Sometime this month, the city manager (if she hasn’t already) will announce that the Dallas budget is in a bit of trouble, and that cuts are in order.

I do not take great joy in saying this. It’s not even especially noteworthy that I’m writing this a month before it appears in the magazine. Anyone who has been paying attention since the city budget was passed in August knew this moment was inevitable, given the recession, the credit crisis and the financial meltdown on Wall Street. We’ve been tracking the potential budget deficit on our blog since the fall, and we’ve even set up a handy chart so you can track sales collections and see how far below projections they’ve been. Through the first two months of the fiscal year, they’re down 3.4 percent, and were down 13.5 percent in October.

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Is the natural assumption, then, after all of this, that no one downtown was paying attention?

Hardly. The manager, Mayor Park Cities, and the council were paying attention, but their priorities are much different than ours — and much different than they should be. They’re concerned with what the mayor calls his vision for Dallas: “But if we’re not willing to invest in the city, then in essence, we’re throwing up the white flag. The greatest risk is that we don’t move forward, that we don’t invest, that we accept mediocrity.” Which is all well and good, but what they should be concerned about is whether we can afford that vision.

It’s one thing to focus on the big-ticket items that the mayor figures are vital to the city’s future, like the $500 million convention center hotel and the $2 billion Trinity River project, when times are good and tax collections are bountiful. It’s another to do it today, when even Dallas is suffering from the recession. This year’s budget, wrote city manager Mary Suhm in August, was predicated on continued “economic development and growth, especially in expanded downtown neighborhoods and Southern Dallas business parks. Commercial growth and new construction continue to drive the increasing value of the City’s tax base.”

I think we can assume those assumptions are no longer relevant. Yes, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be as bad here as it already is elsewhere, where Philadelphia is closing libraries and Atlanta is considering cutting some ambulance service. But we’re not going to escape unscathed, either. The drop in sales tax collections isn’t the only sign. The unemployment rate in the Dallas metro area was 5.7 percent in November 2008, up from 4.0 percent in October 2007. Meanwhile, the number of people receiving food stamps in Dallas County increased 31 percent from December 2007 to December 2008, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

But the mayor and council plunge ahead, oblivious to what’s going on around them. They remind me of General Custer, who figured being outnumbered three-to-one would make his victory even more glorious. Instead, it just made his defeat more inevitable.

So why are the mayor and council priorities so out of whack with reality?

• Politics. The council is up for re-election in the spring, which means that the last thing most of them want to do is tell their constituents all is not well. They might get blamed (which they deserve, of course, but that’s another story).

• The council-manager form of government. The city manager serves at the pleasure of the council. And how does the manager pleasure the council? By telling it all is well, so it can pass along the same news to their constituents. The manager gives the council political cover, and the council repays the manager by not holding he or she especially accountable.

• That peculiarly Dallas mindset that sees the city as different from the rest of the world. The people in charge truly believe that bad things can’t happen here, and are always surprised when they do.

This time, when they do, maybe the people in charge will finally get the message.