There's no doubt that the city of Lincoln desperately needs to come up with more money for its street construction and maintenance needs. Every year the problem grows worse.

Finding a way to boost funding for streets has been on the editorial board's agenda since we started presenting one three years ago. The cost of needed work in the city now exceeds $200 million.

But we're not ready to endorse Councilman Adam Hornung's proposal to designate additional new funding from telecommunication taxes strictly for street work.

Hornung's proposal seems unnecessarily restrictive. City officials would be prudent to keep their options open.

The recently enacted changes in the city's telecommunication tax could generate $600,000 or more in increased revenue for the city. Hornung believes the actual amount will be a million or more.

(As readers will recall, the editorial board opposed the changes on the grounds that they would be too costly to consumers and could hurt local businesses. The question of whether to earmark the new revenue, however, is a separate issue.)

Certainly street projects are a worthy use for the additional funding. But the city's budget is stretched too thin to put a "hands off!" sign on the new revenue for other uses.

As the mayor points out, the budget he has proposed for next year calls for $3.8 million in one-time funding. What will happen after that? If Hornung's proposal were in effect, the city could find itself slashing other important services that arguably might have a higher priority.

Councilman Jonathan Cook put it this way: "It would concern me if we were to put this money toward roads and, as a result, have to cut our libraries or our parks or even our police department."

In recent years, the city has tried a few new ideas for boosting road funding, but with limited success. For example, last year it persuaded the Legislature to allow tax revenue from "growth districts" to finance street projects.

Unfortunately, the city's efforts have created only minor improvements in funding.

Meanwhile, the condition of streets in the Capital City continues to deteriorate. City officials recently admitted that the spring epidemic of potholes was at least partially because of the city's failure to keep up with street maintenance -- filling cracks, etc.

But even though we think Hornung's proposal would rob city officials of needed financial flexibility to deal with revenue shortfalls that affect all city services, we're glad he's working on the backlog of street work.

And we're hopeful that the mayor's plan to create a task force soon for a "full-scale assault" on the street funding problem will lead to other creative proposals for the community to consider.