The city budget comes up for approval tonight at Common Council with the elephant in the room being the pension issue........Will the city be able to defer its ten million dollar pension payment this year? Before that question arose, both Deputy Mayor Stephen Chase and Councillor Patty Higgins were pressing for a tax reduction. Acting City Manager Pat Woods has said if the city was forced to make that ten million dollar pension payment, the tax rate would rise by 18 cents or the budget would have to be drastically cut by the same amount in order to keep the tax rate stable. He called both of those scenarios unrealistic.