photo by: Bremen Keasey/Journal-World

City commissioners meet Tuesday night at Lawrence's City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St.

City commissioners are letting a public company that specializes in “smart home” technology change the location of its financial incentives request from a project at the former Journal-World printing facility to a site on Vermont Street instead.

Commissioners unanimously voted Tuesday night to receive an amendment to the incentives request Alarm.com was seeking for incentives to redevelop a new office space. Previously, the company applied to redevelop the former printing plant at 630 Massachusetts St., and now the same application will instead apply to a property at 714 Vermont St. that the company is looking to acquire and redevelop.

(Full disclosure: The current owners of the Journal-World are not involved in any redevelopment project at the location. Ownership of the location remained with the Simons family, which previously owned the Journal-World.)

Bill Fleming, a lawyer who was representing the applicant, said the company had been interested in the printing plant site, but determined that the space at 714 Vermont St. was a “better location.” Fleming said the company wanted to keep its office downtown because its employees felt working in downtown Lawrence was an amenity.

The company has said it plans to invest about $2.5 million to renovate the building to provide more than 13,000 square feet of office space for its employees.

Although the amended application changes the address for where Alarm.com wants to develop its office space, it still is seeking the same kinds of incentives as at the previous site: the creation of a Neighborhood Revitalization District and an exemption on sales taxes for construction materials.

A few residents spoke during public comment against awarding incentives to the company, even though the commission was not voting on whether to award any incentives on Tuesday. Susie Carson, the city’s director of economic development, said that the company and city will now work through analyses to see if the city would benefit from providing economic incentives.

“This is the step prior to (awarding incentives),” Carson said.

Although the commissioners voted unanimously to approve the change of address, Commissioner Kristine Polian said that she was “not saying she would approve any incentives,” and that she wanted to see whether awarding them would be to the city’s benefit.

As the Journal-World reported, Alarm.com had its first presence in Lawrence in 2019 with just three employees, and then opened an office in 2021 in the second-floor space above the Sylas and Maddy’s Ice Cream shop at 11th and Massachusetts streets. It employs almost 40 people in Lawrence right now and plans to hire 30 new employees in the coming years. The majority of the positions would be software engineers with an average wage of $146,000 per year, according to documents filed with the city.

In other business, commissioners:

• Voted unanimously to approve historical markers about Harry “Nick” Rice and Rick “Tiger” Dowdell, two young men who were killed in confrontations with police during a period of unrest in Lawrence in 1970.

The marker designs have been recommended by the Historic Resources Commission; they would be placed on East 10th Street, between Rhode Island and New Hampshire streets, and on Oread Avenue, just north of KU’s Adams Alumni Center.

Lynne Zollner, the city’s historic resources administrator, told commissioners that there were some potential concerns about the language on the marker commemorating Rice. This marker, among other things, names multiple officers and claims that one of them “probably fired the shot that killed Nick Rice.”

Lawrence Police Chief Rich Lockhart told the commission that while he wasn’t opposed to the markers, he felt they had some “inflammatory language,” and he didn’t think it was necessary to name the officers on the marker to tell the story. Lockhart said that while there is no dispute on who killed Dowdell, the person who killed Rice was still in question.

Several public commenters said they did not believe the change in the language would be necessary, including Chris Rice, the brother of Nick Rice. Local historian Kerry Altenbernd also said he was opposed to altering the language, and that he believed that not listing officers’ names on the markers would constitute “a whitewash” of history and would be harmful to the victims’ families.

“They’ve been waiting for 56 years for some kind of justice for these two unauthorized shootings,” Altenbernd said. “This is more than just history; this is about people’s lives.”

Commissioner Mike Dever said that while he understood the concerns, he felt removing the names of the officers from the marker was “telling the story without all the actors,” and that was something he did not want to do.

“If we remove text from here, we’re taking that story away,” Dever said.