However well-intentioned, the efforts by city council to trim elected officials' health benefits to ease the city's financial crisis, is mostly symbolic. The potential cost savings are a tiny fraction of what the city needs to escape the financial crisis that has been brewing for years.

While it is appropriate for elected officials to make some financial sacrifices if they are going to press the city's unionized workers to contribute to the city's cost-savings efforts - something they surely must do.

Councilman Joe Bratkovich has put the problem in perspective when he notes, as he has at several meetins, that only $164,000 out of a $7 million budget is discretionary spending, meaning money not already committed through contracts and mandated services. Looking at the larger budget picture, the solution lies in a serious and significant reworking of the city's contracts with its three unions. But any amount of savings, as well as any additional revenue will help.

Butler's financial is serious enough that anything less than significant savings in contract revisions will be seen as a perfect example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Elimination of health care benefits for elected officials, as was been proposed by councilman Jim Kraus at a recent council meeting, seems both extreme and insufficient.

For some council members, who have a full-time job with benefits, the city program of benefits might easily be sacrificed. But for officials without employer-based health benefits, total elimination of city-provided health benefits would be too much to expect - especially considering the minimal impact on the city's big-picture financial crisis.

As an alternative to Kraus' plan, Bratkovich has suggested proportional benefit cuts as a more logical approach. A 20 percent or 30 percent cut in elected officials' expenses would provide some relief to the city's money woes, but would pale in comparison to what a 20 or 30 percent cost savings found in revisions to union contracts would produce.

Savings, on the one hand, would be in the tens of thousands of dollars compared with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the other.

It is appropriate for city council to take the lead in reducing the city's expenses and setting an example of shared sacrifices. But nothing city council can do in terms of cutting elected officials' wages or benefits will have the necessary impact of ending the city's structural deficit rooted in various provisions of labor contracts that the city can no longer afford.

The city will only be spared bankruptcy by significant changes to the labor contracts that expire that the end of 2005 and now in the preliminary stages of negotiations.

To help set the tone and to demonstrate the need for sacrifice for the upcoming contract negotiations, city council should go on record as saying that elected officials will trim their health benefit costs by 25 percent or so when union contracts are approved that reflect the same percentage of savings.

In the meantime, if elected official can forgo city-paid benefits because of a employer-provided package, they should do so.