Durham's elected authorities are keeping city-county merger on the table, but putting off any more talk about it while they wrangle with their ever-tightening budgets.

"The priority has to be this budget," Mayor Bill Bell said during Tuesday's Joint City-County Committee meeting. Now, he said, is not the time to discuss merger given "the issues we have to deal with."

Both city and county governments face multi-million dollar shortfalls in projected revenue for the current fiscal year and are preparing 2009-10 budgets with anticipation that the national recession will continue.

At the committee's March meeting, City Councilman Howard Clement suggested merger as a way to save money. He repeated that claim Tuesday.

"Durham can't afford two governments," he said.

However, a task force that studied city-county consolidation for Durham in 2000 reported that such moves elsewhere have not shown cost savings or increased efficiency.

Durham has considered merger numerous times since the mid-1920s. Each time, the idea has been dismissed or defeated by public vote.

"We're just kidding ourselves here," said council member Eugene Brown.

"This merger car has become an Edsel."

The committee did agree that any impetus toward merger should come from citizens rather than from elected officials.

Clement, and other merger advocates such as state Rep. Paul Luebke of Durham, have said merger would be easy because the city of Durham is the county's only municipality.

In fact, though, as County Attorney Chuck Kitchen pointed out Tuesday, more than 2,600 citizens of Chapel Hill and 1,122 citizens of Raleigh live inside Durham County, while 49 citizens of the City of Durham live in Orange County. The Town of Morrisville also has territory in Durham County.