photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The Lawrence City Commission listens to a presentation from city staff during the group's meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2023.

Lawrence leaders on Tuesday took one of the next steps necessary in adopting the 2024 budget, voting unanimously to potentially levy a property tax rate that would exceed the amount of property tax revenue the city collected last year.

The Lawrence City Commission conducted a hearing to consider going beyond the tax rate known by state statute as the “revenue neutral rate” at its meeting on Tuesday. When commissioners consider adopting the 2024 budget in a few weeks’ time, they’d need to decrease the recommended mill levy of 33.207 mills by about 2.5 mills — equivalent to about $3.58 million in revenues — if they wanted to collect the same amount in taxes as last year.

While all five commissioners expressed support for the decision, Mayor Lisa Larsen also noted that she’d like to see the city strive toward reducing large increases in property tax collections in future budgets.

“As a city, as our staff, I think that we need to, going forward, really start to find ways to kind of scale down the big jumps we’re seeing,” Larsen said. “I know inflation’s been a huge factor the last few years, I understand that, but that’s starting to settle down, and I think we should take advantage of that to let that reflect in our budgets going forward. To me, it’s getting to a tipping point, that we really need to do something to address that going forward.”

About half a dozen members of the public offered comments during the meeting, all of them urging commissioners to take action to lower the mill levy instead. Some, including John Martin, said the city should be “tightening (its) belt” and doing more with less instead of approving mill levy increases in successive years.

Others said the city was “double-dipping” and “chasing people out of Lawrence” with unsustainable property tax increases. Another commenter said the city’s budget has more than doubled compared to six years ago, going from roughly $200 million in expenditures in 2018 to about $472 million in the proposed 2024 budget.

Following those comments, Larsen asked city staff why the city’s budget had increased so significantly over the past six years. The city’s director of finance, Jeremy Willmoth, said that’s largely due to the city’s emphasis on deferred infrastructure maintenance.

“If you were to compare the city’s Capital Maintenance Plan from 2016, 2017, even 2018, it’s nowhere near the depth and the breadth of what the 2024 capital plan has in mind,” Willmoth said. “A lot of that has to do with staff having time to really evaluate where our assets are at currently and the level of dilapidation that I think everybody here understands — that the roads are deteriorating, that they need to be replaced, sidewalks, the Loop, need to be maintained. All of that, unfortunately, costs a significant amount of money.”

Commissioner Amber Sellers also asked Willmoth about whether the state keeps any sort of report detailing how other taxing jurisdictions have navigated the relatively new process of notifying taxpayers of an intent to exceed the revenue neutral rate. The state Legislature passed the law in 2021 in an effort to create more transparency from local officials in making tax and budget decisions.

Willmoth said he hasn’t seen such a report, but that there may be something like that in the works at the State Auditor’s Office. He also mentioned the Journal-World’s reporting from earlier this week, which notes that 85% of Douglas County’s 34 entities that collect property taxes are increasing the amount of money they’re collecting in property taxes, often at a rate far greater than that of inflation.

The City Commission also conducted a brief hearing to consider any changes to the recommended 2024 budget, but didn’t offer any direction for city staff on that front. According to agenda materials for Tuesday’s meeting, the city is scheduled to vote on adopting its 2024 budget and its Capital Improvement Plan at its meeting on Sept. 5.

In other business, commissioners:

* Granted final approval to a pair of ordinances, one making it illegal to make hiring, rental or public-access decisions on the basis of someone’s natural hairstyle.

The other ordinance establishes a Neighborhood Revitalization Area at 700 New Hampshire St. and grants a group led by developer Doug Compton financial incentives to rehab the former Borders bookstore building in downtown Lawrence for use as a corporate headquarters for Compton’s First Management and First Construction companies.

The ordinance was pulled from the meeting’s consent agenda by Commissioner Courtney Shipley so it could be subject to a separate vote; it was approved by a 3-2 vote with Shipley and Larsen opposed.