Mark Wulfkuhle, left, supervises while his nephew Brett Vannicola repairs a tear in a farm truck tire.

Cielito Lindo Server Rene Garcia, left, and co-owner Jose Pepe Lopez tend to customers during lunch rush hour at the restaurant, 815 N.H. The business opened in October and serves Mexican fare, including authentic mole sauces.

Galen Tarman, owner of Blue Heron, 921 Mass., has been in business for 25 years, despite the rate of retail turnover under way in downtown Lawrence. Blue Heron's main competition has come from stores in the Kansas City area like Crate&Barrel, Pottery Barn and other national names.

Mark Wulfkuhle, left, supervises while his nephew Brett Vannicola repairs a tear in a farm truck tire.

Lumpe cultivates black poplar mushrooms at Wakarusa Valley Farms as part of the Rolling Prairie Farmers Alliance. The service offers bags of produce for 2-5 weekly at Community Mercantile, 901 Iowa, and Local Burger, 714 Vt. The group also offers service in Kansas City locations. A deposit is required.

A Harley-Davidson odometer is reflective of the surge of new developments and business in North Lawrence.

More than 150 years since members of the New England Emigrant Aid Co. came upon the banks for the Kansas River and decided to set up a free-state stronghold, Lawrence’s leaders once again are moving forward with a sense of direction and forging optimistic plans for affirming their community a bastion of commerce and future success.

That’s the vision, at least.

“The New England Emigrant Aid Co., they were true pioneers – not only did they have a vision of what they hoped for in the new frontier, but they also had a philosophical vision, as far as being antislavery,” said Joe Flannery, president of Weaver’s Department Store, a Lawrence original founded just three years after the town was chartered. “They were astute people and we were fortunate that they landed in Lawrence. They set the groundwork for how Lawrence lives and believes today.”

Now, Flannery said, Lawrence is working to keep that vision alive and steadfast resolve in place so that the community won’t lose its standing as a stronghold of commerce, quality of life and vitality in northeast Kansas and beyond.

Working from a vision statement recently developed by the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, he said, is a great start.

“We need to get some unity somehow,” Flannery said. “Lawrence is always known for being divisive on certain issues, but if we could have some type of meeting of minds, that would be great. We’re going to grow. We want to grow. We just need to figure out how to grow to benefit all of us.”

The chamber’s vision statement – intended to focus on fostering a robust economy, providing and preserving superior amenities and maintaining Lawrence’s distinct spirit and atmosphere – already is being put to work:

¢ Economic development officials have noted the vision statement’s call for more jobs in touting plans for a new bioscience incubator in the East Hills Business Park, a nearly $7.5 million project designed to attract emerging and promising startups to test, advance and market their ideas in pharmaceuticals or other technologies.

¢ During the latest campaign for Lawrence City Commission, candidates Mike Dever and Rob Chestnut – who finished first and second, respectively – campaigned on a need to add jobs, broaden the community’s tax base and improve prospects for attracting new employers to town and spurring existing operations to expand. The same goals have been key components of the vision process.

¢ The Lawrence school district continues to grapple with budget issues as its school-age population shifts into areas where schools need more room, adding pressure to adjust boundaries or expand. Such issues will continue to tug at the largest portion of the vision’s “amenities” plank, one often monitored closely by employers, both existing and prospective.

All the while, builders throughout the community have waded through a market facing sluggish residential real estate prices and diminished commercial activity. Merchants have watched a commercial colossus emerge near Kansas Speedway, challenging retail offerings ranging from furnishings to Massachusetts Street mom-and-pops to national chains on South Iowa Street.

And through it all, the vision gets down to business.

Bioscience incubation

Just after Christmas, chamber officials joined leaders from the city of Lawrence, Douglas County and the Kansas Bioscience Authority to announce a bold new project: creation of a new business incubator for bioscience operations.

The project will be expected to cost up to $7.5 million, with the bulk of it coming from the state bioscience authority. The goal is to transform a warehouse building into a high-tech center infused with state-of-the-art laboratories, shared office space and common conference rooms.

The project fits into the vision for a robust economy, said Lavern Squier, the chamber’s president and chief executive officer, and not only because it will add bricks and mortar – along with microchips, optical glass and ultra-sanitized plumbing and climate-control systems – to the market.

The center will show a firm commitment from the city, county, Kansas University and the state to a future focused on promising technologies and their economic opportunities, something that has been on paper for years but not always recognized in a highly competitive field.

“This is a big step,” Squier said. “It’s an evolutionary step.”

City leadership

Squier said that the chamber’s vision, revealed earlier this year at the 1,200-member organization’s annual meeting, also had been beneficial in helping form a “platform” from which questions could be asked of candidates about pressing issues facing the community.

Rob Chestnut, chief financial officer for Allen Press, knew where the answers were, and his campaigning about jobs, tax issues and other growth-oriented matters helped him finish ahead of incumbent Commissioner Boog Highberger to secure a four-year team at City Hall.

Chestnut, who grew up in Lawrence, started his government work April 10 and sees the chamber’s vision as “putting the wheels in motion” toward developing a community vision, one that takes job growth seriously.

His plan is to find out how Lawrence missed out on employment opportunities – whether it’s because of a lack of available buildings, appropriate space to build new ones or bureaucratic operations that take too long – and find ways to make the process more efficient.

“I agree with many that it’s not a short-term fix,” Chestnut said. “It’s not something that’s going to take six months or a year, but we can make some tangible progress. The process is slow. It takes a long time for employers to make decisions about new locations.”

But having a vision for people to coalesce around, and find value in, gives the commission a chance to move forward and get things done, he said. Whether it’s making room for welcoming new and expanding employers, or simply making it easier for companies to keep up with market demands without facing undue interference from City Hall, the work is out there.

“I think that we have some concepts, but making concepts reality is just about hard work,” Chestnut said. “In organizations you have to create a vision, and then goals and objectives and tactics to make it a reality. : What we need to do is get down to the tangible steps that we can take, as a community, to get this vision going. And for that we’ll have to prioritize. We, as a commission, will have to decide on the things that we really think are the priorities that we want to go after and try – no matter how tempting it is to do something else – to go after those things that are priorities.”

Going to schools

Scott Morgan, who led all vote-getters in the Lawrence school board election, will return to district’s service center as a board member just four years after losing an election.

Just how much has changed isn’t as much the focus as what challenges lie ahead.

Among those topping the list, he said: improving vocational and technical education and programs, so that students not headed to college will be able to compete in a market that increasingly demands specialized training and skills.

“We’ve always been so focused on the college kids that we’ve often let the vo-tech and technical slip,” said Morgan, president of Morgan Quitno Press, whose publications rate services and communities nationwide. “It’s clear we have room for improvement.”

Also looming large are issues related to the district’s lineup of schools, athletics fields and other facilities. While not nearly as important as the training given to kids, he said, such physical investments indicate a community’s collective commitment to education.

Students need enough classrooms to learn in, soccer fields to compete on and space to grow up in – both physically and mentally – for Lawrence to succeed.

Prospective employers also tour schools when they’re thinking about coming to a community, making sure that they can draw employees from a solid educational system.

“Facilities do matter,” Morgan said. “When we have a trailer park of portables parked outside our schools, it doesn’t speak well of our commitment to schools.”

Recent bond issues have addressed the needs. The district is working on $50 million in construction at the city’s four junior high schools and an elementary school, Broken Arrow. Another $10 million is being pumped into technology.

Randy Weseman, now in his eighth year as the district’s superintendent, said that district officials were continuing to monitor demographics that show students shifting into areas where schools either will need more classrooms or adjusted attendance-area boundaries. Such is the reality of a district where the student count is holding relatively steady at a little more than 10,000 students, while tolerance for building new schools is tenuous at best.

“They don’t get too happy when you continue to raise their taxes,” Weseman said of the district’s patrons.

That’s why Weseman, a member of the chamber’s board of directors, is encouraged by the organization’s formulation of a vision. A tax base that relies too heavily on residential revenues adds more students to the attendance rolls while adding to its own tax burden.

Adding more employers, and encouraging existing ones to expand, helps increase revenues coming in from businesses.

“Broadening the tax base is probably a prudent thing to do,” he said.

Implementation plans

Joan Golden, a vice president at US Bank and chairwoman of the chamber for 2007, said that all of the community’s issues could find a home in the chamber’s vision. And the chamber is boosting its lineup of committees to be sure to include as many people as possible in working toward solutions that the community can embrace.

Among new topics added this year to the committee list: downtown and transportation.

The downtown group has plenty to work on. As longtime storefronts – Fields, Mass. Street Deli and The Casbah among them – have closed, giving way to an uncertain future, others are stepping up with aggressive plans for a downtown with an increasingly vibrant future.

Bo Harris continues to work on plans for a mixed-use enclave among aging industrial building along Pennsylvania Street, just east of the central business district. And members of the Fritzel family continue to upgrade office buildings, pursue projects to bring more residents downtown and – in one of the biggest proposed projects facing the community these days – promote plans for building a new public library on the site of the current downtown post office, which would be relocated and usher in a wave of new commercial, office and residential space along Vermont Street.

Flannery watches it all with an interested eye, 20 years after taking over for his father as president of Weaver’s, 901 Mass.

The store that opened as Bullene’s in 1857 endures in an always-competitive market, he said, despite real estate taxes that have increased 60 percent since 2000. The Hobbs Taylor Lofts on New Hampshire Street have helped bring more people to live downtown, something that can only help keep the central business district alive with activity and consumers.

He’s looking forward to the chamber’s Downtown Committee juggling the factors, issues and economic realities that always seem to percolate to the surface – rising property values and taxes, local shops vs. national chains, concerns about public parking – and filtering it through the vision that calls for a community with a robust economy, superior amenities and a distinct spirit and atmosphere.

He likes where all this is headed.

“I think it’s a start,” Flannery said. “It’s just going to take a lot of people to buy into it. It’s a beginning. Whether or not we’ll ever completely get there, it’s going to take a lot of time and effort.”

The community, he said, has plenty to work with.

“I’m always encouraged about Lawrence,” he said. “Between the university and a great downtown and great neighborhoods, there’s a lot to be encouraged about Lawrence.”