It will be busy tomorrow.

That’s one of the few certainties in the Lawrence retail world these days. As shoppers prepare to descend upon the city’s stores Friday to mark the traditional beginning of the holiday shopping season, Lawrence city commissioners have one hard-to-find item on their shopping list: a crystal ball.

City leaders could use some help in seeing what Lawrence’s retail future should look like. Specifically, commissioners are in the midst of deciding whether they should allow large areas of shopping to be developed on the edge of the city or whether such suburban-style development will take away from the community’s prized downtown and other existing shopping areas.

There will be plenty of interested observers on the street Friday, but they might be as split as city commissioners are on the subject.

Go to South Iowa Street – the city’s largest shopping area, where big box stores and national retailers are the norm – and there are plenty of people who feel the same way Lawrence resident Nancy Lahm does.

“I do the majority of my shopping out of town,” said Lahm, who was entering South Iowa Street’s Kohl’s department store. “It is just selection. I can’t find a lot of the items that my family wants.”

Stroll down Massachusetts Street, though, and it isn’t hard to find people who are a bit miffed by all the talk of more big-box stores.

“I think there are plenty of stores already,” said Lawrence resident Christy McConnell. “If you can’t find what you are looking for on Mass. Street, you can find it in Wal-Mart or Target. And if you can’t find it there, you might want to think about whether you really want to be looking for it.”

Seeking an answer

Riley Bredemus, 4, visits Wednesday with Barb Padget, sales associate at The Toy Store, 936 Mass., after shopping with his mother, Rachel Bredemus, Lawrence. Shoppers enjoyed nice weather Wednesday and many got a jump on holiday shopping.

Commissioners are about as evenly split. A clear 3-2 schism has emerged on the five-member commission when it comes to retail issues. It was three commissioners – Boog Highberger, Mike Rundle and David Schauner – who recently opposed giving final approval to a plan for a Wal-Mart store at Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive. Some of their opposition was related to whether the city’s retail market could handle another large store.

It was the same trio of commissioners who earlier this month denied approval of 184,600 square feet of new retail space at Sixth Street and the South Lawrence Trafficway. Throughout that discussion, the three commissioners frequently questioned how much more retail space the community could absorb.

Ultimately, commissioners told city planners and staff members to find out. Staff members have been given up to six months to create a report to answer the question of how much new retail development the city can handle without hurting the community’s existing businesses. Until that report is completed, the city is not expected to consider any new significant retail developments.

“Maybe it is naive of me to think that we can really resolve this issue, but I sure want to try,” Highberger said at the time.

Billion-dollar industry

There is a lot at stake in keeping the city’s retail industry healthy. According to a report prepared by a city-hired consultant earlier this year, Lawrence retailers sell just slightly more than $1 billion worth of merchandise each year.

The retail industry will generate about $20 million in sales taxes – or a little more than 15 percent of the city’s entire $130 million budget in 2006. The effect that the retail industry has on the city’s property taxes is tougher to measure, but by state law no retail store is eligible for a property tax abatement.

Several of the big-box stores pay significant amounts in property taxes. For example, The Home Depot at 31st and Iowa streets – which was the subject of the last major retail battle in the city – pays $173,385 in real estate taxes, according to the Douglas County Treasurer’s office.

“The taxes this industry generates really helps the entire city,” said Joe Flannery, a longtime Lawrence retailer who is the president of Weaver’s department store downtown. “It helps everyone in the community when people stay at home to shop.”

But city commissioners also frequently hear arguments that new retail development can create additional costs for the city. Neighbors around the proposed Wal-Mart at Sixth and Wakarusa, for instance, have argued that development will create so much traffic that it will require costly new road improvements to stop overflow traffic from going through their neighborhoods.

Market versus manage

The bigger cost, though, is that too many new retail areas will cause older shopping areas to fall into a blighted condition because they no longer can compete, says Kirk McClure, an associate professor of urban planning at Kansas University. McClure has become one of the more vocal City Hall opponents to new retail development.

“If you look around at all the empty strip malls and other empty sites we have, that is evidence of the market working badly,” said McClure, pointing to empty space in new developments along New Hampshire Street, in North Lawrence, and in smaller shops near The Home Depot and Best Buy.

The retail analysis that the city hired a consultant to do earlier this year found the overall retail vacancy rate in the city was 4.3 percent, which is considered healthy. But the consultant did find a vacancy rate in downtown of about 10 percent, which was deemed “relatively high” by the consultants.

Overall, though, the report by St. Louis-based Development Strategies Inc. said the city could support a significant amount of new retail development because there was evidence many Lawrence residents were leaving town to shop.

McClure disputes those findings, saying that analysis the consultant used was flawed.

Others are urging the city to follow the report’s recommendations. Richard Hassur, a Lawrence resident who is retired from a career of opening Pizza Hut franchises nationwide, said commissioners need to trust the free market more when it comes to retail.

“If somebody thinks they can do something different or better or be more innovative, they ought to have the chance to do that,” Hassur said. “It just seems like the city is trying to be too protective.”

Back on the streets among shoppers, opinions were mixed on whether the city should be more or less protective. The only clear consensus was that downtown is worth preserving.

“We really like to come here to shop. We just love the ambiance of downtown,” said Deborah Smith, who came from Topeka to shop downtown as part of her 50th birthday celebration. “When you are downtown, it just feels like you are someplace else.”