In addition to asking residents to accept higher taxes to help close a budget gap, Mayor Nutter will ask elected officials today to give up two of their perks.

He is expected to forward to City Council a bill that would disqualify Council members and other elected officials from participating in the controversial DROP pension program.

At the same time, the mayor has begun pleading with those officeholders in phone calls to return their city-issued vehicles.

Doing away with both perks would not save a tremendous amount of money, but residents complaining about about how the city spends money singled them out.

"I have to take it on at some point in time," Nutter said in an interview yesterday.

As the most daunting fiscal crisis of a generation swirls around him, Mayor Nutter will present a budget next week to a City Council whose support for him remains stubbornly uncertain.

On March 19, Nutter will ask Council members and their constituents to accept deep service cuts, onerous tax increases, or both - requests that will severely stress the relationship between the mayor and Council.

"It's going to be testy," said Councilman Darrell L. Clarke, who as majority whip is responsible for rounding up votes in a body where allegiances are still evolving. "It may challenge that relationship."

Missed manners: PLCB is spending $173,000 to coach workers on how to talk to customers.

Liquor store clerks across Pennsylvania are about to get a crash course in manners.

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board is spending more than $173,000 to try to improve the manners of workers at its more than 600 state stores. The board wants to make sure clerks are saying ''hello,'' ''thank you'' and ''come again'' to customers coming in for wine and liquor.

''This is part of the renaissance of the Liquor Control Board,'' Joe Conti, the PLCB's chief executive, told The Philadelphia Inquirer for a story published Sunday. ''The point is to become a specialty retailer and not be known as a government monopoly.''

The board has hired a Pittsburgh consulting firm, Solutions 21, to help coach store managers on how to get their staff to be good sales reps.

The managers will then go into stores and instruct clerks on things like how to greet a customer, how to read a customer's cues and where to stand.

To a generation of Philadelphians, they are known simply as "the free clinics" - city-run health centers where one can get care ranging from pediatrics to dentistry to OB-GYN.

But they may not be free any more.

Even as public-health officials consider massive disruptions in health care - among the options on Mayor Nutter's desk is closing the city nursing home and up to three of the clinics - one change is increasingly likely: Patients without insurance will face fees on a sliding scale at all the centers.

The fees won't be a lot - tentatively a $5 to $20 co-payment per visit - but no one knows the impact on people who are struggling.

"Some will be happy to pay," said Cheryl Bettigole, clinical director of Health Center No. 10, in the Northeast, "but there's no question that it's going to be hard. It's a working-poor population. People are proud. If they can't pay, they might not come."

Even as the state struggles with a growing budget deficit, senators yesterday questioned why the Rendell administration is proposing to cut at least $20 million to hospitals that disproportionately serve Medicaid patients as well as the uninsured poor.

At a budget hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee, both Democratic and Republican senators expressed concerns about Gov. Rendell's proposal to slash payments to those hospitals by roughly 15 percent in his proposed $29 billion budget for 2009-10.