It’s good to see that plans have once again been submitted for a major retail development at the intersection of the South Lawrence Trafficway and south Iowa Street.

The rejection of the KTen Crossing development 18 months ago by the Lawrence City Commission felt like a missed opportunity then and even more so now. Hopefully, the North Carolina developers of the project get a fairer shake this time around.

Collett development group has filed plans for a 585,000-square-foot shopping center on U.S. Highway 59 (Iowa Street) just south of the SLT. The plans call for 395,000 square feet of retail development, about 50,000 square feet of new restaurants and 140,000 square feet of new hotels.

Specific tenants have not been discussed, but Collett previously had interest from tenants such as Academy Sports, Old Navy, Designer Shoe Warehouse, HomeGoods and others. The group also may be considering a large membership-based retailer like Costco or Sam’s Club.

Collett’s latest proposal is significantly larger than the company’s 250,000 square-foot KTen Crossing that the city voted down 4-1 in January 2016. That vote was rife with political implications as competing developers with interests in the Mercato retail development around Rock Chalk Park in west Lawrence lobbied the City Commission hard to deny KTen, which the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission had endorsed.

In the 2016 vote, Commissioners Mike Amyx, Leslie Soden, Lisa Larsen and Stuart Boley voted against the development. Only Matthew Herbert voted for it, issuing prophetic words of caution as he did so.

“Retailers know where to build retail because that’s what they do for a living,” Herbert said at the time. “We have Mercato and we need Mercato to be successful, and we can sit and wait, or we can allow development to build where it’s told us they want to build. We’re not in the business of picking winners and losers. We’re in the business of job creation and tax base growth.”

As Herbert predicted, the vote against KTen didn’t help Mercato; it simply stymied retail development in both areas. The eastern section of the South Lawrence Trafficway finally opened last November, yet neither south Lawrence nor west Lawrence has seen the retail development that was supposed to accompany the opening.

A retail market report Collett commissioned by Kansas City-based Richard Caplan & Associates found KTen Crossing would have added approximately $1.27 million in sales tax revenue once it was fully open. The report also stated the development was likely to draw in shoppers from around Douglas and Franklin counties and create 442 jobs. Given the larger size of the latest proposal, those projections should be higher this time.

Obviously, there are still questions that must be addressed as Collett works its way through the planning process. But as city commissioners prepare to consider this major retail development for the second time, they should think carefully about what happened — or better yet, what didn’t happen — when they rejected the development last time around.