Lawrence and Douglas County have jointly planned growth for decades, but disagreement over the future of commercial development is threatening a piece of that partnership.

At issue are proposed revisions to the commercial chapter of Horizon 2020, the city-county joint long-range plan to guide new development. If agreement isn’t reached, officials say, the two governments could end up with different policies — the county allowing much bigger commercial developments than the city.

And that, officials say, will only create new planning headaches as Lawrence continues to grow.

“I guess the worst-case scenario is you have two different policies, one for the city and one for the county,” City Manager Mike Wildgen said this week.

He added: “I’d rather not work with two sets of numbers.”

The primary conflict is about the size of “community commercial centers” in Lawrence.

Bigger, smaller

Community centers are smaller than the “regional center” along south Iowa Street, and are closer in size to the cluster of retail developments at Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive.

Under the current version of Horizon 2020, passed in the mid-1990s by both the city and county commissions, a community commercial center “typically” contains 150,000 square feet of building space, but can grow to as large as 450,000 square feet.

The proposed revisions to Horizon 2020 would allow some community centers to grow as large as 500,000 square feet. The Lawrence City Commission doesn’t like that idea — it wants a maximum of 350,000 square feet — but it has the backing of a majority on the Douglas County Commission.

The Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission last week reconsidered the proposal. It agreed to some minor revisions of the policy, but deadlocked on whether to cut community centers down to 350,000 square feet.

Now the proposed policy goes back to the city and county commissions, where agreement appears elusive.

“Maybe there’s room to negotiate that,” Mayor David Dunfield said. But, “my general feeling is this is more properly a city issue. I’m not sure why the Planning Commission and the County Commission would not defer to the city in this matter.”

Douglas County Commission Chairman Bob Johnson disagreed. The county, he said, has a voice in Lawrence’s growth.

“We are elected to represent all of the people in the county,” Johnson said. “Seventy percent of my constituents live in the city of Lawrence.”

The reasons why

City Commissioner David Schauner said the smaller community centers desired by the city would keep commercial growth manageable, instead of overwhelming surrounding neighborhoods.

“Three-hundred-fifty-thousand was thought of as genuinely community centered, not a regional center number,” he said. “It’s small enough to be neighborhood friendly, be community friendly, and not be so big as to threaten that feeling.”

But Johnson said it made little sense to move backward from the current top limit of 450,000 square feet.

“In my mind, this is just a common-sense layman’s point of view,” Johnson said. “We’re an urbanizing county; it hardly makes sense to me that we should be downsizing our commercial shopping areas.”

The impasse has slowed new commercial development proposals. Brian Kubota has waited more than a year to proceed with plans for a commercial project on the southeast corner of Sixth Street and the South Lawrence Trafficway. He will have to wait until Horizon 2020 is resolved before moving forward.

“If the present so-called politicians consider that good planning, I guess that’s the way we have to live,” Kubota said.

Officials said a joint city-county study session would be scheduled in January in an attempt to resolve the differences.