Douglas County leaders want to do more to help people in the local homeless shelter transition into stable housing, and they say they'll need to work closely with City of Lawrence leaders to achieve that.
Leaders from the city and the county held a joint work session on affordable housing on Tuesday, giving county commissioners a chance to learn more about housing issues in Lawrence from city leaders. But the ...
It only took the Douglas County Commission one of two scheduled meetings this week to finish deliberating on the county’s proposed budget, and key to county leaders’ changes is a tentative decrease to the proposed mill levy.
The levy that commissioners decided on during Monday’s budget deliberations is 46.380 mills. That's 1.039 mills lower than the proposed levy of 47.419 mills, which had been left ...
For Douglas County Commission candidate Dustin Stumblingbear, a keen interest in local government has led to a natural outcome: running for public office.
Stumblingbear, 43, is an Iraq war veteran and serves on the board of Independence Inc. After moving back and forth between Lawrence and Minnesota during his youth, Stumblingbear — a member of the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma — returned to Lawrence in 2009 for ...
Incumbent District 1 Douglas County Commissioner Patrick Kelly’s decision to seek reelection was driven, in part, on the connections he’s helped forge with community agencies.
“That’s where having experience as a commissioner, to me, is a big benefit,” Kelly told the Journal-World. “We’ve developed some really strong relationships and partnerships, especially during the pandemic.”
Kelly began ...
On the final day of Douglas County's hearings on the 2023 budget, a truancy-reduction nonprofit and a low-income housing program both asked for county funding and said they wanted to play a greater role in the budget process in future years.
The conversation at Thursday's hearing focused on behavioral health organizations, agencies serving at-risk populations, and safety net and human service providers. Among ...
During the second day of 2023 budget hearings, the Douglas County Commission learned more about a funding request from the Douglas County District Court for a project designed to help litigants navigate the court system regardless of their ability to pay for legal services.
The court’s request, totaling roughly $170,000, would allow for hiring a court resource specialist and an attorney who would staff what ...
