The blame game has gone far enough.

Gloucester city councilors, who spent a good part of Wednesday night grandstanding on the city budget — playing to the crowd with easy applause lines by vowing to stand behind funding the Rose Baker Senior Center and Sawyer Free Library — have accused Mayor Carolyn Kirk of, well, grandstanding.

Kirk's recent move to eliminate the budgets for the Sawyer Free Library and the Rose Baker Senior Center to comply with a court order to request $685,000 more for the Fire Department was, in the words of Councilor Jason Grow, "a stunt." And there is certainly a context to that. In choosing which department budgets to cut to comply with a court-ordered mandate to "request" funding that amount of Fire Department overtime, Kirk clearly picked two budget lines that would touch off an alarmist reaction,

But councilors ought to spend some time looking in the mirror. They did the easy stuff Wednesday night, declaring that those institutions would be closed, "over my dead body" — drawing vigorous applause from library and senior center advocates. Yet they never got around to a viable means of deciding how to fund a true funding alternative to Kirk's proposal. That's because they ultimately will have to choose between the firefighters' union, and the city's seniors and library supporters — and they were having none of that Tuesday night.

Council President Bruce Tobey said, "It staggers my imagination that two public service organizations would be targeted."

Really? Why then, have councilors (and previous mayors) regularly targeted public safety departments or school sports when trying to get property tax overrides passed? Why not cut mid-level administrators? Why not take a harder line at the bargaining table, instead of agreeing to unaffordable pay and benefit packages and then later call them "fixed costs," as if they had nothing to do with them in the first place?

Perhaps there are less painful ways to deal with the situation. One of them ought to be obvious: The councilors could stand up to the firefighters' union, join the mayor in pushing for real reforms within that department, and convey the real bottom line in all of this. That's the fact that the city and its taxpayers simply have no more money to perpetuate the current contract, perhaps other city labor contracts as well, and other aspects of the status quo.

Tobey — who was mayor for most of the 1990s, when many of the city's current overly-generous contracts were spawned — has offered some funding alternatives. But all seem to pose problems of their own.

One would be to use a $300,000 reserve for unemployment payouts. But what will he suggest if the city needs that money for its intended purpose, especially if Gloucester's fiscal straits continue or worsen, as many expect?

Another would take $115,000 earmarked for hiring two new police officers, and matching a federal grant. But isn't this pitting one public safety department against another — the very thing Tobey and other councilors decried Tuesday night?

A third is to take $45,000 reserved to implement recommendations in the upcoming public safety audit. Yet that borders on the absurd. The city desperately needs to reform those departments; moving this money to pay for overtime would simply perpetuate the status quo and undercut the entire audit from the start.

One other option, suggested by Grow Tuesday night, would be to take the usual approach, and put up Proposition 2 1/2 property tax override. All we can say is, good luck with that. Does he sense a majority of residents are perfectly willing to cough up more of their hard-earned money to subsidize paying more overtime to firefighters already getting a pretty fair taxpayer-funded benefit package? We don't.

The mayor's hard-line stand in the wake of the court ruling has inflamed fears that the library and senior center may be shut down. That's unfortunate — and unduly alarmist, to say the least.

But some councilors continue to operate with the mentality that, if they just yell loudly enough and people applaud loudly enough, money will magically appear. That is not going to happen this year.

If they give money to the firefighters on overtime, that funding will indeed have to come from somewhere else — and even the library and senior center's funding is spared some other department, program or service will be heavily damaged.

Those are the "tough decisions" that councilors frequently say they were elected to make, but they didn't make any of them Wednesday night. Today, they must.