City commissioners at their meeting on Tuesday could take a step forward on nearly $184 million in debt to fund a variety of projects, including stormwater improvements and the Municipal Services and Operations campus.

The commission is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a resolution to offer the sale of $158 million in general obligation bonds and $25.9 million in temporary notes for projects in the city’s Capital Improvement Plan. Temporary notes are short-term debt, and the bonds are longer-term debt that’s more like a mortgage and pays for an asset that will be held for a long time.

The city has already published notice of its intent to issue the bonds; commissioners approved that on Nov. 18, 2025.

A table in the commission’s meeting agenda shows the projects that the bonds and notes would help pay for. The two largest ones are the first two phases of the Municipal Services and Operations campus, which is intended to bring streets, water, sewer, inspections, traffic and other public works departments together at one site. The table shows more than $39 million in bond financing for the first phase and more than $65 million for the second.

Other major projects in the plan include the Jayhawk Watershed storm sewer project, which is currently impacting traffic on Ninth Street, and improvements to Mississippi Street ($10.3 million from bonds and more than $15 million from temporary notes); reconstruction of Bob Billings Parkway ($6 million from bonds); major renovations at the Outdoor Aquatic Center ($5.8 million from bonds); South Lawrence Trafficway improvements ($5.1 million from bonds) and the reconfiguration of City Hall (about $80,000 from bonds and $3.5 million from temporary notes).

It’s normal for debt resolutions like this to appear on the commission’s agenda at this time of year. But this one is likely to get more discussion than usual, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it’s on the commission’s regular agenda, where the commission discusses items with staff and where members of the public have an opportunity to comment. That’s a change from the past several years, when the resolutions have appeared on the commission’s consent agenda. The consent agenda includes all of the meeting items that are normally considered routine, and the commission can approve all of them in a single vote without any discussion.

Second, the commission pulled debt-related items off of the consent agenda for a more in-depth conversation a couple of times last year. In March 2025, before the commission started the process of issuing $98.6 million in debt, then-Commissioner Bart Littlejohn pulled the resolution off of the consent agenda for a more detailed discussion with city staff. He said then that he’d heard questions from residents about how the debt-issuing process worked.

And last November, commissioners pulled the notice of intent off of the consent agenda, too. Several attendees at the meeting spoke to the commissioners and said they didn’t like the idea that these items could be passed without discussion.

This won’t be the last vote on the resolution. It will come back to the commission at a later meeting for final approval, and the sale of the bonds and temporary notes would occur on April 7.