photo by: Bremen Keasey

Lawrence's City Hall, located at 6 E. Sixth St., shown during June 2025.

Lawrence city leaders will consider approving the city’s outline of its legislative goals heading into 2026, which includes a request to prohibit transporting homeless people from other counties into Lawrence, supporting more programs to address housing shortages and policies that support local control on fiscal decisions.

The city adopts a Legislative Priority Statement each year before the Kansas State Legislature’s annual session, that helps to guide its advocacy efforts. This year’s proposed 2026 legislative statement includes eight key priorities that the city would support that would help “advance the city’s goals,” according to a city memo.

For the second year in a row, one of the city’s key priorities is requesting that the legislature pass a law that would prohibit any organization that receives state funding — including local governments — from dropping homeless people from one county off in a different county, unless they have “received specific assurances” beforehand that there will be services available for the person in the place where they’re being dropped off.

That goal was first included in the city’s statement last year, as the Journal-World reported, but other legislative priorities for the city this year advocate for expanding a safety net that would seem to help prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.

The city’s first priority, according to a city memo, is to “support legislation that helps low income and marginalized populations” like Medicaid expansion or raising the minimum wage.

The statement would also advocate for expanding state and federal programs to help local communities address housing shortages across “all segments of the community,” including low-income or homeless individuals. This past year, the state passed legislation that eliminated a 4% tax credit available for some affordable housing developments and placed a cap of $8.8 million in tax credits that can be issued for projects statewide during a given year. One developer told the Journal-World in April he believed it would lead to an 80% reduction in affordable housing projects built across the state.

The city also said this year’s policy statement reinstates a “broad policy position” that fiscal decisions should be under local control. The city wrote in part of its statement it believes strongly that local spending and taxing decisions should be left to local officials representing the citizens that elected them.”

The other city’s priorities include supporting programs that support greater environmental resilience and develop renewable energy; increasing statewide capacity for mental and behavioral health services, including the treatment of addiction and supporting policies; supporting legislation that would help make it easier to attract and attain public employees, especially public safety positions like firefighters; and funding for economic development and growth.

The City Commission will meet Tuesday night at 5 p.m. at City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St.