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City council voted Wednesday afternoon to pass numerous budget cuts that will impact all city residents.
It comes in an effort to close a $20 million budget shortfall.
The biggest of those cuts are 6 unpaid days off, or furloughs, for most of the city's 6,000 workers. Those are hours that equate to $4.2 million dollars. The rest of the money will come from reserve funds, grants, and a shifting of monies to make up for the imbalance.
Besides water, sewer, aviation and parking enforcement and workers who were spared the furloughs, every other worker will have to take the 6 days off before the end of 2008.
Wednesday's council session got testy at times before a 5 - 4 affirmative vote was cast approving the $20 million in cuts.
Many of those city workers impacted, including firefighters, were in attendance. Although their union president said he will direct his membership not to take the days off, saying the furlough decision was made without union approval.
Cincinnati police will now be shutting down their cruisers one hour a day to save gas in a cost savings move. Officers will be walking the beat instead.
City residents will also now have yard waste collection every other week instead of weekly.
Council says all of these cuts became necessary when the city's manager office discovered late in the process that projected income was not matching actual income.
One member of the council who voted against the cuts says she has been greatly disappointed by her colleagues in recent days.
Leslie Ghiz (r) of the Cincinnati City Council said, "Half the time, this council seems to be going in the right direction, and then they do stuff like this. I thought for sure when we heard the budget report from the city manager a few weeks ago that we were going to be serious, and we were really going to get serious about proposing, and cut everything we possibly could before we asked our workers to take a hit and that hasn't been...and i refuse to sign on to something that is business as usual."
One of the more heated debates Wednesday was between council members Cole and Bortz.
Bortz said the real reason members were not willing to make real cuts to try and balance the books is because this is an election year for council members.
Cole said members of council did not put forth a better solution, and as she said, they were part of the problem since they were not part of the solution.
Stay with 9News and WCPO.com for the latest on this story.
