photo by: Mike Yoder

In this file photo from Aug. 14, 2015, Vice Mayor Leslie Soden and City Commissioner Mike Amyx greet each other before a special commission meeting.

The City Commission will discuss Tuesday who Lawrence’s mayor will be for the remainder of 2016: current Mayor Mike Amyx or Vice Mayor Leslie Soden.

City commissioners are having the unusual discussion because of changes in state law that are quickly rendering Lawrence’s decades-long process of choosing a mayor outdated.

A subcommittee, made up of Commissioners Matthew Herbert and Lisa Larsen, formed April 5 to recommend the next mayor. The subcommittee will also recommend Tuesday what time of year mayors will be elected in the future.

The whole commission must vote on the recommendations, which are not being made public before Tuesday’s meeting. Herbert said the recommendations are “more of an announcement” and the likely direction forward because three votes are needed to approve them, and two commissioners created them.

Larsen said it “wouldn’t be prudent” to share the recommendations before the meeting.

The Kansas Legislature passed a bill in 2015 moving city elections from April of odd years to November of odd years, and Lawrence’s city attorney is recommending the mayor’s election fall in line with it.

“The decision is really two parts: the short-term part is simply figuring out who’s going to be the mayor, and the longer-term task we were asked to decide is when terms will take place in the future,” Herbert said. “We really didn’t want to Band-Aid this thing together; we wanted our decision Tuesday to reflect a more permanent way forward.”

Herbert said the way forward that he and Larsen will recommend would include moving away from the choosing a new mayor each April, as the commission has historically done.

The state’s new schedule for city elections starts in 2017. Elections will be held in November, and outgoing commissioners will remain in their positions until the newly elected City Commission is seated the second Monday in January.

“With the change at the state Legislature, we’re looking at a situation where it doesn’t really make sense any more to have April transitions,” he said. “April is kind of a meaningless period now for local politics.”

Following tradition, Soden, who received the most votes in the 2015 election, was named vice mayor and would have been elected this month as mayor. Boley, who received the second most votes in the 2015 election, would have become vice mayor.

But now, Amyx’s term could be extended to January 2017 to get the commission onto its new schedule.

If the commission decides Tuesday to make Soden mayor sometime this spring, as it would have without the schedule change, she could serve to January 2018.

When choosing who would be mayor in the short term, the subcommittee focused “on the calendar, and not so much on the people,” Herbert said.

When making their decisions, Herbert and Larsen talked about whether to factor in a change to how mayors are elected — moving away from a “ceremonial mayor system,” Herbert said, to a strong-mayor form of government, in which voters elect mayors.

Both agreed that type of shift should be left to voters, not to a two-person subcommittee.

“I was not personally very comfortable making that decision for a community by myself, or with two people,” Herbert said. “What we wanted to decide is, with regard to the change at the state level, how could we move forward using the basic governance we’ve always used, but now with a more meaningful calendar date.”

“I tend to think what we did was pretty good,” he said. “Time will tell if people agree with us.”

Herbert and Larsen will announce their decision near the end of a City Commission meeting on Tuesday at City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St. The City Commission meets at 5:45 p.m.