PROVIDENCE — Already bracing for a shortfall approaching $50 million, the city now faces a greater deficit for the next fiscal year now that the General Assembly is considering cutting $6 million in aid to the city under its proposed state budget.

Mayor David N. Cicilline says his administration will need to resubmit his plan for the fiscal year beginning July 1 if the General Assembly votes to end the $55-million general revenue-sharing program that Providence and other Rhode Island communities have enjoyed for two decades.

Cicilline has already submitted a plan that seeks no increase in the tax rate, but that budget had assumed that the city would get $6 million from the aid program, or the amount that it received this year.

“We were hoping that the Assembly would continue to recognize the importance of communities by sharing revenue that generates resources that contribute to the state,” said Cicilline. “Last year we sustained an unprecedented cut of 50 percent in general revenue sharing and we had assumed that it would stay at those same levels. I think it’s bad public policy when you don’t give anything back to the communities.”

Still Providence appears to have taken a gamble that few other communities were willing to make in assuming it would get anything at all from the state from the program.

“To have budgeted anything would have been completely imprudent,” said Robin Schutt, director of administration in Cranston, a city which assumed in its budget for the next year that it would lose its $2 million in revenue sharing.

“I’ve always said assume the worst and hope for the best,” said Providence Councilman John J. Igliozzi, who heads the council’s Finance Committee. “The legislature has given us every signal that they were going to start zeroing the local aid dollars so it should not have been a surprise to the administration.”

Council members said last week that the city needs to take the lead in fighting the Assembly to restore the revenue-sharing program. “This is a battle cry. We need to make a very strong stand,” said Councilman Luis A. Aponte.

“It’s a very easy decision for a Warwick legislator to take that money away from Providence, but we’re the community generating more money for the state than anyone else,” said Councilman Michael Solomon.

Cicilline said that to cover the additional shortfall, he’ll continue to press labor unions to agree to a number of proposed concessions in wages and benefits that he seeks to impose on all city workers.

“We’re making some progress with some of the unions, but we’re not there yet,” Cicilline said on Thursday, declining to elaborate.

Cicilline is also banking on the General Assembl’s passing legislation developed by his administration that would assess a “student impact fee” on private colleges in the state and obligate private colleges and hospitals to pay host communities a sum equal to as much as 25 percent of what the tax bill would be on their tax-exempt properties.

Those two bills, submitted, respectively, by House Majority Leader Gordon D. Fox and Rep. Thomas C. Slater, both Providence Democrats, are scheduled for a hearing before the House Finance Committee on Tuesday.

Cicilline is proposing a $623-million city budget for fiscal 2010 that would require $279 million from local property taxes. The plan would keep the residential tax rate at $23.70 per $1,000 of assessed valuation and the commercial rate at $28 per $1,000.

It includes a controversial set of cost-cutting measures that Cicilline intends to impose on all 5,300 city workers, from pension and health-care changes to wage adjustments such as a wage freeze and elimination of a paid holiday.

All told, the proposed package of concessions would save the city $25 million in the year that begins July 1.

The council’s Finance Committee began its public hearings on the mayor’s budget on June 1, with a briefing on city revenue projections by his director of administration, Richard I. Kerbel.

The committee held the first of its department-by-department hearings on Thursday, when it looked at the tax assessor and tax collector’s offices. The hearings will continue though mid-July, with the next ones scheduled for Monday night (parks, recreation, and public works) and Wednesday night (police, fire and communications).

The council must set a tax levy — the amount that will be raised by the property tax — by July 31.

pmarcelo@projo.com