photo by: Mike Yoder

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., Thursday, July 7, 2016

One of the priorities in the city manager’s recommended budget is improving pay for city employees, and the budget allocates $4.2 million toward raises.

The 2022 budget included $5 million to increase pay, and City Manager Craig Owens said the $4.2 million included in the recommended budget would conclude a multiyear plan to bring city wages to market-competitive rates. Owens named employee compensation as one of a few priorities in the budget.

“We’ve done a lot to finally implement a pay program that was identified in 2018 by outside consultants,” Owens said. “This (recommended budget) finally accomplished all of the recommendations of that plan and implemented those across all of our employees.”

The city commissioned an outside firm, McGrath Human Resources Group, to complete a compensation study in 2018. It found in part that a significant number of nonunion city employees were underpaid when compared with their peers in other cities. The report compared Lawrence’s pay with that of more than a dozen other communities, including Johnson County, Lenexa, Manhattan, Overland Park, Topeka and Wichita. Efforts to improve pay started under former City Manager Tom Markus, who said in early 2019 that the city had been losing highly specialized staff over the past few years.

In the years since then, the city has also seen more employees unionize. Three new groups of city employees have unionized in addition to the two longstanding unions representing police and fire and medical employees. The new unions represent the solid waste, municipal services and operations, and maintenance and parks employees. All three groups have unionized under the Teamsters since 2020, the most recent in March of this year.

The city has also been seeing more resignations than it did in years past. City officials said earlier this month that the city has been seeing the effects of the so-called “great resignation,” in which there have been record-breaking numbers of resignations nationwide. The city has about 85 vacancies among its approximately 800 positions. For comparison, in September 2021, the city reported that it had more than 60 openings, which at that time was more than twice the number of openings the city usually had.

The details of how the $4.2 million will be distributed among city employees or what the percentage increase would be if approved by the City Commission are not yet determined. Director of Human Resources Megan Dodge said on Friday that the city was still working on calculations of how to apply the proposed funds and that additional details would be available in a few weeks.

In addition to the proposed $4.2 million in raises for city employees, the Lawrence Public Library board also recently approved a slight tax increase as part of an effort to improve library employee pay and bring it in line with the pay for other city employees.

Apart from improving employee compensation, Owens said other ongoing priorities the recommended budget seeks to address include catching up on deferred maintenance to streets, sewers, waterlines and other city infrastructure, and addressing homelessness and housing stability.

The recommended budget for 2023 totals about $436.8 million across all funds and keeps the city’s property tax rate flat at 33.29 mills. It also proposes new parks and recreation fees, utility rate increases and $936,000 in cuts to city services and positions, some of which are offset by other additions. The city is proposing $1.2 million in new parks and rec fees — potentially including new admission fees for recreation centers, which are currently free to access — and the closure of the Prairie Park Nature Center.

As the Journal-World reported, dozens of people spoke out against the closure of the nature center, which makes up $337,000 of the overall reductions, and some commissioners have expressed interest in looking at alternative cuts. The other proposed cuts include a $100,000 reduction to contracted animal control services, $68,000 to eliminate a vacant recreation programmer position, $66,000 to eliminate a vacant legal analyst position and $65,000 to convert some annual flower plantings to native grasses and perennials. There are $606,000 of proposed additions, including increased funding for economic development, information technology and two new positions.

Lawrence city commissioners are scheduled to continue their 2023 budget discussions on Tuesday, when they will vote on the budget’s maximum expenditures. Once the maximum is set, the commission may lower it later in the budget process but cannot increase it.