Lawrence City Hall is pictured in September 2018.
As the coronavirus pandemic and related health orders closed and limited businesses, the City of Lawrence planned for multimillion-dollar revenue losses. However, that worst-case scenario did not occur, putting the city in a stronger-than-anticipated position going into 2021.
Though the city did see significant drops in several revenue streams, some were not as bad as expected, and the pandemic created some surprise revenue increases in other areas. Ultimately, after preparing to spend up to about $7 million of general fund reserves to make up for revenue losses in 2020, the city now projects it will have to spend only about $1.53 million of reserves, according to a recent financial projections report prepared by the finance department.