Auburn City Manager John Salomone on Thursday will release his long-anticipated budget for 2006-07 to the mayor and city council and, more importantly, the public. It is likely that there will be bad news for every segment of the community in the proposed document, from members of council and city staff to nonprofits and taxpayers.

It would be hard to believe that any budget produced by the manager does not put forward some tough choices, from tax increases and service reductions to staff cuts and curtailed city support of non-governmental operations. A once pooh-poohed budget shortfall of $1.4 million prior to November's elections has now grown to an estimated $3.7 million or more by the end of the fiscal year in June 2007 if the city council doesn't drain much of its reserves.

There are only a couple of ways to deal with such a gap - cut services, raise taxes and fees or grow the tax base. Some of the latter has been accomplished through some new development. The city manager has said that he is making sure that the new assessments result in a revenue neutral tax rate. If so, he then would have to come up with either cuts or a property tax and fee increases or a mix of all three - which will make no one happy.

The question will be whether he plays the old bureaucratic game of coming up with draconian cuts that no one can stomach, resulting in a majority of city council being willing to push through a sizable tax increase to quell public outrage. To make up the $3.7 million alone you would have to cut a sizable number of city staff; at least two dozen or more posts, equating to 1/10th of the city's full time workforce.

Talk about cutting members of the Auburn Police Department by 10 members, a truly shortsighted and long-term dangerous act, has been floating around for weeks. Some members of council would be forced to shelve their off quoted “public safety” being the city's highest priority mantra or be willing to raise taxes dramatically.

Dramatic and harsh personnel cuts, in areas that are visible, such as public safety are methods that crafty managers use to ease the political pain of raising taxes. It is usually backroom, not very public positions, that can be eliminated without public outrage. They aren't put on the chopping block, because they have little constituency and are easy to accept and are rarely proposed by a politically calculating manager.

So the big question for the much-anticipated budget release is whether it is a document that logically looks at all budget options or is a document that scares the heck out of everyone to get city council to pass a large tax hike or drain the city's reserves, an act of tremendous fiscal irresponsibility.

Cosentino is a former mayor of Auburn and can be e-mailed at cozguytho@aol.com