photo by: Screenshot/City of Lawrence

Vice Mayor Mike Courtney discusses his budget proposal with the City Commission on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026.

As the deadlines approach for Lawrence’s 2027 budget process, some city commissioners are still intent on getting to a smaller property tax rate increase, or even keeping the rate flat.

What they’re still trying to figure out is which specific cuts will get them there.

The city manager’s recommended budget, which was presented to the commission earlier this summer, includes a nearly 2-mill property tax rate increase for the city itself, and the Lawrence Public Library is also raising its property tax rate by 0.4 mills. Recently, however, Vice Mayor Mike Courtney attempted to find a set of cuts that would result in a smaller mill levy hike, and his fellow commissioners gave their opinions of his ideas on Tuesday.

“What I’ve presented here is an actual proposal that I believe will work,” Courtney told the commission.

Originally, he was trying to get to just a 1-mill increase between the city and the library, but he said that he had actually found enough savings and new revenues to keep the total mill levy flat.

“This proposal has targeted reductions and strategic investments equaling 3.1% of the overall budget,” Courtney said. “The items presented in this proposal will not only get us to a flat mill (levy), but will get us below the flat mill, a surplus that we can put into savings.”

The biggest savings in his suggested plan would come from reducing the size of pay raises for city staff.

The recommended budget includes a 2.5% across-the-board raise and a “step” increase that would be 5% for many employees and is contingent on meeting job expectations. Courtney wanted to remove the “step” increase, leaving only the 2.5% across-the-board raise. He said this would save the city $1.7 million.

Courtney also wanted to reduce spending on street maintenance and stop maintaining the buildings that the city’s public works employees were moving out of with the opening of the new Municipal Services and Operations campus.

In addition, Courtney also proposed adding things that would generate revenue for the city, including a new economic development staff member who would focus on making sponsorship deals, new recreation programming and a 5% increase in tournament spectator fees at Sports Pavilion Lawrence. He also wanted to keep the Community Building open for free play in 2027, expand free rec center memberships to 18-year-olds and add free senior aquatic classes each week.

After Courtney gave an overview of his plan, Mayor Brad Finkeldei told him he appreciated the effort.

“Certainly, I think we all want to find a way to make the right cuts, to provide good services at the lowest possible cost, so I applaud your attempts here, your suggestions in bringing this up,” Finkeldei said.

A majority of commissioners did seem interested in some of Courtney’s ideas, such as raising the tournament fees and keeping the Community Building open. But other ideas weren’t received as well.

Finkeldei didn’t think that the economic development position would be high on the list of priorities right now, and Commissioner Mike Dever agreed. “Unless I knew they were going to create money and there was going to be some value to that,” Dever said, creating the new position would be “tenuous, at best.”

And both of them also expressed concerns about reducing street maintenance.

“There’s these large leaps in quality of the pavement,” Dever said. “It goes from bearable to unbearable. And there’s not this gradual (approach), where we can somehow jump into the curve and get the maintenance just right.”

“I’ve been telling lots of people in the community who complained about their residential streets, ‘Hold on, we’re getting to you,'” Finkeldei added. “And then the one year we’re about to get to them, we cut it; I’m not sure I can support it.”

Then there was pay, which Dever said was the biggest issue they had to figure out.

“All this other stuff’s great,” he said, “but the biggest lion’s share is this $1.7 million that is going to be taken from the step increases,” Dever said. He said he was “in favor of reduction of the budget if it doesn’t come at expense of our employees long-term,”

Finkeldei said it was “a particularly tough year” for this type of discussion, given that inflation had made finances tighter for everyone. But he said he would be open to conversations about changing the wage increase, such as by lowering the step amount instead of eliminating it.

And Commissioner Amber Sellers said she would not agree to getting rid of the step increase if the across-the-board raise was still 2 1/2%.

“City employees have gotten the low end of the stick on their general wage adjustments for the last two years,” she said. “So, 2 1/2, if you’re not going to do a step, 2 1/2 is almost like a slap in the face.”

Ultimately, the commissioners asked staff to bring back a budget scenario with a 2.5% general wage increase and a 2.5% step increase that they could compare to the recommended budget.

The budget conversation is nearing the home stretch. Public hearings on the 2027 budget are scheduled for Sept. 1, and the vote to adopt the budget is slated for Sept. 15.