The city’s budget machine is rumbling back to life, and budget chief Mike Del Grande is eager to sharpen the blades. There are few signs, however, that the budget committee and council are as keen to cut.

Del Grande told the Police Services Board this week the service should freeze its $933.8 million budget, shrugging off warnings that doing so will mean officer layoffs. No study has pegged the correct level of policing, he countered.

The aggressive move was widely reported as the city’s position, but there are signs Del Grande was merely expressing his own opinion.

“None whatsoever,” Councillor Frank Di Giorgio said when asked how much input he and other budget committee members had into Del Grande’s presentation.

Di Giorgio, a political ally of Mayor Rob Ford and Del Grande, said he expects the budget committee to start setting general expectations for the 2013 operating and capital budgets when it meets next week.

In a non-binding letter to city staff last month, Ford asked for a three-year budget plan with a residential property tax increase of 1.75 per cent next year and freezes in 2014 and 2015.

That would mean repeats of the painful deliberations for 2012 that culminated in city staff layoffs, closing wading pools, scrapping a program to distribute Christmas gifts to the needy and deferring hiring of police officers and firefighters.

In fact, in figures released ahead of next week’s budget meeting, finance officials projected a 2.5 per cent tax hike and a 10-cent transit fare increase, which would generate an extra $88 million in revenue.

The city is also looking for $178 million in additional revenue, mostly in the form of extra taxes flowing into the city’s coffers from the building boom.

Di Giorgio said he does his best to meet the mayor’s objectives, but “a little bit of flexibility” will be needed for 2013 and he has trouble envisioning tax hikes below the rate of inflation in the years ahead.

Another budget committee member, centrist Councillor James Pasternak, applauds Del Grande for taking on the police, saying you can’t look at cutting social programs and ignore the enforcement part of the equation.

But he doesn’t foresee ongoing budget cuts, despite Ford’s zeal to slash spending before the 2014 civic election.

“I don’t think council really has the appetite for 0 per cent in 2014 and 2015,” he said. “I don’t think council has the stomach for the cuts that would be required to do that. Even 1.75 is a little tough. The chatter is more like 2.5 per cent, and that could be tough.”

Much of the ammunition for cuts last year came from city manager Joe Pennachetti’s initial projected shortfall of $774 million — a hair-raising figure clung to by the Ford administration even after it was effectively lowered by new revenue numbers.

The so-called opening pressure for 2013 is $465 million, according to city staff, made up of wage and services inflation and cash to replace one-time monies used to balance the 2012 budget.

The police service will stare down Del Grande and ask for a slight increase.

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The service needs an extra $1.8 million from the city to cover a wage settlement with senior officers and $100,000 from the city’s insurance fund, raising the 2012 net budget to $935.7 million from the previously approved $933.8 million.

Ford and his allies initially demanded that police in 2012 meet the same target of a 10 per cent spending reduction as other departments, but eventually relented and agreed to a modest increase of about $4.6 million.