photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

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

Lawrence’s Community Building will remain free to use for a few more months, city leaders decided on Tuesday night.

The Lawrence City Commission voted Tuesday for a three-month extension of the building’s free access trial program, which has been going on since the city started charging for access at its other recreation facilities in January.

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 access card scans in the same time period last year.

The commission got some more data on that on Tuesday, even though interim Parks, Recreation and Culture director Lindsay Hart said the data wasn’t for the full three-month period.

“We’re showing you what we can with the data that we gathered,” Hart said.

One extra stat Hart shared was that 838 of the users of the Community Building also had paid for a membership to the other rec centers.

The commission expressed interest in extending the Community Building’s free program and continuing to gather data, and Hart said that the extension would be no problem for the department “as long as there’s funding.” The city plans to use $17,000 in fund balance to cover the extra operating costs.

The city estimated that the cost of keeping the building open during the original three-month trial period would be $13,000.