Belt tightening at City Hall likely will mean at least one Lawrence nonprofit agency will have to learn to do without city funding.

The Lawrence-based Partnership for Children and Youth learned Wednesday that a pair of city commissioners is recommending that the group be dropped from the city’s budget in 2006.

“It is just a situation where we can’t ask the taxpayers to pick up everything,” said City Commissioner Mike Amyx, the top vote-winner in the most recent city elections who campaigned heavily on holding the line on city spending.

The partnership — which doesn’t directly work with children but rather works to help other agencies obtain grants to work with youths — had asked for $83,995 in funding. It had received $50,000 in city funding for 2005, and had regularly been part of the city’s budget since 1998.

“It definitely puts us in a difficult position,” said Kristen Malloy, executive director of the partnership. “It would impact our ability to keep operating at current levels. It would mean some staff cuts and some program cuts.”

This year city commissioners set a goal of making sure total funding for outside agencies didn’t increase by more than 6 percent, which is how much city officials are expecting the city’s assessed valuation to rise. The self-imposed cap made for some tough choices.

“I just personally saw some areas where there was greater need,” said Amyx, who along with Commissioner David Schauner reviewed the funding requests and made the recommendations. “The biggest thing I wanted to do is make sure the money went to organizations that were making a direct impact.”

Malloy said she hoped the full city commission would reconsider the funding request from her organization. Although her group didn’t work directly with children, she said the partnership was a important resource for other service providers.

Primarily the partnership maintains a database that youth service providers can access to get needed demographic and statistical information useful in preparing grants. It also serves as a group that works with other agencies to assess the service needs of Douglas County youths. Malloy said she hoped she could get commissioners to understand that eliminating funding for her group would hurt other social service agencies.

“It will decrease the level of awareness of funding opportunities,” Malloy said.

The city funding accounted for a little less than half of the organization’s $167,000 budget, with the rest coming mainly from federal and private grants. The partnership has four employees — three of them part-time — and Malloy said it was too early to say how many may have to be laid off.

The other 20 organizations that applied for city funding largely received either the same amount of funding as they did in 2005 or a slight increase.

In other news from Wednesday’s budget hearing:

l Police leaders told city commissioners that they needed $400,000 to purchase new software to better manage records to produce data on crime trends and other reports that were called for in a recent study of the police department.

Wednesday’s budget hearings were the third and final for this week. Commissioners will next have a study session on the 2006 budget on June 15. Commissioners must approve a 2006 budget by early August.