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Consultant presents Connected KC Freight Plan to Lawrence-area planning group
Summary
CDM Smith presented the Connected KC Freight Plan, a regional freight planning effort covering 19 counties, the plan’s technical memos, toolkit, and proactive planning framework; Lawrence staff and commissioners were invited to use the resources and incorporate freight-aware land-use practices.
CDM Smith project manager Devon Morade presented the Connected KC Freight Plan to the Lawrence-Douglas County MPO technical committee, outlining technical findings, stakeholder outreach and a proactive planning framework intended for 19 counties in the Kansas City region.
The presentation gave local planners a summary of the plan’s technical work and tools and stressed integration of freight considerations into municipal land-use, economic development and transportation decision-making.
Morade said the study emphasized that freight has no borders and that regional coordination helps local planning agencies anticipate impacts. “My name is Devon Morade, and I'm with CDM Smith as project manager for the Connected KC Freight Plan,” Morade said during the presentation. He described a multi-step work program: inventory and existing-conditions analysis, a set of roughly 12–13 technical memos, scenario workshops and a proactive planning toolkit aimed at helping local governments factor freight into land-use decisions.
The study area included 19 counties and drew on recently completed state freight plans from KDOT and MoDOT. Morade said the consultant team harmonized long-range plans and freight goals across jurisdictions after encountering inconsistent data formats during collection. The plan incorporated multimodal mapping of truck corridors, truck parking, airports and port facilities and generated freight-activity zones using commercial data (Geotab) to identify concentrated industrial clusters.
Key technical findings presented included an inventory of about 121 freight activity zones, with 37 highlighted for more-intense freight activity. Morade reported the top 37 freight activity centers contain about 90,000 acres of industrial land; the presentation also reported roughly 70 million square feet of manufacturing/food-processing space and a larger, less precisely stated total for warehousing rentable area in the study region.
The team described three scenario narratives used in stakeholder workshops — informally labeled “Wild Wild West,” “Shifting Patterns” and “Show Me” — which helped participants evaluate planning tools under alternate futures and prioritize actions. Morade summarized one of the plan’s goals as creating an ongoing, iterative coalition among the participating planning agencies so the plan would “not be meant to sit on the shelf.”
The plan offers a local “what to expect when expecting freight” land-use checklist — covering safety, utilities, off-site impacts and workforce-livability considerations (daycare, retail access), and a set of planning recommendations tied to economic resilience, multimodal preservation and interagency coordination. Morade said the plan’s full report, tech memos, appendices and the proactive planning framework are posted on the plan website for jurisdictions to review.
Committee members did not take formal action; the presentation was received for information. Staff and the consultant invited questions and indicated the materials and memos are available for jurisdictions and stakeholders to use in local planning or in forthcoming policy conversations.
