If anyone is still pondering whether it’s worth paying taxes these days, they only have to watch the Ely City Council and budget committee struggle over what city services to cut in order to balance Ely’s budget. Tax revenue is shrinking, and we are surely going to miss some of the services they used to fund.

What would we choose to have less of—police or fire services, support programs for kids, library functions or street maintenance?

Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s proposed cuts of state tax dollars to local government aid (LGA) would mean a $297,000 reduction in the Ely city budget for 2010. As a result, an expected 8 percent expense reduction to city departments, may reach deeper, to 16 percent, and result in layoffs of employees. Presumably the fat has been cut, and we are now down to muscle, approaching bone.

The fat-muscle-bone metaphor brings sharply to mind other painful clichés.. Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Throwing the baby out with the bath water. A poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Caught between a rock and a hard place.

The phrase, “sharing the pain” is apt also. As the decision process stumbles along, department heads and service providers are tempted to try to pass on the pain, suggesting cuts to the next department in order to preserve some semblance of normality in their own bailiwicks. That’s understandable. But not as useful as honestly searching to learn how deeply their own department budgets could be cut before hitting bone.

A case in point is the Ely Public Library, where Library Director Rachel Heinrich has calculated the specific dollar distance to bone. The 8 percent cut took the library into muscle and to within $7,500 of the skeleton. A 16 percent budget reduction would cut $12,556 deep into the marrow.

In fact, the loss of that $12,556 would drop the library’s budget below the threshold necessary for staying in the Arrowhead Regional System (ARS). The system provides an estimated $410,295 in services to the Ely Library. For the want of a $12,556 nail, a $410,295 shoe could be lost.

That’s $100,000 worth of interlibrary loan services, $28,000 in state database access, $105,000 in e-books, $840 in phone lines and many smaller ticket items such as large print books, card catalog software, computer lab equipment and state discounts on books, audio-visual equipment and office supplies. The list goes on.

And who cares? I know I would, since I use the library almost weekly, benefiting from many of the essential ARS services. And the folks who made 83,356 visits to the Ely Library in 2009 care also. We count on the 2,434 hours the library is open to serve us. Children numbering 1,329 care about the youth programs the facility offered last year. And kids and adults, alike, care about the ability to use the 69,508 books and other items like CD’s we borrowed last year.

Of course, if library funding were cut to the bone, we wouldn’t lose all of those services. Just the $410,295 worth provided by ARS.

Heinrich has done an intelligent piece of work. She’s let us know the dollar boundaries between fat, meat and bone. I hope other city departments are doing the same. The budget committee and Ely City Council have tough decisions to make to balance the 2010 budget. It will be important for them to know the consequences of cuts at various levels.

We can thank the city staff and City Council members for so far avoiding major layoffs of employees. One thing organizations and businesses are learning during the economic downturn is that downsizing is often a mistake. The unintended consequences are the costs of severance, paying out accrued vacation and sick leave, and the decreased morale and increased anxiety of remaining workers. In a community, layoffs obviously result in fewer dollars spent in local businesses and a further reduction in tax income for the city and state.

All that said, we are going to have to rely on city leaders—elected, appointed and hired—to address the budget cuts with a truthful presentation of sometimes hard-to-determine facts. We need them to avoid any trickery or half-truths in their assessments. And finally, we rely on each one for candor, as they forthrightly bring information to the table that will inform the best possible decisions.

We rely on them to leave the city with as much muscle and bone as possible, keep the nose for our faces, hang onto the baby when throwing out the bath water and swing the sharp stick away from our eyes.

And they have our sympathy because we know it’s true—they really are caught between a rock and a hard place.