photo by: Contributed

Left to right: Pam McDermott, Karen Willey

The current Douglas County Commission chair and a Republican candidate will compete for the District 3 seat on the commission in the November election, representing the largest Douglas County Commission district by geographic area.

Incumbent Karen Willey, a Democrat who has been on the commission since 2022, will face off against Republican candidate Pam McDermott, who previously ran for County Commission in 2020, for the District 3 seat. District 3 includes the western portion of Lawrence, the city of Lecompton and the entirety of five townships: Willow Springs, Marion, Clinton, Kanwaka and Lecompton.

Karen Willey

Willey moved to Lawrence in 1993 and received her bachelor’s in environmental studies and PhD in geography from the University of Kansas with a focus on soils.

She currently serves on the Legal Redress Committee of the Lawrence NAACP, as president of housing nonprofit BRAC, and as a volunteer firefighter. Additionally, for the last 31 years, she has served as a volunteer on a dozen community boards, including the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission.

While Willey said she would save her final vote for a public meeting, she said her priorities for the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center and public safety building project are to move 911 emergency communications and emergency management to a secure location, address current safety concerns for the public and consolidate departments for efficiency, among other goals. However, some of her concerns are the overall cost of the project and balancing priorities.

“I have held the line that I am not comfortable raising taxes to support this project,” Willey told the Journal-World. “It will need to fit within the down payment that the county has saved for this purpose and the fund to service debt on the rest.”

Currently, the city and county are partnering to address homelessness in Douglas County, Willey said. She said this collaboration needs to focus on prioritizing local funding for local residents and on both subsidized and market rate housing, and that the county needs to establish infill and greenfield developments.

Distributed solar — such as panels on rooftops or in parking lots — needs to be prioritized in city and county codes, Willey said. Willey voted for the conditional use permit for the proposed Kansas Sky Energy Center industrial solar farm in northern Douglas County.

“As the coal plant continues to age past its anticipated life span, Douglas County will need to be mindful of our increasing needs for electricity,” Willey told the Journal-World. “What type and how much of Douglas County’s need should be generated here is a much-needed community conversation.”

Pam McDermott

McDermott graduated from the University of Kansas in 1987. She started Morning Star Church alongside her husband in 1992, where she currently works full-time directing the church’s community involvement. McDermott worked from home for many years while educating her five children and during that time had been an active volunteer at the now-closed Kennedy Elementary School, a Leadership Lawrence participant and an Eisenhower Series graduate.

McDermott said that the county’s budget has grown considerably in recent years, along with residents’ property valuations. As a potential county commissioner, her first step would be to examine how funds have been allocated over the past few years.

“The property tax burden, the appraisals, and the spending are taxing some people out of their homes and denying others the ability to own a home,” McDermott told the Journal-World. “It affects renters and businesses. It’s unnecessary for that to be the reality here.”

The problems that the county currently faces with homelessness and affordable housing were created by the city and the county, McDermott said. She added that Douglas County is full of generous people, but there needs to be another solution other than taking amounts through property taxes, federal grants or subsidies.

“I don’t think our current plan is the most cost-efficient or gets the best results,” McDermott told the Journal-World. “… (The government’s) role should be to make a community affordable for everyone and make public safety a priority. Where tax dollars are involved, there should be transparency and accountability.”

McDermott said Douglas County has a beautiful landscape and rich soils, and she wants to protect them from utility-scale renewable energy projects. McDermott said a majority of people in District 3 have told her that they are in favor of solar in just about any place except on these soils.

Editor’s note: This article was corrected to reflect Willey’s current employment.