photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Lawrence City Hall, background, and the former Journal-World printing facility, foreground, are pictured Thursday, May 28, 2026, in downtown Lawrence.

Lawrence city commissioners have approved purchasing the former Journal-World printing plant building, and they’re interested in using it for more than just extra space for city offices.

At its meeting on Tuesday, the commission voted unanimously to approve the $2.1 million purchase of the building, which is directly across the street from City Hall. Staff said the intent was to create a City Hall annex that would give staff more room than the current City Hall building allows.

“Its location is literally directly across the street, so you really can’t beat that,” said Gwen Gigous of the architecture firm Multistudio, which worked with the city to evaluate potential annex sites.

Under the agreement that’s been reached, the city will offer $2.1 million for the facility in “as-is” condition and will have a 60-day “due diligence period” to engage with employees and prepare the title and closing paperwork. The goal is to close the purchase by June 20. The city is also expecting it will cost $21 million to renovate the building, but that wasn’t voted on on Tuesday. Renovation work would likely occur in stages and involve repairs to the roof, most of the windows and the HVAC system, among other things.

City Hall is currently about 35,500 square feet, and for years city staff has said that’s not enough room for the employees who work there. A couple of years ago, some city employees had their workstations in repurposed conference rooms, and even in 2026, former City Manager Craig Owens told the Journal-World, there were offices in City Hall that were built for one person but had multiple people working out of them.

“We are bursting at the seams,” Assistant City Manager Brandon McGuire told the commission on Tuesday. He said the annex wasn’t a luxury, but “a solution that we’ve worked on to solve a problem that is a real problem.”

The current City Hall building has other problems beside this, Gigous said. She said its lobby was confusing and not welcoming and there were security issues with functions like Municipal Court, which now takes place on the first floor of City Hall. “Municipal Court is working out of space that isn’t really intended to be a court space,” she said.

Even the existing rounded City Commission room itself has issues, Gigous said, with its small space and odd acoustics that make it difficult to hear speakers from certain parts of the room.

Gigous also said city staff was asked about its needs. “They want a space they can be proud of,” she said. “They want a space that the public feels really good about coming into.”

The city previously discussed whether to move staff out of downtown and to a different building with more space. In 2024, staff proposed buying a building on Bluffs Drive near Sixth and Iowa Streets for this purpose, but the City Commission decided it didn’t want to move City Hall out of downtown.

Following that, the city and Multistudio examined several other options, including the printing plant, the Reuter building on New Hampshire Street, the former Borders building and the former Riverfront Mall building. They found that the printing plant site best met the city’s needs.

Several attempts have been made to redevelop this long-vacant building. The most recent was from tech firm Alarm.com, which decided in February to pursue a different building for its new headquarters. (Note: The Journal-World no longer owns the building nor has any financial interest in it.)

McGuire said Alarm.com was looking at the building at the same time the city was, and that the city was at one time in negotiations for how they might split the property. When Alarm.com changed course, he said the city saw an opportunity.

“It would be a whole heck of a lot easier and cleaner if we just took all of that,” he said.

The fact that the city was considering the building was only made public last week, and Commissioner Kristine Polian asked City Attorney Toni Wheeler to explain for the members of the public who felt “blindsided” by the purchase. Wheeler said cities were allowed to negotiate property acquisitions in closed executive sessions because if the negotiations happened in public meetings, other parties would know the price the city was willing to pay, which could put the city at a disadvantage.

“I do want to make sure that people know that this has been in discussion,” Polian said.

While she supported the purchase, Polian said she wouldn’t support a decision on how to use it just yet. She wanted to examine the city’s revenue sources and finances in more detail first and figure out what efficiencies would come out of another city facilities project, the Municipal Services and Operations campus for public works. “All the public sees us do is spend a lot of money,” she said.

She and Commissioner Mike Dever both said they were also interested in looking at the city’s existing real estate and seeing what could be sold off or repurposed.

The commission also talked about how the building could be used for more than just offices. Mayor Brad Finkeldei said he was “interested in seeing what other uses might be for the building.”

Gigous said the annex could make City Hall into more of a “community hub” for events and gatherings, and that in the future it might even be possible to create a skywalk to connect the annex and the current City Hall building. And McGuire also noted that the city will soon control the Riverfront property to the east of City Hall, too, adding up to “a large chunk of the north end of downtown.”

“I do think some master planning of this block would be very helpful,” McGuire said.

Whatever the future discussion looks like, Finkeldei said he thought the city would have failed if the space at the north end of downtown was “all just a government complex.”

Commissioner Amber Sellers said much the same.

“There’s always been a public benefit in mind with this entire project,” she said.