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With an estimated $500 million more in state cuts to municipalities looming in mid-November, Rockville budget officials are bracing for another hit to city finances, but City Manager Scott Ullery said officials are not expecting the same kind of impact the city felt this summer.

The state cut 90 percent of the highway user revenues and police aid funds, or about $2.4 million, in August, forcing the City Council to rebalance the fiscal 2010 budget last month.

Ullery and Stacy Tate, budget and finance officer for Rockville, said county education funding will likely suffer the most cuts, and not municipalities as in the last round.

But that does not mean Rockville is out of danger.

"If county revenues are cut, that could trickle down," Tate said.

The Maryland Board of Public Works is expected to make $290 million in cuts on Nov. 18 and the Maryland General Assembly could make several hundred million more in cuts during the 427th legislative session starting in January.

Shaun Adamec, deputy press secretary for Gov. Martin O'Malley (D), confirmed it is the governor's intention to make a recommendation of approximately $300 million in cuts to the Board of Public Works on Nov. 17.

The county's tax duplication payment to Rockville for 2011 could be affected by state cuts, Tate said. The 2010 payment has already been made, she said.

After attending a Maryland Municipal League meeting in Cumberland two weeks ago, Ullery said news of the cuts was "sobering."

It prompted him to recommend last week that the City Council cut from the fiscal 2010 budget certain capital improvement projects that had previously only been delayed.

While he does not expect any further cuts in the current fiscal year to be as large as the $2.4 million the city recently reconciled, he said staff would follow a similar process of finding ways to trim.

"It the cuts were at that [$2.4 million] level, we'd look at the capital program and possible deferral or elimination of certain projects," he said. "We would still look at operating expenses, but there's not a lot of blood left in the turnip as far as operating expenses."

Beyond that, the City Council would have to consider trimming city services, he said.

Rockville is not on the brink of having to lay off employees, he said.

Tate said the city will not be caught off guard by additional cuts.

"We started looking at the operating budget after the first round [of $2.4 million in cuts]," she said. "We didn't want to be caught off guard so we tried to react pretty quickly."

Ullery said the Maryland Municipal League, a non-profit and non-partisan association of city and town governments, will make protecting municipalities its top priority in the upcoming legislative session by presenting information to legislators on the impacts of removing funding from local governments.

He added that in December the council will have to sit down with staff and go over the budget line by line to set its priorities.

After Ullery presented his recommendation of cutting renovations to the Pump House in East Rockville from the fiscal 2010 budget, residents strongly opposed the cuts and urged the City Council to substitute something else.

The council listened and voted to delay renovations to the Rockville Municipal Swim Center instead.

Ullery said he thought the City Council's actions were appropriate in that instance, but generally it is better to follow priorities set out ahead of time rather than make changes on an ad-hoc basis.

"Going forward we need to take a complete analytical and dispassionate look at everything we're doing in the city and what the mayor and council's priorities are," he said.