The crystal ball at Lawrence City Hall envisions significant amounts of new growth south of the Wakarusa River.

An aerial view of Lawrence at Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive shows where city growth is expected in the future. Crafting sewage and transportation plans for the area will be a hurdle for planners to overcome.

In fact, the city’s wastewater plan calls for 20,000 people to be living in that newest part of Lawrence by 2025.

That’s the good news for people who want to see continued growth in Lawrence. Unfortunately, the crystal ball gets fuzzy when it comes to the details.

“We have a sewer plan that shows 20,000 people living in the area south of the Wakarusa River, but we have a transportation plan that really provides no new way for all those people to get to downtown Lawrence,” said Phil Struble, president of Landplan Engineering, which creates development plans for builders across the city.

That doesn’t make sense to Struble, but he said that has been a frequent theme with Lawrence planning.

“We have lots of plans,” Struble said. “We’re planning all the time. It really is a constant process. But one of the things that we as a community haven’t done very well is ensure that all our plans match each other.”

But not everyone buys that argument. David Burress, a member of the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission, said the situation often was “overblown” by developers seeking ammunition to push a project through.

He said developers often were quoting plans that have been replaced or are in the process of being updated. Burress said that’s the case with Transportation 2025, which he admitted doesn’t call for nearly any projects south of the Wakarusa River. But he said that’s because the plan was developed before city leaders learned it would be feasible to put a new sewer treatment plant along the Wakarusa River.

City Manager Mike Wildgen said the transportation issue was just one example of how planning a growing community could be challenging.

“Nothing in this business is static,” Wildgen said. “People make land purchase decisions, business decisions, decisions about where to send their kids to school, all independent of what we’re doing.

“And every two years we have an election that could change the City Commission. What I’m saying is that this isn’t a dictatorship. It is a changing world at all levels, and we work hard to keep up with it.”

And Wildgen said though the city’s planning process wasn’t perfect, it has had successes over the years.

“We have a strong downtown because of planning decisions we’ve made,” Wildgen said. “We have great neighborhoods with lots of diversity, and planning has played a role in that.”

But ever since staff members told commissioners in late September more studies were needed to determine whether the city’s sewer system could keep up with growth in northwest Lawrence, several city commissioners have expressed concerns the planning process isn’t clear enough.

Limited horizon

In theory, that should be an easy question to answer. In the early 1990s, the city and the county joined together to create Horizon 2020, the plan for both Lawrence and the unincorporated parts of Douglas County designed to prepare for future development.

In the hierarchy of plans, no plan should trump Horizon 2020. But many times Horizon 2020 creates as many questions as it answers, both planners and developers say. For example, Struble said Horizon 2020 showed the future use of the southeast corner of Sixth Street and the South Lawrence Trafficway as single-family homes. But a subsequent plan shows it as industrial.

Or at least that’s how the plan reads to Struble. How it reads to someone else may be different. Differing opinions are common when interpreting Horizon 2020, which was written in the early 1990s by planning, city and county commissioners along with community volunteers who sought to provide direction to the community’s growth for the next two decades. But many say the plan fell short.

“Horizon 2020 was created to be a politically correct plan that was designed to not offend anyone,” said Price Banks, who was the Lawrence-Douglas County planning director from 1982 to 1994. “As a result, it is open to anybody’s interpretation.”

City commissioners are considering creating a communitywide “visioning” process that would seek to answer questions about how fast, where and when the community will grow.

“Horizon 2020 was written in such a broad brush way that it avoided the hard questions,” City Commissioner David Schauner said. “Sometimes I feel sorry for management down at City Hall. They have a ton of projects to evaluate, but there’s no real vision or direction to tell them where we are headed.”

The result, City Commissioner Sue Hack said, had been planning on too small a scale.

“I feel like we’re still in a hunt-and-peck situation,” Hack said. “I want Horizon 2020 to be long-range. I want it to be Horizon 2020. I don’t want it to be Horizon January.”

Mayor Boog Highberger has an idea to help the city do a better job of long-term planning. He’s asking city commissioners to consider changing the city’s annexation policy.

Currently, the city annexes land in small chunks as developers bring projects forward. Highberger thinks the city should start doing large-scale annexations that would bring into the city limits all the land the city is expected to grow into during the next three to five years. In addition, the city would work with landowners to plan a street grid system and infrastructure for the area. Currently, street systems for a project generally are designed by developers and reviewed by city planners.

“We need to get ahead of growth instead of responding to proposals for growth,” Highberger said. “And I also think this is a way to acknowledge that Lawrence is going to continue to grow. I think everybody recognizes that. If there are no-growthers out there, I don’t know where they are.”

Struble said he thought the development community would respond well to Highberger’s proposal, if the city understands the amount of planning and financial resources it would take to get in front of development and stay in front of it.

A vision

It also likely will require someone willing to stand up and be a champion for the cause of thinking bigger, and someone who will put their political reputation on the line. Banks said he thought those types of people were becoming harder to find, because serving on the City Commission and other boards has become more high-profile.

“I think we have a vision vacuum in the community,” Banks said. “We have been in a reactive mode instead of a proactive mode for quite a while now.

“I think some of it has to do with we’re no longer electing community leaders like we used to. There was a time that commissioners would be the pillars of the community. They would be presidents of banks, leaders of industry, the really key people at the university. It is tougher to find those people to run now.”

Others in the community have said the city may be going through a bit of transition after the 2003 death of Bob Billings, the man regarded as the city’s pre-eminent developer. Billings – the driving force behind the Alvamar developments – amassed thousands of acres of property that were squarely in the city’s westward growth path. Whenever city leaders needed to do long-range planning, they were able to accomplish a lot just by working with Billings.

“What has happened is we’ve lost the convenience of being able to work with one large landowner who was always very willing to work with the city,” said Mark Buhler, an executive with Stephens Real Estate and a former county commissioner. Struble, who worked on many projects with Billings, agreed.

“Now we are where every other community is,” Struble said. “We have independently minded property owners, independently minded developers and we have to try to come up with a common goal to unite them.”