The city of Lawrence’s per-capita spending and debt levels reached 10-year highs in 2014, a trend that city officials are saying cannot be sustained over the long haul.

Those numbers were part of an annual performance audit report that Lawrence city auditor Michael Eglinski delivered to the City Commission last week. It examined the city’s current financial position and compared it with each of the previous nine years and with other cities of comparable size and demographics.

Eglinski then calculated “benchmarks,” which are the median of all the comparable cities.

Overall, he said, the city’s financial position improved in 2014 from the previous year.

“However, indicators for long-term liabilities and interest coverage are below the benchmarks and have worsened,” Eglinski said in the report. “The City added long-term debt in 2014.”

The report showed that total city spending in 2014 was just under $1,400 per resident, and that total debt per resident reached about $1,100. Both of those were 10-year highs, even after adjusting for inflation.

Meanwhile, total revenues per resident were slightly more than $1,000, slightly lower than the spending level and below the 10-year high mark set in 2010 when revenues were about $1,500 per resident.

Most of the increase in debt in recent years was attributed to the $18 million renovation and expansion of the Lawrence Public Library, and the development of the $25 million Rock Chalk Park recreation center.

Lawrence typically issues short-term “temporary” notes during the construction phase of a project, then issues the final long-term bonds when those projects are completed. So both the library and Rock Chalk Park projects were put into long-term bonds last year.

“It’s certainly not sustainable,” Commissioner Matthew Herbert said. “A lot of deferred maintenance got taken care of all at once. You had a library that was 30 years out of date. You had a recreation facility that taxpayers voted for in the 1990s that finally got built. On paper it looks like we put a bunch of money in a pile and set it on fire.”

City Commissioner Leslie Soden agreed that the trend is not sustainable.

“That is one of the things I’m really concerned about,” she said. “We’re not very liquid. We have a lot of debt. We were higher than the benchmark. And our liquidity (the ability to convert assets into cash) was lower. To me, those were definite red flags that major spending needs to be reined in.”

Although the debt figures may be cause for concern, city officials said they are not cause for immediate alarm. Lawrence continues to maintain healthy balances in its bond and interest fund — the source used to make payments on the city’s bonds — and it enjoys favorable credit rating.

In mid-July, when the city refinanced some of its water and sewer bonds, financial advisers told the commission that Moody’s Investor Services had rated city bonds backed by utility revenues as Aa2 and its property tax-backed bonds slightly higher, at Aa1.

Lawrence also has enjoyed a relatively stable and growing tax base, Eglinski said. Real estate values flattened out during the Great Recession, but they did not plummet as they did in other U.S. cities when the housing bubble of the early 2000s burst.

Retail sales tax collections have also risen slowly but steadily since 2010.

On Tuesday, city commissioners will hold a public hearing on a proposed budget for 2016 that would continue the trend of increased spending, although officials say it will not require a property tax increase.

That budget calls for about $207 million in total spending next year, a 9 percent increase over this year, much of which is due to pay raises for city employees and increased spending on capital improvements such as street and sidewalk repairs.

Herbert said he believes most Lawrence residents support those kinds of projects, and he pointed to a recent citizens survey that showed investing in the city’s infrastructure was the public’s top priority.

“People just want to make sure their money is being spent wisely,” he said. “People don’t object to money being spent; they object to money being spent frivolously. Ultimately, at the end of the day people don’t object to capital improvement projects.”