photo by: AP File Photo

In this Sept. 27, 2012 file photo, a Casey's General Store is seen in Bondurant, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

Five years after purchasing the old Nottingham Elementary School property, the city of Eudora has approved the first commercial project for the site: a Casey’s General Store.

In 2015, the city bought the closed Nottingham school building and the surrounding 15 acres from the Eudora school district for $850,000 with the goal of bringing commercial development to the site. The property is just north of Eudora’s Church Street exit off Kansas Highway 10.

At a special meeting Aug. 18, the Eudora City Commission approved a final development plan from Casey’s General Stores to construct a convenience store on 1.52 acres on the Nottingham property’s northeast corner. Casey’s bought the site from the city last year for $840,000, contingent on the city preparing the site for development.

Casey’s plans to build a 4,000-square-foot store and a 3,696-square-foot canopy, which will shelter six fuel pumps that can be accessed from either side. The store, which will face Church Street, will have access from 14th Street and Church Street via a street to provide access into the Nottingham property.

Eudora Mayor Tim Reazin said Casey’s approved plan conforms with the higher design principles the City Commission insists on for the Nottingham development. The new store will have such things as four-sided architectural design with masonry on all four exterior walls and greater landscape screening of its dumpster and recycling area behind the store.

“As I told the representative from Casey’s at the meeting, this is a 20-year project,” Reazin said. “I told him, ‘This is what it’s going to look like in 20 years’ We want more than just a metal building.”

Approval of the site plan doesn’t mean Casey’s will now start construction of the new store. Eudora City Manager Barack Matite said the city first would have to make the site “pad ready” by installing water lines, sewers and interior streets at the Nottingham site. That work would start this fall and, weather permitting, the site should be ready for Casey’s to start its project early in 2021, he said.

To get funding in place for the infrastructure work, the Eudora City Commission is set to approve Monday the sale of up to $9 million in temporary notes to finance the Nottingham work. In February, the City Commission approved the sale of $4 million in temporary notes, but that didn’t include the $1.5 million needed for the Church Street upgrades, Matite said.

The estimated cost of the Nottingham infrastructure is not expected to exceed $5.5 million, and $1.2 million of that is for needed Church Street upgrades that will be reimbursed to the city through a Kansas Department of Transportation grant the city was awarded in July, Matite said. He is requesting up to $9 million as a hedge against higher costs, which would require approval of additional debt authorization.

Matite said the notes for the Nottingham infrastructure would be rolled into a bond and paid off through the sale of Nottingham properties to commercial developers and from the diversion of sales and franchise taxes collected in the Nottingham tax increment financing district.