Lawrence City Commissioner Stuart Boley is pictured Thursday, Dec. 28, 2017 outside City Hall in downtown Lawrence.
Commissioner Stuart Boley has filed for reelection to the Lawrence City Commission.
Boley, who is a retired auditor with the Internal Revenue Service, was elected to the commission in 2015 and served as mayor in 2018.
Regarding why he wants to continue his service on the commission, Boley said that with the commission’s new strategic plan and priority based budgeting process, he thinks the commission is making progress in providing excellent city services to Lawrence residents at a reasonable cost. He said he would like to continue that work.
photo by: Seth Sanchez
Free State Brewery company sales and distribution manager Jeff Jensen, left, and Lawrence sales ambassador David Leff, right, fill up a van with COVID-19 testing kits during the first week of March as part of a delivery to hospitality businesses in Lawrence.
A collaboration among three Lawrence organizations has resulted in a robust COVID-19 testing program aimed at finding asymptomatic cases among community members who often interact with strangers.
In December, the Lawrence Restaurant Association partnered with LMH Health and Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health to begin surveillance testing of hospitality workers. According to Emily Peterson, chair of the Lawrence Restaurant Association, 45 Lawrence businesses including restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bakeries and event spaces are now participating in the program. Those 45 businesses have around 1,100 staff members who are tested monthly.
photo by: Mike Yoder/Journal World Photo
Restoration work began again Monday on the St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church, 900 New York, as part of a historic preservation project. A crew from The GKW Group - masonry restoration specialists from Kansas City, Mo., was working on the exterior brick walls and chimneys on the south and east sides.
Additional restoration work is underway on the brick masonry of a historic Black church in East Lawrence thanks to a generous response to fundraising efforts.
The Rev. Verdell Taylor, of St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church, said workers are now tuck-pointing the brick veneer on the east and south sides of the church built in 1910 and anchoring the brick veneer where it has pulled away from the underlying wood frame. Several fundraising sources made the work possible on the church, 900 New York St., which is on state and national registers of historic places.
Fri, 02/26/2021
LAWRENCE A team of investigators at the University of Kansas is collecting data and designing interventions to improve the quality of sleep for firefighters and paramedics in the Lawrence Douglas County Fire-Medical Department.
For these first responders, better sleep could improve their quality of life and boost their performance as they encounter life-and-death situations. The stressful work of responding to emergencies demands both physical stamina and quick decision making.
“Among the many responsibilities of their job, our EMTs and paramedics have to make drug calculations regardless of the time of day or night or situation, so sleep deprivation is a concern,” said Kevin Joles, division chief with LDCFM. “If somebody is sleep deprived and distracted when throwing a ladder against a house and they hit a power line, it could kill them or another firefighter.”
Days Inn, 730 Iowa St., is pictured Dec. 24, 2020.
City leaders will soon consider spending another $90,000 on a program that shelters homeless people in hotels, allowing the program to continue operating another few weeks amid frigid temperatures.
As part of its meeting Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission will consider authorizing spending another $90,000 from the general fund to sustain the program through March 5, which would bring the total city funds spent on the program since its inception to $340,000.
The city approved $200,000 of extra funding for the hotel shelter program in January, which staff estimated would be enough to fund the program through the second week of March. However, according to a city staff memo to the commission, the recent frigid temperatures have increased costs. The memo states that since the arrival of extreme cold weather Feb. 7, the shelter has been seeing an increased number of guests, and the city has also been bearing additional costs to sh