Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone (The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.) There's an old saying that you can't put a dollar sign on quality of life, but we do it every 12 months in municipal government when we put together our budget for the upcoming fiscal year. While the budget may be a big swirl of numbers, it is also a statement of the values we hold dear in this community.

What programs will we advance? What projects take priority? What cuts will we make in order to preserve other services? We attach numbers to all of that, but our values guide those numbers.

And make no mistake about it, our fiscal year 2011 budget is as much a statement of values as anything we have put together in my nearly two decades of being an elected official in Somerville. The reality is Somerville, like every city and town in the Commonwealth, faces budget-busting health care costs at a time when state aid has dropped to its lowest level since 1985. During this next year, our health costs will equal the amount of state aid we receive. If we fail to reverse that trend, our state aid will only cover a portion of our health costs in 2012 and beyond. It is the municipal government equivalent of being underwater on your mortgage, and it is a crisis facing every city and town in Massachusetts.

Where our values enter the picture is in how we manage the crisis. Some municipalities make across-the-board cuts, giving little consideration to which services deserve priority and which services can be delivered more efficiently. We will not slash services. Instead we figure out how to preserve what we have and how to continue the positive momentum we have within the City of Somerville. Our approach is much more balanced, prudent and strategic.

Obviously, given budget-busting health care increases and critically low state aid, we have to make budgetary cuts. Yet we are not cutting services. You read that correctly, this budget contains no service cuts. We are not cutting teachers and cramming children into overfilled classrooms. We are not closing libraries or cutting back library hours. We are not cutting elderly services. We are not reducing our police force or diminishing our community policing efforts. We are not laying off firefighters. We are not abandoning our commitment to affordable housing. Meanwhile we are maintaining our commitments to creating playgrounds and open space. We are increasing our youth services. We will continue to have a well-maintained city.

Those services embody our values. They reflect the promises we make to one another to ensure that Somerville is a top flight community to live, work, play and go to school. In order to keep those promises, we have had to make difficult decisions requiring a certain amount of pain and sacrifice. We have reorganized many city departments and reduced our workforce as part of that effort. We have looked toward outsourcing in places where we can offer an equivalent or better service for a lower cost. We have done this realizing that real human beings are behind all those line items in the budget . This is not a process we undertake with relish. We recognize the human cost.

Yet it is the duty of this city to spend the taxpayers' dollars wisely. The sad truth is our budgetary situation necessitates we make cuts and there will be people behind any substantive cuts we make. Dipping into our reserves, restructuring our debt, identifying new fees and fines, and capturing indirect costs associated with our water and sewer accounts cannot entirely bridge the gap. We have reduced staff and lowered costs in the pursuit of greater efficiency. The alternative would be to find upwards of $2 million in cuts to our schools, public works or public safety. And we know from the surveys that we have conducted during the budget process that schools, public works and public safety are the services our residents value most.

It is easy to say you have values when times are easy. It is when times are tough that you demonstrate what your values truly are. So amid all this talk about budgets and numbers, what I hope the people of Somerville recognize is the effort we have taken to assert our values.