Hartford - Municipal officials pleaded Wednesday for continued aid to cities and towns, arguing that preserving grants for local governments will help stave off punishing property tax increases and cuts in services.

But it took some prodding to get some of them to acknowledge what it will take to avoid those property tax increases - deeper cuts than have been yet contemplated in other areas of state spending and likely increases in the income tax.

Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy, a candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2010, joined a group of roughly 200 local officials from the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities to warn that cities and towns have already made steep cost reductions in their own budgets and would be badly damaged if legislators and Gov. M. Jodi Rell further reduce the funding on which they depend for everything from public schools to hiring police and firefighters.

And local officials of both parties said they would have to rely on any alternative to increasing the regressive property tax, a concession that some changes to state taxes on income and sales may be necessary in order to maintain the level of government their constituents demand.

"I don't have the luxury, like some of my colleagues here, to raise taxes and get re-elected," said Tim Stewart, a Republican and the mayor of New Britain, which has reduced its budget 6 percent this year. "If I raise leased a survey showing that roughly 71 percent of municipalities in the state would have to raise property taxes if Rell's budget plan were to become law, and nearly 88 percent believed they'd have to raise property taxes if state aid to towns fell 10-15 percent below Rell's proposed levels.

More than half said they would need layoffs to balance their town budgets under Rell's budget.

Raising property taxes as the state's impoverished cities grapple with huge rates of foreclosure would "pour gasoline on the fire," said New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr.

But someone will have to raise new revenue, the mayors said, in order to meet the organization's wish list of demands, including the full funding of existing grant programs - including some that would be reduced under the Democratic budget package introduced last week.

Rell immediately threatened to veto the Democrats' $38.2 billion package, which would raise more than $3 billion in taxes over the next two years, despite cutting deeper than Rell's $38.4 budget proposal.

If they are to avoid passing spending cuts down to the local level, some "revenue changes" are inevitable, city leaders said.

DeStefano endorsed the tax package passed out of the Finance Committee last week, and Malloy, choosing his words carefully, eventually acknowledged that "a more progressive system is going to have to be part of the answer."

That seemed clear to some local officials, too, like Montville Mayor Joe Jaskiewicz, a Democrat, who said such changes at the state level may be an unfortunate necessity if they are to avoid punishing town governments with reductions in aid for everything from public schools to paving budgets.

"In all honesty, what else can they do?" said Jaskiewicz, who will present his town's budget to the Town Council on Monday and who has been struggling to find savings. "That may be the only avenue, other than keep beating the local taxpayer up."