The Coalition for Collaborative Governance organizes advocacy efforts to achieve our mission to promote more collaboration, transparency, and accountability in our local governments’ cultures, budgets, policies, and practices.

City of Lawrence 2026 Budget Process

In February 2025, the City of Lawrence hosted community engagement opportunities about their 2026 budget, but our coalition found these to have significant limitations. We requested that the City of Lawrence host additional community engagement opportunities, but the City reported that their staff did not have the capacity to do so.

So our coalition independently hosted A Community Conversation about the Lawrence City Budget on June 5, 2025. We shared our research with the 70 people in attendance and then broke out into small groups for substantive discussions about our concerns and ideas for solutions.

We also produced a survey, which you can fill out here, and we will present our community’s input to our City’s elected officials and staff.

Most recently, several coalition members spoke before the City Commission to present questions about the sustainability of their debt and some of our initial survey results. You can see our public comments here:

• Overview of the City's debt increases and questions about the sustainability of their debt and their debt payment plan, Holly Krebs

• Transparency challenges our coalition faced, Christina McKenna

• Results from our survey's debt-related questions, Melinda Ball

• Survey comments about the City's capital investments and debt, Julie Jones

If you would like the City to provide more community engagement about their budget, please ask your City Commissioners to provide these opportunities by emailing them at commissioners@lawrenceks.org and ccagendas@lawrenceks.org.

Outdoor Swimming Pool

Holly Krebs led an advocacy campaign to retain the size of the Lawrence outdoor swimming pool in the fall of 2024. She gathered almost 1800 signatures on a community-wide petition and organized a coalition of supporters to lobby the City Commission to reverse their decision to significantly shrink the size of our pool.

On Oct 12, 2024, this coalition presented a coordinated series of public comments before the Commission, which convinced them to reverse their decision. On Nov 19, 2024, we gave another series of comments outlining the significant flaws in the community engagement and planning process for this renovation. While the Commission did not grant our request for a citizen oversight committee of the remainder of the project, they did assign future community engagement to their Communications and Community Relations department, which has been great to work with.

Watch some of our coalition’s stellar presentations before the City Commission and read more about our pool campaign here!

Write Our City Commissioners to Make Your Voice Heard!

To: commissioners@lawrenceks.org, ccagendas@lawrenceks.org

Subject: [Include your specific request or complaint here]

Email content: Dear City Commissioners,

[Insert short message about your request or complaint. You may want to address how the issue at hand affects you.]

[Close with a respectful salutation and your name]

Notes:

• The Commissioners receive a lot of written information each week, so they may be more likely to read your full email if it's short and to the point.

• If you want your comments to be public, include the "ccagendas" email above, and your email will be published at the end the Commission's weekly packet.

• You can also email individual Commissioners here: Amber Sellers, Bart LittleJohn, Brad Finkeldei, Lisa Larsen, and Mike Dever