photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

City staff present 2027 budget options to the Lawrence City Commission on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026.

“City Hall is on fire,” Amber Sellers told her fellow city commissioners on Tuesday night. There are three options for the 2027 budget, and you can only grab one.

One of them has a roughly 2-mill property tax rate increase and funds a fire and medical staffing expansion and employee raises that city staff proposed earlier this year. The other two have a 1.5-mill hike and lower raises, and a 1-mill hike and a smaller Fire and Medical staffing increase.

You have no time to make fine adjustments. The question Sellers asked is: “Which one are you going to grab?”

Ultimately, she and two other commissioners came to a consensus – they’d grab the one with the 1-mill increase.

That budget plan, which staff called “Option 3,” is a new option that staff revealed to the City Commission on Tuesday, and Sellers, Mayor Brad Finkeldei and Commissioner Mike Dever all signaled at least tentative support for it.

Option 3 was not attached to the commission’s meeting agenda on the city’s website ahead of time, and it includes multiple new cuts and changes that city staff found to reduce the mill levy impact of the 2027 budget.

One change from the previous budget options was that it would reduce Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical’s staffing increase from 15 first responder positions to 12. That’s the minimum number needed to put the now-idle Engine 6 back into service. The other three positions, which staff described as “relief” positions, would be delayed until 2028, and overtime for personnel would also be reduced. In total, these changes would save about $500,000.

It would also make cuts to the city’s Municipal Services and Operations Division, including reducing the alley rehabilitation program by half, saving about $220,000. And it would lower the employer contribution to the city’s health plan and increase what employees contribute to market rate, which would save about $670,000.

The other two options are Option 1, the city manager’s recommended budget with a 1.9-mill increase that was presented in July, and Option 2, a budget plan with a 1.5-mill increase that incorporated suggestions from Vice Mayor Mike Courtney. Among other things, Courtney had proposed making the performance-based “step” pay increase for staff 2.5%, instead of the 5% that some employees would have received in the recommended budget, making changes to Parks and Rec programs and adding a new position for either economic development or code compliance.

The commission wasn’t voting on a plan on Tuesday, but Finkeldei did want to “try to find a way to get three votes.” “We can’t be tweaking it too much at the very end,” he said.

Much of Tuesday’s discussion was about the pay and benefits for staff. As the Journal-World has reported, the city’s health care program has been spending down fund balance for years, and Finkeldei and Dever both said the changes in Option 3 would help stabilize it.

“I feel like we need to do what we can to manage that crisis now,” Dever said.

“Health insurance is something we really need to get under control,” said Finkeldei. He said he preferred that over reducing employees’ raises. (Option 3 would keep the wage adjustment where the original 2027 budget proposal did, at a 2.5% general raise and the 5%, performance-based “step” increase for some workers.)

“I’d much rather consider this change to health insurance than I would on the wage adjustment,” Finkeldei said. “I think both would be kind of a double whammy.”

Courtney and Commissioner Kristine Polian, on the other hand, both asked about doing different things at different parts of the pay scale, such as lower raises or freezes for the highest-paying positions. But some other city leaders said that might cause problems. Many of those positions are also highly specialized and hard to hire, City Manager Majed Al-Ghafry said, such as planners or engineers.

“We can’t just say, well, we’re going to have to freeze the increases. They could be specialty positions,” he said. “… Sometimes you have to pay above the market to bring in the top talent.”

Dever said it was important “from a morale standpoint, from a management standpoint, from an overall ethical standpoint” to treat employees equally. And Sellers said that “surgical” tweaks weren’t what was needed right now.

“The effort we put into being surgical doesn’t actually make any difference,” she said. And doing a wage freeze for only part of employees at this point, “that’s doing surgery blind.”

Sellers at first said that, while she could support most of Option 3, she wasn’t comfortable with postponing the three LDCFM positions. “When we put things on the back burner expecting things to happen – for something of this magnitude, that’s not a chance I’m willing to take,” she said. “We’ve been on this ride before.”

But the commissioner on the opposite end of the dais from her, Polian, wasn’t on board. Earlier in the evening, Polian was the lone no vote on exceeding the revenue-neutral property tax rate, the rate at which the city would collect the same amount of money in property taxes that it did last year using the current year’s property valuations.

“I’m very concerned about our economy,” Polian said.

Ultimately, Sellers signaled that she would reluctantly support Option 3 “as-is” if that’s what it took to get to a consensus. Dever warned that, with the commission split the way it was, that consensus would have to stick.

“The only way it will happen is if we get three people to agree with it,” he said. “… We as commissioners either need to come to an agreement, or we’re not going to have a budget.”

Finkeldei, for his part, said that budgets aren’t about making everyone happy. Drawing on his experience as an attorney, he said that when you have to compromise, “if everyone walks away unhappy, you probably did something right.”

“That’s how I’ve always felt about the budget,” he said. “I’ve never walked out of a budget thinking it had everything I wanted, because that’s just not how the real world works.”

Just a couple of weeks remain in the city’s 2027 budget process. The final vote on the budget is scheduled for Sept. 15.