photo by: RiverFront & Center

The community group RiverFront & Center created the pictured design concept for the proposed Kaw River Commons project. It's one of the potential paths the section of the Lawrence Loop slated to be constructed between Seventh Street and Constant Park adjacent to downtown Lawrence could take.

The City of Lawrence is hosting an open house Wednesday to kick off public engagement for another incomplete section of the Lawrence Loop — the stretch from Seventh Street to Constant Park adjacent to downtown Lawrence.

The Lawrence Loop, once completed, will be a continuous 22-mile concrete path around the city. There are only a few sections left to construct, as the Journal-World has reported, and the city has budgeted to spend millions of dollars to complete the path in its last couple of Capital Improvement Plans. Wednesday’s open house is scheduled from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Carnegie Building, 200 W. Ninth St.

A project overview of this section of the Lawrence Loop posted on the city’s website identifies this as “one of the more complicated sections,” thanks to potential railroad crossings, private property and busy road crossings. According to the next five-year CIP approved by the Lawrence City Commission in September, this section is budgeted to cost about $10.5 million to complete between 2024 and 2025, $1.3 million of which is already funded.

As the Journal-World has reported, a group of Lawrence residents came up with one potential design concept for the area around this part of the Lawrence Loop back in 2021, and it includes multiple crossings and connecting segments near downtown Lawrence and two helices that would bring pedestrians up to the elevated crossings on the southern side of the Kansas River.

The project overview on the city website notes that the city is exploring funding opportunities to support the final design and construction of this portion of the Lawrence Loop and plans to submit an application for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity discretionary grant program. Lawrence is defined as “rural” by the Department of Transportation because its population is less than 200,000, meaning the minimum RAISE grant the project could receive would be $1 million and the maximum would be $25 million.

Along with the Seventh Street to Constant Park section, there are only two other sections of the Lawrence Loop left to complete, which are included in the CIP. One of them is the Iowa Street Crossing project, which is at the southern end of Iowa Street intersecting with Kansas Highway 10. The project will include a grade-separated crossing, likely either a bridge or tunnel, and the Kansas Department of Transportation agreed to provide 50% of construction costs — $1.5 million — to help fund the project last year.

The other remaining section, and likely the final segment to be completed, extends from Queens Road to Kasold Drive. There’s a little more than $5 million for that section included in the CIP from 2025 to 2027.