Economy ends city’s building boom of ’90s

Before Marty Kennedy finished his six-year tenure on the Lawrence City Commission Tuesday, he sat in the commission chambers and ticked off a list of buildings and projects the city had completed during his term.

Downtown 2000. The Indoor Aquatic Center. Prairie Park Nature Center. Eagle Bend Golf Course. The skate park. The Lawrence-Douglas County Health Center.

It’s a series of improvements that have allowed Lawrence residents new opportunities to work, play and get healthy.

“It was quite an exciting time,” Kennedy said later. “When all is said and done, it was a very good time.”

But the economy has slowed the flow of cash into city coffers, and officials say that the public building boom of the late 1990s is probably over for now.

“This commission will have ample opportunity to decide what capital projects they would like to see done,” City Manager Mike Wildgen said. “We’ve got a long list of capital projects that would be good for the community.”

But as a practical matter, he acknowledged, “just given the economy, I don’t see every project on these capital plans being done in the near future.”

Building boom

Much of the 1990s building boom was aided by passage of a countywide one-cent sales tax in 1994. Douglas County used its portion of the receipts to build the new jail east of Lawrence; portions also went to the cities of Lawrence, Baldwin, Eudora and Lecompton.

Lawrence used its share to reduce the city’s property tax rate by two mills — a mill is $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed valuation — and to finance what was expected to be $12.2 million in improvements for the Parks and Recreation Department.

“As a public official, you can’t ask for anything more than the public saying they want to invest in the community,” then-Commissioner John Nalbandian, an architect of the sales-tax-for-parks plan said when the sales tax was approved by 57 percent of the voters.

The Indoor Aquatic Center at Free State High School was one of the last city building projects constructed during the good economic times of the 1990s. Two young boys head to the children's play area Friday at the center.

“People said, ‘These projects are reasonable,’ ‘The financing for them was thought out’ and ‘We want to invest in our community.'”

City officials immediately set about putting the money to work. Commissioners approved construction of the city’s downtown aquatic center at a cost of $2.89 million in 1995. An additional $2.045 million was spent on the softball complex on city-leased land at Clinton Lake. And the East Lawrence Center, 1245 E. 15th St., was expanded and renovated for $2.45 million.

Other improvements financed by the tax:

l The Indoor Aquatic Center, $7.7 million.

l Lawrence-Douglas County Health Center, $7.1 million from the city; $7 million from the county.

l Prairie Park Nature Center, $950,000.

l Centennial Skate Park, $120,000.

And that doesn’t include the Downtown 2000 project, which cost $7.34 million of private donations and city contributions to build the Lawrence Arts Center and $6 million for the 514-space downtown parking garage. The city money came from bonds financed through property taxes.

“In terms of city projects,” Wildgen said. “That was a major series of them.”

What’s next

The city continues to receive money from the county’s one-cent sales tax — it expects to receive $7.07 million this year — but officials say most of the cash goes to paying off the debt incurred to build most of those projects quickly.

Wildgen said it will be 2006 before the downtown aquatic center bonds are paid off and city officials can use that source money to start new projects.

Mayor David Dunfield said the new city commission that took office last week does have some building projects it wants to accomplish. The pace will slow, however.

“We do have some projects that we know about, like the Carnegie Library restoration,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll see a building boom on the scale of what we saw in the 1990s. But we’re not going to dry up and blow away, either.”

City departments certainly have ideas. The city’s five-year capital improvements program includes $82 million of proposed projects featuring everything from road improvements to parks projects to additional fire stations. Many of the projects may never be built, officials said.

And the Parks and Recreation Department is about to complete a long-term master plan for the 1,500 acres of city-leased land at Clinton Lake.

“It’s going to have a huge price tag,” Wildgen said. “But it’s a good plan. It will show this commission and future commissions how to provide additional services to the community.”

The slowing money flow won’t make it easy.

“The budgets will be rather constrictive,” Kennedy said. “They won’t have the ability to have that much expansion.”

And money does make a difference.

“There is an element of opportunity,” Dunfield said. “When the revenues are coming in stronger, it puts us in better position to build.”