The decisions that await the Spokane City Council when it grapples with the 2009 budget on Monday will not fall under anyone’s definition of happy holidays.

The $618 million package is a product of conditions that were bleak even before the severity of the national economic downturn revealed how ominous it would become. And we still don’t know how grim it will get or how long it will last before a true recovery occurs.

But while Mayor Mary Verner and her budget writers are to be commended for their restraint and conservativism in the 2009 proposal, there is still a questionably optimistic element in the overall package.

First, however, let it be noted that a commitment to keeping planned expenditures within the year’s expected revenues will help combat the structural budget deficit that has plagued the city for years. A policy decision to treat unexpected income – including tax collections that outpace normal rates – as one-time revenues is a laudable discipline. Overly generous contract settlements with city workers this year were not.

Still, a belt-tightening approach is reflected in the modest 1.3 percent increase between the 2008 and 2009 budgets. (The respective hikes over the preceding three years have been 7.4, 4.7 and, gulp, 14.6 percent.)

But historic experience has limited value in the extraordinary times we are facing.

The proposed budget is based in part on a prediction that sales tax receipts will grow by 2 percent over 2008. While that would be well below the historic 3.5 percent annual increase, it may not be as modest a guess as it should, considering, as Verner noted in her budget message, actual sales tax collections already have fallen more than 6 percent below the expectations built into the 2008 budget adopted a year ago.

The mayor’s message also included a troubling acknowledgement that this spending plan will require $2.3 million in cuts for 2010. To confront that challenge, she urges “new ways of doing business, through the use of lean techniques and operational changes.”

Such strategies are easier to put on paper than into practice, especially on the heels of a fat-cutting process used to produce the current fiscal blueprint.

Some conspicuous pitfalls are easy to identify. For one, plans to beef up public safety staffing already are partly on hold – hiring six police officers and a Fire Department employee will be deferred at least until the second half of 2009, and maybe longer if revenues don’t meet forecasts. Also, the city has entered an animal control agreement with the county, and that carries a $2.5 million obligation that isn’t in the budget.

We admire the mayor’s general restraint, but she and the council must be ready to retrench at the first sign that even these cautious projections are too rosy.