Swore, Corbett stick to their guns on closing a piece of Second Avenue SE for a medical 'mall'

CEDAR RAPIDS -- No one has ever suggested that readers who e-mail comments to Gazette Online represent a scientific survey of the residents of Cedar Rapids.

Even so, the negative jabs that surfaced Wednesday on Gazette Online about City Hall's proposal to permanently close Second Avenue SE between 10th and 12 streets SE were reminiscent of those of recent weeks about a City Hall proposal to spend $540,000 to protect local residents from their Yardy yard-waste carts. The City Council backed off that one.

“This is plain bad on many levels,” wrote Dudie to Gazette Online about the idea of closing a piece of Second Avenue SE. “Bad for traffic, bad for the downtown and bad in concept.”

“This is great!” wrote a3fan. “While they are at it, why don't they close down that pesky I-380 and put up a mall. Another great idea is to close all the bridges across the Cedar River. I'm sure more people will come downtown if they get to take a ferry to get there.”

And SemperFiGuy: “INSANE!!! … Close off a highly traveled street? Are you kidding me?”

Out on the streets, though, Cab driver Cliff Grother on Wednesday said the City Hall plan to permanently close a piece of busy Second Avenue SE wouldn't complicate his professional life one bit.

“Progress doesn't complicate life,” Grother said. “If it makes it better, short and sweet, people have to adjust to progress.”

The nine members of the City Council on Tuesday evening felt essentially the same way when they expressed support for closing Second Avenue SE between 10th and 12th so Physicians' Clinic of Iowa can build a new 180,000-square-foot medical “mall” there.

The PCI project, which will cost about $44 million with a parking ramp, will become the anchor for a newly forming Medical District, which the city, the city's two hospitals and PCI created via agreement last fall.

In conjunction with the closure of a piece of Second Avenue SE, the council also talked about converting both Second and Third avenues from one-way arterials to two-way streets, an idea that several consultants have proposed to the city in recent years, council member Monica Vernon noted.

Council member Chuck Swore, who presented the idea to close two blocks of Second Avenue SE to make way for PCI's medical mall, said he was questioned about the idea at two different speaking engagements on Wednesday.

The questions didn't change his mind.

“With gain, you're liable to have some pain,” Swore said. “But if we want our Medical District to get off on the right foot, I would think we would want to be as receptive as possible within reason of assisting them in whatever way we can.”

He noted that the City Council wants to hear from the city's traffic engineer about the details and costs of changing traffic flow. In the plan to close a piece of Second Avenue, 10th and 12th streets SE would remain open, he said.

On Wednesday, Ron Griffith, the city's interim traffic engineer, joked that it's pretty easy to close a street, noting the city did just temporarily downtown for the city's St. Patrick's Day Parade.

In a 20-minute conversation, Griffith referred to three or four different studies in the last five years that discussed downtown traffic and converting the one-way avenues into the downtown into two-way streets. Another study is about to be completed, he said.

However, actually closing Second Avenue SE between 10th and 12th streets is a new wrinkle, Griffith added.

Griffith said it wouldn't be automatically necessary to convert Second and Third avenues to two-way streets simply because Second Avenue SE would close between 10th and 12th streets SE. Such a closure, though, would force traffic headed downtown to go to either First or Fourth avenues because Third Avenue SE is a one-way out of the downtown.

He put the cost of converting Second and Third avenues from 19th Street SE to 13th Street SW at about $1.8 million, which would cover costs to change traffic signals at intersections and signals at the downtown railroad crossing. Upgrading the crossing signals so trains would not have to sound horns would add considerably to the cost, he added.

Griffith said two-way Second and Third avenues likely would feature one lane of traffic in each direction with a center turn lane.

No doubt, he added, some traffic that now uses Second and Third avenues would migrate to the wider First and Eighth avenues if Second and Third avenues became two-way streets. In the end, traffic engineers never know for sure where traffic will go until a change is actually put in place, he said.

Mayor Ron Corbett on Wednesday conceded that some wouldn't be happy with the closing of a piece of Second Avenue SE, but he, like Swore, said it was important for the council to give PCI direction now so PCI knows how to design its new building. Construction is expected next year.

Corbett said he had not checked his City Hall e-mail box, so he didn't know if the comments coming to him were as negative as the ones coming into Gazette Online.

Second Avenue SE between 10th and 12th streets SE on Wednesday afternoon looked a bit like a wasteland with a lot of bare ground awaiting the start of the PCI project.

Shelby Christensen, manager of the Denny's Muffler Shop in the 900 block of Second Avenue SE, figured his shop wouldn't lose any business as long as 10th Street SE stays open when Second Avenue SE from 10th to 12th streets SE closes. At the same time, he said the business has been approached to sell.

“You just kind of roll with the punches and deal with what you have to deal with,” he said.

Cab drivers Ihab Ahmed and Faisal Abdelkarim, both Sudanese immigrants, disagreed a bit over whether closing a piece of Second Avenue SE would complicate their travels.

But they both were equally puzzled that the city was closing a street for a new medical building.

“They bought the street?” a disbelieving Abdelkarim asked of the physicians' group.