Meanwhile...

You're not going to believe this, but other stuff has been happening besides basketball the last two weeks (or, two months if you're me). I was surprised to hear it, to be honest.

The council continues to grind through the budget, with a handful of cuts ready to go. There's also more focus on boosting the Police and Fire departments.

Certainly, police and fire are two of the city's core services, and every effort needs to be made to keep those departments functioning top-notch. There's more than just level of service at play here. The city's public safety is chronically a sore spot for residents (some deserved, some not, as we've discussed in the past), so there's some political expediency that helps things out.

It's no big surprise that preserving police services is a top priority for city officials. It's been that way for years. Hopefully those departments can be stabilized a little bit this year, and other departments can be focused on in the future. At some point, the focus needs to expand.

While we're here, I'm still wondering what the overall preference is among the city's residents. Cuts, or saving services? I get the feeling that the overwhelming feeling is cuts, but then you hear groups of folks talking about preserving the library, or preserving public safety (where's the folks trying to save the pool at Coolidge Park, by the way?). What if all those little groups got together? Would their combined voices (and mutual but competing interests) come close to the folks who are perfectly OK with the cuts? Is this even a discussion at this point?

Certainly, the city can't save all of the services in danger, but how deep is the incentive for folks to demand some of them be saved? Or is the level of frustration with government and taxes so deep that they don't care, they just want the cuts? It's kind of an important question going forward that the city is going to have to figure out as it moves forward.