Last week, the Lawrence City Commission agree to form a new task force that will study ways to attract more retailers to downtown Lawrence. The decision came less than six months after the city received a final report from its Retail Task Force, which covered much of the same territory.

The new task force will have several charges. It was told to look at the mix of retail vs. bar and restaurant businesses. The city’s planning department had already updated those numbers and presented them at Tuesday’s commission meeting. The percentage of downtown commercial space occupied by retailers continues to decline, while the percentage of space occupied by eating establishments was relatively stable. The overall commercial vacancy rate was down but continues to ebb and flow.

The new group also was assigned to look at how a city-sponsored retail incubator could reduce vacancies. The Retail Task Force already studied that issue and concluded that the city should encourage the private sector to take that job on but consider some public incentives for an incubator in downtown or elsewhere.

The other two charges of the new group were to look for more opportunities to work with Kansas University and the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau to plan downtown events and to provide greater support of the arts in downtown. Both of those are ongoing efforts that don’t seem to require much additional study.

So, what do commissioners think they will learn from another downtown task force? Two commissioners who took office in April — including one who owns a downtown business — organized a recent downtown listening session, and the idea for a new task force came out of a commission discussion of that session.

Did the listening session produce some startling revelation, or are commissioners simply hoping a new task force will take the same information given to previous groups and come up with a different conclusion? Do commissioners already have some action in mind that they hope will be supported by a new task force with new members?

It will be interesting to follow the progress of the yet-to-be-named task force. Depending on what commissioners have in mind, it could either be another exercise in futility or serve as the basis for significant downtown action.