Lawrence officials may not believe the city can pay as much for the K-10 Connector bus service as Johnson County officials have requested, but it might behoove them to approach the issue with a more cooperative attitude.

The K-10 Connector makes several trips each day between Kansas University, Johnson County Community College and KU’s Edwards Campus. It is a useful service for many Lawrence residents and helps reduce traffic on Kansas Highway 10. It seems like the kind of service that the city would like to support or even expand. (How about an I-70 Connector bus between Lawrence and Topeka?)

However, as budget discussions are ramping up in Lawrence, deliberations are getting a little testy, and turf issues are rearing their ugly heads. At a meeting of the Lawrence Public Transit Advisory Committee on Tuesday, Transit Director Robert Nugent was quick to debunk the assertion of Johnson County officials that former Lawrence City Manager David Corliss had “approved in concept” a plan that would raise Lawrence’s financial support of the bus service from $120,000 per year to $327,800 per year. Without the increased support, which Nugent estimated was about a third of the total cost of operating the service, Johnson County said it would need to “revisit and reassess its support of the route.”

Not only was that deal not struck, Nugent said, but he questioned how much Lawrence should contribute to a service it doesn’t operate. “They’re not running that route for us — we didn’t ask them to provide that route,” he said. “I’ve been in business for almost 30 years, and I’ve never funded somebody else’s service.”

That may be true, but the city has worked hard to coordinate its services with the KU bus service and is working with KU on plans for a transit hub. The K-10 Connector provides a good service to Lawrence residents — a service that Lawrence couldn’t afford to provide on its own — and it doesn’t seem unreasonable for the city to cooperate with another community to provide that service. Nugent told the advisory committee that, according to Johnson County, 60 percent of the ridership is people going from Douglas County to Johnson County.

Officials may be right that $327,800 is too much for the city’s budget to handle this year. Maybe they could help the K-10 Connector explore other options like fare increases or asking KU to help share the cost. There’s no need to draw a line in the sand. Let’s try to work together on a workable plan to continue a service that benefits both Lawrence and Johnson County.