photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Trevor Flynn, an assistant director of Lawrence's Municipal Services and Operations, speaks to the City Commission about stormwater rates on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026.

Lawrence will be raising stormwater rates by 7.5% in each of the next three years, similar to what it’s already doing with water and sewer rates.

At its meeting Tuesday night, the City Commission unanimously approved the three year-over-year rate increases for 2027, 2028 and 2029. Assistant director of Municipal Services and Operations Trevor Flynn said that this would be the first time the city had done a three-year rate cycle for stormwater. But water and wastewater rates did move to a three-year cycle this year, after the City Commission voted in 2025 to raise them 7.9% each year in 2026, 2027 and 2028.

Flynn said that staff wasn’t comfortable moving ahead with the three-year cycle for stormwater last year because it had just made changes to how it calculated stormwater fees. Specifically, it changed its definition of an “equivalent residential unit,” or ERU, which is a measurement of impervious surface area of a property, or the area that water can’t pass through. The city charges on the basis of how many ERUs a property has.

Currently, the city’s monthly stormwater rate is $10.71 per ERU, but that will rise to $11.52 in 2027, $12.39 in 2028 and $13.32 in 2029. The increases are expected to add $637,557 in new revenue in 2027, $686,186 in 2028 and $738,524 in 2029, according to a presentation from city staff.

As the Journal-World has reported, stormwater rate increases in Lawrence have been the norm in recent years. One of the largest increases was in 2021, when stormwater rates rose 50% in just a single year. Back then, city staff said the previous fee was relatively low, and that the increase was needed to fund major stormwater infrastructure projects.

On Tuesday, too, Flynn and other city staff told the commissioners that the new increases were intended to help fund future projects. Flynn listed some of the projects coming up in 2027, such as the tail end of the Jayhawk Watershed Project, as well as rehab projects at Crestline and Bob Billings and on Clinton Parkway.

One city commissioner, Kristine Polian, wondered whether the city had narrowed down its priorities enough.

“You don’t typically see stormwater fees go up that much,” Polian said. “… Are we really, truly honing in on our high priority?”

Engineering program manager Nick Hoyt told the commission that the city had been working for years to identify areas in need of stormwater repairs and maintenance. Staff had been setting priorities based on street flooding, structure flooding and other concerns, he said.

When figuring out the new rates, the city also brought in a consulting firm, Raftelis Consulting, to help develop a multi-year model for anticipated revenues and expenses. Consultant Collin Drat said the point of a multi-year rate cycle was “ensuring that we can keep adjustments to the rate as smooth as possible.”

“No one likes the rates to go up, but we really don’t like it to go up in big chunks,” Drat said.

And City Manager Majed Al-Ghafry said that if the rates were calculated annually, “every year we would have to come up with a different number.” The curve keeps consistency, so that “the public, the community sees that we’ve been consistent on that,” he said.

For those who want to calculate how many ERUs they have, Flynn said there’s a map on the city’s website that can tell you that for your property. You can find that at lawrenceks.gov/mso/stormwater/rates.