Our Research
Lawrence Budget Research
How Will the City’s New Utility Fees Affect Residents?
On Sept 16, 2025, the Commission voted to increase the City’s water and wastewater fees about 8% each year for the next three years, and the community has already seen substantial increases in these and the stormwater and solid waste fees over the past five years.
Our coalition researched the financial impact of these changes on Lawrence residents, using average baseline data and rate increases that City staff provided in 14 agenda items between 2019 and 2025. The chart below shows this research, and Holly Krebs’s presented that data before the Commissioner to inform their deliberations. The cumulative effects of these rate changes are substantial, and these calculations indicated that an average Lawrence household would pay $1,045 more in City utility fees in 2028 than they paid in 2020.
A City Commissioner suggested that we provide more nuanced data to show how these rate increases would impact different populations in our community, so we worked with City staff to get the data needed for this analysis. Visit our utility fees page to see even more detailed breakdowns of how different-sized households can expect to be affected by these fees.
City Budget Reports
The City of Lawrence’s total budget almost doubled in the last five years. It has increased from $260.9M in 2020 to $518.7M in 2025.
Budget Analysis: Capital Investment, Debt, and Deficit
Our City has also taken on significantly larger amounts of debt over the last two years while simultaneously facing budget deficits.
Budget Analysis: Community Engagement and Transparency
The City’s Strategic Plan commits them to fiscal transparency, but our coalition researchers did not find that their budget data met this commitment.
Our coalition believes our community deserves more opportunities to learn and provide feedback about the City budget, but the City is not providing these opportunities.
How Sustainable is the City’s Proposed Debt?
The Commission's 2026 debt decisions are particularly important because our community will pay for this debt for the next 25 years. If the City approves the proposed 2026 debt, they will have approved $355M worth of debt in three years, for an average of $118M per year. Previously, the most they had ever approved was $60M.
How do they plan to pay for it?
A City chart shows that if the Commission approves all debt proposed through 2030, the debt payments paid by our property taxes will be $22 million in 2030, which is 84% more than this year’s debt payment. The city is able to afford these larger debt payments because they are using cash reserves to cover some of each year’s payments.
But by 2032, the city will have spent all the reserves that their current policies allow them to use. This means that the cost of the city’s proposed debt is expected to be greater than the city’s resources to pay for that debt in 2033-2035.
KU Graduate Student Research on
Recent Lawrence City Issues
Affordable Housing
Affordable Housing: Local Housing Solutions in Lawrence Kansas by Katherine Sinclair
Brick Streets and Sidewalks
Preserving Our History: One Brick at a Time, Improving Transparency and Engagement in Lawrence’s Brick Streets and Sidewalks Policy by Annalee Hanneman
City Hall Relocation
Commission Term of Office
Terms of Office for Commission-Manager Government in Kansas: Impacts on Lawrence by Anne Marie Yatsula
Homelessness
Homeless Solutions in Lawrence, KS by Joshua Navarro
Kaw River Pedestrian Bridge
Building Bridges . . . and Trust Kaw River Pedestrian Bridge by Fernando Torres
Kaw River Pedestrian Bridge by Thomas Hall
The Lawrence Loop by Faith Eberhart
Land Development Code
Land Development Code Process by Elizabeth Blakely
Lawrence Land Development Code Is "Town vs Gown" Relationship the Underlying Tension and Potential Release for Lawrence? by Ian Njuguna
Lawrence City Hall Relocation
Lawrence Transit Center
New Boston Crossing
The Natural Consequences of the New Boston Crossing: An Analysis of the Community Engagement Process by Amaya Dajani
When Is It Too Much? A Study on the New Boston Crossing by Morgan Phelps
Ninth Street Road Diet
Ninth Street Road Diet by Beth Peterson
Tax Abatements in Lawrence
Understanding Tax Abatements in Lawrence: A Community’s Path Forward by Geoffrey Brown
Outdoor Swimming Pool Analysis
In Aug 2024, the City approved a pool renovation plan that would have eliminated more than a quarter of the total water area in our pool. The Commission passed this plan because the Parks & Rec department and their consultants didn’t present substantial data from their community surveys showing that residents wanted a larger facility. (The good news is that our advocacy efforts saved the size of our pool!)
Read our summary about how community input was omitted and ignored through the planning process.