photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024.

Lawrence City Manager Craig Owens acknowledges the city has a big task in front of it heading into next year.

This past year’s budget process was an initial sign of significant financial pressure facing the city. The City Commission on Sept. 3 passed a 2025 budget that was dramatically different from Owens’ initial budget proposal. It removed a mill levy increase of 3.6 mills after a public backlash, instead keeping the tax rate neutral by using $1.6 million of the city’s general fund balance in place of the revenue that would have been generated by a mill levy hike.

The commission and Owens both said that budget would not be sustainable, and some big changes would need to be explored before the 2026 budget process. As the Journal-World reported, Owens announced earlier this month that the city would be creating a Community Budget Committee, which will seek the input of seven community members in the budget process.

“We have very challenging work ahead, and as a community and certainly as local government we need to try new things,” Owens said. “This is an extra and voluntary (step) and represents us working to increase engagement.”

The committee is expected to begin meeting in December, but its meetings won’t be open to the public and some confidentiality may be required during the process — a fact which has concerned some community members worried about government transparency.

Leslie Soden, a former Lawrence mayor and city commissioner who served on the commission from 2015 to 2019, said that when she heard that the meetings of the Community Budget Committee would be private, she was concerned about how the move could affect public trust in the government.

Soden said she feels there is a great value in the fact that all of the city’s board and committee meetings are open to the public. They all have agendas and minutes submitted. They are broadcast live. They allow members of the community to see what is going on in the conversations. With this committee’s meetings being private, Soden is worried that it could give the impression of being much less open, or even appearing as if “backroom dealings” could be taking place.

“The fact … this group isn’t going to meet in public, it raises a lot of eyebrows,” Soden said.

During Soden’s time on the commission, when the Downtown Master Plan was being crafted, she heard from community members that there were a variety of focus groups involved that were invitation-only and closed to the public, including one for developers and one for art and events.

Soden spoke out against the “secretive focus groups” when she learned about them in February 2019, and the city issued an apology, as the Journal-World reported. Along with the apology, the city later posted a list of the focus group topics, invitees and brief summaries of what was discussed on the Downtown Master Plan website.

At the time, Soden said she felt the secretive meetings “tainted the public process” and the commission moved to increase the community’s public input in the process.

Remembering that moment, Soden said the fact no public observation was possible made those meetings feel undemocratic. She thinks hosting meetings behind closed doors for government procedures can allow — whether intentionally or unintentionally — for bad actors and corruption, and believes meetings that impact the public should be open to the public.

“Governments should be open and transparent and the public should have ways to participate at all levels,” Soden said.

Cori Wallace, a spokesperson for the city, said the committees — both the Community Budget Committee and Employee Budget Committee that will be made up of city employees — will serve as additional opportunities for public engagement. Wallace said the insights that stem from the meetings will be presented to the public during City Commission meetings, and the city is hoping the work from the committees will improve the budget process.

“These meetings are designed to be a springboard to higher quality conversations in our community, with a group of folks who discussed the budget for a number of months,” Wallace said.

Owens hopes with the limited resources the city has — he noted the city is projecting a larger deficit in the general fund for next year and no plan to staff new fire stations the city needs — having more people involved from both the public and city staff itself will better influence how the budget is created.

Another factor that Owens says is related to the initial privacy is that the city will need to explore a reduction in services — meaning discussing the potential for cuts, whether to employees or programs. Owens said he thought that talking about those possibilities publicly would be “reckless and cruel” and could lead to needless stress for people who rely on the city’s services. The discussion of potential cuts is a big reason why Owens is not worried about the initial confidentiality.

“I have no qualms about keeping confidential the necessary and important brainstorming and problem-solving work that has to happen before I sign my name to the proposed budget,” Owens said.

Owens said bringing in more people to illustrate the difficulty of balancing the many different needs and priorities of Lawrence’s “enormously diverse and demanding community” can highlight the difficulty of the task at hand. He thinks having more people work through the budget challenges will remind residents that all people in Lawrence are “in the same boat” in trying to take care of everyone in the city with limited resources. Owens believes the new committees’ perspectives will better steer the ship.

“Wherever we go, we are going there together,” Owens said. “You might want to get to know what the other people in the boat may need and where they are trying to go.”