Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on May 3, 2016.

Come July, where Lawrence residents can carry a concealed weapon may depend on whether they are walking into a building on the University of Kansas campus or a municipal building such as the public library.

The difference has to do with the beginning date of a four-year exemption to a state concealed carry law that went into effect July 2013. Universities and municipalities were allowed to submit a resolution declaring an exemption, and the City of Lawrence resolution did not count an initial six-month exemption period that was built into the original version of the law in its resolution, according to assistant city attorney Maria Garcia.

An amendment that states the exemptions will expire in July 2017 was added last year to the concealed carry law. However, Garcia said because the city’s resolution declaring an exemption until January 2018 was submitted before that expiration date was added, it continues to hold.

“Our interpretation of it is still the same,” Garcia said. “And we feel confident our interpretation is correct.”

The League of Kansas Municipalities backs up that assertion. Eric Smith, deputy general counsel for the league, said the expiration date of July would not affect the prior exemptions of cities such as Lawrence.

“We’re comfortable that ultimately it will be determined that that did not affect the prior exemptions,” Smith said.

Smith said that case law supports that stance, and that while he knows other institutions are planning for their exemptions to expire six months earlier, he thought there would be little opposition to the city’s resolution.

“The only ones who could ever make an ultimate ruling on that would be a court, if there was ever litigation on it,” Smith said. “So it’s really going to be up to the legal interpretation of the different agencies and what they choose to do from there.”

The concealed carry law, named the Personal and Family Protection Act, allows people to have concealed weapons in public buildings that don’t provide security measures.

Once all exemptions have expired, the application of the law in Lawrence will still be more complicated than whether you are on KU property or municipal property. That’s because prohibition of weapons can only be determined at the building level. An amendment to the law specified that universities or cities can only continue to ban concealed weapons if all of a building’s entrances have “adequate” security measures, defined as metal detectors or guards.

“This has everything to do with whether a building has the authority to prohibit — putting up that sticker on the door — someone from bringing a gun in there,” said Breeze Richardson, director of communications for the Kansas Board of Regents. “Whether that’s the courthouse or whether that’s the library or whether that’s the university.”

The Kansas Board of Regents applied for the exemption for all the universities that it governs, with an exemption period from July 2013 to July 2017, according to Richardson. That means starting in July, any buildings where KU wants to prohibit weapons must have the security measures required by the state.

Richardson said universities will have to apply to the Board of Regents annually in order to prohibit weapons in certain buildings. With its exemption period expiration only five months away, KU has already announced plans to ban weapons for certain events at Allen Fieldhouse.

According to its resolution, the City of Lawrence has another 11 months to figure out which municipal buildings it would like to add security to in order to allow those buildings to prohibit concealed weapons.

As part of budget discussions last year, a plan was proposed, but ultimately not pursued, that would have put metal detectors and guards at four of the most frequently visited city buildings: City Hall, Lawrence Municipal Court, the Lawrence Public Library and the police department’s Investigations and Training Center. The cost of that plan was estimated to be between $530,000 and $895,000, depending on personnel salaries.

Due to the cost of adding security, the city is considering consolidating some of its facilities to use metal detectors and guards more efficiently. The city owns the building that houses City Hall, but leases the building at 1006 New Hampshire St. where Lawrence Municipal Court is located. City Manager Tom Markus said Thursday that staff is still discussing consolidation options but there is nothing ready to go public yet.

As part of the 2018 budget, city commissioners will ultimately decide which buildings, if any, should add metal detectors in order to prohibit weapons. The City Commission typically begins budget discussions for the upcoming year the first week in May.