After hearing from several members of the public that they’re not interested in directly electing Lawrence’s mayor — a proposal from the chamber of commerce — city commissioners generally agreed they don’t want to move forward with changes right now.
Representatives of the The Chamber of Lawrence Kansas asked commissioners to put a question on voters’ ballots to determine whether the city should have a directly elected mayor. City voters would have to approve a change to the form of government.
The mayor position is currently a one-year term that essentially rotates among commissioners who received the most votes in their elections. Typically, following a city election, commissioners choose the person who received the most votes as the vice mayor, and the following year, the person who received the second most votes is chosen as the new vice mayor while the vice mayor advances to mayor.
Originally, the chamber was asking the commission to put the question on voters’ November ballots, but a follow-up letter from Bonnie Lowe, president and CEO of the chamber, states that “It has become clear that the question of whether Lawrence should adopt a Directly Elected Mayor form of government will require — and would benefit from — continued community engagement and discussion beyond the upcoming election.”
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Voters in 2024 narrowly rejected a change to the form of government that would have established a directly elected mayor but also would have created commission districts and increased the number of total commissioners from five to seven. (Read more about that in this article and the articles at this link.)
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Evie Lazzarino, vice president for external affairs for the Chamber of Lawrence Kansas, spoke briefly to commissioners during their Tuesday meeting. She said the chamber would appreciate a discussion of the idea.
“We would love more time to look at how this might come together, and also, of course, to involve our new city manager, who is coming himself from a town with a directly elected mayor in DeSoto, Texas,” Lazzarino said.
Lazzarino said the chamber has talked to a lot of community organizations and a lot of former mayors, and the consensus is that the discussions need more time.
“We need a little bit more meat on the bones and more time to get this going,” she said. “… We really believe that this is something that has possibilities, and is something that could help prepare us moving forward with a mayor having time to enact a vision rather than passing the gavel when someone’s just getting started in one year.”
The vast majority of more than a dozen people who spoke to commissioners about the proposal told commissioners they were against the idea.
Some members of the public who spoke said commissioners could choose to select the same person as mayor for more than one year without changing the city’s form of government, if they wanted to address the annual turnover. Some questioned why the chamber was able to get the proposal placed on the commission’s agenda.
The discussion also morphed a bit into a change a previous commission voted for in February 2023. Some people asked commissioners to revisit that vote, which made all five commission terms four-year terms.
Previously, three commission seats were elected every two years, with the third-place candidate receiving a two-year term. That meant that voters could replace a majority of the commission in every election.
The vote was considered in conjunction with the potential for the larger changes to the form of government that city voters later rejected.
Commissioner Amber Sellers said she thought it was not equitable for commission terms to be different lengths, which was why she voted for all four-year terms.
“If we want to talk about a form of government, elect a mayor, districts at large, whatever that looks like, I want us not to have a surface-level conversation about it,” she said. “We need to have a real deep, granular conversation about it as it relates to equity and representation and disparate impacts of discrimination, because we have that.”
She said many of the comments she’s read about this issue and their racial undertones have hurt her and feel like a personal attack against her.
“And if that’s how this community feels, then why would anybody that looks like me want to run to represent this community?” she said. “Because I didn’t run because I was a Black woman. I truly believed that the skills and talents that I had could help to elevate our community. So we have a lot of work to do, but in this current phase of what this looks like, this is not it.”
Commissioner Kristine Polian said she generally doesn’t want to reject proposals without hearing more about them; however, she said that in particular with the new city manager coming in soon, this was not the right time to have this discussion.
Commissioner Mike Dever said he thought it was time, and the commission’s responsibility, to have a discussion about the change to all four-year terms. He said he thought the commission’s vote to move all terms to four-year terms, which occurred before he was elected, “broke” the representative system by taking away the possibility of electing a new majority every two years.
Vice Mayor Mike Courtney said he was in favor of the four-year terms, as commissioners who are on for four years will be able to set the strategic plan for the city, whereas someone with a two-year term might not be able to do that.
Sellers said she thinks it’s time to discuss what form of government truly represents everyone in the community, and whether the community truly believes that the current model is it.
As the time approached 11 p.m., when commissioners have to vote if they want to extend their meeting, Mayor Brad Finkeldei said the commission will have some discussion in the future but will not be moving forward at this point.
Read more background on the city’s conversations and votes about the form of government in the articles at this link.
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Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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