For most of the past year, two voices have been emerging from Bainbridge City Hall: one calmly saying, “Everything’s just fine, thank you”; the other cried wolf, as in, “We’re going broke…our shrinking revenue isn’t keeping up with expenditures.”

There were strong indicators that bad news was at least approaching the city’s door, but the disparity between the two sides continued even as the City Council approved a 2009 budget. As it has turned out, the budget’s bottomline wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

The two opinions began to merge, however, when on Dec. 23 Finance Director Elray Konkelplaced a memo on the city’s Web site saying that its November revenue was $500,000 less than had been anticipated.

This bolt arrived a week after the council’s approval of the budget, which had been deemed sustainable by the city administration. But when November’s numbers were counted, the amount of panic being experienced by Konkel, Administrator Mark Dombroski and their staffs must have been palapable.

Ten days into January, the question was: So what about December’s take? Not yet, was the city’s response. A special meeting on the issue was scheduled for the middle of January, but was then rescheduled for Jan. 28. As it turned out, December sucked, too, and the deficit for the two months added up to $1.12 million.

Obviously, the city’s finances have been teetering for many months, but it appears that few wanted to face reality. Dombroski and Konkel, perhaps, but they kept their mouths shut until it became clear that their doubts had become truths.

We learned Wednesday night, during Dombroski’s thorough and carefully worded summary of the city’s sad state of affairs that an immediate reduction of $2.3 million as needed to plug the leak – including the cutting of six city employes. And it could get worse, depending on the accuracy of the assumptions on which the new numbers were based.

Fortunately, this time there was only one voice emerging from City Hall: Let’s work together and solve this problem.