Price Banks, director of the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Department from 1982 to 1994, knows what a city planner has nightmares about: a City Commission meeting full of angry people.

In a 1955 Journal-World advertisement, Miller-Midyett Realtors listed this house at 1618 W. 22nd St. for 0,500. For an additional ,000 you could have bought the new Ford.

“There have been a lot of bad planning decisions made when the chairs of City Hall fill up,” Banks said.

Banks and others said when people scratch their heads about certain planning decisions – like why the western end of Ninth Street ends in a neighborhood at Kasold Drive – they should remember that city commissioners are prone to oiling the squeaky wheel.

But when it comes to planning for the future, planners often find themselves staring at past decisions that are difficult to overcome. Many have been related to the city’s roadway system. For example, the city’s Transportation 2025 plan recognizes seven major streets that logically could have been major through streets.

They include:

¢ Ninth Street, which ends at Kasold Drive.

¢ 15th Street, which does not go through Kansas University.

¢ 19th Street, which does not extend west of Iowa Street.

¢ 27th Street, which doesn’t travel through Haskell Indian Nations University.

¢ Harvard Drive, which has several breaks and off-setting connections.

¢ Inverness Drive, which does not extend south of 27th Street or north to Sixth Street.

City Commissioner Mike Amyx – who, in addition to his current stint, was a commisioner in the 1980s – said sometimes streets were blocked because commissioners heard arguments that the neighborhoods would be more livable because there would be less traffic passing through them.

“I think people have to remember that there were good reasons put forward at the time to support it,” Amyx said. “But I think we do wish we had a better street grid system.”

Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commissioner David Burress is not buying that argument. He said he thinks many of the decisions are examples of city leaders giving too much power to the wrong people.

“It was planning by developers,” said Burress, who said developers were interested in designing projects in a way that would best serve their pocketbooks instead of the community.

Playing catch-up

Sometimes, though, it isn’t neighbors or developers applying the pressure, it is fellow elected officials.

Members of Lawrence’s development and planning communities said that was at least partly the case in 1995, when Lawrence school district leaders selected the current location northeast of Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive for Free State High School.

“I haven’t figured it up exactly, but I think that decision perhaps has cost the community $100 million,” Burress said.

Burress said that’s because the high school sparked growth in a new area of the community before the city was ready for it. By locating the high school significantly north of Sixth Street, it forced the city to put sewers, roads and other services in an area that hadn’t received any infrastructure planning.

The area hadn’t been developed much because it, unlike most of the city, sloped toward the Kansas River. That meant to put sewers there, developers would have to construct expensive pump stations that would push the sewer uphill toward the sewer treatment plant.

But by the school district bringing sewer service to the area, it made the entire process more financially feasible. Plus, people like to live by schools, so the area became an easy sell for real estate agents.

However, city officials were being pressured to accommodate growth in an area they hadn’t spent much time thinking about how it should grow.

A courtroom in the Douglas County Courthouse was filled to capacity in 1955 during a rezoning hearing for the proposed Hillcrest Shopping Center proposed by R.M. Raney. Clockwise from lower left are city leaders George Bradshaw, John Crown, Jack Harris, John Weatherwax, Jack Maxwell (back to camera), Charles Stough, unidentifed, and Dr. L.K. Zimmer.

“I think that location really opened our eyes to community planning,” said Phil Struble, president of Landplan Engineering, which creates plans for developers across the city. “Prior to that selection, our community planning really stopped south of Sixth Street and east of Wakarusa Drive. That was an oversight on the entire community’s part that came as a result of us not thinking big enough.”

Tom Bracciano, director of facilities for the Lawrence school district, though, said the district worked hard to coordinate efforts with the city. But he said the school district had to make its decision based on public input, too. He said the district originally had planned a new high school at the current site of Langston Hughes School, which is south of Sixth Street and would not have opened up the area north of Sixth Street for development. But the community didn’t support the plan, in part because there was concern that the far west Lawrence school would become the “rich school” and Lawrence High School would become the “poor school.”

“If things were always done in the most efficient, cost-effective manner, they’d be a lot better. We all like to think that, but I’m not so sure,” Bracciano said. “We all want – and should have – a say in our communities, but when that happens, the decision-making process becomes political. What’s the most efficient or the most cost-effective may not be what people want.”

City Commissioner Sue Hack said the Free State High School scenario was a vivid example of how the community hadn’t always thought enough long-term about its growth.

“I think that is where we fall short,” Hack said. “We ought to at least have plans on paper. If we use them, fine. But if we don’t, at least they are there for the next generation of people.”

Cornfield mall fallout

But sometimes a community can make what many people believe is a good planning decision and still have it come back and create unintended negative consequences.

John Nalbandian – a former city commissioner and current chairman of Kansas University’s department of public administration – said he thought that was what happened in the early 1980s when city planners and commissioners rejected a proposal to build what was dubbed the “Cornfield Mall” in far south Lawrence.

Nalbandian called that decision “courageous” because he believed commissioners were justified in worrying that the mall would harm downtown Lawrence.

“The message, in my opinion, is that if you are a developer it will do you no good to buy large parcels of land and bring those parcels into City Hall all at once,” Nalbandian said. “Because if you do that, your project will be denied. The message we sent, intended or not, was that if you want a project approved, it has to be relatively small.”

Nalbandian said that has made it difficult for the city to do anything but piecemeal planning. He thinks the city now must try to convince developers that thinking big is OK.

But convincing developers is probably only half the battle, Nalbandian said. Convincing the public is an equally daunting challenge, he said.

“There are people who think Lawrence was at its peak at 30,000 people and everything else has been downhill,” Nalbandian said. “I think what could change that attitude is if a really large project came forward that would be so well done that it would make people say ‘Wow.’ It could set a standard and start changing how some people think.”