photo by: Screenshot

Commenters fill the Lawrence City Commission meeting room for the city's budget hearings on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024.

After dozens of community members — some angry and emotional — spoke out about the increasing tax burdens they’re feeling, Lawrence city commissioners on Tuesday signaled that they might be interested in a smaller tax rate hike than previously proposed.

At its meeting on Tuesday, the commission held two public hearings, one on the budget and the other on the city’s intent to exceed the so-called “revenue-neutral” tax rate. The commissioners voted unanimously to approve exceeding that rate, which is the property tax rate at which the city would collect the same amount of money in taxes as it did in the previous budget year.

As the Journal-World has reported, the budget plan won’t be up for a final vote until September, and the proposal from City Manager Craig Owens would raise the mill levy from the 2024 rate of 33.207 mills to 36.807 mills. That’s a 3.6 mill increase, which would amount to about a $120 per year increase in city property taxes for the owner of a $300,000 home, as the Journal-World previously reported.

For most of the people in the crowd that showed up to the commission chamber at City Hall, that — along with proposed cuts to Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical — seemed like too heavy a cost to bear.

One commenter, Brian Farley, said he’d started a group called the Douglas County Taxpayers Association and that he’d seen a lot more interest in the city’s budget process over the past year. During last year’s budget hearings, “there might have been five people down here,” he said, but now “there are a lot more people who understand that we have a problem here.”

“If we don’t care for the lowest of the people who are contributing, then we have failed,” he said.

Multiple speakers brought in the mailings notifying them of the potential tax increase, and some told the commissioners they were seeing an increase in combined taxes on their property of 20% in some cases. A common refrain from many public commenters was a feeling the increase in taxes was driving them out of the city.

“What’s the goal of the city, is it to create another Overland Park?” commenter Patrick Webb asked. “That’s not what Lawrence is.”

The proposed mill levy increase in the 2024 budget would be the largest for the city in at least 50 years, and much of the money generated would go toward rebuilding the city’s equivalent of a rainy-day savings account, as the Journal-World has reported. And, as many commenters brought up, the budget plan also recommended making cuts to services in areas such as parks and recreation and Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical staffing.

Ahead of the public hearing, city manager Craig Owens presented an overview of the proposed budget and provided options to the commission to restore the staffing rates for the fire department.

Owens said he was aware that tax increases and service cuts are not fun for anybody, but that reductions now would allow the city to build the fire stations it needed for the future.

“The step backwards (in staffing) affords that,” Owens said. “I’m not sugar-coating, but this needs to be done to build better service levels for the next couple of years.”

Multiple commenters, including several firefighters, didn’t see it that way. They struck an alarmed tone as they spoke out about the possibility of reducing staffing from four firefighters per truck to three. And they wondered how cuts could affect the response to major fires like the one at Brandon Woods senior living facility on Monday afternoon, in which dozens of residents and staff had to be evacuated from the three-story building.

Seamus Albritton, president of the Lawrence firefighters union, said the fire department had been shutting down one of its engines, Engine 5, “on a pretty regular basis” because of staffing levels. He said the fire at Brandon Woods would have been much worse if Engine 5 hadn’t been in service at the time.

“We got extremely lucky yesterday when we burned the roof off of Brandon Woods senior living, that Engine 5 was in service,” Albritton said. “Now, that fire, knowing what I know about it … that should have been a loser.”

TJ Everett, who said he had worked for Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical for seven years, accused Owens of using firefighters’ safety as “a pawn in his budget chess match.”

“Just as in a relationship, I’m willing to put up with a lot of crap if I feel like the other person still actually cares about me,” Everett said. “But perhaps you, too, have been in that relationship where you realize that you’re not really valued the way you thought you were. And that’s how Mr. Owens’ proposal makes me feel.”

The commissioners discussed a variety of options on the table for restoring the fire department funding and thinking of other creative solutions. Commissioner Brad Finkeldei talked at length about how there will need to be “a lot of discussions” in the future and wondered about what fund balance can be used to fund some of the potential cuts.

Commissioner Mike Dever indicated he sympathized with the many firefighters who spoke out against the staffing change, but he noted the commission is in a tough situation of figuring out how to keep the staffing, saying they have to “manage a budget that was poorly estimated” by the city.

“People like the fire department, but we need to be able to pay for it,” Dever said.

Toward the end of the meeting, the commissioners spoke about possible ways to reduce the amount of the mill levy increase. They discussed the possibility of spending down some of the city’s reserve funds, as well as changing the timelines on the two new fire stations, and directed city staff to work on some changes to the budget proposal.

Finkeldei summarized recommendations of what the city staff should look to change. That included pushing back funding for the new fire stations by one year in the Capital Improvement Plan, making cuts to a proposed cost-of-living adjustment for city staff, ensuring enough fire department staffing for four-person crews and allowing the parks and recreation department to use some reserve balance to help fund the replacement of some closed playgrounds.