FORT WAYNE, IN (Indiana's News Center)---Fort Wayne City Council met Tuesday evening to discuss the 2009 city budget submitted by Mayor Tom Henry last week.
The balanced budget was submitted to council at $134 million dollars.
But in the wake of todays economic woes, council members felt like more cuts should have made.

Liz Brown (R) Fort Wayne Council, At-Large:
" I'm pretty disappointed. We knew what was coming. Pat Roller has done an excellent job since day one telling us what we're projecting to get in revenue and what we're probably going to have in expenses and what our deficit is going to be with the new circuit breaker property tax cap.
So yeah, it's pretty disappointing because this is the year to start trying to make cuts before we have to dig even deeper.
What we have to get down to is what are the basic city services that we can not live without? And we haven't even come close to that when we still have travel and seminar fees and gasoline mileage and all those other things in there. And they may not turn out to be a lot of dollars but I think what I've heard tonight is that in the past years, we've never cut more. We the council have never cut more than 250 thousand dollars, not more than a quarter million dollars of a 160 something million dollar budget. I think I could have found more than 250 thousand dollars tonight, by myself, with a red pencil."

Pat Roller, City Controller:
" We're very proud of the budget we put in. We're very proud of what our departments have done thus far and I think working closely with council we can get to where we need to be."

The general consensus amongst council members was that cuts need to be made before approving the budget by December.