Months of work and hours of public hearings ended with a near unanimous vote Tuesday night on a 2010 city budget that in the final analysis was just slightly bigger than the $420.6 million spending plan submitted by Mayor Dan Sullivan in early October.

The 10-1 vote -- Assemblyman Matt Claman was the lone no -- came after three hours of tinkering in mostly incremental amounts. The Assembly was working off a substitute budget proposal put together by members Patrick Flynn and Jennifer Johnston. Their plan added a total of about $600,000 to Sullivan's budget and took away about $115,000 in extra revenues the mayor expected to get from higher bus fares.

Other Assembly members through the evening put forward a series of generally smaller additions. Two of the larger ones -- proposals by Claman to add training academies for police officers (at $1.7 million) and firefighters (at about $1 million) -- failed to win much support and didn't make the final budget.

Libraries did a little better. Flynn and Johnston had proposed adding about $75,000 to the library budget to buy books. Assemblywoman Sheila Selkregg pushed a successful amendment adding another $50,000 to that, with an eye to helping out branch libraries, particularly in Eagle River and Girdwood, where one sick staffer can close the whole operation.

Bus service also benefited. The Assembly added about $75,000 to restore People Mover service on two rider-intensive holidays next spring -- for Presidents' Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The Johnston/Flynn substitute budget totaled about $421.2 million. Sullivan said later he was comfortable with that level of spending because it fell within guidelines he had set out earlier for increases. He was non-committal on the other additions voted across Tuesday night they total somewhere around $300,000 -- and said he may decide to veto some of those. But a decision on that won't come for at least a few days, Sullivan said.

"It's good not to make quick judgments, especially on budgets," he said.

Claman, who served as acting mayor for the first six months of this year, said he voted against the eventual budget compromise because he disagrees with Sullivan's plan to save $12 million in tax dollars this year by selling some new bonds and using the money to pay off existing bond debt, and because the new budget doesn't include hiring new police and firefighters to replace those expected to retire next year.

Assemblyman Dan Coffey noted that the city has added 90 police officers to the force over the last five years and also grown the fire department. That should create at least some manpower cushion, Coffey said.

Coffey said he thinks the city needs to restrict spending now after several years of increasing budgets and increasing property taxes. "We had a period of excess, and (now) we are having a period of re-trenchment," he said.

Johnston echoed that idea. "We need to have some (fiscal) restraints in the next couple of years ... so we can go back to having a budget that can start growing in a good way," she said.

"It's not perfect," Flynn said of the compromise he and Johnston put together. "I did my best."