Douglas County commissioners favor identifying and improving key roads east of U.S. Highway 59 to accommodate increased truck traffic and growth including the possibility a new Lawrence sewer plant will be built in the area.

That will be their recommendation when the county, Lawrence City Commission and Lawrence school district officials hold a joint meeting Wednesday. The county is not recommending a specific site for the sewer plant, but Commissioners Bob Johnson and Jere McElhaney said they favored an eastern location.

Commissioner Charles Jones said he didn’t have a problem with the plant being somewhere east of the highway, but the plant shouldn’t dictate the location of growth.

“I think growth should be to the east,” Jones said. “The question is, how do we create an alternative to going down 23rd and 31st (streets)?”

City and county officials expect that wherever the sewer plant is built, it will increase the likelihood of development in that area. If west of Highway 59, that will mean the need for expensive street and road improvements such as crossings, or “flyovers,” over the southwestern leg of the South Lawrence Trafficway at Kasold and Wakarusa drives.

At the same time, road and street improvements are going to be needed east of Highway 59 as industrial growth increases in eastern and southeastern Lawrence, county commissioners said. More eastern growth also seems likely to follow improvements to Highway 59 by the Kansas Department of Transportation.

Jones thinks that will increase traffic to the area, especially trucks seeking routes to eastern and southeastern industrial sites at the East Hills Business Park and the former Farmland fertilizer plant, should it eventually be cleaned up and used once again as an industrial or business site.

Increased truck traffic will mean a need for improved north-south and east-west streets or roads, commissioners said.

“It will make industrial growth that much more attractive,” Jones said.

Commissioners said a way to move traffic from the highway to the east side of town needs to be found regardless of what happens to the long-stalled South Lawrence Trafficway.

As local governments wrangle over the location of the sewer plant, Lawrence schools Supt. Randy Weseman said he was ready for a decision to be made.

“I say make a decision,” Weseman said Monday.

Weseman said he would plan for growth no matter what side of the highway the plant was built on.

Generally, it is thought that a plant on the east side of U.S. 59 will result in growth in the Baldwin school district. Baldwin Supt. Jim White said the district would be able to plan for that growth.

“We didn’t have a huge concern as to the location of the plant,” White said.

Putting the sewer plant east of the highway would work well, according to Phil Struble, president of Landplan Engineering, a private firm that helps developers plan for new development. He said he didn’t think building the plant east of the road would affect growth of the Lawrence school district.

And in some ways an eastside plant may be good because if it was on the west side, it might eat up prime development land, Struble said. He estimated development wouldn’t occur within a half-mile of the plant.

He said building east of Highway 59 wouldn’t eliminate the need to extend westside roads such as Wakarusa south of the Wakarusa river.

“It might delay the need a little bit, but it won’t cause it to go away,” Struble said.

Struble predicted new development would start near Highway 59 and go slowly to the east and quickly to the west, regardless of where the sewer plant was built. The target date for completing the new plant is 2011.