photo by: City of Lawrence screenshot

Students who attend Limestone Community School line up to urge the Lawrence City Commission to not approve rezoning requests for a development project in the Wakarusa River floodplain during the City Commission's meeting on Tuesday, March 5, 2024.

All eight of the rezoning requests for a sprawling development project located partially in the Wakarusa River floodplain along the South Lawrence Trafficway earned a stamp of approval from Lawrence city leaders Tuesday night — including six that needed a supermajority to advance.

At Tuesday’s Lawrence City Commission meeting, commissioners approved those six requests for the New Boston Crossing project all on 4-1 votes, with Commissioner Lisa Larsen opposed, and also unanimously approved the two other rezoning requests. Larsen was opposed to the majority of requests because they involved areas that overlap with the Wakarusa River floodplain. A little less than half of the 177-acre project site overlaps with the floodplain.

But though other members of the commission recognized that concern, they had other issues in mind. Mayor Bart Littlejohn said he felt compelled to vote in favor of all of the rezoning requests, citing in particular the city’s need for more housing. Littlejohn noted that the city on average saw 300 new single-family homes go up for sale per year in the 1990s and early 2000s, while the number of homes on the market at the start of this year was just 104.

“This essentially just goes back decades — that we direly need housing,” Littlejohn said.

As the Journal-World has reported, those requests needed to earn a supermajority for approval in the first place because they’d previously failed to earn a recommendation for approval from the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission, where some members had similar concerns to Larsen’s about developing in the floodplain.

On Tuesday, Vice Mayor Mike Dever noted that the project won’t be able to move forward without federal approval related to the floodplain anyway. In this case, the Wichita-based project team needs an approval from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to modify the floodplain’s regulatory boundary.

Phil Struble with Landplan Engineering, part of the development team, told commissioners it’ll take four to six months to hear back from FEMA about the outcome of that request.

If they do get the OK to move forward with that proposal, developers aim to mitigate development concerns through a strategy that many of the couple of dozen public commenters who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting referred to as “fill-and-build.” That would involve grading and filling on the project site to lift a portion of the area out of the existing floodplain.

That’s a practice those commenters were critical of, along with other aspects of the project team’s plan. Earlier in the meeting, Struble mentioned that the group had met with Rebecca Buford, the leader of Tenants to Homeowners, to initiate discussions about incorporating affordable housing in the development. Though the project aims to add hundreds of homes and many thousands of square feet of retail and hotel space, it’s previously called for new homes that would cost roughly $350,000 each.

“Probably over the next couple months, we need to start nailing these kind of issues down and work out something with (Buford) or someone else in that same space, but we’re committed to that,” Struble said. “We understand that that is a benefit to the City of Lawrence, it’s a benefit to our development because we are attempting to provide those uses and benefits to that part of our community within our development.”

But some commenters said including affordable housing now might only be an effort to make the project more palatable for city leaders. These commenters said if the developers had wanted to include affordable housing as part of the project, they would’ve done so at its outset.

One portion of the commenters was a group of kids who attend Limestone Community School who strongly urged commissioners against approving the rezoning requests. They instead asked commissioners to consider alternative development locations based on maps they’d created and suggested other uses for the land like donating it to Haskell Indian Nations University or to Native tribes.

In other business, commissioners:

• As part of the meeting’s consent agenda, approved a proposal from Sister Cities Lawrence to formally partner with Tocopilla, Chile, as a new sister city, and authorized an agreement between the City of Lawrence and the Lawrence Humane Society for animal sheltering services.

The Tocopilla partnership will add to Lawrence’s standing sister city relationships with Hiratsuka, Japan; Eutin, Germany; and Iniades, Greece. The partnership with Tocopilla is intended to focus on environmental issues; Chile’s Ministry of Energy designated the town of approximately 25,000 inhabitants in northern Chile as the first community in the country to participate in a sister city relationship as part of the Net Zero World initiative supporting countries as they transition to clean energy.

As for the Lawrence Humane Society agreement, it’s a new five-year deal that reflects the current scope of services provided at the humane society and allows for a 7.5% increase in city funding each year. The city’s compensation starts at $440,000 for 2024 and will escalate to $587,606 by 2028.

• Authorized City Manager Craig Owens to execute a supplemental agreement with GHD Services Inc. for $87,409 for the Farmland remediation project.

That refers to the city’s contamination cleanup program at the former Farmland Industries fertilizer plant, which the city took over in 2010. The city is legally responsible for handling remediation of environmental contaminants on the site and since 2018 has had a consulting contract with GHD Services to recommend new remedial actions.

• As part of a work session, received an update from city staff about changes to the way outside agencies can request funding during the 2025 budget process.