Editor's Note: This is the first story in a multi-part series examining the past, present and future of Eudora as the city drafts its next comprehensive plan that will serve as a guide for development for the next 20 years.
Note: Two areas of this story were clarified. One title was corrected to codes enforcing officer and the chronology of the Buxton Report's relationship to the Nottingham Project was updated.
By LUCIE KRISMAN
When Eudora officials sat down 17 years ago to plan for the future, the city was coming off an overwhelming decade of new residents moving to town.
Assistant City Manager Leslie Herring said the biggest desire for the community back in 2003 was a sense of control of its population growth. Eudora grew 43% from 1990 to 2000, from 3,000 residents to 4,300.
"I talked with a couple of the planning commissioners from back in that time before, and they had so many development applications coming in all at one time,” Herring said. “They couldn't handle them all. Neither could city staff. It was completely unmanageable."
Former City Commissioner Don Durkin said Eudora’s schools and its affordability drew a lot of people into the city during that time.
“I think Eudora was an affordable option to Johnson County or to Lawrence,” Durkin said. “It was a good place to live.”
Eudora’s population is now around 6,400, according to the most recent Census data from 2018, and city officials are once again headed to the drawing board to think about their vision for Eudora’s future.
More than 900 residents and business owners filled out a recent survey asking for input to inform the city’s decisions.
Before looking ahead, The Eudora Times asked various former and current city officials to look to the past and what has been achieved – and what hasn’t – since the adoption of the last comprehensive plan in 2003.
‘What just hit us?’: Forming the previous plan
Durkin said some of the biggest issues facing the city in the early 2000s were updating infrastructure and making sure the fire and police departments were sufficiently staffed.
He said the goal of the previous comprehensive plan was to anticipate Eudora’s future wants and needs, such as the desire for a new swimming pool.
“I think the idea of this is to plan for your future,” Durkin said. “To look into the future and see what we want to do, like ‘do we want a swimming pool, do we want all these new things and updates?’ We tried to plan ahead.”
Durkin said Eudora’s rapid growth in the 1990s and early 2000s led to discussion among the city about what systems, like electric, water and sewer systems, would need to improve as the city experienced growth.
“I think what was probably talked about back then was growing faster than your city can keep up with,” Durkin said. “You’ve got to expand your sewer and electrical and your streets and you can overdo it. A little at a time is the best thing.”
Former City Administrator Mike Yanez, who was the first to fill the position for Eudora in 2002, said improving downtown and creating a more pedestrian-friendly streetscape plan was an infrastructure need for Eudora at the time.
Now a resident of Tonganoxie, Yanez said he felt during his last visit to Eudora that this change had been achieved with a more pedestrian-friendly area, new sidewalks and decorative storefronts.
“The downtown at the time was quite deteriorated,” Yanez said. “Lot of empty storefronts and curbs were falling apart.”
Yanez said balancing accommodation for the growing population while keeping Eudora’s small-town feel was a concern for the city when discussing its last plan.
“We really didn’t want to become Johnson County,” Yanez said.
This meant determining if schools were big enough or needed improvements, if the sidewalks around the schools need to be improved for safety, and if the city had adequate water and sewer capacity to cover anticipated growth.
Yanez said this was approached with his maintenance program for the city that he worked on with city staff. The program created a schedule that designated improvements for different blocks during different years and was altered if unforeseen needs came up.
Yanez said the mayor at the time, Ron Conner, and the Planning Commission kept the process for adopting the comprehensive plan on track, but the process was also driven by the community.
“There’s a whole lot of moving parts to the comprehensive plan,” Yanez said. “It was a good exercise with public involvement and great leadership from the city and the Planning Commission. The public knew that they were very welcome to walk in the door.”
“A plan for better growth”
While city officials were finalizing plans, Eudora appointed its first full-time fire chief in Spencer McCabe and saw completion of the new high school in 2003.
Current Mayor Tim Reazin said the belief was that rapid growth in the city would continue.
"At that time, we were growing so much. We wanted to have a plan for better growth," he said.
The resulting 2003 comprehensive plan is a 200-page guide outlining the city’s demographics, existing conditions of community facilities and services, planning issues and objectives, and future land use and infrastructure.
Officials say completed goals in the past two decades include better communication of city regulations, as all city ordinances, laws and regulations are now online.
“We actively use it when we're talking to new builders and developers who come in,” Herring said. “It's so great because they'll ask, 'Where does it say that?' and I'll send them a hyperlink and highlight the language. So that's one of the things that we have done."
Vice Mayor Ruth Hughs said a new codes enforcing officer position has also been helpful for the community.
"I think that has been huge," Hughs said. "It helps make sure all the citizens are following the same rules, and it helps our community look good."
The previous comprehensive plan also suggested requiring underground utilities in new developments and relocation of certain above-ground utilities as a design goal for developments in Eudora. This is a change that has successfully been made since then, Herring said, along with now requiring sidewalks for every new development.
In 2003, the plan also had a focus on making sure Eudora’s downtown kept its integrity in a rise of more modern retail. Reazin said despite the loss of local businesses like Blue Collar Press and the Black Lodge Recording studio, downtown is doing much better with the help of initiatives like the downtown grant program.
"That's helped with Zeb's and the Lodge and all those places that have applied to those grants,” Reazin said.
However, there were also proposed initiatives that still haven’t been completed in the 17 years since the last plan was drafted.
The prior plan listed an interchange at Winchester Road and K-10 by the former Eudora West Elementary as a desire for the city. Reazin said this change was not a priority for KDOT, but he hopes a solution for school traffic can be discussed in the next comprehensive plan.
"I'm hoping that we can figure out a way to have another exit from the high school because that right now is a big problem with traffic that leaves the school,” he said.
Reazin also thinks more needs to be done with housing in the city.
Still, Hughs said the 2003 plan was useful since it gave future city officials a sense of direction in the years since.
"I believe out of that came forward thinking that we probably would not have had," she said. "I was amazed to look at how much we've really done and the different ways we're doing business in the city."
For example, the role of city administrator changed to a city manager in 2012.
“I think we started growing, and we saw a need for a trained person who went to school to do this. It was a big deal for us," Hughs said.
Herring said this transfer of responsibilities to someone as their full job, as opposed to an elected mayor who had these responsibilities on the side of another day job, was a significant change to how local government worked in Eudora.
"We moved from somebody who was in an elected position to basically giving that power of day-to-day operations to a professional manager,” Herring said.
Hughs said other notable changes in Eudora since 2003 include the development of a Parks and Rec master plan and the renovation and maintenance that has helped downtown Eudora keep its historical value.
She also pointed to the Buxton Report study conducted in 2016 that helped Eudora learn more about retail recruitment and retention in the community. The Buxton Co. partnered with the city to explore and provide an analysis on the economic opportunities in the area, spurred by the Nottingham Project.
Other changes in Eudora in the past two decades include the additions of the Eudora Community and Aquatic Center in 2007, the new Eudora Elementary School in 2009, the Convention and Visitor's Bureau in 2015 and the Parks and Recreation Foundation in 2016. In 2010, Eudora became a city of the second class.
In forming the next comprehensive plan for Eudora, Herring said some of the goals from the prior plan, such as growing in a controlled and sustainable way, are still ongoing aspirations that serve as a guide.
"I don't know that you will ever find a community that has completed their comprehensive plan," Herring said. "It's like this moving target that's always moving. We've definitely achieved or made progress on some of the goals, but most of the goals if you look at our existing comprehensive plan are not things that you just check off."
Herring said the desire for responsible control over growth is an ongoing influence in planning Eudora’s future.
"I think that the comprehensive plan in 2003 was a response to feeling like 'what just hit us?'" Herring said. "And we don't want to be unprepared again."
In the upcoming second story in this series, we ask city officials about their goals for the future with Eudora’s next comprehensive plan. Stay tuned for additional stories in this series.
Reach reporter Lucie Krisman at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
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