photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Alley Porter, city budget strategy and performance director, addresses the Lawrence City Commission on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. At left is Lawrence Police Chief Rich Lockhart.

As Lawrence city leaders work out how to pay for the fire department’s planned expansion, local law enforcement officers have a request for them: Don’t cut police to fund it.

“Public safety is not one-sided, and it should not be funded that way,” Lt. Amy Rhoads of the Lawrence Police Department told the City Commission during its conversation on the 2027 budget on Tuesday night. She was one of a dozen or so Lawrence police officers who spoke at the commission’s meeting, urging them not to cut police positions or programs like foot patrols and officers in schools.

The commission on Tuesday was again giving input on the 2027 budget, including whether they’d raise property taxes to staff a new fire station, Station 6, and, if not, what they would cut instead.

Station 6, the new Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical station planned for northwestern Lawrence, is a central part of the commission’s budget talks this year. Paying for the station’s construction isn’t the problem – rather, it’s paying for its staffing and operations needs as it prepares to open a couple of years from now. Previously, city staff said it would take an approximately 3-mill property tax rate increase to fund the station’s operations.

Commissioner Kristine Polian said she supported Station 6, but that she wanted more information about Fire Medical’s immediate plans, given that the physical station wasn’t expected to open until 2029.

“We are saying 3 mills to start funding the operations of something that’s not going online until 2029,” she said. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t or we should; I just need more information.”

Alley Porter, the city’s budget strategy and performance director, said there were multiple components to the Fire Medical portion of the 2027 budget. One would be funding certain positions that Douglas County agreed to cover for just this year. Another is that the recruit classes for Station 6 wouldn’t take place all at once; the department is proposing one in 2027 and one in 2028.

And Mayor Brad Finkeldei noted that the city took one of the two fire trucks that was at Station 5 out of service for 2026. “My hope was to add back that fire truck … and get that back up in operation even before Station 6 opens,” he said.

But if the commission doesn’t decide to raise the mill levy, it will have to make cuts elsewhere to provide the funding for fire and medical’s expansion. And Porter shared what some of those cuts might be.

Before Tuesday’s meeting, she said, departments were asked to identify potential cuts. She also said these possibilities were “high-level” and “preliminary” right now.

“They’re not meant to be recommendations,” she said.

Cuts were proposed in homeless services, public works and Parks and Rec. The suggestions included the closure of the Indoor Aquatic Center during the summer, position cuts in certain departments and severe reductions in sustainability and equity efforts, among other things.

But the majority of the public comments were about the potential cuts the police department identified. These included reducing the number of school resource officers and eliminating downtown foot patrols; having the department’s front office open three days a week; and eliminating six sworn and four non-sworn positions.

In roughly an hour of public comments about the budget, commenter after commenter, many of them officers, said any such cuts to police would have serious impacts on public safety.

“I will tell you, every single cut that we make affects patrol and affects the response, what we can do out there,” said Deputy Chief Anthony Brixius, who said it was the first time he had addressed the commission without the commission asking him to speak.

Another commenter said the school resource officer program shows kids that police are “safe people and kind people and people who show up for you.”

“None of that happens if an officer is spread across 10 buildings,” the speaker said.

Yet another said she was an officer’s wife and that public safety cuts would make the community, schools and officers themselves less safe. “Please do not take away my husband’s safety and my kids’ safety because of budget,” she said.

Several members of an activist group called the Commission for Collaborative Governance also spoke, wondering whether the city’s personnel expenses were sustainable. The coalition’s members called for not funding all of the fire department staffing needs immediately, freezing hiring for city staff vacancies and negotiating payments in lieu of taxes with the University of Kansas and other organizations that are tax-exempt, among other things.

In addition to the public comments on Tuesday, the commission received information from public outreach efforts about what people would prefer. In a survey about the budget, 32% of respondents supported funding the fire department’s expansion with a mill levy hike; 39% supported keeping the mill levy flat and cutting services; and 29% supported a combination of the two.

The commission’s discussion went late into Tuesday night, and they agreed that much more discussion and tough choices lay ahead.

Polian wanted more information, including on how departments such as police, fire and medical and parks and rec had been affected in the past couple of years because of budget cuts. “We had cuts in 2025, right?” Polian said. “Let’s see what those effects are.”

And Commissioner Mike Dever said the police department’s concerns about their service levels had to be addressed. “If we don’t publicly face that, we’re not doing our jobs,” he said. He also said that, realistically, he thought the city would have to raise the mill levy.

Vice Mayor Mike Courtney, for his part, said he was personally touched by what the public safety employees who spoke said.

“I think we need to take that to heart,” he said.

The commission’s budget discussions will continue throughout the summer; one of the next discussions will be on the city’s proposed Capital Improvement Plan on May 19. The final vote on adopting the budget won’t take place until September.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A crowd waits in the overflow space outside of the City Commission meeting room on Tuesday, May 5, 2026.