Lansing’s property values have declined by $1.4 billion since the market peaked in 2007, and tax collections are coming in lower. After voters rejected a proposal to raise the tax rate this year, Mayor Bernero moved to make the first major cuts to the city’s police and fire departments: 44 police officers and 44 firefighters face layoffs at the end of the month if no deal is reached with the unions, and the city will lose two of its eight fire houses. “I’m providing 2011 services with a 2001 budget,” the mayor said, adding that even the high cost of gas is a strain.

Providence saw more than $3 billion of its property values evaporate after its last revaluation. Now the struggling city is raising its property tax rate, forcing homeowners to pay more taxes on homes that are worth less money. It is also laying off 78 of its 468 police officers at the end of this month if the union fails to make concessions, laying off teachers and closing six schools to save money. “We’re on a precipice,” its mayor, Angel Taveras, said in an interview here. “And we can go over it. I’m doing everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

In Atlanta, where property tax collections have fallen from $209.5 million in 2010 to an estimated $179 million in the coming fiscal year, Mayor Kasim Reed is pushing the City Council to take the extremely rare step this month of reducing the pensions of current employees. The pensions were sweetened several times over the last decade — always in election years, Mayor Reed noted — and are now underfinanced. “The money is not there,” he said in a phone interview.

And here in Baltimore, property values have been falling for the last two years, and are expected to continue. Because of complicated formulas that phase in the increase of property taxes when values rise, the city still expects to collect a little more this year than last year. But next year officials expect revenues to fall for the first time in recent history. The city has resorted to “rolling brownouts” that close three fire stations each day, furloughs that keep city workers home for several days each year and cuts to its pensions, among other things.

The news is not all grim. Some cities are beginning to restore some of the harshest cuts they made earlier in the downturn. San Diego is ending its rolling brownouts of fire stations. And Colorado Springs, which turned off a third of its streetlights last year to save money, has turned the lights back on.

But with the end of the stimulus, and with cuts to the federal Community Development Block Grants program worrying many mayors, some seemed to look at one of the conference’s newest members, Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who was President Obama’s chief of staff, as a potentially powerful ally.