"Sooner rather than later" are the words most applicable to the city's current financial condition.

If city leaders do not take meaningful steps sooner rather than later to address the situation, the city will find itself with an almost hopeless task, outside the realm of opting for state fiscally distressed status, under which local control will be virtually lost.

If city leaders engage in the tough decision making that faces them - again, sooner rather than later - they will enter the formal budget-preparation process in the final months of this year with the capability of producing a spending plan that keeps the city out of the red.

With nearly half of the year gone, there isn't a time cushion upon which the city council can rest.

Whatever is done won't be easy or pleasant, considering that the city faces projected deficits estimated at between $50,000 and $140,000, although city officials are struggling to keep spending at the break-even point. Meanwhile, if the council does nothing substantial to increase revenue and decrease spending, the prospect of a $500,000 deficit by 2006 looms as a troubling possibility.

None of the main ideas presented by a consultant who studied city finances solely on available budgetary and financial information represent an easy vote by officials. They are the kind of options that have the capacity to destroy political careers.

However, city finances have reach the point where officials will have to look deep inside themselves and their consciences to make the choice of whether to vote on behalf of the city's long-term best interests or their own continuing public-service ambitions.

It is to be hoped that city residents will familiarize themselves with the crisis at hand and recognize and appreciate the difficult agenda that awaits the council in the coming months.

"Reassessment" is a bad word from the vantage point of taxpayers, but there might be no choice but to do it, despite the costs involved. And, for city residents who depend on adequate police and fire service, the prospect of manpower cuts looms as a troubling product of the three-year-long spate of deteriorating financial reports.

That the city did not press hard enough for hold-the-line police and fire contracts during the last round of negotiations could come back to haunt the departments this time, if manpower reductions must be implemented. The streets department already is operating with a manpower shortage that prevents major progress on repairs, and the street conditions increasingly are projecting Butler as a poor city, despite the economic boom some other segments of the county are experiencing.

There is a window for increasing some current city fees and to adopt new ones, such as an application fee tied to tenant registration, but those fees, as well as higher parking rates, won't rescue the city from its worsening plight.

The day might be coming when the City of Butler has volunteer as well as paid firefighters; when all police officers are out on the streets, regardless of their rank; when "reassessment" will be something to grumble about in the past tense, rather than trying to avoid it for the future; when wage freezes and pay and benefits cuts are regarded as more palatable than having no job at all.

Those are the kinds of difficult study and decisions that lie ahead - and, of course, sooner rather than later.

The do-nothing option is not an option any more.

- J.R.K.