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In the fight over a gross receipts tax cut, the Albuquerque City Council and Mayor Martin Chavez are six months apart.

The mayor wants his proposed -cent cut to take effect Jan. 1, while a solid majority of councilors voted Monday to delay the start until July 1, 2008.

The mayor is promising a fight and a veto. He started his counterattack Monday, even before the council vote.

"No matter how much money you give government, it will take more," Chavez said at the hastily organized Civic Plaza news conference. The tax cut will "help the families of Albuquerque," he added.

City officials have estimated the cut would save the average household about $70 annually, costing the city about $18 million a year.

Chavez today promised to veto the council's plan.

The mayor's pitch makes little distinction between support for a delay and outright opposition to the tax cut.

Singling out Councilor and congressional candidate Martin Heinrich on Friday, for example, Chavez said: "If he's opposed to tax cuts, then he can justify that" in his campaign for the seat currently held by U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, an Albuquerque Republican.

He mentioned Councilors Don Harris, Brad Winter and Michael Cadigan in similar terms, and he repeated the talk at a news conference today.

"We can let them be accountable," Chavez said.

On the other side, councilors say the six-month delay will free up about $9 million that some on the council have agreed should go to Bernalillo County to help operate the Metropolitan Detention Center. Not chipping in for that, they argued Monday night, would be shirking an important governmental duty.

"We really want to make sure we're all safe," Harris said.

Council President Debbie O'Malley, meanwhile, took on the mayor.

"We are talking about approving a tax cut," she said. "We're just moving the date over six months."

The delayed cut won council approval 7-2, with Councilors Ken Sanchez and Craig Loy voting against.

Six votes is enough to override Chavez's promised veto.

Also Monday, the council signed off on a rewrite of the mayor's nearly $500 million annual operating budget. The document directs more money to libraries, police officer salaries and a paramedic unit at the expense of a proposed extreme sports park and a Downtown metro park.

Chavez today called the budget "pork-laced" and promised to use his line item veto power on some of the projects - the jail funding would be an obvious target.

But perhaps anticipating such criticism Monday night, Harris said the council's version was "far superior" to the mayor's.

"Our job is not to rubber-stamp whatever the mayor wants to do," he said.

The budget includes fee hikes for city golf courses, but only one third what the administration had proposed.

For example, if a current $3 fee was proposed to rise to $6, the fee will now rise to just $4.