Rochester used a one-time, $15 million dollop of state aid to reduce its $40 million deficit this year.

The mayor of Syracuse has asked a law firm to draft a memo about the possibility of municipal bankruptcy.

In Yonkers, project deficits over the next four years will total over half a billion dollars. That’s billion with a B.

While the state’s financial situation has stabilized in the past two years, municipalities hurt by the 2008 recession have been limping from fiscal year to fiscal year, worried that they’ll stumble without some sort of aid.

Officials at the state and local levels say many governments outside of New York City are at or near a tipping point — between eliminating services such as garbage collection or imposing financial control boards, like the ones already in place in Buffalo and Nassau County.

Each city and county has its own set of circumstances, but many fiscal experts point to larger forces confronting the state’s mayors and county executives.

“This is not a problem of bad management,” said Richard Brodsky, a former state assemblyman who’s now a fellow at Demos, a progressive think tank. “There used to be a manufacturing base with factories, and they would pay taxes. The property tax base that the cities rely on simply can’t fund the level of services that they’ve set up — schools, police, fire — that people expect and deserve.”….

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