Lawrence conference center feasibility study due mid-February

Get ready to talk about whether Lawrence ought to get into the conference center business.

A long-delayed report studying the feasibility of whether Lawrence could support a new conference center is scheduled to be released in mid-February, City Manager David Corliss has confirmed. Then it will be up to city commissioners to decide what comes next.

“Once we get to that stage, we need to talk about the level of priority commissioners have for that type of project,” Corliss said.

The idea of a conference center has been a topic for City Hall discussion after leaders of The World Company — which owns the Journal-World and LJWorld.com — announced last year that they were interested in developing a mixed-use project that would include a conference center on property owned by the company. The proposal has been to redevelop the former printing plant of the Journal-World at Sixth and Massachusetts and Sixth and New Hampshire streets into a project that would include a hotel, apartments, an open-air plaza and a conference center. Company officials have said they likely will ask city and Kansas University officials to consider how the two entities could participate in the conference center portion of the project.

Corliss said the new report from Convention Sports & Leisure won’t provide much guidance on whether the city or other public entities ought to provide funding for a conference center. Instead, the report looks at how large of a center feasibly could be supported in the community.

“We’re trying to determine if a center of a certain size were built, would it be well-used in the community,” Corliss said.

But Corliss said any request for financial participation from the city will require commissioners to consider how the project stacks up against other projects under discussion at City Hall.

“It is not our top capital priority at the moment. The police facility is,” Corliss said.

Dan Simons, president of the digital division of The World Company, said the possibility of a new police headquarters project shouldn’t dissuade the community from moving forward on a conference center.

“We have said from day one that a mixed-use development, part of which is a conference center, will generate a lot of money that can go toward paying for a police headquarters or other city needs,” Simons said. “If done correctly, this will add revenue to the city.”

Simons said having KU involved in the project could help the community attract a variety of academic conferences that currently are being held elsewhere but could benefit from the expertise available at the university.

City officials originally contracted for the feasibility study in July, and it was estimated the study would be done by mid-September. But Corliss said difficulties in coordinating the schedules of officials at the city and the university — which are splitting the costs of the $29,000 study — led to a delay. In August, Corliss said he expected the study to be completed by the end of 2014.

Corliss said he is now confident the study will be ready to be released by mid-February. He said he’s received a draft of the report and that final rewrites of the document should not take long.