It’s budget season again in Lawrence! This is my third year watching the budget in some capacity, and while I’m certainly not an expert, I can point out some patterns I’ve seen and issues I have with the way it’s structured.

The first two years I participated in the budget process in Lawrence, the site that the budget was hosted on was incredibly confusing. I gave public comment specifically about this issue in 2021 (for fiscal year 2022 or FY2022), and again in 2022 (for FY2023) since nothing had changed. This year, though, I have to give props to the city for the new tool that they’ve provided the public with. It’s a step forward for transparency and provides more information about what kind of funding each section of the strategic plan is receiving.

The Tool Itself

Maybe most interestingly, the new tool lets users play around with the budget, showing us how much funding different levels of service will require. While the amount that you can change each fund is limited to between 5-15%, it’s still interesting to see what small reallocations could do for city services.

The tool is, overall, good for what it is. It doesn’t include all departments (such as the City Manager’s Office, where many employee salaries come from), and since the FY2024 budget is still in progress, uses numbers from the FY2023 budget. It tells us where the city’s priorities lie, or at least where they did last year.

While the tool is pretty good, the budget itself is a different story. As is common in many American cities, the police are given a massive share of the budget at the expense of other departments. It’s been shown time and time again that defunding and restructuring the police (if not abolishing that institution outright) is a necessary first step towards repairing systemic injustices that have been harming marginalized communities for centuries. This is an issue that extends beyond just the budget, but what we can show with this tool is still worth investigating.

I started by just looking at each category in the police department fund. Each category was very confusing when completely unexplained (as was the case the last couple years), so the descriptions provided were helpful to an extent. It still left some things unexplained, like where in the budget police officers’ salaries come from and how much is spent on weaponry. Due to the somewhat limited nature of the tool, many seemingly unrelated things are tied together into one area. Reducing the number of officers in school (who disproportionately target students of color, as the police outside of schools also do) would also eliminate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program in the police department. Despite the irony of a DEI program in a department whose existence perpetuates inequity, it seems strange that these two things are tied together.

There are other examples of issues like this, but again, they stem from the budget tool being limited in scope. It can make moving funding around somewhat difficult, as reducing the funding for general police technology also reduces body-cam usage, which would be a huge transparency problem.

Meanwhile, while the police are pretty well-funded in the eyes of the city (currently at levels 3 and 4 of funding options, 5 being the highest), departments like ADA compliance and maintenance of Lawrence’s GIS (Geographical Information System maps that show zoning, utility lines, property ownership, etc) are lower on the priority list. Both of these are accessibility issues for different reasons – ADA for obvious reasons and GIS because it allows us to access information about the places we live using interactive maps.

Time To Defund The Police

Fully funding and completely revamping these two systems costs a fraction of what can be taken from the police budget. In fact, it was almost difficult to figure out where all to put the money that can be acquired from moderately defunding the police. I removed a relatively small $1.6 million from various police funds and was able to fully fund ADA compliance, Technology and Assets (making GIS incredibly accurate and usable), create two more transportation plans a year, provide way more city support for local businesses, add an annual neighborhood code inspection, add city-sponsored neighborhood cleanups, create the admin necessary to house every person in Lawrence, create a land bank, ensure all rental properties are inspected every three years, significantly improve the fire department’s risk reduction efforts, add 15 miles of trails, add 50 landscape beds to the side of roads, and expand the Prairie Park Nature Center. I also elected to take as much as I could from the city-operated golf course (about $200,000 out of $2 million total) considering the negative impact of golf on the environment. With this, I was also able to improve preventative street maintenance and ensure that Capital Improvement Plan projects are always completed early or on time. I still had more than $26,000 left over.

This list was just the highlights. Each section I added funding to had 3-5 areas that all improved with the change in funding. This also only redistributes a small fraction of the police budget – $1.6 million is roughly 5% of their total funding. The amount that can be done with this money is also somewhat deceptive since, as far as I can tell, it only really accounts for the city staff needed to make all of these things happen. More funding would be required to implement the transportation plans and build necessary affordable housing to end homelessness in Lawrence. Again, though, this much improvement only took 5% of the police budget.

Going beyond the budget tool, we can imagine what a more complete defunding of the police would look like. Further redistributing the police budget would allow Lawrence to put more money towards solving the problems that create crime, like unstable housing and food insecurity. We could expand funding for our mental health services, which could further support our community in ways that police are largely unable to. Lawrence could invest in more sustainable practices, which is necessary if we are to prevent and mitigate the worsening climate crisis. Defunding the police is not only required from a justice perspective, but because the money can be used to fund programs the community needs.

Some Bonus Thoughts

I’m coming back to this blog post about a week after I initially wrote it, as an initial draft of the budget for FY2024 has been released. It has surprised me in multiple ways, and deserves a post of its own.

The city is still recommending that we refer to and make public comment with the tool discussed in this post, and I definitely recommend doing so if you are interested at all in the city’s operations. This year has already been a step forward from last year for transparency, and I hope the trend continues as the budget is more fully presented to the public.