WHITTIER >> The City Council has tentatively agreed to about $800,000 in cuts that would nearly balance what was a $55.7 million budget for fiscal 2014-15.

The budget won’t be actually approved until June.

Little information was available on the specifics of about $500,000 of the reductions that City Manager Jeff Collier said would affect city employees.

Collier did say the city won’t be asking for pay cuts but little else.

“I really can’t say much,” Collier said about proposed labor cost reductions.

Without the proposed cuts, the fiscal 2014-15 budget would have been about $1 million out of balance.

The budget for fiscal 2013-14 is projected to have a deficit of about $1.2 million.

The City Council on Tuesday in a nearly two-hour closed session meeting discussed Collier’s proposal to eliminate $651,819 in employee costs. The council pared that number down to about $500,000. It also approved about $300,000 of a proposed $381,560 cuts in nonemployee expenses.

Rod Hill, city controller, said the city still must meet and confer with the two employee associations before the labor cuts can be made, and that’s why those were kept secret.

Those meetings won’t be held until after the council meets again — a meeting is scheduled for Tuesday — to further refine the numbers and get further direction, Collier said.

Collier said he doesn’t think the cuts are “radical.”

“We’re going to continue to provide services to our residents,” he said. “Many of the reductions won’t be visible.”

While developments are planned for some of the sites, they tend to be residential or non-sales tax producing businesses, he said.

Most of the $300,000 in nonlabor reductions will come from eliminating areas in the city budget that typically go unspent, Collier said.

However, the council did agree to close the Senior Center on Sundays for a savings of $3,200 and eliminate an after-school program at Longfellow Elementary School for a savings of $15,000.

The council refused to cut $5,338 in money and services the city provides to the Rio Hondo Symphony. Instead, council members voted to cut $338 from the Symphony.

Collier said some of the city’s problems are due to the loss of seven auto dealerships on Whittier Boulevard during the late 2000s.

Sales tax — projected for $8.4 million for fiscal 2014-15 — still remains below the $10 million annually received when all of the auto dealerships were operating.

“We’ll never replace those dollars,” Collier said.

Councilman Owen Newcomer opposed making most of the cuts proposed by Collier but received little support from the rest of the council.

“It’s unconscionable that we want to cut and not use any of our rainy-day reserve,” Newcomer said. “Since the recession started, we have added $5 million to our reserves.”

The city has about $15 million in reserves. Newcomer proposed using $750,000 with budget cuts making up the rest.

“If we use $750,000 (in reserves) in each of the next 15 years, we’d have a good enough reserve,” he said.

But Councilman Bob Henderson said the city faces even larger deficits in the future because the nearly $1.9 million it now receives by leasing water rights will go away after fiscal 2015-16 and may not be available in the future.

As a result, city staff projects deficits of nearly $5 million in the following three years, Henderson said.

“Instead of spending the reserve, we need to hold it for a time when (retirement costs go up) and the possibility of water sales goes away,” he said. “It’s prudent management at this point to be somewhat fiscally conservative.”