By RUSS OLIVO

Chances are, you're not on a first-name basis with the guy who picks up your household trash.

But if you were planning on improving your relationship with the solid waste guy, now might be a good time: Under Gov. Donald Carcieri's latest budget proposals your friendly neighborhood sanitation engineer may be soon be passing through a little less frequently than he does now.
Pawtucket Mayor James Doyle and other Blackstone Valley pols began considering rollbacks in public services once considered unthinkable yesterday as Carcieri proposed another round of draconian cuts in local aid, designed to close a projected state deficit of $400 million in the fiscal year beginning July 1.
Among the questions Doyle and the leaders of already cash-crunched communities like Pawtucket, Woonsocket and Cumberland are facing: How much more can they shrink services to make up for the latest blow from the Statehouse?
“It means we're going to have to start looking in areas we had hoped we would not have to go,” said Doyle “Everything's on the table right now.”
Already before the General Assembly is Carcieri's supplemental budget proposal to strip cities and towns of automobile excise tax reimbursements for the last two quarters of the current fiscal year.
Now Carcieri wants state lawmakers to make that giveback permanent through fiscal 2011 to save $130 million, a one-two revenue punch that would rob Pawtucket of some $14.7 million over the next 17 months, including $4.9 million  promised during the current fiscal year.
The city has already cut dozens of staffers and won wage concessions from labor. Taxpayers are tapped out. For Pawtucket and communities in similar straits, avoiding bankruptcy may be a matter of getting small – or smaller, says Doyle.
The city's recreation department, which has already been decimated by personnel cuts, could be abolished, he said. The city could pick up the trash every other week instead of weekly. City Hall could go to a four-day work week. The public library could be open less often or closed.
Woonsocket Mayor Leo T. Fontaine was out sick yesterday, but Finance Director Thomas Bruce was sounding themes similar to those of Doyle in response to the latest state budget news. Bruce was using phrases like “a new landscape” and “a paradigm shift” to explain how the cuts, if they come to pass, could reshape the way Woonsocket and other communities deliver services.
“I'm very alarmed,” said Bruce. “How local government provides services is going to drastically change.”
Woonsocket stands to lose a mid-year $2.7 million this fiscal cycle followed by a $5.4 million cut in 2011 if Carcieri's excise tax proposals become law, said Bruce.
The 2011 cut represents some 11.6 percent of the entire $46 million the city spends to run the municipal side of government. Bruce said that would be an  “enormous” loss the city could not absorb without reducing services, raising taxes, or both.
Woonsocket came into the fiscal year dragging a cumulative budget deficit of about $6.7 million from the prior year and had its bond rating downgraded to Baa2, a couple of notches above junk status. The city projects ending the current fiscal year perhaps another $1 million in the hole – a void additional cutbacks in state aid stand to exacerbate.
“That's a grim outlook, in my opinion,” Bruce said.
Carcieri's proposal has ratcheted up the rhetorical backlash from municipal leaders to a new level of rancor. Doyle says the governor's cuts guarantee the state budget will be balanced on the backs of working-class individuals who are already at the breaking point, a policy decision he calls “criminal.” Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee lambastes Carcieri for putting forth a “camouflage budget” designed for optimal deflection of the political fallout.
“The governor is not being honest with the public,” says McKee. “If he's removing dollars going into communities to support municipal services, schools, police, one of two things are going to happen. Or three. Services will decline, taxes will increase, or communities are going to go bankrupt. It's a very destructive strategy when he removes these funds and he's not being honest.”
Carcieri has recommended that state lawmakers lift the $6,000 exemption on automobile assessments so that cities and towns are free to issue tax bills on those assets. But McKee says Carcieri's failure to couple the rollback of excise tax reimbursements with the elimination of the exemption is one of the most deceptive aspects of his budget proposal.
Unless the two are tied together, said McKee, cities and towns do not have the ability to tax the exempt portion of a vehicle's value. Thus, local leaders will be forced to find other ways to compensate, reinforcing the perception that the state is blameless for the fiscal problems that citizens will inherit, either in the form of reduced services or new taxes.
McKee says the governor's proposals will worsen liquidity problems many communities are facing. Some, including Cumberland, may respond by withholding state shares of  conveyance taxes, recording fees and other locally raised revenue the state normally takes a piece of. It's not punitive, says McKee, just a safeguard to maintain cash flow.
“There is a train coming down the tracks that's just going to hit our communities,” said McKee. “It's running a thousand miles and hour and the governor is camouflaging that. If the supplemental budget and this 2011 budget get passed, that's just going to run over these communities.”