The $3.9 million in spending cuts endorsed this week by the Ventura City Council brings the city a big step closer to living within its fiscal means, but the budget wrangling is far from over and likely to intensify.

While the approved cuts help bridge an estimated $4.3 million fiscal gap in the 2008-09 budget to begin July 1, the council held off on five additional recommended cuts amounting to more than $300,000.

If those programs are preserved, as Councilman Ed Summers urged, something else — deeper cuts to another city service, the loss of a staff position, a new fee — has to emerge.

"I think we need to find other creative ways to save them," Summers said in an interview Tuesday. "These are important programs to some of our core objectives."

The five items on the chopping block are $83,000 in funding for the Ventura Visitors and Convention Bureau, $40,000 in cultural arts grants, $81,400 for nonmandatory police training, $60,000 for a nonsworn police employee to supervise the city's three police storefronts, and $36,000 in extra downtown police foot patrols.

The council is expected to resume the debate at its May 29 meeting and wants city staff members in the meantime to explore alternatives, said Summers, who suggested further reductions in city marketing and outreach and its glossy recreation guide.

"We still have some hard decisions ahead of us," Councilman Carl Morehouse said. "If you feed those (five items), something else has to starve. And I am not really sure where those cuts come from."

As is the case in cities across the state, Ventura's budget picture has soured because of falling home values and sagging sales tax receipts, among other things.

The $3.9 million in cuts adopted Monday range from park maintenance to less reliance on paid consultants. Also eliminated are water testing in the Ventura Keys, five police cadets and neighborhood traffic and Neighborhood Watch programs. A handful of vacant positions may be cut, but layoffs are not anticipated.

The five programs in limbo are all "extremely sensitive topics," Morehouse said, because they involve tourism and the city's desires to live up to its motto as "California's New Arts City" and have a top-notch police force.

For the Ventura Visitors and Convention Bureau, City Manager Rick Cole offered a compromise Monday night — a cut closer to $61,000 or $65,000.

The city's 10 percent bed tax collected on hotel and motel visitors continues to be a bright spot, showing modest gains in a sagging economy. Proponents of the visitors bureau said the cut would hurt the drive to make Ventura a tourist destination.

Cole said the bureau, like the city, could tighten its belt. "We believe the bureau should be part of the same scrutiny as our city departments," Cole said.

Rob Edwards, director of the nonprofit Downtown Ventura Organization, opposed reducing police foot patrols Friday and Saturday nights. He offered to get volunteers to take over some downtown cleanup work to free money for the patrols. It was also suggested that the Ventura City Corps, a new group of local teen volunteers, could pitch in downtown.

Josh Addison, founder of the Bell Arts Factory on Ventura Avenue, said the west side police storefront is critical. He said the office, now in a commercial strip near Olive Drive, could be relocated at virtually no city cost into office space provided by Catholic Charities and maintained by volunteers.

The $40,000 cut to cultural grants would hurt small arts groups that depend on the money to stay afloat, Summers said. "Some of these grants are the only means to put arts programs in our schools," Summers said.