photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The Village of Pallet cabins on North Michigan Street is pictured Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026.

If you want to see what comes of the City Commission’s business trips, you might take a trip down North Michigan Street.

The Village of Pallet cabins for the homeless there is a project that the city might not have done had leaders not heard about it at a conference, Mayor Brad Finkeldei told the Journal-World this week. It also might not have applied for certain federal grants, or made certain deals with KU, if not for these trips where leaders around the nation can network and share ideas.

But was it a good value? That’s what the public often wants to know, and why City Commissioner Kristine Polian wanted more discussion on a travel request for two city commissioners at a meeting earlier this month.

“There’s been a lot of public inquiry and concern into this travel,” she said at the meeting on Jan. 13. “… I personally would like to first talk about the value of this type of travel. There is value in it.”

The travel the commission voted on at that meeting – 4-0 in favor, with Commissioner Amber Sellers absent – was a trip by Finkeldei and Sellers to the National League of Cities Congressional City Conference in Washington, D.C. And it’s fairly typical of the types of trips city leaders go on to learn about new policy ideas, grants and programs and bring some of them back.

The Journal-World examined five years worth of travel requests from the city’s elected leaders, looked at where they go and why, and asked Sellers and Finkeldei about what the city gains from sending them to D.C. and other places around the nation. Here’s what we found out.

People and ideas

For Sellers, the benefit of conferences is simple: They’re places to talk to important people and hear important ideas.

Conventions don’t just draw leaders from other cities, she said; they also draw in high-ranking federal officials who can explain how programs at that level work and how individual communities can benefit from them.

At one event she attended, she said, “I was able to sit down and meet with one of the undersecretaries for HUD (the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development). I got to meet with somebody in Transportation, as well as in HHS (the Department of Health and Human Services). And those were 30-minute conversations that I had one-on-one, for the most part unmitigated access to these individuals to ask them questions about different programs. To talk about different strategies.”

Sellers said that the advice in these sit-downs is often tailored to each city’s unique needs and goals.

“They do the work of doing a little background understanding of your community, so it’s not just a blind conversation,” she said. “They have actually done the work to kind of sit down and kind of talk this through with you.”

Sometimes, it gives you an idea to apply for something. Finkeldei said at one conference, city leaders learned that the federal RAISE grant, which is short for “Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity,” could be used not just for road construction, but also for sidewalk projects. You had to meet certain requirements, such as having a plan for ADA accessibility, but he said the city met those, so it went ahead and applied for sidewalk funding.

Ultimately, the city did not get this particular grant, Finkeldei said, but it would not have learned that the opportunity was there if commissioners hadn’t gone to the conference.

He said he expects the city will apply again – and that it will use the information it gathers at future conferences to figure out what projects will play best with federal decision makers.

“Now that we have a new administration, there’ll probably be a session on RAISE grants,” he said. “And what does this new administration think, what are they looking for in a RAISE grant?

“The previous administration, ADA was important, and sidewalk projects were important. We might get there and learn that this sort of project is not going to rank very well, and so maybe we have to pivot and look at a road project or something.”

Tangible results

Other times, trips have yielded more substantial results for Lawrence – such as the Pallet shelters.

Finkeldei told the Journal-World that at a conference several years ago, there was a presentation by HUD, Seattle and the Pallet company about how the prefabricated cabins were being used to provide shelter for the homeless.

“They talked about how they were using (the cabins), what they were doing, how they were doing it, not just physically but with how it was funded, how they used different types of money and it was something that HUD was supporting,” Finkeldei said.

And then, in the conference’s expo center, city leaders got to see the cabin firsthand.

“They actually had a Pallet home,” Finkeldei said. “They had the physical structure, so you could walk into it, see it, the CEO of Pallet was there. And that’s how we made the connection about Pallet.”

The conference didn’t just tell the city that Pallet was an option, but also how to fund it using American Rescue Plan Act money and other sources of grant funding. And it also gave leaders an idea of what its operations would look like, Finkeldei said – “not just the structure, but … people talking about how it operated, how they had the rules for the place, how they used it to close some camps.”

Another idea, Finkeldei said, came from a meeting for the Town and Gown Association, which is a group for university communities. The idea was off-campus housing offices.

“In some cities, they create a list for parents or students, these are our recommended locations, and to be on the recommended locations you have to have these sorts of conditions,” Finkeldei said. “The condition of your property has to be this good.”

City and KU representatives both attend these meetings, Finkeldei said, and when they heard about these programs, “it was kind of a joint, ‘Hey, this would be a great idea for the city of Lawrence to try.'”

So the city included it in the requirements for KU’s Gateway project, Finkeldei said. One of the things the university committed to do was open an office of off-campus housing.

“They’re in the process of doing that right now,” he said.

Who goes where?

To get a better idea of how often commissioners travel and where they go, the Journal-World searched through past meeting agendas to find their travel requests. According to the city’s travel policy, if commissioners go on a trip, they have to complete a “travel authorization form,” have it reviewed by the city manager or assistant city manager, and then vote to approve it at one of their regular meetings.

The Journal-World reviewed documents over the past five years and found 30 trips the commission was asked to authorize, some involving multiple commissioners.

Most of the trips are for conferences or meetings that draw local government officials from around the state or around the country. Of the trips the Journal-World examined, more than 10 of them were associated with the National League of Cities, an advocacy group dedicated to helping local governments.

As for where commissioners traveled, there were locations from coast to coast, but roughly a third of the trips were within the state of Kansas or the KC metro area. The most frequently visited out-of-state destination was Washington, D.C.; the Journal-World found six requests for trips to the nation’s capital in the period it reviewed.

There were big differences in how often individual commissioners traveled. Sellers and former City Commissioner Bart Littlejohn seemed to be the most frequent travelers; of the travel requests the Journal-World examined, 19 involved Sellers and 17 involved Littlejohn. After that were Finkeldei, with eight requests; former City Commissioner Lisa Larsen, with seven; and former City Commissioner Courtney Shipley, with five. The Journal-World did not find any travel requests at all involving current City Commissioner Mike Dever, at least during his current stint on the commission which began in 2023. (He also served on the commission from 2007 to 2015.)

At the meeting earlier this month, Finkeldei said there’s a reason for Sellers’ travel patterns being different: She holds a leadership role in the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials, which is a special sub-group of the National League of Cities. Currently, she is NBC-LEO’s first vice president; in previous years, she held other leadership positions in the organization.

Sellers said she often has to spend extra time planning the events at conferences with other NLC and NBC-LEO leaders.

“I do appreciate the mayor kind of laying it out, saying that when you’re in these positions, you are required (to help plan),” she said. “I am required, on the executive board of NBC-LEO, I also plan out our portion of the conference. So I’m working with staff to plan out our different events, our general meetings, our outings, our engagement.”

But it’s not always the case that a specific commissioner has to be at a specific function like that. City Clerk Sherri Riedemann told the Journal-World that sometimes the city receives invitations for conferences and events and shares them with the commission, and other times commissioners send a request to the clerk’s office to sign them up for an event; that request is then also shared with the other commissioners.

“Once we know who plans to attend, the City Clerk’s office generates the travel request, per the travel policy, and submits that to the entire Commission, via the agenda, for approval,” Riedemann said via email.

The budget impact

It’s easier to discern how often commissioners go on trips than what those trips cost. And the documents the public sees when the City Commission considers a request can give the impression that they’re more expensive than they really are.

An example is a request in August 2023 for Littlejohn to attend the Kansas Housing Conference in Overland Park, just 30 miles away from Lawrence.

The report attached to the commission’s meeting agenda says “The fiscal impact to the City is approximately $1,239.47.” An attached travel authorization form breaks it down into a $399 registration fee and, among other things, $300 for “method of travel – personal vehicle” and $340 for “ground transportation (taxi, bus subway, Uber, etc.)”

But Riedemann told the Journal-World that the travel authorization form doesn’t necessarily reflect the actual cost of the trip, which may be lower. In this case, all the city really ended up paying for was the registration fee for the two-day conference and $95.37 for mileage.

Whatever any individual trip may cost, the trips are all covered by a specific section of the city budget, and it’s usually a fairly small one.

Riedemann said conference expenses were budgeted as travel and training line items for the commission. In 2025, she said, travel expenses were $17,000 and training was around $11,000, and this year the city has budgeted $14,000 for travel and $8,000 for training. The city’s entire 2026 budget, by comparison, totals $431 million across all funds.

Out of their pockets

Not all of the trips city leaders take while representing Lawrence are paid for with city funds. One type that generally isn’t, Finkeldei said, is travel abroad to Lawrence’s sister cities as part of a local delegation.

Lawrence has sister city relationships with cities in Germany, Japan, Greece and Chile, and occasionally sends a delegation of community officials to meet with those cities’ leaders. In its review of the past five years of City Commission travel requests, the Journal-World was only able to find one time when a city commissioner requested funds to travel to a sister city. That was a trip by Sellers to Eutin, Germany, in June 2024.

But Finkeldei said this was an exception involving special circumstances. He said Commissioner Mike Dever went on the same trip and paid for it out of his own pocket. And when Finkeldei went to Hiratsuka, Japan, he paid for that trip himself.

“Typically, people pay for themselves,” Finkeldei said. “Amber wasn’t in that position, and so we did approve that, but that’s the exception, not the rule.”

Though city leaders might usually pay for these trips, Sellers said they’re still business trips in a way. When she went to Eutin, “we sat down with the mayor and had a discussion about some of the issues that they’re dealing with,” and “many of them mirror some of the things that we’re dealing with. Houselessness, affordable housing.

“So there’s throughlines,” Sellers said.

Looking for savings

The city’s travel policy does include a list of things that can’t be reimbursed on trips, such as alcohol purchases, entertainment, traveling companions who aren’t associated with the city government, and, in general, “expenditures which do not involve a public purpose.” It also states that “[e]mployees and elected officials are expected to exercise reasonable judgement to minimize costs by exercising the same care in incurring expenses that a prudent person would exercise in conducting personal business.”

On that last part, the clerk’s office has steps it takes to save money on travel, and individual commissioners have their own strategies, too.

One thing Riedemann said the clerk’s office does is plan trips far in advance. That way, the city can get early bird registration rates and can sometimes book rooms at the hotel that’s holding the conference, which saves on travel to and from the conference venue.

The clerk’s office also tries to book commissioners and staff on the same flights when possible so that they can carpool to the airport. And Riedemann said “We do shop for the best rate on flights and never book first class.”

Sellers and Finkeldei both told the Journal-World that when they’re traveling, they take extra steps to cut the city’s costs.

Finkeldei said that while he can’t do much about the costs of registration and airfare, he can cut down the length of his hotel stays.

“What I try to do is limit my hotel nights,” he said. “So I like to fly out early in the morning and fly back late at night.”

Sellers, meanwhile, said she pays for her own luggage and often doesn’t turn in receipts for reimbursement. “That’s just me,” she said, not any city requirement. “And I know that other commissioners have done it in the past, so it’s not like anyone’s trying to get rich off of these.”

They’re not trying to make themselves look more impressive or important, either, she said.

“We’ve had members of the community that have said, ‘oh, this is padding your resume’ or whatnot,” Sellers said. “Any elected official that goes to conferences, they’re doing the work of the community.

“Are they gaining something from it personally?” she continued. “Of course they are. But anybody does that. If your job sends you to a conference, you’re going to the conference on behalf of your work professionally, but you’re also gaining something from it personally, and you can’t separate the two.

“But that’s not my intent. The intent is to gain information to be a stronger policymaker in my community.”