photo by: Richard Gwin

The East Hills Business Park, located along Kansas Highway 10 in East Lawrence, celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2008.

About 30 years since the inception of East Hills Business Park, several of the park’s lots have been resigned to remain just that. City leaders said that while much of the park has been very successful, five lots needed to be taken off the books at this point.

“We believe that it is highly unlikely that a number of these tracts will develop at all because they serve as key infrastructure to the park, or because of the lot configuration or the lot size they’re just not going to be developed,” Assistant City Manager Diane Stoddard told the Lawrence City Commission at its meeting Tuesday.

East Hills was a joint venture between the city, Douglas County and the Economic Development Corporation of Lawrence and Douglas County. Eight lots remain unsold, and with them about $415,000 of outstanding special assessments. A city audit report noted in June that the assessments were due in May 2014 from Douglas County — which owns the land — but were never received.

Stoddard said that five of the eight lots are either serving other infrastructure purposes or have characteristics that make it unlikely they will ever be sold. Two of them are serving as storm drainage for the park, and three are irregularly shaped and/or landlocked. City staff therefore recommended that the special assessments on those five lots, which total about $260,000, be waived entirely.

The special assessments cover infrastructure costs related to building East Hills. The city set up a benefit district at that time, which meant the company that bought each lot would eventually pay special assessments to allow the city to recoup much of those infrastructure costs.

As far as the assessments on the three remaining lots, staff are recommending that they be “deferred indefinitely” until the lots are sold for development. Two of those lots are also part of the city’s new business park, Lawrence VenturePark, which is adjacent to East Hills. Those three lots will remain on the books so that special assessments from those lots could still result in revenue for the city should they be sold in the future.

City Manager Tom Markus told commissioners that the manufacturing industry has been down nationwide, but there is potential for it to improve in years to come.

“We’ve really been challenged with the Venture lot, but I would tell you that’s not unusual across the country either, and I experienced that in previous employment,” Markus said. “The manufacturing sector is difficult to attract business to, and while we have some current prospects that we’re working very strenuously to get here, it’s a tougher market in terms of all the incentives that other jurisdictions provide and other considerations that manufacturing makes when they make a site location (decision).”

The city is still working on securing its first tenant for VenturePark. Earlier this year, home improvement retailer Menards indefinitely delayed a project to build a new distribution center and manufacturing plant at VenturePark.

Commissioners unanimously approved the staff’s recommendation to waive assessments to five of the lots and defer assessments on the remaining three.

In other business, commissioners approved changes to the transient guest tax grant policy. The changes were recommended by the Transient Guest Tax Advisory Board to clarify the grant program’s goals, and include provisions that call for events to demonstrate a measurable economic benefit or pull of regional visitors.