Other divisions, like the county clerk's office, are also scaling back their requests in hopes that they will not be cut entirely from the mayor's proposed budget.

County Clerk Sherrie Swensen yanked $228,400 from her initial $5.5 million request after Corroon asked her to cut back. The hefty request is due mostly to a push to meet federal voting requirements that have left the county needing 100 additional electronic voting machines and personnel to man the new equipment.

Swensen said she cut back the number of poll workers for the primary election to lower her funding requests. But Swensen said she needs Corroon to agree to all of her remaining requests if the county wants to be able to meet federal requirements and run fair elections.

To do that, she said she needs more machines, more personnel and more technical training for poll workers. A trial run of the Diebold electronic voting equipment last week showed that getting elections to run smoothly with new equipment is going to require almost one-on-one interaction with voters, she said.

"In order to make this operate the way it should with this new equipment, I think this is very critical," Swensen said. "We had no idea that this would be as expensive as it is. I realize they have budget constraints, so we really started going over everything for any potential room to do with less."

Increasing health-care costs are also putting a dent in the 2006 budget, with a projected 15 percent bump across the county, council fiscal analyst Darrin Casper said. Although Casper had not seen any concrete proposals from Corroon as of Monday, he said the mayor is actively trying to scale back budgets and match revenues to expenditures as closely as possible.

"The main goal is getting a grip and trying to bring each of those major funds into alignment," said Casper, who added that initial requests would have drawn down reserves far too low. "That can't stand. We have to change that."

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