Memo to Steve Kozachik: Congratulations on your election to the City Council. Remember that adage, "Beware what you wish for, because you just might get it?"

Now that you've unseated Democratic incumbent Nina Trasoff for the Ward 6 seat, you may be surprised by the magnitude and complexity of your new responsibilities — and by the meagerness of your new powers.

You and Mayor Bob Walkup will be the sole Republicans on the City Council. Democratic incumbent Karin Uhlich held onto her narrow lead over her Republican challenger on Friday.

Unless you set aside the aggressive, partisan tone that characterized your campaign for the City Council, you may find you are unable to bring about the kind of changes you promised as a candidate. The hard realities of the city's budgetary and other problems won't bend easily to your will.

You will need to learn to work with the Democratic members to find consensus, to search for compromise and build coalitions. We were glad to see in a story Friday by the Star's Rhonda Bodfield that you were planning to meet one on one with other council members to establish rapport. This is an important first step on a long road.

Your support of Proposition 200, the so-called Public Safety First initiative, was ill-advised and irresponsible. We opposed the amendment to the city Charter, which was unfunded but would have required the city to spend $156 million over five years to beef up police and fire staffing.

The voters crushed the measure last week, and you should be grateful, because the budgetary problems you will face on the council are already chilling enough.

Because Proposition 400, which would simply have allowed the city to continue to spend all the revenues it collects, has apparently drowned in the Prop. 200 undertow, you will be asked to decide how to reduce spending by as much as an additional $21 million next year — on top of an existing deficit that City Manager Mike Letcher has projected will be $46 million.

You have said that the long-term solution to the city's revenue problems is to "grow the pie," and we agree.

You will find that some of the council's decisions that you characterized as "sweetheart" deals during your campaign are not so black and white. In the clear light of your new responsibilities, you may even find yourself defending some of them because they will, in fact, help grow the city's revenue pie.

As we have said, we don't buy many claims that Republican candidates were making prior to the election about Democratic malfeasance. Many of the city's problems, from poor street maintenance to the loss of a minor-league baseball team and possibly spring training, were either brought on by the bad economy or by forces beyond the council's control.

You criticized the City Council for accepting the Rio Nuevo Multipurpose Facilities District board's decision to spend $15 million on a new entrance to the Convention Center in preparation for a convention hotel that might not happen.

We hope you will continue to question Rio Nuevo decisions and to challenge assumptions about its projects. Trasoff sometimes spoke of the planned hotel as if it were inevitable — but it's vital that the numbers support the project.

You must be willing to examine upcoming financial studies about the hotel's viability and about financing to pay for it with an open mind. If the numbers don't pencil out, you must bring other council members along with you in opposing further spending on the project.

We agree that an independent audit of Rio Nuevo spending and revenues is overdue. We will support your push to get one in the works with all deliberate haste.

We agree with you that a priority must be revising the city's land-use code. It is byzantine, inefficient and out of step with current development standards. As you have said, it is "absolutely an impediment" to the business community and must be changed.

We hope you will be a driver for reform of the code.

You must resist temptation to employ the technical and managerial expertise you use in your job — as the university's associate director of athletics for facilities and capital projects — to try to micromanage land-use-code reform or city departments. The city and the council need leadership, not management by elected officials.

Finally, though you campaigned for transparency in government, your campaign failed to reveal that you inquired about a job with Rio Nuevo earlier this year. For the record, that was not transparent behavior — and it is unacceptable.

We wish you well in your new position. Our hope is that you will be a voice for responsible fiscal management, genuine transparency and consensus building on the council.