As the Aberdeen City Council reviews the budget and looks for savings, it might be tempted to look in the direction of some new funding for a city administrator. Since the city doesn’t have one now and doesn’t know what it’s missing, that might look like pretty low-hanging fruit.

A better idea is to think with a longer view about the benefits of having someone with operational authority over the day-to-day operation of the city, carrying out policy set by the council and mayor.

Money was in the budget for that position for part of this year, but it went unspent because the salary was rejected by more than one job candidate. Money is in the budget again for 2019. The base pay ranges from a little more than $110,000, to almost $134,000. That seems like a lot of money to us, but we don’t doubt that it’s market rate these days.

There will be those who say we wouldn’t need a city administrator if the mayor didn’t have a full-time job and could be at City Hall more. That’s just not true; Erik Larson has done a good job of juggling his elected position with his paid position. But the demands of a city of this size, especially one that is trying to dig itself out of a hole, are such that it needs a full-time administrator.

A good administrator should be able to recoup part of his or her salary for the city by finding efficiencies and positioning Aberdeen for grants and other outside funding.

The city has a lot of balls in the air right now. Among the issues at hand include a need to support the downtown business community, homelessness, the unsightly condition of some downtown buildings, melding some services with Hoquiam, the Gateway Center project, the traffic mess at the east entrance to town, the possibility of a lot more trains coming through here hauling potash to a proposed facility in Hoquiam, the Northshore Levee Project, the Morck Hotel, what to do with the homeless camp property the city just purchased, what to do with the old Armory property and how to replace the Aberdeen Museum of History.

That’s a lot.

How those challenges are dealt with will make a big difference to the quality of life in Aberdeen.

Hiring someone to wrangle that list and represent the city is worth the investment, and keeping that position’s salary in the budget will pay off in the long run.