Across the country, elected officials in privileged communities are caught between a fervor to hold down taxes and a fervor to maintain good schools, well-paved streets, an ample police force, generous library hours and other premium public services that set a community like Bronxville apart. These officials have by and large decided to cut costs as unobtrusively as possible.

The main cuts have been in personnel — school staff, police officers, public works employees, city hall workers, librarians — a total of 35 in Bronxville. The cuts are mostly through attrition, although sometimes there are layoffs. And rarely, in affluent towns, are so many employees cut that the reduction shows up in fewer garbage collections (twice a week is the standard), or in slower response time to 911 calls or a delay in snow clearing.

Most family incomes in Bronxville, about 15 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, are in the six and seven figures, ranking the village among the wealthiest enclaves in America. But even an additional $100 to $200 tacked on, in a village where the typical homeowner already pays $43,000 in annual property taxes, has met enough resistance to make town officials think twice.

Some residents argue that the town should be more businesslike, cutting other costs to offset the outlay for smaller classes. Peter P. Pulkkinen is one. A 40-year-old investment banker, he and his wife, Sarah, moved here in 2004 from the Upper East Side and their two oldest children are now in the first and third grades. He wants small classes for them. But rather than raise taxes, he would restrict teacher compensation— particularly their benefits.

Displaying a sheaf of charts and projections that he and a friend prepared for a school board meeting, Mr. Pulkkinen said in an interview that if property taxes continued to rise in Bronxville at roughly the trajectory of the last decade, they would double by 2020 — and by 46 percent in the unlikely event the “austerity budgets” of the last two years continued through the decade. “I think it is a false paradigm to have to choose between radically diminished services or exponentially higher taxes,” he said, “without first addressing the structural issue of teacher compensation.”

So far, he argued, Dr. Quattrone and the school board have not done so. Instead, they have chosen “soft targets.” One hour a week of Spanish instruction to grade-school students, for example, was eliminated last year. Mr. Pulkkinen instead would attack “structural” expenses like tenure, the accumulation of unused sick days and the rising amount the school board pays for pensions and health insurance.

The cost of health insurance and pensions for teachers and other school employees is $6 million, or nearly 14 percent of the $43 million budget, up from $2.1 million in 2000-1, or 9 percent of that budget. The pension portion alone — a mandatory payment to the New York State pension fund — is projected to be $3 million in the coming school year, or 7 percent of the proposed school budget. Teachers and other village employees, nearly all of them unionized, pay only a small amount of this cost. Property tax revenue covers almost the entire outlay, and this at a moment when the pension will have risen by nearly 25 percent in the three years through June, according to the superintendent’s office.

That increase — and the prospect of bigger ones to come — played a role in the school board’s decision to lay off all 17 custodians last year. Janitorial services were outsourced, eliminating the future pension cost burden.

“We would be abdicating our responsibility,” Mr. Pulkkinen said, approving of the decision to outsource janitorial services, “if we failed to leave behind a stable, solvent and sustainable framework for the future.”

Rising Taxes

The $43,000 property tax levied by the village on a typical Bronxville home is up 34 percent in the last five years, although the increase was negligible in the last two years as the mayor, the village trustees and school board members responded to their constituents’ concerns.

“I don’t think we have seen an antitax uprising, but holding down property taxes is certainly spoken about a lot,” said Dr. James D. Hudson, the 54-year-old school board president, a dentist with two children in the high school. He is often buttonholed on the subject, he said, at cocktail and dinner parties or while shopping.

“Their concern is that their taxes will continue to spiral up if we continue to do business as usual,” said Dr. Hudson. “If you will, we are looking to develop a lean, mean education machine.”

Lean and mean were rarely invoked in the past as a goal for the wealthiest suburbs. Now that talk is commonplace. In Bronxville, 86 percent of the typical $43,000 property tax levied by the village goes to the school system, particularly to educate the growing grade school population. For the parents of these children — moving here in many cases from New York City — $43,000 is less than they would spend to put two or three children in a private school.

Adding to the pressure, younger couples, including the Pulkkinens, are buying their homes from empty-nesters, who often sell to escape the rising tax burden. Mary C. Marvin, the mayor, says this exodus is accelerating.

In a village covering one square mile, with a static population of 6,400 people, the elderly once constituted nearly 20 percent, but that proportion is steadily dropping. Most important, these empty-nesters paid substantial property taxes without swelling the school population.

“You want the taxes to be something these older people can pay,” the mayor said, “because when they sell, they sell to families with children, and the children cost more to educate than the taxes their parents pay.”