photo by: Bremen Keasey

The construction site where the future Municipal Services & Operations department campus will be in Eastern Lawrence on Jan. 10, 2025. City commissioners will consider approving further agreements with construction and design firms for the $130 million project.

Lawrence city commissioners approved two agreements on Tuesday night for construction and engineering work on the city’s new public works campus, and the mayor said he was glad to see the project making headway.

The two agreements will cover different parts of the construction work on the Municipal Services and Operations campus, which will be located at VenturePark in eastern Lawrence on the site of the former Farmland Industries fertilizer plant. One is a $17,983,565 construction management agreement with McCownGordon for the construction of the first phase of the project, and the other is a $4,474,375 engineering agreement with Dake Wells Architecture Inc. for the design of the second phase.

Mayor Mike Dever told the Journal-World that it was good to keep the project moving forward, considering it has been in the city’s Capital Improvement Plan for years. He said the project would help MSO provide better services for the community in the future.

“This is a comprehensive approach for something we’ve needed to do for a long time,” Dever said.

As the Journal-World reported, the commission voted in April 2024 to approve an accelerated timeline for constructing the campus. The $130 million project will bring together various city divisions, including streets, water, sewer, inspections and traffic, and will also have space for MSO administration, a fueling station and a central maintenance garage.

The first phase of the project has been underway since December and will construct a building that will house the majority of the MSO department’s divisions and the fueling station. The cost for the first stage is estimated to be $65 million. With the new agreement, the city so far has allocated a total of $46,671,309 in contracts with McCownGordon, and a city memo said the construction firm anticipates that two more agreements will be needed before the completion of phase one.

The city anticipates the first phase to be finished in 2026.

The second phase of the project would include construction of the solid waste building and the central maintenance garage. That phase is expected to be complete by 2027.

In other business, commissioners:

• Finalized changes to the city’s Land Development Code on a second and final reading.

In November, the City Commission voted on the sweeping set of changes to the land development code that had general goals of streamlining the code and allowing for more diverse housing stock in the city.

Tuesday’s vote was a routine final step in the approval of the code changes, and was initially on the commission’s consent agenda, which is a list of items generally considered routine that can be voted on by the city in a single motion with no discussion. However, Commissioner Bart Littlejohn wanted to pull the item off of the consent agenda to briefly discuss it. Littlejohn said he wanted to remind the community that this approval would not mean the end of modifications to the land development code.

The code is still set to be implemented fully on April 1, but commissioners and city staff have noted that there will be revisions and corrections to the code even once it is in place.

• Approved $150,000 in grants to help fund special events in the city in 2025.

Thirty-two events will be receiving funding from the Unmistakable Events Grants, formerly known as the Transient Guest Tax Grants. According to a city memo, 41 groups applied to the grant program, and an ad-hoc committee evaluated the requests and decided which ones to recommend for funding.

None of the groups that requested grant money for this year will receive the full amount that it requested. Last year, as the Journal-World reported, four events received the full amount that they requested, but only 20 total grants were awarded for that year.

Among the events and organizations that received the largest awards this year are:

• Free State Festival 2025, $12,000

• Lawrence Busker Festival, $11,250

• 2025 Juneteenth Celebration, $11,250

• Lawrence Old-Fashioned Christmas Parade, $9,000

• Theatre Lawrence Annual Holiday Show, $9,000

• Lawrence Comedy Festival, $9,000

• KU Powwow & Cultural Arts Festival, $8,000

• LAAND, $7,200

• Lawrence Art Guild Art in the Park, $6,000

• Lawrence Restaurant Week, $6,000