City officials have made a convincing preliminary case in favor of annexing Westar’s Lawrence Energy Center, and the matter certainly warrants further consideration.

On the plus side for the city would be about $900,000 a year in additional property taxes. That’s a nice sum, but the main point city officials are making is that the Westar facility benefits from city services and should be a part of the city’s tax base that funds those services.

With the city’s growth to the northwest, the Westar property now is so close to the city that it has hooked on to city water service. In case of fire, the energy center’s first line of defense would be the Wakarusa Township Fire Department, but an emergency of any size certainly would require a response by Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical.

Westar officials recently rejected the city’s request to help fund repairs to the Bowersock Dam, which helps maintain the upstream depth of the Kansas River, saying that the project wasn’t particularly important for the water intake that serves Lawrence Energy Center. That conclusion may be debatable even now and could become even more questionable depending on the future water levels on the Kaw.

Westar officials seem to want to apply a strict cost-benefit analysis to the annexation issue, but that isn’t how it works. Just because many Lawrence residents have never had a fire at their homes doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from — or shouldn’t have to help pay for — fire and medical services.

The big loser if the plant is annexed would be Wakarusa Township, which currently receives about $574,000 a year in taxes from Westar. The township’s loss is unfortunate, but it may not be unfair considering the direct services Westar receives from the township compared to what it receives from Lawrence.

It’s also true that Westar will have the right to recover such expenses from its customers, but the additional tax would only amount to about $1 a year for each of the 300,000 customers in the service area that includes Lawrence. Paying property taxes is a cost of doing business. For instance, Westar customers already share the property tax bill for the company’s large headquarters building in downtown Topeka.

Lawrence property taxes fund a whole range of city services. Not everyone benefits directly from all of those services, but, like most of us, it seems Westar derives enough benefit from enough services to warrant its inclusion on the city’s property tax rolls.