photo by: Nick Krug

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

As anyone knows while balancing a budget, there are tradeoffs with any decision made. If you go to see that new movie, will you have to miss out on dinner with friends? Can you splurge on those new shoes you’ve been eyeing if you lower costs by packing a lunch to work more often?

When it comes to balancing municipal budgets, those same tradeoffs come at a scale of millions of dollars, and with more far-reaching effects. To figure out how Lawrence residents would make those tradeoffs, the city government has given them a tool to share their thoughts online — an interactive budget simulator called “A Balancing Act.”

Alley Porter, the budget manager for the city’s finance department, said the tool has given the city some information on what services residents value most as it has crafted its 2025 budget proposal.

As the Journal-World has reported, Lawrence is looking at a budget shortfall based in part on an inaccurate forecast of sales tax collections, and city staff has already proposed cuts to the fire and Parks and Recreation departments, as well as the city’s largest property tax rate increase in at least 50 years. Porter said the budget simulation tool has given the city feedback on areas where people don’t want cuts. Specifically, it’s shown four areas where respondents have, on average, supported an increase in services: police patrols, ADA compliance, street maintenance and code compliance.

With the city aware of those priorities, staff has worked to “preserve or increase” service levels in those areas, Porter said.

Combined with public hearings, Porter said the city sees A Balancing Act as a crucial way to get public input on budget priorities. This is the second year that Lawrence has used the tool, which was created by a Madison, Wis.-based company called Polco and is used by many other municipalities, including Denver; College Station, Texas; and Charlottesville, Va.

“We see this as a way to engage folks earlier and hopefully more effectively,” Porter said.

Porter said the tool is a good way to illustrate for the average person what the city goes through in creating a budget and the difficulties involved in balancing different priorities with limited resources.

When you go to the Balancing Act website at lawrenceks.abalancingact.com, you see a pie chart and a heading of expenses, broken down into five areas that correspond to the city’s strategic plan goals. For example, if you click on the “Safe and Secure” heading, you see that the city spends $67.1 million on initiatives related to it, including the police and fire medical departments and other public safety initiatives.

Porter said each of the city’s departments logged its spending on the site and provided explanations of what work the department does, how much it costs and why it does those specific tasks. The departments also came up with rubrics on a 1 through 5 scale of “service levels,” with 1 being very minimal service and 5 being “world class.”

For example, if you were to look under the police department’s Equity/Outreach section, the department has pegged its services at the level of 3. If you click on the “Info” icon next to the description, you can get more details of what that means. For the Equity/Outreach level 3, it includes a staffed equity and outreach coordinator and has school resource officers in middle and high schools. If you were to decrease the funding to service level 1, that would mean no dedicated staff for outreach and that officers wouldn’t do any outreach work. Conversely, increasing the level to 4 would increase full-time outreach staff along with the previous tasks seen in service level 3.

Changing any of the services adds or reduces the spending in the simulated budget. Porter said departments worked to estimate the effect that each increase or decrease in service level would have on the cost.

Of course, in order for residents to submit their simulated budget idea to the city, it has to be balanced, Porter said. The simulation starts out with a $4 million deficit to reflect what the city is facing. In that way, residents could be reducing services, increasing property taxes or a combination of both, Porter said.

Across 205 submissions from the initial release of A Balancing Act in May, according to data from the city, 65 respondents ended up increasing taxes, indicating that they were willing to pay more in order to keep certain services. Seventeen submissions decreased the taxes, and 122 kept taxes unchanged.

Submissions are still coming in, Porter said. The city has seen 232 new submissions since the proposed budget was made public earlier this summer.

With another public hearing for the budget set for Aug. 20, Porter hopes this tool can continue to provide feedback and illustrate some of the financial challenges cities face.

“I think that’s a good reality as you look into future years,” Porter said. “To provide that same level of service, it is going to cost more in the future.”