photo by: Bremen Keasey

Lawrence City Commissioners during the meeting Tuesday night at Lawrence's City Hall, 6 E Sixth St. Commissioners approved multiple funding agreements for the construction of its new MSO campus.

As Lawrence City Commissioners approved two additional agreements Tuesday night with a construction company for work on the city’s new Municipal Services and Operations campus, staff and contractors said the $130 million project was on time and on budget.

The commission voted unanimously to approve two more agreements, worth over $9 million, with construction company McCownGordon for further construction work on the the new campus, located at VenturePark in eastern Lawrence. The project, which will be broken up into two phases for construction, aims to bring the various divisions of the MSO department, including streets, water, sewer, inspections and traffic, together at the same facility.

The city already allocated tens of millions of dollars for work on the project, where construction at the site began in December 2024. The two agreements approved Tuesday night are a roughly $8.6 million agreement for interior finishes, equipment, appliances, landscaping and several other features of phase one; and a $519,205 agreement for preconstruction services for phase two.

Andy Ensz, a city engineering program manager overseeing this project, said there has been a lot of construction progress at the site since the last update, which came in April 2024 when the commission voted to approve an accelerated timeline for the construction of the new campus, as the Journal-World reported.

Ensz said the phase one agreement approved Tuesday is expected to be the last one for this phase of the project. The city has allocated more than $55 million in contracts to McCownGordon for the project and spent around $9.5 million on “soft costs” so far — meeting the $65 million budget on the first phase of the project.

Ensz said the project is “on budget and on schedule” for the city’s goal to get the first phase complete by spring 2026, with some of the department’s employees moving in later that summer.

The second phase of the project will include a solid waste building and central maintenance garage. That project is expected to be completed by 2027; designs will be finalized for that in 2026.

Ensz said he appreciated the support the commission has provided for the project and is happy to see the progress made by the construction company so far.

“We’re excited to see how much (of the building) has already been completed,” Ensz said.

Ensz also shared details of some of the ways the team has found to save money on the large project. One example was reusing an old concrete foundation found on the site for crushed concrete that the project needed. Another way was purchasing certain items, including backup generators and precast materials, sooner than originally planned to benefit from lower prices.

Mayor Mike Dever thanked both the city staff and members of the construction company for their work on the planning process and for finding those savings.

In other business, commissioners:

• Approved a final development plan for a new drive-thru coffee shop on the southern part of Iowa Street.

As the Journal-World reported, the Arkansas-based chain 7 Brew Coffee filed plans to build a new drive-thru location at the site of a now-defunct mattress store at 3231 Iowa St., which is next door to a McDonald’s and in front of the Target store.

The Iowa Street project will involve a demolition of the existing building, according to plans filed at City Hall. A smaller building will be constructed on the site, leaving room for two drive-thru lanes to snake through the property.

• Awarded a construction bid of just under $3.3 million to Freeman Concrete Construction LLC for maintenance on the following streets:

• O’Connell Road from East 23rd Street to East 31st Street

• Emery Road from West Ninth Street to Stratford Road

• West 27th Street from Iowa Street to Lawrence Avenue

• Crestline Drive from West 27th Street to West 30th Street

• West 30th Street from Crestline Drive to Harrison Avenue

The work on those projects is anticipated to be finished by November 2025, according to a city memo.