photo by: Nick Krug

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

City leaders will soon consider a plan for how to spend more than $1.5 million in federal funding from the Community Development Block Grant and Home Investment Partnerships programs.

As part of its meeting Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission will consider the 2020 spending plan, which would allocate $1.53 million for various community and social service organizations. Recipients would include the Lawrence Community Shelter, The Salvation Army and the Success By 6 Coalition of Douglas County, according to a city staff memo to the commission.

The program also provides funding for neighborhood associations located in low- to moderate-income areas. Four such associations applied for and would receive funding: the Brook Creek, East Lawrence, Pinckney and Schwegler neighborhood associations.

The neighborhood associations would get significantly less funding than in past years, and several neighborhood residents are asking the commission to maintain the funding previously provided. In explaining the funding decrease, Community Development Manager Danelle Walters recently told the commission that the old funding process set aside a certain portion of money up front that could only be distributed to neighborhood associations. Now, however, the neighborhood associations and social service agencies are all requesting money from the same pool.

Under the city’s new system for ranking the requests, the neighborhood associations received the four lowest scores of all of the organizations that requested funding, according to the memo.