Douglas County commissioners to preview 2027 budget, EMS agreement with Lawrence

Douglas County commissioners met Wednesday with two decisions that could reach households in Lawrence, Baldwin City, Eudora, Lecompton and the county’s rural townships next year: the shape of the 2027 budget and the terms of a new EMS cooperation agreement with Lawrence. The budget office, which maintains budgets for the county and other taxing entities and sets tax mill levies, is also using Open Budget Douglas County to show residents how spending moves through the county ledger.

A 2026 benchmark shows how tightly those choices are tied to property taxes. Commissioners approved about $202.6 million for the current year, with a 40.669-mill levy, down 0.629 mills from the year before. County leaders said property taxes made up 75% of county revenues, after a June 2025 proposal had outlined a 41.298-mill levy before final adoption. That leaves little mystery about where future pressure lands if county spending rises or if EMS funding shifts.

The EMS agreement matters because Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical is already the backbone of shared emergency response. Created through a December 16, 1996 interlocal agreement that merged the Lawrence Fire Department and Douglas County Ambulance Service, the department now says it handles almost 12,000 calls a year from seven stations and two support facilities with 164 staff members. It is a division of the City of Lawrence, but county support helps sustain medical response across Douglas County, from the city to the county’s unincorporated areas.

The department’s current strategic plan runs through 2026, and it was unanimously re-accredited in March 2023 through 2028 by the Commission on Fire Accreditation International. That makes the funding framework more than an accounting exercise: commissioners are weighing how to keep a long-running city-county system aligned with call volume, staffing and equipment needs as demand stays high. The county code also establishes a Department of Emergency Medical Services and Emergency Management to coordinate countywide EMS and preparedness, and that chapter was updated in 2025.

Commissioners also held a separate work session on policies for data centers and battery storage, two fast-moving issues that can affect land use, utility demand, infrastructure and emergency planning. Together, the budget preview, the EMS agreement and those policy talks point to the same question for 2027: how much service Douglas County wants to buy, how much tax pressure residents can bear, and how much of the county’s public-safety system will continue to rest on the Lawrence partnership.