photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Businesses along the Ninth Street corridor, pictured on Oct. 30, 2025, are concerned about a pending multi-month closure of the street.

Lawrence residents should soon prepare for a key portion of Ninth Street — which leads to downtown and KU’s football stadium — to be closed to thru traffic for months.

Now, the questions are: How long will it be closed, and will it be shut down while potentially thousands of World Cup visitors are in town?

City of Lawrence officials on Thursday morning briefed neighborhood business representatives about the latest plans for the closures, which are part of an approximately $20 million project to replace storm sewers in central Lawrence that are more than a century old.

City officials didn’t sugarcoat the impact the project will have on businesses in the area.

“This is going to be a painful project,” Nick Hoyt, the city’s engineering program manager, told a couple of dozen business representatives gathered along Ninth Street at the Fork & Tumbler restaurant.

Exactly what version of the project is about to begin, though, hasn’t yet been decided. What has been decided is that Ninth Street — roughly between Louisiana and Mississippi streets — will close to all traffic in December.

How long and how often it will be closed thereafter is up in the air, and is the subject of a new survey the city is asking Ninth Street businesses and employees to answer.

One option would close the stretch of Ninth Street in December and keep it closed until July 2026. That would mean the street, and one of the key gateways to downtown, would be closed during the World Cup soccer tournament, which leaders hope will produce thousands of visitors to Lawrence for a month or more. Lawrence is on a short list of cities to serve as a base camp for a World Cup team. Those base camp locations typically become the place that thousands of international fans from the team reside in while in America for the matches.

That is the option city officials have been planning on for more than a year now. But as it appears more likely that Lawrence will host a World Cup team, city engineers have come up with a second option. Ninth Street would still close in December but it would temporarily reopen in April 2026. It would remain open until December 2026 — getting through the World Cup and KU’s 2026 football season — and then close again and remain closed until April 2027.

If you are trying to follow along at home, the first option would close the street for eight consecutive months. The second option would close the street for 10 months, but would do so in two five-month segments with a seven to eight-month break in between.

Hoyt told the business crowd that he understands the options are kind of like asking which version of a root canal you would prefer. But, like a root canal, you can’t safely choose to not have it done.

“My understanding is if you don’t have the root canal, you are going to get an infection,” he said.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Nick Hoyt, engineering program manager for the City of Lawrence, points to a section of Ninth Street during a presentation at Fork & Tumbler on Oct. 30, 2025.

In this case, the infection would come in the form of flooding. Melinda Harger, the city’s assistant director of Municipal Services and Operations, said the aged stormwater system has had capacity problems since the 1990s. As each year passes, concerns grow that a heavy rainstorm will overload the clogged and crumbling storm sewers and create flooding of homes, businesses and streets in central Lawrence.

That explanation, though, didn’t allay the concerns of several business owners at Thursday’s meeting. Multiple business owners predicted significant business closures as a result of the project and the difficulties it will create for customers to access their shops and restaurants.

“You are going to kill the business,” said Rob Coleman, an owner and operator of Fork & Tumbler, a less than two-year old restaurant at 616 W. Ninth Street. “Not you personally, but this project will. We’ve got a lot of money in this thing, a lot of people, a lot of debt.”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Wall art at Fork & Tumbler’s dining room is pictured on Oct. 30, 2025.

Across the street, Brad Ziegler, an owner and operator of The Big Mill restaurant, said he also was worried about his business’ survival, and said he’s frustrated about what the end product will be as well. The section of Ninth Street — as the Journal-World has reported — will be converted from a four-lane street to a three lane street with a pair of bike lanes occupying space that previously housed the extra lane for vehicles. He said that configuration won’t improve traffic flow or parking along the street.

“We are not going to end up with a better road for our business,” Ziegler said.

The issue has all the makings of being a politically charged one, and the City Commission ultimately will decide how to proceed. Three candidates for the City Commission spoke and quizzed city officials at Thursday’s open forum meeting.

Candidate Mike Courtney said the city needs to work with KU to see if it can help, noting that the university has parking lots and a bus system that perhaps could provide some relief for residents struggling to get to the area. He also said smaller buses perhaps could run from downtown to the Ninth Street area.

City Commissioner Bart Littlejohn, the lone incumbent seeking re-election, reminded the crowd the commission has increased the city’s transient guest tax charged on hotel rooms in advance of the World Cup. He said it should be explored whether some of that new money can be used to fund a marketing campaign to tout that the Ninth Street area is still open and how customers can access it.

Candidate Kristine Polian said she thought it would be a huge mistake for the city have the road closed during the World Cup, but also quizzed city officials on why the project has to happen as quickly as proposed.

City officials said they did not see any time period where the project wouldn’t be painful to businesses. They noted that delaying the project would create a scenario where Ninth Street would be under construction at the time that KU is opening up its completed stadium and surrounding Gateway project, which will include the now-completed conference center, and yet-to-come hotel, student housing and retail/restaurants.

But city officials and the crowd did not dive deeply into that timing issue on Thursday. KU officials, for instance, have not committed to having the Gateway District fully completed during the bulk of 2028. Rather, the development agreement that KU has made with the city calls for the project to be completed by Dec. 31, 2028, as the Journal-World has reported. That would mean that the first football season that fans aren’t experiencing construction at or around the stadium would be the 2029 season. If that indeed ends up being the case, a Ninth Street project that began in December 2027 and stretched until July 2028 would largely coincide with construction underway at the stadium, and get Ninth Street completed before KU’s 2028 football season and before a Gateway grand opening. Such a timeline would basically delay the project by about 15 months compared to the city’s latest option.

A late 2027 start date, however, wasn’t one of the two options presented to businesses, and Thursday’s meeting didn’t note that KU’s official end date for the Gateway Project is late 2028. Business representatives, though, did express concern about how quickly this project will begin impacting them, and expressed a need for more time to plan issues such as supplier deliveries, customer parking and other such issues.

“As a business owner down here, we need help, and we’ve got a month to figure it out,” Fork & Tumbler’s Coleman said of the December start date. “I don’t know how we are going to do that.”

City commissioners are expected to make a decision on how to proceed at a meeting in either late November or early December, city officials said. By then, the city expects to have an estimate of how much additional the project will cost if the Ninth Street work is split into two five-month periods. The city has estimated it likely will add a few hundred thousand dollars to the project.

Owens Flower shop, located along Ninth Street, is pictured on Oct. 30, 2025.