Cash-strapped municipal leaders gathered in Hartford on Monday to make a few proposals. As they stared into the chasm of Connecticut’s estimated $6 billion budget deficit in the next two years, one of them, Mayor Scott Slifka of West Hartford, stated the obvious: Asking for money is not a strategy. Not this year, anyway.

With much of the focus in Hartford on the state’s fiscal problems, the mayors and first selectmen wanted to remind everyone that the cities and towns are in deep trouble, too. Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch wanted to remind the governor and legislators that his city had to borrow $100 million in the last year just stay solvent. “Bridgeport is a couple of blizzards away from bankruptcy,” he said. Newtown’s fiscal problems are not that bad, but austerity is the watchword among local budgetmakers this year who do not want to follow the latest trend in public financing to its logical conclusion, where red is the new black.

Uncertain as to how much more austerity they can wring out of their own discretionary spending, municipalities are asking the legislature not for money, but for a new set of prerogatives that will allow them to ignore or delay existing state mandates that are unfunded or underfunded, including requirements that they store the possessions of evicted residential tenants, post meeting notices on town websites, and conduct in-school suspensions. They also want to defer revaluations to spare towns the cost of conducting them and property owners the cost of the often-higher rates of taxation that result. Along with a plan for greater regional cooperation, which we endorsed here last week, this makes sense. Regardless of the economic climate, the state has no business enacting policies it is not willing to pay for.

We take issue, however, with proposals that would give cities and towns the right to impose “local-option” taxes, which can take the form of hotel taxes, land value taxes, sales taxes, and even income taxes. (Local leaders are reluctant to ask the state for more money, but not the taxpayers?) The idea of paying for property tax relief with tax hikes elsewhere does not make sense on its face. It does, however, sustain a level of spending that helped get state and local governments into trouble in the first place. You do not have to be an Einstein to understand this simple Einstein dictum: “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.”

We know first-hand the struggle municipalities are facing in making ends meet in 2009. Putting together a budget that addresses the best interest of the town and its citizens will require creativity, efficiency, and greater productivity. This is not the year, however, to bypass those challenges and simply search for more revenues. As the man said, asking for money is not a strategy.