City of Lawrence Parks and Recreation Department

Before any decisions can be made regarding new fees or services for the Lawrence Parks and Recreation Department, local leaders want to know more about the department’s finances.

The final draft of the department’s 10-year master plan, presented Tuesday to the City Commission, includes revenue and expenditures for recreation programming, but not all financials. Vice Mayor Stuart Boley said that in order to plan for the department, he wanted to have a more complete picture.

“I don’t disagree with the information; I just don’t think it’s complete,” Boley said. “And to plan around incomplete information I think can cause problems.”

Boley, a retired tax auditor with the Internal Revenue Service, said that just having the revenue and expenditures of certain programs doesn’t take into account the depreciation of facilities or their debt payments. He also said he would like to see more trend analysis for the past decade to see what certain programs and facilities are costing the city over time.

“If we look at what happened over the last 10 years, maybe we’ll have a better plan for the next 10 years,” Boley said.

One of the department’s four main goals in the plan is to improve its financial standing. The financial portion of the 250-page master plan includes a model to determine user fees and help the department recover more costs. Some parks and recreation programs — such as the aquatics centers, Prairie Park Nature Center and Sports Pavilion Lawrence — have about half or more of their expenses subsidized by sales tax, and it is currently free to use the workout and weight room facilities at the city’s four public recreation centers.

When looking at program expenditures from only the recreation fund, the master plan indicates the department’s budget received a $2.2 million sales tax subsidy in 2015. Boley said the additional financial information regarding debt payments and expenditures from other funds such as the special recreation fund is important to include if the commission is to consider increasing user or program fees to help recover costs.

“If we’re trying to come up with the subsidy amounts, wouldn’t we take a look at the whole picture, and not just one fund?” Boley said.

Consultants who worked with the city to develop the master plan said that those specifics would be dealt with in more detail when the cost recovery model is implemented. Using the model, recreation programs and services are sorted into a pyramid of five subsidy levels according to how much the program or service benefits the community versus the individual.

“The recommendation for doing that pyramid cost recovery process will straighten all this out,” said Pat O’Toole, a principal with GreenPlay LLC.

The master plan also includes some service additions. Some of the projects in the plan include expanding the workout and weight rooms at the Holcom, East Lawrence and Community Building recreation centers. However, O’Toole noted that if a request for a capital expense were to be presented to the commission, it would include more financial information.

“Adopting a plan like this does not commit dollars,” O’Toole said, noting that projects would follow the same process as any other.

At the conclusion of the discussion, the commission referred the Parks and Recreation Department’s Master Plan to city staff to make additions. Staff said they will add the debt service information and financial trend information requested by Boley to the plan and bring it back before the commission in the next few weeks.