photo by: Douglas County GIS/Journal-World

The blue star shows the proposed location for a new US Engineering production center in Lawrence VenturePark. The red star shows the company's existing location.

A company that already employs about 150 high-paid pipefitters and sheetmetal workers at Lawrence VenturePark is beginning the process to build a second production center in the eastern Lawrence business park.

US Engineering has filed plans with Lawrence City Hall requesting financial incentives to build a new 75,000-square-foot-facility on a pair of prime lots along Kansas Highway 10, just east of the O’Connell Road intersection.

The facility would be in addition to a 150,000-square-foot production center that that US Engineering operates in Lawrence Venture Park. The company is in the business of designing, building and installing complex heating, cooling and plumbing systems for commercial development projects across the country.

The Lawrence facility, which opened in 2022, does a lot of the fabrication work for those large systems, meaning the building is full of pipefitters, sheetmetal workers and other trade professionals who are building and putting the systems together before they are shipped to construction sites where other crews install the final product.

The application material filed with Lawrence City Hall suggests the same type of work will be happening at the new facility. A memo to city commissioners describes the project as “an expansion of its production facility,” but other parts of the application suggest it may not be your typical expansion.

Most expansion projects involve adding onto an existing building. That’s not what is proposed here. Instead, the documents at City Hall state the company wants to build the new 75,000-square-foot facility on a pair of vacant lots that are across the street from the company’s current facility.

The proposed lots happen to be two of the most visible in Lawrence VenturePark. The project would go on the vacant ground just north of the Hersey Salty Snacks facility, which is the production center for Dot’s Homestyle Pretzels.

The big question with the project, though, is how many new jobs the new facility would add to the Lawrence workforce. The application materials that I reviewed doesn’t list a jobs numbers. I’ve asked the city for additional details, but haven’t yet received an update.

An official at US Engineering’s Kansas City headquarters told me on the phone that the leader for the Lawrence project was out of the office this week, so those details were not immediately available. However, the company spokesman did provide me basic information about the company’s current workforce totals in Lawrence. The Lawrence facility has about 150 production employees and about 30 support staff at facility, which is located at 2800 Venture Park Drive.

Expected job growth at the Lawrence location likely will be a key piece of information for the city as it considers the company’s request for financial incentives. So too will be the wages those employees will be paid. On that front, the city did note that the current facility is paying average wages of about $90,000 per year, according to information the company is required to file with City Hall.

That puts the jobs well above the median wage in Lawrence, where a full-time, year-around employee earns just less than $60,000 per year, according to federal statistics.

In terms of what incentives the company is requesting, they include:

• A 70% percent abatement on property taxes for the next 10 years;

• An exemption from paying sales tax on any construction materials needed to build the new facility:

• Free land from the city — the two lots along K-10 Highway — to locate the new facility.

The two lots are likely bigger than what the company needs to accommodate a 75,000-square-foot-building, but the city memo said the company has expressed interest in future expansions “as part of a campus concept in Lawrence Venture Park.”

The requested incentives are in line with what the city has offered other companies interested in locating at Venture Park. The city several years ago created a special incentives program called the Catalyst Program that lays out a specific set of incentives that companies locating in the park can qualify for. US Engineering received incentives under the Catalyst Program for its current Lawrence facility.

A big part of the Catalyst Program is the city streamlines the approval process for the incentives. A city memo states city commissioners likely will be asked to approve the incentives request at a meeting next month. The memo states City Hall staff members will prepare a cost-benefit analysis of the project by Sept. 2 and that city commissioners would be in a position to vote on the incentives package at their Sept. 16 meeting. A separate process to transfer ownership of the lots to US Engineering would take place in the late summer or early fall.

In the application materials, US Engineering said it wants to begin construction on the new facility in October and hopes to have construction complete by July 2026. The company estimates the facility would be about a $12 million construction project.