photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Melissa Sieben, director of Municipal Services and Operations, looks out over the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus from her office on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026.

If you doubt the creativity of city workers, look at what Lawrence’s public works and utilities staff has had to do to make the most of its aging, spread-out buildings.

Where to store parts? Wherever they fit, in structures that were built in the ’70s or even earlier to serve a much smaller city. Where to park if the parking lot isn’t big enough? Put in an asphalt shoulder and park there. How do you eat lunch without a break room? Carry a microwave in your truck.

“We are, of course, very crafty as public employees,” said Melissa Sieben, Lawrence’s director of Municipal Services and Operations. “Like, necessity is the mother of all invention, right? And we definitely necessitized inventions as often as we had to to keep things going!

“But I’ll tell you – it was at a point where it couldn’t continue.”

Now, about 180 of those employees are free to use their creativity for other things. They’ve moved into the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus on the site of the former Farmland Industries fertilizer plant, and Sieben and MSO spokesman Michael Leos both say productivity, communication and morale are much improved.

“The collaboration is through the roof,” Leos said.

MSO is the city’s public works and utilities department, which works on everything from streets to water to trash collection to traffic signs to maintaining the city’s vehicle fleet. Months ago, the Journal-World reported on many of the department’s problems, and this past week it got to look inside Phase 1 of the new $130 million campus to see how it alleviates them.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The Municipal Services and Operations Campus is pictured Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A briefing room for field staff is shown Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

More space, less sprawl

It starts with just more room.

MSO’s old facilities didn’t even have enough space for some divisions to comfortably meet for their morning briefings. And the department had to find outside spaces to hold meetings where all of its divisions would be present, such as an annual safety lunch that usually was held at the Douglas County Fairgrounds, Leos said.

But the new building has a meeting hall big enough that City Manager Majed Al-Ghafry was able to hold a departmentwide meeting there a week ago, Leos said. There are multiple other conference rooms and meeting spaces where staff can have briefings and discuss their daily assignments.

There’s also the fact that they’re all in the same building. MSO had a number of buildings all around the city before; its solid waste operations and central maintenance garage at 11th and Haskell, a traffic building in the Pinkney Neighborhood, the Kansas River and Clinton Lake water plants, even an administrative building on Kresge Road, north of the Kansas Turnpike.

“So many of us were kind of scattered there for a while,” said Andy Ensz, project manager for the campus project.

One of the things Sieben and Leos appreciate is that departments that previously wouldn’t interact regularly are now just down the hall from each other. “I see more people on the regular now because we are so much more concentrated,” Sieben said, and that sometimes leads to collaboration that might not have happened otherwise.

“You can have that accidental collision with somebody in the hallway and go, ‘You know, I was thinking about this the other day,'” she said. “That would have been, like, a (Microsoft) Teams call or something like that. And, really, the reality is you probably wouldn’t have thought of it, because you didn’t see them.”

“Not only are the workgroups more cohesive,” Leos said, “but, like, streets see field members and go, like, ‘Hey, you jerk, what are you guys working on today?’ It’s just the camaraderie.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Traffic employees work on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

The equipment that was scattered across multiple sites is now easier to access, too.

For instance, parts for repairing water infrastructure used to be housed in several different buildings near the Kansas River Water Treatment Plant, wherever there was space for them. Now, they’re all organized on neat shelves, and so are the street signs in the traffic division.

A traffic employee at work in the new facility says the previous traffic building “was an old, run-down building; everything was dirty and kind of a mess.” When he first started working there, “it was like drinking from a firehose trying to figure everything out.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Trucks wait right next to the shelves in an outfitting room on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A sign gives directions on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus. Behind it are salt dispensing racks that will be used in winter weather operations.

Efficiency improvements

Employees had to use more complicated processes for a lot of things, like getting equipment into the field. Previously, Leos said, they would park trucks outside a building, load things onto a forklift and carry it out of the building that way. But now, there are outfitting rooms with vehicle bays, so the trucks can drive right in and load up directly off the shelves. Leos says this is “one of the biggest improvements.”

In one of these rooms, Leos is surprised to see another efficiency feature: a couple of squat robots navigating around the trucks and sweeping the floor.

“Oh!” he says. “They will do stuff and they won’t even tell me.” He’d heard that the building would have some robots to help out with the chores and reduce cleaning costs, but he didn’t know they’d get here so soon.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A robot cleans the floors on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Vehicles are parked in the “conditioned” storage area on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

Another feature that will save money and time is the “conditioned vehicle storage” space. It’s not climate-controlled, but it is fully enclosed and lets staff park trucks out of the elements.

“This is going to be such a huge net savings for the city, because almost our entire fleet, at least on the MSO side, we parked the trucks outside,” Leos said. During snow and ice storms, he said, workers sometimes had to spend half an hour or more de-icing the trucks before they could start their work, but now they can just roll directly out.

Salt and sand for de-icing roads are also better protected and better organized in huge storage buildings outside. There was some “makeshift” covered storage previously, Leos said, but it was a lot of smaller storage pods.

It was also in a risky location: the floodway right by the Burroughs Creek.

The city’s fuel pumps were there, too: they’re still online for now, but they will be retired eventually, and vehicles at the campus can fill up at two new and much larger fueling stations.

A fueling station is pictured Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A small room for more privacy is pictured Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

Privacy and comfort

The new campus also has a lot of spaces built with employees’ comfort in mind.

In the old MSO facilities, there weren’t always enough lockers for field employees. But here, there are large locker rooms with private changing stalls that have doors. There’s even a machine that dries your boots.

And, of course, there are showers. That’s not just good after a long day in the field, Leos said; it’s also helpful for people who bike to work. For them, there’s also a row of indoor racks and a station with tools for emergency repairs.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Boots are drying on a special machine in the men’s locker room on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A row of “isolation pods” is shown Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

For administrators and other office workers, the second-floor offices have sound dampening, so normal conversations don’t carry across the room. If you want even fewer distractions, there are also armchair/cubicle hybrids that Leos calls “isolation pods,” and even a couple of small rooms with soundproofing where you can take a phone call.

Leos and Sieben like some spaces on this floor for reasons beyond just their utility.

One of these is a room full of monitors that shows the feeds from the city’s traffic cameras. Sieben goes from screen to screen and tries to point out all the intersections she’s been through today.

“I love this room,” Leos says. “… I like to think the city is a body, and it’s breathing and it’s moving all the time. This is a room where you come in and you go, ‘Oh, yeah; when I run and go use the bathroom, 35 cars have crossed an intersection!”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A room full of monitors shows the feed from the city’s traffic cameras on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Phase 2 of the city’s Municipal Services and Operations Campus is under construction on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026.

‘They’re really proud’

The MSO campus project isn’t over yet; Phase 2 is under construction a short walk away. It will house the Solid Waste division and the central maintenance garage that services the city’s vehicle fleet, and it’s expected to be finished by fall of 2027.

When it’s through, it will be the culmination of almost a decade of work. Ensz, the project manager, said the architects started their study of how the departments worked and what their needs were in late 2019 or early 2020.

That process also included projections for future staffing, which Sieben said will be crucial as the city annexes and begins to develop the land west of the South Lawrence Trafficway.

“As the community is looking to expand its footprint with some of those annexations that are moving their way through right now, we’re going to need this space to be able to serve folks at the level that they expect,” she said.

Right now, though, the thing that strikes her the most is how happy the new campus has made the workers.

“You can just see the smiles on their faces,” Sieben said. “They get to come into a place that they’re really proud to work in.”

Or, as Leos put it: “We’ve really dealt with a workforce that’s sort of grinned and beared it, and now they’re coming to work like, ‘I cannot wait to be a civil servant.'”

Sieben said that the campus can be a bit abstract for the general public, not least because it’s gated off and isn’t accessible to them. But she wants Lawrence to know that she and her team are grateful, and she said MSO is planning an open house for anyone who’s curious – date to be determined.

“I know the public doesn’t get to be here, so they don’t necessarily see it,” she said. “We’re going to have an open house to let people come look at what they gave us.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Awards and memorabilia are displayed near the front entrance on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

An indoor bike rack is pictured Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

An employee works in the storage area on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Parts for the city’s water operations are lined up on the shelves Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Traffic signs in storage are pictured Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The men’s locker room is pictured on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

An office space is pictured on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

One of the two break rooms is shown Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus. There are washable dishes provided to cut down on paper and plastic waste.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Documents found while cleaning out the city’s old buildings sit on a table Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The new wash bays are pictured Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A truck passes by the salt storage on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026, at the Municipal Services and Operations Campus.