The August 11 Peoria City Council meeting promises to be a long, long meeting. The council spent an hour and a half Tuesday night brainstorming ideas for plugging the projected $10 million budget deficit. City staff will take those ideas and run the numbers on them (and in some cases, check the legality of them), then bring them back on August 11 for a policy session where council members will discuss them in detail.

Here is the list of ideas as compiled by the Journal Star:

New tax and fee ideas

• 2 percent tax on package liquor
• “Carry out” tax on restaurants, retail establishments, distributors or other businesses that generate wrappers, bottles and other products that turn into litter
• “Bed tax” on not-for-profit entities such as Bradley University and local hospitals
• Business license fee
• Additional tax to use city parking decks
• Arrest fee
• Fire service protection districts
• 5 percent water utility tax
• Storm water utility tax
• Fee assessed on pet owners
• 2 cent per gallon motor fuel tax
• Eliminating $6 a month garbage tax and rolling it into the property tax

These were in addition to the suggestions made by staff in this report, which includes wage freezes, voluntary separation, revenue adjustments (cutting funding to ArtsPartners, the public library, and other organizations), and revenue increases (e.g., eliminating free land waste pickup).

Councilman Gary Sandberg also suggested that, if the council is going to consider cutting funding to the library, they should also consider cutting funding to the Peoria Civic Center by the same percentage. He also asked staff to bring back a report on how much downtown parking decks would need to charge to break even (i.e., eliminate parking subsidies).

He also hinted at a more radical suggestion: eliminate the city’s police department and turn that function over to the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office. Sandberg points out that county law enforcement officers’ salaries are one-third less than Peoria police officers’. After the meeting, he added that we could put half the savings in salaries toward plugging the budget deficit, and use the other half of the savings to hire more police officers. In effect, we could help plug the deficit and increase police protection at the same time.

I asked Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard what he thought about Sandberg’s proposal. He said that it wasn’t an apples-to-apples comparison to compare city officers to county officers. Instead, when comparing salaries, the council should compare city officers in Peoria to city officers in other similar-sized cities. He said that there are differences between city and county law enforcement, but didn’t elaborate on what those differences are.