Opponents of Second Avenue closure look to Springfield, Ill.

For months, retired Rockwell Collins engineer James Maxted has been trying to make the case against putting a new medical clinic in the middle of Second Avenue SE, and now he said he knows what it's like to shout in the wind.

“It's doesn't feel very nice,” said Maxted, of 1936 Grande Ave. SE. “Nobody will listen.”

Even so, Maxted wants to make sure that the City Council sees pictures of a new medical clinic expansion on the edge of downtown Springfield, Ill., before it casts a third and final vote Tuesday night to close Second Avenue SE to make way for Physicians' Clinic of Iowa's proposed new medical building.

The vote - the council has voted twice, 6-3, to close the street, and Mayor Ron Corbett assures that support for the street closure remains secure - is surely a done deal, Maxted all but concedes.

He intends, though, to go down to defeat with pictures and this question among others: Why can't PCI build a connection over Second Avenue SE to clinic buildings on both sides of the street, as it initially planned, if the Springfield Clinic was able and happy to build over Sixth Street in Springfield, a city of comparable size to Cedar Rapids?

Among those who will join Maxted in opposition at Tuesday's council meeting will be Don Thomas, who was the city's streets commissioner and a council member from 1994 through 2005. During his tenure in office, St. Luke's Hospital pushed City Hall to close a portion of A Avenue NE for the hospital, an idea that Thomas said this week was as foolish then as closing Second Avenue SE is now.

“Our position was to keep A Avenue open and design something around it,” said Thomas, a civil engineer and land surveyor. “Airports have known about these innovations for years. It's easy to get up and over. This is old stuff. It's just engineering design. It happens in all kinds of cities.”

Mark Kuhn, chief administrative officer at the Springfield Clinic, said the clinic's main campus now sits on both sides of busy Sixth Street. A 120,000-square-foot expansion of the existing clinic was completed in 2008 at a cost of about $32 million. By comparison, the proposed PCI medical clinic in Cedar Rapids will have a total of 205,000 square feet of space and cost an estimated $36 million, not counting the cost of a parking garage.

Kuhn called the Springfield Clinic's three-story structure over Sixth Street a “connector,” which is 85 feet wide and 60 feet deep - it takes two to three seconds to drive under it - and provides an additional 17,000 square feet of office and clinic space for the clinic. Kuhn's office is on the second floor of the connector, just above the traffic below.

The arch theme of the connector, he said, is sufficiently “cool” that it has prompted the clinic to redesign its logo to incorporate the architectural design.

“The connector is functional and attractive and respects the historical heritage of the city and at the same time allows us to be progressive and to invest in downtown Springfield,” Kuhn said.

There were extra costs that came with building the three-story connector. But Kuhn said there would have been extra costs as well to buy more land in the suburbs to incorporate the 17,000-square-feet of space that now is over the city street.

No one is more familiar with the Springfield Clinic design than Mike Sundall, chief executive officer of Physicians' Clinic of Iowa in Cedar Rapids. Sundall said PCI “patterned” its initial clinic design, which had a “crossover concept” over Second Avenue SE, after the Springfield Clinic design.

Ultimately, though, Sundall said PCI chose a medical “mall” concept with multiple entries to enhance patient flow over a medical “building” concept, which is what he said the Springfield Clinic represents.

The Springfield Clinic expansion did not come without some resident complaints, one of which was that the connector across the street would block the view of the downtown for people coming into it on Sixth Street, said Kuhn and Mike Farmer, director of planning and economic development for the city of Springfield.

Both now say that the connector over the street has added a small piece of drama as the downtown skyline of historic buildings, a cathedral and the state Capitol pop into view. The design has turned the Springfield Clinic into something of a city landmark, Kuhn said.

“Now,” he said “we get 98-percent positive comments: ‘We're glad you did it. We're glad you stayed downtown. We're glad you invested in the city and didn't take your medical building to the suburbs.'?”

Both Kuhn and Farmer noted that the Springfield Clinic is not in a special tax district like PCI's proposed clinic in Cedar Rapids.

New property-tax revenue generated by the PCI development will be used for a number of years to pay for the parking ramp that goes with the development, while new property-tax revenue generated by the Springfield Clinic goes into the local government budgets. Farmer said the city of Springfield did provide the clinic with some financial support on landscaping, moving utilities and moving a Lincoln-era home and placing it on a new site.

Upon a successful Cedar Rapids council vote Tuesday evening, the city intends to vacate Second Avenue SE for the PCI clinic project next spring.

PCI has asked for the final vote now so it can secure bank financing for the project.