Lawrence will compete for a grant to make the popular Free State Festival into a national event, but city commissioners were told that some East Lawrence residents are concerned arts leaders aren’t taking enough time to listen to their concerns.

Lawrence city commissioners at their weekly meeting started the application process for a National Endowment of the Arts grant that would provide $200,000 to help expand the Free State Festival in 2016 from an event that has more of a regional draw to one that has a national presence. The festival is a multi-day event held each summer that highlights, music, art, film and ideas.

Susan Tate, director of the Lawrence Arts Center, said the festival has a good chance to become more prominent nationally.

“Lawrence already has a concentration of independent filmmakers with a lot of international connections in the film world,” Tate said. “And we’re a top music city already.”

The festival takes place largely in downtown Lawrence, and an expanded festival likely would include events along the portions of Ninth Street, which has been proposed to become a unique arts corridor. That proposed arts corridor project has sparked concern among some East Lawrence residents that the neighborhood along Ninth Street isn’t enough of a partner in the proposed remaking of the street. On Tuesday, several of those neighbors said they were concerned the neighborhood hadn’t been involved enough in the Arts Center’s planning.

City commissioners though unanimously agreed to move ahead with the required preliminary work for the grant. They noted the full grant application will come back to the City Commission for review in about three weeks. Commissioners, though, did urge more communication between arts leaders and neighborhood residents.

“Everybody needs to be a little more proactive in meeting,” City Commissioner Jeremy Farmer said. “It seems to me this isn’t an issue we’ve argued about much in the past. If we can’t get along about art, God help us.”

The final application for the NEA grant is due in mid-January. The city likely will learn whether it will receive grant money by mid-2015.

In other news, commissioners:

• Unanimously approved longevity bonuses for city employees who have worked for the city for at least five consecutive years. Commissioners routinely have made the end-of-year payment since at least the 1990s. This year, eligible employees were paid $48 for every year they have consecutively worked for the city. This year 574 employees are eligible for the program, and the city will make total payments of about $425,000.

• Agreed on a 4-1 vote to issue about $10 million in checks for infrastructure work at Rock Chalk Park. Mayor Mike Amyx voted against the payment. As they discussed at last week’s meeting, a little more than $1 million in payments related to interest costs, legal fees and other soft costs associated with the Rock Chalk project have been withheld until the city can review more documentation. City Manager David Corliss said he expected to have a report on those items next week.