’s dotted and our T’s crossed.”
Although the island has been in a long state of distress, Davenport Parks and Rec is confident a fresh new start is coming soon.
“We absolutely want to restore this to the beauty it can, it just takes time,” Tubbs says.
Davenport Parks and Rec received eight different bids from professional cleaning companies in the area ranging from $20,000 to $80,000.
There were talks of Credit Island Lodge becoming a polling location in the fall, but because of the flooding, Scott County Auditor Roxanna Mortiz said they anticipated the lodge wouldn’t be ready to host voters. Instead they decided to move the precinct to St. Mark’s Church on Telegraph Road. Letters of the change were already sent to voters to keep them in the loop.
(Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story indicated that the lodge had a deadline to meet in order to host a polling location. The story has been corrected to note that Credit Island Lodge will not host voters for the upcoming election)
