Everybody wants to protect downtown. But nobody’s quite sure how.

A year after the Progressive Lawrence Campaign swept three candidates onto the Lawrence City Commission with a promise to protect Lawrence’s downtown, commissioners are still trying to figure out what they want to do.

“Other than trying to make sure that downtown improvements stay on track and property taxes don’t get out of line, I haven’t put my finger on what we can do,” Commissioner Boog Highberger said. “Preserving downtown is crucial to the future of Lawrence. I have to admit I don’t know the best strategy to achieve that.”

But that doesn’t mean commissioners won’t keep trying to figure out an answer.

In November, the commission told city staffers to look for ways to keep the chain stores at bay.

“We may be on the verge of (downtown) losing its uniqueness to franchise operations,” Commissioner David Schauner said at the time.

Property values downtown keep going up, swelling the city’s tax coffers. But those taxes are particularly burdensome on the type of local businesses that make downtown Lawrence unique, Schauner said.

“We don’t have another venue that is as closely associated with what people think of as Lawrence as downtown,” he said.

And as doing business downtown becomes more expensive, the only stores able to afford the higher rents and tax bills are part of national chains, he said.

Commissioners told city staff to look into ways to ease the tax burden on locally owned businesses downtown, especially those in historic buildings.

“Probably (the) best vehicle would be some type of rebate,” Assistant City Manager Dave Corliss said at the time. “You’re not going to be able to go in and give a tax exemption, absent changing the Kansas Constitution or a number of different statutes.”

Commissioners also are worried the higher values and corresponding decrease in locally owned retail stores will accelerate another phenomenon: the rapid growth of bars and restaurants along Massachusetts Street.

“In the last 20 years we’ve lost almost a third of the retail stores,” Schauner said at the November meeting.

More recently, Highberger said he wasn’t ready to weigh in on whether the city should restrict chain stores, the way San Francisco’s city government did this spring.

“I think if downtown becomes a place of chain stores, we’ll have lost what makes Lawrence unique,” Highberger said.

And Schauner said he’s still interested in encouraging more mom-and-pop retail stores downtown.

“The lack of a place to buy a gallon of milk downtown is an issue,” he said. “I don’t know what the role of government is in that.”