The City of Lawrence soon will be charging a new fee for commercial and multi-family building projects that will help fund additional review for large-scale developments.

The fee is projected to pay for a new position — a senior building inspector — in the city’s planning and development services department. The senior inspector will help to manage, review and inspect large commercial and multi-family projects.

“Those kinds of larger projects sometimes have a lot of coordination that’s needed to make sure things go smoothly during the project and especially at the end,” said Kurt Schroeder, assistant director of development services for the city.

But the new fee, in many cases, will add thousands of dollars onto the cost of commercial and apartment projects. The fee will be calculated by using the current building permit fee formula — which is based on the dollar value of a project — and then adding 20 percent to that fee total. For instance, a $25-million project would have to pay about $44,000 in permit fees and an additional $9,000 for the review fee.

Lawrence has had several large-scale commercial and multi-family projects in the past several years. Last year, a record-breaking $227 million of new construction took place in Lawrence. That included 19 projects valued at $1 million or more, such as the multimillion-dollar HERE apartment and retail project from a Chicago-based development firm and an apartment and office building at Ninth and New Hampshire led by Lawrence businessmen Doug Compton and Mike Treanor.

Schroeder said the review fee, and subsequently the new inspector, will enable the city to provide better inspection services for the type of large projects Lawrence has been seeing the past several years. He said those projects require a lot of effort and time from city staff.

“We want to make sure we’re inspecting and keeping all the buildings safe and code compliant, but we also want to make sure there are not delays in the service,” Schroeder said. “This, we think, will kind of help fill in some of the gaps we’re starting to see just because of the volume of inspection activity and plan review.”

Since 2011, Compton has undertaken three major downtown apartment projects. Bill Fleming, an attorney for a group led by Compton and Treanor, wasn’t opposed to the fee as long as it was indeed used to fund an additional position.

“As long as the fee is reasonable, I don’t know why anybody would object to that if it’s money that’s actually going to be spent on better service and the review process,” Fleming said.

Members of the City Commission are also in the process of reviewing the fees the city charges for various services, including application fees for economic development incentives.

The City Commission approved the plan review fee as part of next year’s budget. The new fee will go into effect in January, and Schroeder said the city will start advertising for the senior building inspector position in early 2017.