No matter how you cut it, this year’s budget process is going to sting.

The city faces what Mayor Joseph Solomon has advertised as a $7.4 million deficit for the end of this fiscal year, which ends on June 30, and projects a budgetary shortfall as high as $18 million for FY2020, which begins July 1.

On the school side, even by cutting out every math interventionist at the elementary level, which we can be certain is not beneficial to our students’ sustained success in mathematics, and by cutting other things like teaching aides for early elementary school classrooms and, as usual, maintenance on buildings that crucially need it, at this point they are still looking at another astronomical ask of $8.5 million from the city – the same city that doesn’t have nearly enough money to keep itself afloat.

Add to this the projections made by former city councilman and school committee member Bob Cushman, who utilizing nothing other than the city’s own budget documents and expense trends has assessed a $78 million shortfall over the next five years – and that is assuming taxpayers pony up a maximum, 4 percent property tax increase each year.

At this point, we have to wonder how the city will be able to avoid financial disaster, like filing for bankruptcy as Central Falls did in 2011. How can a city so seemingly strapped for cash come up with such gaudy numbers out of nowhere, especially when Mayor Solomon has ruled out a waiver of the 4 percent cap on tax increases? We already know the city’s cash reserves cannot even come close to helping us weather this storm.

Unfortunately, the driving factors of these dire times appears to be what nobody wants to acknowledge – and that is, in the city’s case, how much we spend on retired city employee benefits and, in the school’s case, how much we spend on active employees.

Nobody wants to come out and say that people are overpaid or receive exorbitant benefits, but is that not readily apparent by simply looking at the numbers? How can a city function when 43 percent of its new revenue since 2004 goes directly to paying for pension and healthcare plans for people (and their spouses) that are no longer actually working for the city? How can a city function when over a quarter of its budget must be dedicated to these expenses?

There is absolutely no denying that unlimited, lifetime healthcare for employees who work 30 years is a generous benefit, let alone that care extending to their spouse. There is no denying that guaranteed 3 percent cost-of-living adjustments throughout the entirety of retired public safety workers’ pensions – and DPW workers get close to that as well – is a generous benefit.

There is also no denying that, when over 81 percent of your costs as a school department stems from active employee expenses and retirement benefits, there is something out of whack. Salaries alone account for about $100 million of the proposed $174 million FY2020 budget, and health benefits and pensions add another $43 million to that pie. The remaining 17 or so percent is what we have left to serve the nearly 9,000 kids in our schools.

It is not popular to say it, and politicians certainly may fear to do so given the amount of power currently wielded by unions in the state – look no further than the firefighter overtime bills and evergreen contract bill that have flown with no resistance through the Rhode Island House as evidence of this shifting dynamic – but the root of our financial crisis is based in our collective bargaining agreements.

People deserve to be paid well for the essential work that they do, and they deserve to have benefits that enable them and their loved ones to see a doctor when they fall ill. But the cold reality is that our city government, both in the executive branch and the legislative branch – who has never once joined together to deny a contract from proceeding forward despite having the authority to do so – has failed to properly account for the costs that these benefit packages would incur. Now, we are likely going to find out just how hard it will be to wrestle those benefits away from the people that, understandably, want to retain them.

There is no magic bullet that can slay this budgetary beast – it’s going to be a slugfest, and it’s going to get ugly. Hard questions will need to be asked, and honest answers will need to be provided. As anybody who must budget themselves stringently knows, what you want and what you deserve is not always what you can afford – and that’s just harsh reality.

At this point we can no longer talk about what people “deserve,” but only what the city of Warwick and its taxpayers can afford.