After a bold beginning to their discussions, Lawrence city commissioners agreed Tuesday night to a budget that will barely make a dent in the city’s street maintenance backlog.

The city currently budgets about $4 million to maintain streets that are unacceptable but worth saving. The interim city manager raised that figure to $6 million in the 2007 budget he presented to commissioners to help the city catch up on its maintenance needs. Even the $6 million would not have begun to address the 30 percent of city streets that the public works department has determined aren’t worth repairing and must be replaced.

City commissioners initially embraced the additional $2 million investment, but when it came time to adopt the budget Tuesday night, they cut the increase by more than a third in order to avoid any increase in the city’s property tax levy. Holding the line on property taxes is a laudable goal, but further delay in local street improvements is a high price to pay.

On July 17, commissioners asked Public Works Director Chuck Soules to determine how much could be accomplished with a $5 million street budget. All five commissioners said at that time they weren’t interested in cutting the increase for street maintenance if it would lead to more costs in the long run.

The next week, Soules came back with a report saying that reducing the maintenance budget from $6 million to $5 million would eliminate repairs to 35 blocks of streets that currently fall into “the unacceptable range.” Applying the same formula, the reduction for a $5.3 million budget, would amount to about 24 blocks.

Rising construction costs also will make it hard for the city to gain any ground. The $5.3 million street budget is 32 percent more than the current year’s budget, but Soules reported that construction costs have increased by 20 percent this year alone.

How can commissioners possibly contend that putting off needed street maintenance won’t result in higher costs in the long run? The city’s plan is to catch up on maintenance needs and then dedicate more funding to streets that need to be rebuilt. Skimping on the maintenance budget will stretch out the time needed to complete those repairs and delay work on rebuilding streets. Do commissioners think road construction is going to get less expensive during that time?

Commissioners rejected, at least for now, the idea of a sales tax to help fund street improvements. That left them the choices of modestly raising property taxes for that purpose, cutting other projects or programs or accepting a lower maintenance investment. They were quick to say that the $1.3 million increase is much better than in previous years, but the reality is that, with higher construction costs, the impact of the increase will be minimal.

It was a bold start, but the end result is that commissioners – like their predecessors – essentially left this important problem for some future commission to solve. Lawrence as a city is the loser because of this inaction.