Work will start this week to prepare the old Nottingham Elementary School site for commercial development, five years after the city of Eudora bought the 15-acre property with the vision of expanding the community’s retail tax base.

That vision received a boost in September when the Eudora City Commission finalized the sale of a second lot in Nottingham’s four-lot first development phase. The agreement calls for the city to sell a 36,000-square-foot lot to Legacy Group LLC, an Overland Park-based owner of Wendy’s franchises, for $520,000. Last year, the city sold a 1.52-acre site in Nottingham’s northeast corner that borders Church and 14th streets to Casey’s General Stores for $840,000. The City Commission approved the final site plan for that store in August.

Eudora City Manager Barack Matite said Eudora residents could expect to see construction equipment arriving this week on the Nottingham site west of Church Street just north of that street’s entrance from Kansas Highway 10. Construction to install the interior streets, sewers, waterlines and other needed infrastructure for commercial development will start Friday, weather permitting, he said.

The city bought the Nottingham site from the Eudora school district in 2015 for $850,000 with the goal of bringing commercial development to the site at the city’s main gateway. The city’s early plans to redevelop Nottingham stalled when a private developer the city partnered with was unable to find an anchor tenant it needed to make the project work. The Nottingham project’s outlook improved when late last year the Eudora City Commission agreed the city needed to take a more active role in the site’s redevelopment.

The project gained further momentum when the city received in July a $1.2 million Kansas Department of Transportation grant to help pay for development-related upgrades to Church Street and nearby roadways and to construct streets inside the development. The City Commission subsequently approved bonding to pay for the remaining Nottingham development costs, which Matite said were not expected to exceed $4.3 million. It is the city’s expectation to recover that investment through the sale of Nottingham property parcels and the diversion of sales and franchise taxes collected in the Nottingham tax increment financing district.

Construction work on Church Street will not start until late winter or early spring of next year, Matite said. However, he said he was currently meeting with contractors and engineers about how those improvements, which will include turn lanes, sidewalks, curb and guttering and a traffic light, could be completed without shutting down traffic on heavily used Church Street.

“Our goal is to maintain two-way traffic,” he said. 
”Obviously, we might have to construct temporary roadways to make that happen.”