In an attempt to halt the 2010 budget's slide into deficit, Gov. M. Jodi Rell released a $337 million package of proposed budget cuts Tuesday afternoon, slashing funding to programs for the poor and sick, local governments and state agencies.

Rell's deficit-mitigation package, the fifth stop-gap budget package the governor has been forced to issue since June 2008, brings the weeks of recent warnings from budget analysts into stark relief.

Among Rell's proposals:

• A 3 percent cut to aid for municipalities, which could lead to property-tax increases and cutbacks in local government services.

• Deep cuts to relatively small-scale public health programs such as needle exchanges, Alzheimer's support and AIDS services.

• Cancellation of a projected 0.5 percent cut in the state sales tax, which would save $130 million in revenue.

• Freezing intake for safety net programs, including State-Administered General Assistance and Rell's own Charter Oak Health Plan.

• Sweeping more than $52 million from dedicated state accounts, including the Citizens Election Fund, the Stem Cell Research Fund once championed by Rell, and from various accounts for the Department of Environmental Protection.

• Cutting after-school and school-based health programs for children, and broad reductions in non-entitlement spending on everything from teenage pregnancy prevention to services for the disabled and elderly.

"It is deeply painful even to suggest these cuts - and yet they are unquestionably necessary," Rell said in a written statement released with her budget plan. "State government cannot afford, literally or figuratively, to allow this budget - which has only been in effect a few short months - to grow any further out of balance."

Many of Rell's proposals will require legislative approval, and she said she would call lawmakers back to the Capitol to enact cuts soon. A Senate aide said they anticipated reconvening what has come to seem like an endless budget debate sometime in mid-December.

Democratic leaders did not immediately respond to the substance of Rell's proposed cuts, saying they would spend the coming days reviewing her plans with their colleagues.

"The governor and her administration took about a month to compile this plan; it will take us several days to examine its merits and disadvantages," Senate President Donald E. Williams Jr., D-Brooklyn, said in a statement, adding that Democrats "look forward to working with the governor" to bring the state's $37.6 billion budget back into balance.

"Obviously the effects of the global recession continue to be felt here in Connecticut just as they are being felt across the entire United States," Williams' statement concluded. "Thirty-five other states are currently attempting to close new deficits in their existing budgets."

But unlike in some other states, many potential remedies are off-limits to Connecticut's legislators now. In recent interviews with reporters and editors at newspapers around the state, Rell's budget chief, Robert L. Genuario, pressed the case that severe budget cuts would be necessary as the state faces still-plummeting revenues. And, since lawmakers and Rell agreed to borrow more than $1 billion to help balance the current budget, the option of borrowing the state's way out of the new shortfall will not be available.

Also not an available option: laying off state workers. The governor's deal with state employee unions secured give-backs from organized labor, in exchange for a no-layoff provision for full- and half-time state workers through the end of fiscal 2011.

Legislators must "act now," said Rep. Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, the House minority leader and a likely candidate for the Republican nomination to replace Rell in 2010. Rell is not seeking re-election.

"We cannot afford the inaction of the last year that led to the fiscal crisis in the first place," Cafero said. "We all knew that the Democratic budget the majority party passed in September was not real and out of balance as soon as it became law.

"We are left with fewer options and even less time to start Connecticut back on a path toward fiscal stability,'' he added.

One of the most likely points of conflict in the governor's proposal is the cut in municipal aid, which is projected to save the state $84 million. The Republican governor and Democratic lawmakers alike have tried to avoid reductions to local governments since the state's fiscal crisis began, wary of the political fallout from municipal officials, as well as the warnings that cutting aid for local schools and infrastructure would just be passed on to property taxpayers in the end.

On Tuesday, representatives from the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities warned as much, calling on lawmakers to reject the aid cuts as "bad public policy."

"Cutting more state aid in mid-year wouldn't be a savings," said Kevin T. Maloney, the conference's director of public relations, in an e-mail message. "It would merely shift more of the state budget deficit onto local governments and local property taxpayers."

Maloney also noted that cities and towns have seen overall state aid reduced by $50 million already, including cuts for special education expenses, the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan Fund, and in payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) for state-owned property and private colleges and hospitals.

Anticipating resistance to the town aid cut, Rell said she would assemble a panel of legislators and six municipal officials to propose immediate changes in the law to provide "mandate relief" for local governments, relaxing current state requirements to save towns money. The same panel, a spokesman for Rell's budget office said, will also be charged with identifying whether specific municipal grants are targeted for reduction, or whether the state's aid will be cut across the board.

"CCM appreciates the Governor's support for mandates relief," Maloney said, "but that can't save towns dollar-for-dollar from a significant additional cut in state aid, especially in the middle of a fiscal year."

Meanwhile, advocates for the needy said Rell's proposed cuts would prove devastating to those most in need of state-funded services in times of recession.

For $113,000 in savings, Rell proposes slashing 25 percent of the budget for the five needle and syringe exchange programs in the state, a move that advocates of the program said will disproportionately hinder a service that operates efficiently - and also helps serve as a "gateway" for those most in need of medical care to get help before they are seriously ill.

"For such a small program and small amount of money in the grand scheme of things, cutting a full quarter of those funds is a lot," said Shawn Lang, director of public policy for the Connecticut AIDS Resource Coalition.

"The governor's recommended cuts are unnecessary, and would have a disastrous effect on some well-established and much-needed programs, many of which have struggled for years with underfunding," said Ellen Andrews, executive director of the Connecticut Health Policy Project. "The vast majority of the cuts would affect people who can least afford them - the elderly, disabled, people with HIV/AIDS, and the poor."

Instead of whacking funding for such programs, Andrews said, the administration should redouble efforts to negotiate lower rates with the HMOs who cover clients in the state HUSKY program, where auditors said they found roughly $50 million in overpayment by the state.

"We really can do better," Andrews said.