Several residents living south of Bob Billings Parkway expressed their support Monday night for closing Kasold Drive when the city of Lawrence launches a lengthy reconstruction effort.

Nearly all of about 30 residents who attended a neighborhood meeting raised their hands in favor of closing Kasold from Bob Billings to West 22nd Street for the estimated eight months it would take to complete the project. The meeting took place at the Lawrence Police Department’s Investigations and Training Center, 4820 Bob Billings Parkway.

They said they preferred that option over keeping the street open, but reducing it from four lanes to two lanes and switching those lanes back and forth from one side of the street to the other during the reconstruction. Keeping the street open would increase the project completion time to 15 months, said Joe Caldwell, a representative of Bartlett and West Engineers, the firm designing the project for the city.

“We’d like to close it,” Caldwell said. “There are going to be headaches either way.”

But not all at the meeting favored the street closure, especially John Olson, store director at the Hy-Vee Food & Drug Store, 3504 Clinton Parkway.

“That just scares me to death,” Olson said.

A lot of the store’s customers come from the neighborhoods to the north and commonly use streets accessing Kasold to get to Hy-Vee, Olson said. He said he was afraid they would choose to go to other more accessible stores.

No decision, however, has been made about closing Kasold, Caldwell said. City commissioners will have to discuss the issue at a future meeting, and other Kasold area residents will have a chance to weigh in, said Caldwell and Lawrence Public Works Director Chuck Soules, who also attended the meeting.

If Kasold is closed, that would probably take place sometime in mid-February or early March of 2006, Caldwell said, and it would probably reopen by Dec. 1, 2006. If Kasold remains open, construction would probably start late this fall and continue for 15 months, he said.