photo by: Rochelle Valverde/Journal-World

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on Jan. 31, 2023.

At this week’s Lawrence City Commission meeting, city leaders will consider making a pair of preliminary decisions on an amendment to Lawrence and Douglas County’s joint comprehensive plan and a set of development incentives for a project involving one of the oldest buildings in town.

The amendment to Plan 2040 relates to a major development along the South Lawrence Trafficway — the New Boston Crossing project — that is seeking to add hundreds of homes and tens of thousands of square feet of retail and hotel space across 177 acres of agricultural land.

But much of that acreage is also located in the floodplain of the Wakarusa River, meaning it’s particularly susceptible to flooding. That was the main reason that six of the eight rezoning requests from the Wichita-based development group behind the project failed to earn a recommendation for approval from the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission in late January.

The amendment would revise Plan 2040’s land use map and its residential and open space uses within the project area. According to a report from planning staff included with Tuesday’s meeting agenda, those changes aim to circumvent any concerns about the floodplain.

“The applicant proposes to modify the floodplain boundary and engineer a new regulatory floodplain boundary through grading and fill of the site to lift a portion of the plan area out of the existing regulatory floodplain,” the report reads.

The developer’s ability to do that — or to proceed with the New Boston Crossing project at all — is dependent on an approval from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that would allow for removing land from the existing floodplain and establishing developable land through modification of the existing site topography.

The Planning Commission already voted 5-4 to recommend that city leaders approve the changes to Plan 2040 at a meeting in November 2023.

If the city approves the amendment on Tuesday, that won’t be the final step in the process, however. The request is also on the agenda for Wednesday’s Douglas County Commission meeting, and both bodies will have to approve the amendment in order to adopt a joint resolution codifying it.

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As for the other item of note on Tuesday’s agenda, the City Commission is the first of several groups that will consider a set of development incentives for a project involving the Turnhalle building, the 1869 stone structure at 900 Rhode Island St.

As the Journal-World has reported, the owners of the historic building plan to convert it into an approximately 300-person event space and restaurant, plus construct an approximately 835-square-foot addition for the back of the building to bring it into ADA compliance.

In late January, the city’s Public Incentives Review Committee unanimously approved an incentives package for the project, which will be the subject of a public hearing at Tuesday’s meeting. As the Journal-World has reported, the PIRC approved three types of incentives: a 15-year, 70% Neighborhood Revitalization Area rebate; a 20-year, 2% additional sales tax via a Community Improvement District; and Industrial Revenue Bonds providing a sales tax exemption on construction materials and labor.

An NRA is part of a property tax rebate program applying only to the value of new improvements made to a property and not its base value. Whatever taxing jurisdictions the NRA is located in receive 100% of the property taxes generated by the property and the 70% rebate, in this case, would apply only to new elements like the planned addition.

Both that type of incentive and Industrial Revenue Bonds are subject to approval from more than just the City Commission. The incentives package requires the approval of two other taxing jurisdictions — Douglas County and the Lawrence school district — before returning to the City Commission for a final stamp of approval.

The Community Improvement District doesn’t require jumping through as many hoops, meanwhile. They’re established through a city ordinance, which also sets any terms presented in a development agreement. The Turnhalle project’s additional sales tax collections would be capped at $1.9 million through the life of the project, meaning the Community Improvement District would exist either for a 20-year period or until the developer has collected roughly $1.9 million in sales tax, whichever comes first.

In other business, commissioners will:

• During a work session, hear a presentation about planned work to improve equitable entrepreneurship and small business support in 2024.

The Lawrence City Commission will convene at 5:45 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St. A live stream of the meeting can also be viewed via Zoom or the city’s YouTube channel.