Council member hopes to delay Second Ave. vote to discuss other options

City Council member Monica Vernon will ask her council colleagues on Tuesday evening to put off a vote on the request by Physicians' Clinic of Iowa to close two blocks of Second Avenue SE to make way for a new medical building.

Vernon said she and everyone else on the nine-member council supports PCI's investment in a spot in the city's new Medical District. However, she said she and some others on the council feel like they will be forced to vote against PCI because it has insisted that the city close a piece of Second Avenue SE or else. Or else PCI may take its investment dollars and build in Hiawatha, Vernon said the PCI threat has been.

Vernon said she doesn't understand how the City Council's support for the Medical District and its willingness to provide incentives to PCI to locate a new building in the district has come down to an all or nothing vote on Second Avenue SE.

“Second Avenue SE is sort of a big thing to give away,” she said.

She is proposing that a committee of council members sit down with PCI and see if there might not be some compromise.

Vernon was among council members who pushed to end former City Manager Jim Prosser's tenure with the city. Prosser left in April.

Vernon last evening said she wished Prosser were here on this one: She said Prosser believed in giving the council a range of options on particular issues with the pros and cons and costs of each spelled out.