Now that Lincoln Mayor Chris Beutler has presented his budget to the city council. It's their turn to decide what should stay and what should go.

Tuesday was day one of budget meetings with city department chairs discussing which parts of individual budgets are needed and which parts could be restructured.

City council members met with three departments Tuesday, including Public Works, Building and Safety as well as Parks and Recreation.

Council members say what could have been a rocky start to several weeks of budget meetings and hearings was overall very successful.

One day after Beutler presented his 2008-2009 proposed budget to the city council, members are now flipping the pages, making sure the proposal is what's best for capital city residents.

"We have a $1.5 million gap. Our choices are to either look at each individual department and find places where we can slide some money around and get the $1.5 million that way in cuts, or we have to look at some sort of revenue increase," said Doug Emery, Lincoln City Council member.

That process is not an easy one, involving several weeks of meetings and hearings as well as dealing with a couple different types of budgets.

"We really scrutinized the public works department today. We really went over some of their accounts in depth. We were concerned about the increases in the water and waste water rates, looking for efficiencies," said Robin Eschilman, Lincoln City Council member.

Public works is currently using the old budget system, which makes their budget process different from building and safety, whose budget is based on fees, and Parks and Recreation, who are now working on the new performance based budget system.

"We learned today, we could close a pool and save $37,000 a year. If you put a spray ground in there instead, you could run a spray ground for about $7,000 a year, but I really can't see us just closing a pool," Eschilman said.

That's only one of many tough decisions the council has to make as they try to balance the budget while having the community as a whole in mind.

"So many different people are interested in different things. Some are willing to pay a little bit of a higher fee to keep the thing that's important to them. There are other people that don't use those things at all," Eschilman said.

"You have to be careful that you have the pain of any cut spread equally across the community," Emery said.

Each department is asked by Beutler to present their individual budget to the council each year, after he has presented his proposed budget. The council then decides how the current year's budget compares to the last.

Council members will meet with four more departments Wednesday. Those departments are Lincoln Fire and Rescue, the Lincoln Police Department, the Health Department and Libraries.