photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Corby Rust of Landplan Engineering addresses the Lawrence City Commission on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026.

One of the largest annexation requests in recent memory in Lawrence won approval from the City Commission on Tuesday night.

Commissioners voted 5-0 to approve the annexation request and an amendment to the comprehensive plan for land use for roughly 288 acres southwest of Sixth Street and K-10. They also voted to approve a series of rezonings for that land, but not all of those approvals were unanimous. Commissioners Amber Sellers and Kristine Polian each opposed one of the rezonings, and Vice Mayor Mike Courtney opposed multiple of them.

As the Journal-World reported, the bundle of requests was associated with a mixed-use development called Beacon Landing that’s being proposed by Wichita developer Phil Bundy. The rezonings were for 126.7 acres of commercial development, 87 acres of single-family or duplex development, 23.5 acres of high-density apartment development and a 51-acre area that will be reserved as open space, and Bundy’s group has said it’s planning hundreds of housing units and amenities like a multipurpose stadium and a wildflower meadow park.

Jeff Crick, director of planning and development services, said that while this might not be the biggest annexation request of all time in Lawrence, it was “probably one of the biggest ones we’ve seen in the last 30 years.”

But commissioners had some questions before their vote, including about how much control they would have over what happened to the land in the future. Courtney and Polian both asked whether any future development would come back before the commission, and Courtney wondered if conditions could be put on the development at this stage. He said the land presented a “unique opportunity” to build more affordable housing.

Deputy City Attorney Randy Larkin said that under state statute, that wouldn’t be possible with this request. The commission could only approve it or deny it, or, with the rezonings, send them back to the Planning Commission.

“This is not our property. That is their property, and as long as they comply with city code and state law, they can do what they can do,” Larkin said.

But if the developer seeks incentives – which Bundy intends to do, in the form of STAR Bonds – the commission can put conditions on those. And Mayor Brad Finkeldei said the land would have to be in the city before the commission could consider any of that.

“If we don’t annex the land, they can’t ask for incentives,” he said.

Corby Rust of Landplan Engineering, representing the applicants, said they didn’t know all of the details yet of what might be built. One of their rezoning requests was for a “commercial center” zoning type that could be used for housing, as well; “we don’t entirely know what’s going to be there,” he said, and “it gives us a lot of flexibility.”

“This is just the beginning. This is the start,” Rust said. “There are so many more questions that are going to get answered here in the platting process and the site plan process.”

Courtney also had questions about whether the annexation would obligate the city to pay for new infrastructure out west. Finkeldei and Larkin both said that, because this was a consent annexation, the vote wouldn’t require the city to spend anything.

“There’s no obligation here. This is a consent annexation,” Finkeldei said. “They have no right to services.”

The commission heard from several members of the public, including a builder and a couple of economic development leaders who said Lawrence needed more housing and the annexation would be the first step toward creating that.

Kevin Kelley, CEO of Peaslee Tech, mentioned the students that the technical training center served. “They’ll all leave us if we don’t have places for them to live and places for them to work,” he said. And builder Trent Santee said the city had prioritized density and infill for years instead of annexation, and that it hadn’t worked to create new housing.

“The bottom line is, we’re out of space,” Santee said.

Other speakers, however, were concerned about the specific plans that Bundy’s group proposed, or said they wanted the amendment to the land use plan to be discussed in a community process first.

“What I really feel passionate about is, if we are going to take a step of annexing this much property, we need to know what the plan is,” said Emily Bowersock Hill, the CEO of local wealth management firm Bowersock Capital Partners. She mentioned the “cornfield mall” development once proposed south of Lawrence, and said she thought downtown was struggling because too much commercial development had happened on the periphery of the city.

Finkeldei, who has served on the Planning Commission before, said that often when you’re making land use decisions, “you don’t know exactly what’s going to be there,” and that can be hard.

“It’s a struggle I hear all the time in the public,” he said. “… I think it’s a struggle commissioners have dealt with for years.”

But he also said that it was necessary to make these kinds of decisions so that developers had the information they needed to draw up plans and invest in a project.

“If you don’t have the zoning,” he said, “you can’t spend the money to decide what it’s going to look like.”