Irvine’s Budget Cuts Hit Services, Not Jobs : Spending: $2.3 million is trimmed, prompted by dwindling sales taxes, business permits, other revenue.

Some potholes might be filled less quickly, and police will devote less time to burglary and rape prevention programs under a series of minor budget cuts that the City Council approved this week.

The cuts were prompted by dwindling sales taxes, business permits and other revenue.

No full-time employees will be laid off, City Manager Paul O. Brady Jr. said, but the $2.3 million in spending cuts will result in some reduction in services and delays in maintenance or replacement of city equipment and facilities.

Irvine’s economic condition is the worst in its 20-year history but is not as bad as in many other county cities, Brady said.

But City Councilman William A. (Art) Bloomer said Tuesday that further budget cuts are needed now, because administrators who drafted the budget were too optimistic about a quick economic recovery. He criticized the budget for the same reason when the council adopted it last summer.

Bloomer recommended Tuesday that the council make deeper cuts than Brady proposes because, he said, more reductions will be needed in a few months unless sales taxes jump unexpectedly.

The city should “face reality right now and take the actions that are going to be required,” he said.

Councilwoman Paula Werner warned against overreacting and cutting programs unnecessarily.

Despite the council agreeing to most of Brady’s recommended cuts, not everyone lost in the council’s budget reductions and transfers. Woodbridge neighbors persuaded the council to pay $15,150 toward planting trees to obscure their views of a new 60-foot-tall church. The city should have required the church to plant the trees when it approved the domed structure across Alton Parkway from the neighborhood’s cul-de-sac, the council said.

Senior citizens also persuaded the council to hire a new senior citizen outreach coordinator. The former coordinator has left the city, and Brady had proposed that the position be filled by shifting a city employee into the job, rather than hire someone with specific expertise in senior services. The proposed staffing shift would have saved $85,000.

And a plea from Cultural Affairs Commission chairman Hal Maloney prompted the council not to eliminate the city’s arts-in-education program. The $12,000 cooperative program with the Irvine Unified School District had been on Brady’s list of cuts.

Cuts approved Tuesday included spending less on street repairs in residential areas; reducing staffing hours for the Police Department’s front desk; slashing programs aimed at preventing burglaries, robberies and rapes, and halting the distribution of bulletins to businesses warning about crimes.

Council members also agreed to save $15,000 by having themselves and their commission appointees pick up their own agendas and correspondences from City Hall, rather than paying a courier service to deliver them.

The council also eliminated the spraying of weed killer in city parks and delayed construction of some picnic areas.