Cutting an already-bare bones budget by another 10-percent or so hardly seems an easy task, but that looks to be the job awaiting the mayor and city council members over the next year and a half as they prepare for what's shaping up to be a genuine municipal Armageddon in 2016.
Officials have been told they can anticipate a revenue loss of around $1.6 million for the city in 2016, primarily a result of the combination of a decline in total assessed valuation and the accompanying negative impact of the property-tax caps.
Even with the additional money the proposed increase in the Economic Development Income Tax rate would bring in, the city would still have to cut about $1 million from the 2016 budget.
And as the mayor said, the city can't reduce spending by that much without a subsequent reduction in the level of services it provides.
Residents, and especially business leaders, need to start asking city officials just what services are to be eliminated or pared back — so they can decide whether Vincennes will remain a place in which they wish to live or do business.
Will the city continue to progress, or will it, through a lack of financial resources, regress?
Vincennes is not alone in facing this question.
Cities throughout the state are grappling with the same problem, some facing even larger anticipated budget deficits.
Is the eventual emasculation of municipal government really what lawmakers sought when they so overwhelmingly approved the tax caps back in 2008?
Is that what voters wanted when they went to the polls in such numbers to cast their ballots in favor of writing those caps into the state constitution?
We understand the philosophical notion of "limited government," but we also know that the world (and, mirabile dictu, even Indiana) has changed greatly in the last 200 years.
Further changes are possible over the course of the next 12 months.
Hopefully the economic recovery will not only continue its slow climb out of the 2008 recession but actually pick up steam, with higher wages helping to increase local income-tax revenues.
And perhaps the governor will decide against a run for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, actually take an interest in his home state, and agree to share some of those billions he's been accumulating in the state treasury to showcase his fiscally-conservative bona fides.
In 2016, Indiana will celebrate the bicentennial of its statehood. If we go along as we're currently trending, her cities and towns will by then be in full slide backwards, replete with trash-filled dirt streets, burned-out downtown buildings, and overgrown, abandoned parks.
Won't that be a state of affairs worthy of celebration!