Residents of Clovis will receive telephone calls next month to gauge their interest in paying more for city services with a new sales tax measure.
The Clovis City Council heard from consultants Monday night who have assisted other communities in passing tax measures.
The earliest a measure could come before Clovis voters is March, in time for the next City Council election.
Council members said they were all in favor of adding funding for the city, but Mayor Bob Whalen said he hoped there was a way other than a sales tax on families struggling to pay for fuel and food.
He said he hoped the surveying effort would not be a marketing campaign for a sales tax.
Catherine Lew, president of The Lew Edwards Group, which will coordinate the telephone interviews, said her job will not be to endorse a tax measure.
"We have gone back to mayors and city councils and stopped projects ... when it looked like it would not pass," she said.
Other council members said they want residents to decide.
"If a sales tax is something they don't want to do, that's fine, but would they be comfortable knowing public safety will be rolled back?" said Council Member Nathan Magsig.
The city had a deficit of $4.3 million going into the new fiscal year that began July 1.
Deficits last year and this year have had a noticeable impact on police, said Vince Weibert of the Clovis Police Officers' Association.
Last year, he said, Clovis was supposed to have 120 officers and had 115. This year, the city is making do with 107 officers and was supposed to have 130 by next June, Weibert said.
The council has discussed a sales tax for about a year and assigned a citizens committee to give the council direction. The committee backed a quarter-cent sales tax, which would raise about $4 million annually. The committee wanted the sales tax to end in seven years with the funds used for public safety and some parks and roads projects.
An existing three-tenths-of-a-cent sales tax, known as Measure A, was approved by voters in 1999 and paid for a new police and fire administration building and a fire station. That tax will end Sept. 30.
When Measure A was approved, city officials believed it would take 15 years to pay it off, but the revenues collected paid for the new city buildings in about 8½ years.
As part of the survey, voters will be asked what they know about Measure A.
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