Council Approves Tentative City Budget : Finances: Potential state cuts could reduce the $300-million plan by as much as $9 million.

With potential state revenue cuts hanging over the city like a sword, the City Council on Tuesday approved a tentative city budget of about $300 million for fiscal 1993.

The budget, including $127.5 million for city departments, is riddled with “contingencies,” potential cuts that will take effect if the state Legislature acts to reduce cities’ shares of property taxes or motor vehicle license fees.

The city must prepare to absorb additional revenue losses of as much as $9 million if the most extreme plan is implemented in Sacramento, city officials say.

By using some one-time payments and refunds that would normally go into reserve, the “very complex, very controversial and still somewhat confusing” new budget, as Mayor Rick Cole characterized it, restores some previously planned cuts in services.

Tentatively restored are some cuts in library hours and scheduled layoffs of 12 police rangers, non-sworn officers used primarily as guards at city facilities.

The action is based, however, “on a very shaky assumption” that the state will not make further cuts, Cole said. “If through some miracle, the state can be talked out of taking more from us, we’ll restore (the cuts).”

To beef up the budget in the face of decreasing sales tax revenues, the council extended the payment schedule of a contribution to a Civic Center development project and appropriated part of a refund from city contributions to the Public Employee Retirement System fund.

The additional funds will be used for, among other things, paying the city’s membership fees in the Independent Cities Assn. and administering a residential landmark district in the center of the city.

The new budget represents an increase of more than $20 million over this year’s budget. Most of the increase will be absorbed by higher personnel costs, including cost-of-living increases guaranteed in various union contracts.

A proposal to increase the business license fees for the city’s two country clubs, the Valley Hunt Club and the Annandale Country Club, was tabled at the insistence of Councilwoman Kathryn Nack, whose district includes both clubs.

The proposed tax of $10 per member was unfair, she said, because other private clubs would not be affected.

But Cole argued that the clubs’ affluent members could afford to pay the increase. “Stand in front of those clubs and watch the Mercedeses come and go,” he said.

Currently, the Annadale club pays $1,664.42 in city taxes and the Valley Hunt Club, $1,051.22. “That’s less than one member pays in a year (to belong to one of the clubs),” Cole said.