Mike Rundle says it’s time to stop being so cautious.

Every year, he said, Lawrence city government takes in more cash than it projects in its budget. And every year, the city spends less than it expected. The result is millions of dollars in extra money that gets rolled into the next year’s budget.

Rundle, a Lawrence city commissioner, said it’s time to start budgeting with the extra money and reduced expenditures in mind. Otherwise, taxpayers will bear the burden of the city’s conservative fiscal estimates.

“I don’t want us to take unreasonable risks,” Rundle said in a memorandum sent Friday to colleagues.

“However, I think it may be unreasonable to raise taxes if we can expect to bring in added revenue or continue as we have in the past to carry unexpended funds forward at or near the rate we have in past budget cycles,” he wrote.

Other city officials were skeptical of the proposal.

“While that was true in the 1990s,” Mayor David Dunfield said of the extra money, “that’s probably less true in the current situation.”

According to Rundle’s analysis, the city took in an average 10 percent more in general fund revenues — property and sales taxes, mainly — than budgeted between 1998 and 2002. During the same time, the city underspent its general fund budget by more than 4 percent every year.

As a result, the city had at least 18 percent of its general fund budget left over at the end of each fiscal year. But during that time, officials never budgeted with the expectation of more than 4.4 percent of carryover funds.

¢ Memo from Mike Rundle about city budget¢ Stories from the City in Crisis budget series

That’s fine for most years, Rundle said.

“This year is different,” he said.

Now, he said, that money could be used to avoid a projected 3.4-mill increase in city property taxes, Rundle said.

“In our effort to keep the mill levy increase down could we adjust our projections of income and expenditures?” he asked in the memorandum.

City Manager Mike Wildgen said his staff would research the issue. But with $1.38 million lost in state aid and city sales tax revenues failing to increase, officials shouldn’t expect to have as much leftover money as in recent years.

“We are getting less revenue than we expected in 2003,” Assistant City Manager Dave Corliss said.

Indeed, Rundle’s analysis determined that the gap between real income and projected income was at its smallest in 2002; at less than $1 million, it was just 2 percent more than what was projected.

Rundle conceded that revenues were faltering. But there still might be cost-savings on the expenditure side, he said.

“There’s probably areas, even if small ones, where we can piece together differences,” Rundle said.

Commissioners next discuss the 2004 budget at 10 a.m. Wednesday in City Hall, Sixth and Massachusetts streets.