Dozens of community members gathered Wednesday and many voiced concerns about a discussion hosted by three county and city commissioners and advertised as focusing on a plan to handle homelessness.
Douglas County Commissioners Erica Anderson and Gene Dorsey and Lawrence City Commissioner Kristine Polian led the event at the Lawrence Public Library. Attendees included some service providers who work directly with people experiencing homelessness and some community advocates, along with many others.
Commissioners later told attendees why they were bringing this issue to the community for discussion in this format.
They said they felt as though their fellow commissioners — including the “legacy commissioners,” as Polian referred to those who started serving prior to 2025 — and city and county staff members were unwilling to come to the table to have a conversation.
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“We are forcing the issue, absolutely. We are raising the heat,” Anderson said.
But messaging ahead of the event largely focused on a YouTube video titled “Douglas County Fails Homeless Accountability,” and several people voiced concerns about it.
The video contains references to and footage from area news outlets and downtown Lawrence under a commentary voiceover, as well as footage from camps in Baltimore that is not marked to be distinguishable from the Lawrence footage.
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One person in the audience said their impression was that the video was not intended to educate, but to inflame and instill fear in the community.
Some audience members said the video gave the impression that the three commissioners wanted to scrap the “A Place for Everyone” homelessness strategic plan that the city and county commissions both approved in May 2024 after years of work.
The three commissioners clarified that they don’t want to scrap the plan, but they do want to revisit and update it.
Anderson recently asked to have a discussion about the homelessness strategic plan, but there was not consensus among the commissioners to add it to a future agenda. Both the city and county commissions routinely ask for consensus before they ask staff to place items on future meeting agendas and prepare information for discussion.
Meeting organizers did not share who created the video. Lawrence resident John Ims, who opened the event, said it was “made by a separate group,” but the script was sourced from a report Anderson had written, “A Place for Everyone: System Accountability Review.” Ims also said the images from Baltimore were included in the video because Baltimore had a similar plan for homelessness.
Attendees pointed out some inaccuracies in the video. That included a statistic that “One supportive housing site in Lawrence generated more than 1,200 police calls in a single year, over 100 calls (a) month.” A person in attendance pointed out that the housing complex that statistic refers to is not supportive housing.
Another person, a former county employee, noted that a reference the video construed as $267.77 million spent on the plan was inaccurate — that cost was an estimate of what it would take to fully implement the plan, but its approval did not commit the city or the county to fund anything specific.
Another audience member then asked how much has been spent on the plan, and Polian said that “you will not be able to decipher” how much money is actually going out or coming in. She said the city’s budget documentation is very high-level.
“No citizen will be able to say, ‘Hey, this is how much we have spent on this initiative,’” Polian said.
Some attendees voiced concerns about who was there and who wasn’t — people who had firsthand experience with homelessness services seemed to be absent.
One person said they only found out about the meeting through a Facebook post that was shared among service providers earlier that day, and “that kind of feels a little icky to me, since we’re the ones with the boots on the ground.”
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At the end of the meeting, organizers gathered some email addresses of people who want to engage in future discussions.
The commissioners did not constitute a quorum of either body, so they were not in violation of the Kansas Open Meetings Act.
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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.
Nathan Kramer (he/him), a multimedia student journalist for The Lawrence Times since August 2024, is a recent graduate of Free State High School. He also served as a news photo editor for Free State’s student publication, where he worked as a videographer, photographer and motion designer. See more of his work for the Times here.
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