Lawrence city commissioners on Tuesday voted 5-0 to increase the rates residents pay for water and wastewater service over each of the next three years.
Rates on average will increase about 7.9% for 2026, 2027 and 2028, which is expected to increase city revenues by $5.75 million, $6.1 million and $6.6 million, respectively.
That 7.9% average increase includes commercial and residential rates. Melinda Harger, assistant director of Municipal Services and Operations for the city, said the rates for households will see increases in the range of 8.3% to 8.5%.
Harger and other city staff members gave commissioners an overview of numerous projects underway to improve the city’s water infrastructure.
Some community members voiced concerns about the increasing costs to residents.
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Among them was Holly Krebs, lead organizer with the Coalition for Collaborative Governance. She ran calculations to fill in numbers that were not provided to the public in the commission’s meeting agenda and seek an idea of how much the average household’s utility bills were increasing.
City staff members over the last several years have provided the commission an average of 4,000 gallons per month used by single-family households.
Krebs calculated the approximate increase to the average household’s monthly utility bills based on the averages the city has previously provided, and she estimated the additional increases to stormwater rates and solid waste increases based on the last two years’ increases.
According to Krebs’ calculations, verified by this publication, the average single-family household’s water and wastewater bill — based on numbers the city provided when the commission approved three years of rate increases back in 2022 — will increase to $153 in 2028 from $122 in 2025 under the now-approved increases.
However, Krebs’ calculations had used an increase of 7.9% as provided in the commission’s meeting agenda. Since the average increase for households will be closer to 8.4%, households’ average water and wastewater bill increases will actually be a bit higher than she’d calculated.
Commissioner Amber Sellers challenged the numbers, saying they only told part of the story. Sellers said she wanted to know the numbers for a household of one, and that Krebs’ numbers didn’t include rates for seniors, low-income households and multifamily households.
“You don’t take into account that someone who is elderly gets a discount, so their increase is not — so, yes, it’s an average, but you can’t do averages,” Sellers said.
According to tables in the meeting agenda, each unit in a multifamily home inside the city will pay $9.17 per 1,000 gallons of water used in 2026. The rates for single-family homes inside the city are $11.18, $12.30 or $12.86 per 1,000 gallons of water used in 2026. The different rates depend on usage, which is calculated based on the Winter Quarter Average, or WQA. Households that have the greatest usage will see the greatest rate increases, Harger said.
Krebs said she did run the numbers looking at all the different percentages, but decided that “it was too much in the weeds.”
City staff members did not provide additional numbers during the meeting to explain the impact on individual households.
Commissioner Lisa Larsen said she’d like to see the city take a look at its utility discounts for seniors.
“You’ve gotta be pretty low-income in order to qualify for that,” she said.
The city’s “low-income elderly utility rate” requires that the person “have an income during the preceding calendar year from all sources of less than $16,566.00,” or “Any elderly person whose filing status is “head of a household” on their annual tax return, with a household income during the preceding calendar year from all sources of less than $22,484.00.”
New rates will be effective Jan. 1, 2026.
Commissioners on Tuesday also approved a 2026 budget that will increase property taxes, take a fire engine offline and charge residents fees to use the recreation centers. Read more about that at this link.
Send us your water bills
We’re curious about how water use and charges differ across households and across town.
If you’re willing to share your City of Lawrence water and trash bill with us, please send a photo or PDF of your bill(s) to City@LawrenceKSTimes.com (don’t forget the “KS”). Please also let us know how many people live in your household, and if you do anything that uses more than typical water, such as watering your lawn daily.
We will not publish any identifying information from your bill, but we are interested in your address so we can see how costs differ in different areas of town.
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Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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