County Executive Maggie Brooks is in a tough spot. If she loses the appeal on her sales-tax plan, she'll have to find some other way to solve the county's budget problems.

According to the Democrat and Chronicle, county officials are looking at "extremely bold" solutions. And Brooks has told this newspaper and the D&C that she would consider re-evaluating the Morin-Ryan agreement.

Morin-Ryan requires the county to share its sales-tax revenue with the City of Rochester, suburban towns, and suburban school districts. When it was adopted in 1985, it literally saved the city's neck.

Maybe Brooks is simply thinking about making small tweaks to Morin-Ryan. At worst, though, she could be thinking about dumping the agreement altogether, letting the county keep all of the sales tax. That might ease the county's budget problems, but it would transfer them to the other municipalities, which would have to raise taxes to make up for the loss.

It would cause quite a flack - needlessly. Brooks doesn't stand a bat's chance of changing Morin-Ryan. It's written into state law, so the State Legislature - including the heavily Democratic Assembly - would have to approve it. I'm can't figure out why she would even raise the idea.

What else could Brooks do? For one thing, she could expand her system of charge-backs. To help make ends meet this year, Brooks charged the city and towns some of the cost of their Monroe Community College students. In the past, county officials have considered doing the same thing with Safety Net - the state program for people who don't qualify for welfare.

The state and county share the cost of Safety Net, and in the past, county officials have talked about having the city and the towns pay for their own recipients. Since most of those recipients are city residents, the city would take the biggest hit.

That might be popular in the suburbs, and it might look tempting to Brooks, but it would be enormously divisive in this starkly divided community. Whether Brooks takes that path may be a good test of her leadership - and, by the way, of Mayor Bob Duffy's influence.

There is yet another option, of course, and that's taking the boldest step of all: moving toward some form of consolidation - of services and layers of government. It would take time to do that, so it wouldn't save money overnight. But that's the answer to Monroe's budget problems, long term. Whether we get started on it will be another test of Brooks' leadership.

Yet another war?

All this White House saber-rattling about Iran is making me nervous. And I hope that Democrats and Republicans in the Senate are paying more attention than they were when the Bush administration was laying the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq.

Nobody could argue that Iran isn't a serious concern, but there are good ways and bad ways to respond. The last thing the world needs is a war with Iran.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, though, to figure that Bush and Cheney want to take that step before they leave office. The question is whether they think they need anybody's approval first. They could insist that the attack is just part of the fight in Iraq. Their current argument, that Iran is helping Iraqi militants kill American soldiers, could be part of the set-up.

In a New Yorker article in October, Seymour Hersh warned that the administration was well advanced with plans for an attack on Iran. If you didn't read Hersh's piece, take a look at it. See also Esquire's March piece on Admiral William Fallon, who was resisting the Bush push for an attack on Iran - and who has been replaced as head of the US Central Command by David Petraeus. Then stay on your guard.