Lawrence city commissioners heard from more than 50 community members Tuesday, most asking them to hit pause on the updated land development code. Ultimately, they voted to approve the update.

The land development code regulates development in the city, including zoning regulations, residential occupancy limits and more. The document has wide-ranging implications for the growth and direction of the city. In the summer of 2022, the city started reviewing the code to make it simpler and aligned with goals like sustainability and housing. The commission created the Land Development Code Update Steering Committee to work on the process.

About four dozen of the people who spoke encouraged the city commission to slow down the process and send it back to the Planning Commission for further discussion and community involvement.

Many cited concerns about increasing density in their neighborhoods. Others said that parking is already a problem in a lot of residential areas, and they feared some provisions of the code would make that worse.

Some public commenters said increased density in neighborhoods doesn’t necessarily equate to more affordable housing, and some voiced concerns that out-of-town developers who don’t really care about Lawrence will swoop in to buy properties and turn them into rental units geared toward college students just so they can make a profit.

On the other side, a few people who identified themselves as renters argued that they care about their properties and their neighborhoods, too. Some said they’d like to continue being able to afford living in Lawrence and felt that the code change would help ensure they could.

Several community members raised concerns about the process, feeling like they haven’t had a chance to give input. In one instance, a redlined version of the document was uploaded to the Planning Commission’s agenda too late for people to give written public comment about it.

“How can we proceed with the process if the process was not followed correctly?” Commissioner Lisa Larsen asked. “… For those who wanted to make those comments, they didn’t get an opportunity to do that. So to me, the process was broken.”

Others, however, felt that over the past two years, they’ve had plenty of opportunities to get involved. The city has held open houses and sought feedback at multiple points throughout the process.

“I feel confident; I’d love for it to pass. Yet you are now faced with the public that says ‘stop,'” Dustin Stumblingbear said.

The meeting got a bit heated as Larsen also took issue with the 14-member steering committee not voting on items as the work was ongoing, and how members would know who supported what if they didn’t take a vote. She said she didn’t like how the slides for the commission meeting indicate that the committee “approved” and “supported” things when there weren’t any votes taken, and that was concerning to her.

“If you’d watched any of the steering committees beforehand, if you thought it was wrong, you could have brought this up anytime in the last two years,” Commissioner Brad Finkeldei said. “I don’t appreciate you coming here at the end saying it’s a process that you don’t agree with.”

Commissioner Amber Sellers said the code update was intended to right wrongs of historic codes that perpetuated racial, social and economic segregation.

“This development code is probably one of the most progressive pieces of documents that this city and that this commission could ever pass in the next probably 40 years,” Sellers said. “It’s long overdue.”

Finkeldei said there were a lot of things the committee added into the code to protect neighborhoods, and he thinks it’s a code that works to balance those issues with the need for more density and infill development. He also said the code makes a lot of changes to industrial and commercial zoning, and nobody came out to speak about those items.

Vice Mayor Mike Dever said he felt that the code solved some of the problems people have raised about sprawl. He thinks the city had previously shifted away from density, and “I feel like that’s kind of what brought us to this point today.” He highlighted millions of dollars the city has spent on water treatment systems and infrastructure improvements and said the city needs to pay for that by growing the community.

Some members of the public also criticized new ways the code will allow administrative approvals of some things that currently go through public-facing processes. Dever said the expedited processes to get developments approved would make them cheaper, therefore making housing more affordable, and that some developers would move on if they couldn’t get their projects approved promptly.

The code will launch with a provision that will allow changes after the first six months or so of “living with” it.

Elizabeth Garvin with Clarion, the consultants the city hired to assist in the code process, said that would be “to make sure that we catch any inadvertent outcomes in the code that we can’t see as we’re looking at it right now.” She said they’d anticipated doing that at a staff level, but they could bring it back to the Planning Commission and city commission.

Finkeldei moved to approve the new code, and Sellers seconded. The commission voted 4-1, with Larsen opposed.

See the complete agenda item at this link. (Note: The link goes to a 1,523-page PDF that may be slow to load.)

Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.

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