As they formulate a budget based on flat revenues for next year, Lawrence city commissioners may not have the luxury of considering staff reductions only as “a last resort.”

During special budget meetings, this week, commissioners met with the city manager and department heads to assess the city’s needs for the coming fiscal year. They acknowledged that the city was going to have to tighten its belt but said they hoped reductions could be accomplished without staff cuts.

It’s understandable that officials don’t want to add to the unemployment rolls during the current struggling economy, but any business or government entity seeking to streamline its operation and reduce costs has to be willing to put jobs on the table for discussion.

That discussion may be particularly apt for Lawrence city staff, because of the huge growth in city employment numbers in the last decade. In 1999, Lawrence had the full-time equivalent of 675 employees. The number of employees grew steadily to a peak of 829 in 2007. By this year, it had dropped to 810 employees but that still represents a 20 percent increase in the number of city employees in the last decade. Granted, the city’s population grew during that period, but not by 20 percent.

Those figures, combined with the current tight economic times, seem to invite commissioners to examine, rather than at least tentatively reject, the idea that the city should consider efficiencies that would allow it to operate with fewer employees. Closing the city’s Human Relations division and folding its duties into another department was one possibility suggested recently by the city manager. That step and other possibilities to streamline the city’s operations may deserve renewed consideration.

It now appears that the state won’t keep about $1 million in liquor tax revenue expected to be collected in the city this year, which means the city’s budget situation may not be as severe as some had feared. That’s no reason, however, to simply breathe a sigh of relief and go back to business as usual.

These are hard times for taxpayers as well as for city budgets. City officials should see these lean times as a challenge to take a hard look at how they are spending taxpayer dollars and see how the city might streamline its operation and increase efficiencies.