photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The Community Building at 115 W. 11th St. is pictured on Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2021.

The Community Building, which is currently the City of Lawrence’s only free recreation center, has seen more than twice as many visits in the first two months of 2026 as in the same time period in 2025.

That’s according to statistics from Parks, Recreation and Culture staff that the Lawrence City Commission is slated to discuss next week. The commission will hear a presentation about how the Community Building’s three-month trial period of free access is working, and they might discuss what the next steps for the facility should be.

At one time last year, the city had planned to close the Community Building for free play gym hours entirely. But commissioners asked for the trial period in December, before the city’s new rec center fees went into effect. From Jan. 5 through Feb. 25, there have been 2,527 visits to the Community Building, up from 1,050 in the same time period last year.

(However, as the Journal-World previously reported, before the rec center fees went into effect, Parks and Rec was not tracking its facility visits as closely as it does now.)

Youth after-school visits are also up. In 2025, they averaged five per day, and now they’re averaging 10 per day.

The city estimates the cost of keeping the building open during the three-month trial period at $13,000. Keeping it open for the rest of the year would take an extra $56,000 in part-time wages.

On Tuesday, the commission will also hear about some of the ongoing problems with the Community Building that would make it difficult to implement memberships there. The building is not ADA accessible from its north entrance, which requires users to go up a set of steps. And while there is an ADA accessible entrance to the south, it isn’t visible from the front desk and could allow people to enter the facility undetected.

The short-term solution would be adding a ramp to the north side of the building, which is projected to cost $150,000, but a longer-term solution that could be funded in the future would be to relocate the elevator to be closer to the front desk. That would cost $990,000, according to the Parks, Recreation and Culture presentation materials.

The commission is scheduled to hear a couple of other items from Parks, Recreation and Culture on Tuesday. One of them is a report about the department’s sponsorship program, which generates tens of thousands of dollars in revenue each year for the department. The report says the city has entered a new sponsorship agreement with LMH Health over the past year that will generate $15,500 annually.

The other item is a briefing on the city’s Percent for Art program, which sets aside a percentage of the cost of major city building projects to pay for public art. Last year, Parks, Recreation and Culture suggested formalizing this program by making it a city ordinance, and commissioners could discuss that idea further at Tuesday’s meeting.

In other business, commissioners will:

• Consider receiving an annexation request for 650 acres at the southwest corner of the intersection of Kansas Highway 10 and West Sixth Street. If the commission votes to receive the request, it will next go to the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission for consideration.

• Consider accepting an incentive application from Catalyst Property Group for a commercial development at the northeast corner of Sixth Street and George Williams Way. The developers are requesting a Community Improvement District, which would let them get reimbursed for certain infrastructure improvements and site preparation costs using sales taxes generated in the district.

The Journal-World has previously reported that Aldi is considering locating on this site. There’s space for one more tenant beyond that, and a report from city staff said the developers had seen interest in that from several businesses.

The City Commission meets at 5 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St.