photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

LDCFM Firetruck Ladder 5 in July 2023.

The City of Lawrence and the union that represents firefighters and other emergency personnel are at an impasse on wages, and the City Commission will be asked to resolve it at its meeting on Tuesday.

Last year, the city and the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 1596 came to a working agreement that would cover the years 2025 through 2027. But this year, they reopened it solely to discuss wages for 2026 and 2027, according to a memo from the city’s human resources department to the commission.

The two sides have been unable to agree on those wages, and when it was determined that there was an impasse, the estimated costs of their proposals were more than $100,000 apart.

The report from mediator Stephen Douglas Bonney, who was selected as the fact finder in the impasse case, shows that the city was proposing a 3% pay increase in the first pay period of 2026. The union, meanwhile, was proposing a 4% increase in the first pay period, as well as an additional 2% increase partway through the year.

Bonney is recommending an across-the-board pay increase of 4.5% in the first pay period of 2026. He also is recommending a change in the policy for “step” raises, or movement from one tier of the department’s pay scale to another, so that LDCFM employees would step up on the pay scale at the beginning of each year rather than on the anniversary of their hiring, as is current practice. This is something that the union did not want changed.

“This would be equitable,” Bonney wrote of his pay proposal, “because it would allow employee wages to keep up with predicted inflation, close the gap between LDCFM wages and Peer Agency wages, and avoid busting the City’s budget.”

When Bonney met with representatives of the city and the union in August, he wrote, the city cited its budget deficit as a major concern, while the firefighters said their wages were lagging behind a list of peer agencies that included departments in Topeka and the Kansas City area.

In his report, Bonney wrote that LDCFM’s wages do “remain below median market wage rates for Peer Agencies across all employee classifications,” but that some positions lag further behind than others.

For example, Bonney found that the pay for employees classified as drivers was especially far behind. He found that LDCFM’s median hourly wage for a driver EMT position was $24.57, which was just over 80% of the median wage for similar employees in the peer agencies. But other employees might be lagging much less, with their pay between 91.7% and 98% of the market median, Bonney wrote.

Now, it will be up to the City Commission to decide how to resolve the impasse.

This is not the first time the commission has had to break a deadlock between the city and the firefighters union. In 2019, the two sides couldn’t reach an agreement after a long period of mediated negotiations, and the commission chose to adopt the union’s proposal over the city’s, as the Journal-World reported.

In other business, the commission will:

• Consider receiving a request for tax incentives for a proposed affordable housing project at Bob Billings Parkway and K-10. The development, known as Floret Hill, would create 121 permanently affordable rental units and would also include 12 affordable townhome units for purchase. It would also include a 1-acre commercial property to the north of the housing development.

In 2022, the project received a land donation from the city, and last year it got $1.3 million in affordable housing trust funds. But the developers say the land at the site has features that make it challenging to develop, and that labor and material costs have gone up. They are requesting a 100% property tax abatement for 10 years and a sales tax exemption on construction materials.

• Consider authorizing City Manager Craig Owens to sign an agreement for a Build Kansas grant to rehabilitate the apron and taxiway of Lawrence Regional Airport. This grant is for roughly $28,000, and the city would use it to help pay its share of a federal matching grant under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The federal grant would be for about $568,000 and would require the city to provide $29,924 in matching funds.

Another airport-related project is also on the agenda. This one would be awarding a $774,000 contract for a taxiway lighting project to Third Generation Electric. It would use money from the Airport Fund and State Grant Fund, according to a memo to the commission.

The airport-related items and receiving the affordable housing project’s incentives request are both on the commission’s consent agenda, a group of items that can be approved on a single vote.

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