HALLOWELL — A four-monthslong budget saga appears to be coming to a close with $190,000 in spending cuts presented by City Manager Gary Lamb during Monday’s City Council meeting.

Gary Lamb Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal file

The new funding cuts will roll over to next year’s budget to reduce potential tax increases — a strategy the City Council landed on after it spent two months illegally attempting to reverse its approval of the current budget, which raised property taxes by about 20%.

Councilors, in a narrow vote, allowed Lamb to take control of the cuts during a meeting last week. Ward 1 Councilor and Finance Committee Chair Kate Dufour argued the City Council should stop “micromanaging” the budgeting process and allow city staff to find relevant cuts — aiming for a 7%-10% cut in each city department.

But most of the $191,636 in cuts presented by Lamb during Monday’s meeting came from unused salaries and benefits and were not equally spread out by department.

Nearly a third of the spending freeze, a total of $59,000, was cut from the city’s health insurance line alone, simply because of unused benefits from unfilled positions. Lamb also cut the Social Security line by $10,000, retirement match by $9,000 and dental insurance by $3,600.

Several police officer positions have been vacant in the six months since the budget was passed, leading Lamb to cut more than $40,000 from department salaries that will not be used in this fiscal year.

John McNaughton, a resident who has consistently urged the City Council to cut more from the budget to help taxpayers as much as possible, said during Monday’s meeting that much of the funding Lamb chose to freeze would have been surplus funds, anyway. He urged councilors to cut an additional $150,000 on top of Lamb’s freeze.

“So, $191,000 sounds like, ‘Wow, that was a real aggressive move across all departments,’ but a large portion of that was simply because there wasn’t staffing in a department that didn’t use the dollars,” McNaughton said. “Just so everyone realizes, it’s great when we’re working on it, but there could be extra that we feel like we could get.”

No council action was taken on the cuts: Lamb was given full purview over any spending freezes earlier this month.