City staff members presented an update on January rec center usage numbers after implementing fees and, although they have netted their goal total of paid memberships, that doesn’t mean the revenue goal is a shoo-in.

A Feb. 10 report from Lindsay Hart, interim director of Lawrence’s Parks, Recreation and Culture department, shows that people have purchased 2,542 memberships, which include resident and nonresident adults, seniors and household users buying monthly or annual passes. 

The city generated about $182,000 in January revenue from memberships, day passes and punch cards.

An additional 862 people received free memberships in January, which breaks down to 126 qualified access memberships, 442 youth memberships and 294 free passes to the community building, which commissioners voted to keep free on a three-month trial basis. Here’s more information about how to apply for qualified access memberships.

Sherri Riedemann, city clerk, sent the city manager and commissioners an email Monday with an up-to-date projections spreadsheet for memberships and expected revenue from rec centers in 2026.

The spreadsheet indicates that the city hopes to generate about $456,000 in total membership revenue with 2,250 memberships sold — which include resident and nonresident feeds for annual and monthly passes — and 500 total day passes/punch cards. The total anticipated memberships is 3,000, which includes 450 free youth passes and 300 free qualified rate passes.

“We will most likely exceed the goal of 2,250 people, and we could still fall short of our revenue goal,” Hart said Tuesday.

Though the city is about 40% of the way to its revenue goal, its total revenue to date includes the full cost of all yearlong memberships. To continue to grow revenue and meet its goal, the city will need to add new annual members and hope for upward trends in monthly memberships.

If a person pays for a monthly membership repeatedly over a full year, they will be counted 12 times in the total number of memberships, Hart said. Meanwhile, a one-time purchase of an annual membership counts as one tally against the total goal. 

Say multiple people who bought monthly passes in January choose to not buy passes in February — each January pass will still be counted as one membership, but revenue would dip without those people paying a February fee, though they could be replaced by new users buying memberships. 

The spreadsheet Riedemann provided indicates that the city hopes to sell 725 monthly passes to resident/nonresident adults in each month of 2026; 165 to resident/nonresident households; and 460 to resident/nonresident seniors and nonresident youth. Through January, it sold 505 (69.7% of the goal), 110 (66.7%) and 358 (79.6%), respectively. 

Commissioners and Hart discussed Tuesday that it’s possible the city will see a drop in monthly subscriptions this month. Commissioner Mike Courtney said that more people are motivated to go to the gym in January following Christmas and the new year.

The group also agreed that it’s challenging to guess how the year will go after only one month of data.

“A lot of people bought monthly passes and, you know, some people do that because they only come in the winter,” Mayor Brad Finkeldei said. “And other maybe people are just waiting to see what the rules are going to be … so it’ll be interesting to see how February does and how people react.”

Rec center attendance numbers

Throughout January, the East Lawrence facility had 918 visits; Holcom Park had 480; and Sports Pavilion Lawrence had 14,479. That translates to 222, 130, and 2,291 unique users, respectively.

By comparison, in January 2025, East Lawrence had 113 total visitor scans, Holcom Park had 709 and SPL had 15,930, per Riedemann’s email.

Click here to open this chart in a new tab.

Courtney remarked on the increase in visits to the Community Building, which went from 636 in January 2025 to 1,261 in January 2026. Hart has said on a few occasions that staff members weren’t as faithful about asking visitors to scan in prior to implementing fees in January, so past numbers may be underestimated.

“Speaking with staff, just openly, you know, hearing their comments, they feel like traffic (in the Community Building) is about the same,” Hart said. “… So again, we’re a month in. There’s a lot of data to collect, but I think the numbers look high, but at this time, staff don’t feel like it’s been overwhelming.”

She said in March, she will present numbers of youths using the Community Building after school.

Tournaments, spectator fees and the World Cup

The city also implemented spectator fees in January. It costs $5 per person per day to attend tournaments, which led to almost $48,000 in added revenue for the month.

Hart said that they’re currently expecting to make an additional $165,000 in spectator revenue throughout the year, coming up short of their $250,000 goal. That number can still change as some tournaments have yet to be scheduled and they can’t perfectly predict the number of spectators for future events. However, the World Cup has become a roadblock.

As Kansas City gears up to host multiple matches of the 2026 Men’s World Cup, it is highly likely that one of the competing teams will pick Rock Chalk Park as their home base. To reduce security burden and alleviate parking concerns, Parks and Recreation is not taking any tournament reservations from mid-May through mid-July.

As a result, nine tournaments usually scheduled at SPL on an annual basis could be booked this year. SPL will still be open to members as normal during that time.

“We actually are still going to host a few smaller camps and small tournaments that typically bus in, and so we’re going to be working with them to make sure they understand parking could be an issue,” Hart said. “… And yes, we’re still going to have our camps, and we’re going to have a lot of programs going on, but mainly we do want to be open for our members, for our community.”

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

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