I was talking to a perceptive observer of Lawrence, Kansas, when we got onto the subject of the roadwork that has turned the town into a bewildering maze.

“It’s not that hard to get around,” I said. “I just drive to Kansas City on I-70, take a highway back west and enter Lawrence from the north. It only takes an extra hour or two.” My friend smiled.

“A lot of people don’t realize that when all this work is done, Lawrence is going to be a very different place,” he said. In fact, he predicted that Lawrence is on the threshold of a boom. Improvements in infrastructure and the completion of the South Lawrence Trafficway are going to spur unprecedented growth.

This will provoke wailing and gnashing of teeth among Lawrence’s no-growth contingent, but they have had their day. They took the fastest growing town in Kansas and turned it into the second-worst performing small metro economy in the nation. They sent American Eagle packing to Ottawa because it offered only “dead-end jobs.” They lobbied for saving prime agricultural land from development in preparation for the day when Lawrence will have to depend on local farmers to provide food for subsistence.

Armed with esoteric studies that presumed to dictate the precise percentage of retail space a town should have, they made dire predictions of the results of overbuilding: widespread vacancies, blight, bands of marauding robbers. Lawrence would be ruined forever if a second Wal-Mart was built, they claimed. A fortune was spent in legal fees to prevent it. But the store got built, and Lo! — life has gone on. Lawrence has somehow survived.

But there are still two sides to the story. When I drive into Lawrence these days I pass a congregation of cranes and monstrous earth moving machines at work. It’s awesome — and also appalling. The trafficway may be a boon to development, but it may provoke sprawl and ecological degradation. It was stopped in its tracks 30 years ago. Now it’s being finished, at considerably higher cost. The “cornfield mall” was shot down in the name of saving downtown. Today, a new mall is being proposed for the same spot. Was anything accomplished by the opposition? How do you define “progress” in this town?

The pendulum swings — from apocalyptic negativity to “anything goes.” The opponents of growth managed to win Lawrence a reputation of being hostile to development of any kind. Today, there’s danger of the other extreme — rampant, unplanned growth, promiscuous use of tax incentives and subsidies for development. The controversial Rock Chalk recreation center unfolded suspiciously like crony capitalism — developers in bed with government. Lawrence may also be threatened by reckless government spending and the expansion of superfluous bureaucracies.

Of course, booms have downsides. But economic stagnation can also create social pathologies, including poverty and crime. Will leadership step up to manage growth? Lawrence will soon find out. So fasten your seat belts and cross your fingers. Full speed ahead.