The $135 million budget that will likely be adopted Tuesday night by the Walnut Creek City Council looks much the same as the draft budget proposed to city leaders in May.

It will include fewer staffers, program cuts and fee increases, all to close a deficit that started at $2.1 million but was made larger by the addition of police and IT staffing.

City leaders readily admit it will not address the millions in unfunded needs for roads and maintenance for capital facilities. They also acknowledge that once this budget is adopted, there will still be a lot of work to do.

"Clearly, there is millions of dollars of needs that we are going to need to figure out how to address in the future," said City Manager Ken Nordhoff at the June 5 meeting.

The needs include everything from a complete rebuild of the city pools to maintaining city streets. A report by the city's Blue Ribbon Task Force last year said $50 million is needed over the next 10 years both for new capital facilities and to maintain existing ones.

More than $8.1 million is set to be spent over the next

To help deal with those unmet needs, the council is expect to adopt Tuesday along with the budget a new policy requiring that one-time money from things such as sale of property or development agreements will go to IT, capital and facilities improvement needs.

Scores of swimmers turned out at the last City Council meeting to protest a pool closure and at the same time lamented the terrible shape the pools are in. If the city had better facilities, they said, it wouldn't cost so much to operate them. The City Council bagged the idea of closing Clarke Swim Center on Sundays seven months out of the year.

But cuts likely to go through include closing the business license, development services and community development counters at City Hall one day a week; keeping emergency reserves to 5 percent of the budget rather than 10 percent; shifting employees into different jobs and cutting back on the city's recreation guide.

To balance the budget and get "greater cost recovery," fees on everything from field rentals to the cost of appealing an administrative decision to the City Council are going up -- in some cases by a lot.

Councilman Gary Skrel pointed out recently that the city is down 51 staff positions since the $119 million 2006-08 budget, but the budget for the next two years is $16 million larger. Part of that is because costs keep rising, said Assistant City Manager Lorie Tinfow.

Skrel has been vocal over the past few years about the cost of employees, specifically their pensions. During these budget talks, he asked whether public services can contract out for more work than already planned. Several temporary and seasonal parks employees, along with the city arborist, will lose their jobs and that work will be contracted out. A traffic and street maintenance position will also be frozen in that department.

Whether the city will save money by contracting out work is not a guarantee, said a public services worker who fears for his job and so asked not to be identified. Losing positions means more work for employees who are left.

"You have to pick and choose your battles of what is going to be maintained on a regular basis out there," he said.

Two years ago, when the city closed a $20 million shortfall, the department took huge hits, he said.

The employee is frustrated that there seems to be a perception that employees are making a lot of money, especially when it comes to retirement. He argued that employees will receive a pension, but that Walnut Creek is one of the few cities in the area that offers no medical coverage after retirement.

On average, traffic, street and park maintenance workers earn around $60,000 a year and landscape maintenance workers $54,000 annually, according to 2011 salary information obtained by Bay Area News Group.

"We are one of the lowest paid, with some of the lowest benefits, and we are expected to take more and more hits again," the employee said. "It's really disconcerting. In public services, you are not here for the big bucks, you are here for the long haul."

Contact Elisabeth Nardi at 925-952-2617. Follow her at Twitter.com/enardi10.