photo by: Courtesy: University of Kansas

The dual renderings show how the portion of KU's West Campus may look in the next 10 to 15 years as it develops with additional research, housing and retail development as proposed as part of the KU Innovation Park project.

Story updated at 6:15 p.m. Tuesday:

Efforts to make KU’s West Campus a much larger hub for high-tech businesses and research have received a $5 million boost from the state of Kansas.

Gov. Laura Kelly and other state officials on Tuesday afternoon announced that the University of Kansas will receive a $5 million infrastructure grant to help the university complete its Innovation Park project slated for the portion of the Lawrence campus north and west of the intersection of 23rd and Iowa streets.

The grant was part of a $100 million allocation of COVID-19 relief funds that the state has set aside to spur economic development projects. In total, 35 economic development projects received infrastructure grants as part of Tuesday’s announcement. Innovation Park was the lone project in Douglas County to receive funds.

University leaders are hoping the $5 million state award is the first of several for the project. As part of its application for the infrastructure grant, KU disclosed it also is seeking a separate $50.8 million grant through Kansas’ SPARK program, which is the primary way the state is disbursing billions of dollars of federal COVID-19 relief funds.

Attempts to reach KU Chancellor Douglas Girod and other university leaders with the Innovation Park project weren’t immediately successful late Thursday afternoon, but in February Girod indicated that he thought KU would be successful in garnering some grant money for the project.

“This represents a number of different entities coming together to make investments in our community,” Girod said in February. “It really is others bringing resources to the table that ultimately we will benefit from. They do that because they recognize that KU is probably one of the biggest economic engines that our state has going forward.”

KU officials last year announced plans to develop West Campus into what they have dubbed Innovation Park. The project includes the university’s technology and bioscience incubator building that currently is undergoing an expansion. That project is expected to be completed this summer.

By 2024, KU intends to build two new research buildings — each totaling about $30 million — to attract a variety of researchers and businesses that want to use that research. One building would house what KU is calling the Kansas National Security Innovation Center, which would focus on research related to cyber security and other innovations that could be used by the homeland security or defense industries. A second building would house the Kansas Bio-Innovation & Sustainability Center, which would focus on research related to green energy and a host of environmental issues, among other topics.

In addition, KU envisions multiple other buildings being part of the Innovation Park project, including large buildings that would place university research space and private office space for corporations under the same roof. Over the next 15 years, KU envisions 10 buildings in the park that would provide 800,000 square feet of research, laboratory and office space.

KU leaders previously have said securing federal grants and other such funding for the national security and bio-innovation buildings is critical. Once those buildings are constructed, KU is projecting that rents it charges for businesses to occupy portions of those buildings will provide a funding stream to finance future expansion of the park.

KU Endowment also has announced a separate but related project that would build commercial space, retail space and apartments on the West Campus property — which is owned by KU Endowment — in an effort to make the entire park a live-work-play development.

Over the last several months, KU Endowment leaders have publicly discussed several elements of that plan, but haven’t yet formally sought the necessary planning approvals from the city of Lawrence. Among the elements KU Endowment has proposed for the area are:

• A residential housing complex of about 300 living units, complete with a parking garage.

• A day care center that would be run by the KU-affiliated Hilltop Child Development Center.

• A mix of restaurants, convenience stores, coffee shops and other food- and beverage-oriented businesses. Endowment leaders have said they would like to attract a small-scale grocery store as part of the project.

While most of the development is anticipated to take place on the west side of Iowa Street, including much of the area that currently is used for KU’s Park & Ride lot, plans shared in February showed commercial and retail development on the east side of Iowa Street where it intersects with 21st Street.

As for the $5 million grant the project received on Tuesday, application materials stated the money would be used to complete some additional wet lab space in the bioscience and technology incubator facility that is currently being expanded. The additional lab space is expected to provide capacity for an additional two to four companies to locate at the incubator. Part of the grant money also would be used to develop engineering plans for the future phases of expansion at the park.

KU leaders have been selling the need for the project, in part, as a way to bolster the university’s standing with students and researchers in an effort to reverse a multi-year trend of stagnating or declining enrollment numbers.

But in its application for the state funding, KU leaders also said the Innovation Park project is needed to make Lawrence’s overall economy healthier, calling Lawrence’s economy a “highly undiversified economy and one that is overly reliant on relatively lower per-capita GDP sectors such as food service, retail and accommodations.”