Padding around his house in a Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt, while his wife, Renee, still slept, Mr. Saffo would flit from worry to worry. With the city facing a shortfall equal to 8 percent of its revenues, the mayor wondered whether this would be the year the Council had to close a fire station, and compromise emergency response times. Would the city have to withhold merit raises from employees for the third year in a row, and further demoralize valued workers? Could it keep the streets navigable by continuing to patch potholes rather than repaving?

“It gnaws on you day and night,” Mr. Saffo, a centrist Democrat, said. “Are the policy decisions we’re making helping rather than hurting? Are we doing everything we possibly can? You do stay up and think about this stuff.”

As a diversion, the mayor would surf North Carolina news sites in search of fiscal doom in other cities, “just to make sure I’m not the only one going through this.” But Wilmington always pulled him back.

He was running for re-election in November and he badly wanted to beef up the city’s police presence downtown, where a rowdy weekend bar scene had turned increasingly violent. But was it feasible to raise taxes to do so when voters had trended conservative (and angry) in local elections last year?

The mayor and the Council, who serve part-time, were still smarting from last year’s decision to raise property taxes to make debt payments on projects they had approved when coffers were flush. If a tax increase was out of the question, would they need to raid the city’s reserves? That, Mr. Saffo knew, could threaten Wilmington’s capacity to rebuild if a hurricane smacked the Carolina coast this summer.

“We’ve had to make some pretty tough choices,” Mr. Saffo said one afternoon in his City Hall office. “We actually do make decisions where people can feel it and see it and touch it, and if they don’t like it they let you know about it.”

He pinched his brow with his thumb and forefinger.

“How you play this tough hand will determine how your community is going to come out of this,” he said. “You can hunker down and not invest in anything and then have to play catch-up, or you can continue to invest and find ways to improve so we can catch that economic wave up.”