Mayor Nutter's first budget and five-year financial plan were easily approved by a City Council committee yesterday, setting the stage for all-but-certain final passage May 22.

Compared to the later years of the Street administration, when budget negotiations were frequently fraught with conflict between Council and the mayor, Nutter's $4 billion budget was approved quickly and easily, well before the end-of-the-month deadline mandated by the City Charter.

Although the tax cuts included in the budget are not as big as Nutter had proposed, he largely got what he wanted with the deal, including significant new funding for public safety, Fairmount Park, and Community College of Philadelphia.

"I think we did about 99.9 percent of what we said we were going to do," Nutter told The Inquirer's editorial board yesterday.

City Council, which persuaded the administration to insert an additional $10 million in spending a year into the five-year plan, also seemed more than satisfied with the deal.

"It really is a new day. I think we acted the way people expect us to act: like mature adults who can talk and work together and get a budget that makes sense and moves the city forward," said Councilman James F. Kenney.

Council President Anna C. Verna praised Nutter's cooperation, saying the deal represented a fair compromise between his priorities and Council's wishes.

Once the deal gets final Council approval, the five-year plan that accompanies the budget will be reviewed by the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, which has oversight responsibility for the city's long-term fiscal future.

Uri Monson, PICA's acting executive director, said yesterday that Nutter's plan addressed several of his agency's long-held concerns about major threats to the city's financial health, such as the underfunded pension liability and overly optimistic projections of revenue from the real estate transfer tax.

"They recognized the holes, and they've made efforts to deal with many of them. Whether or not they've been fully addressed is what we have to look at," Monson said.

One notable feature of Nutter's first budget is its heavy reliance on the large budget surplus left him by Mayor John F. Street.

Nutter's 2009 budget will burn through $120 million of the $182 million Street left in the cupboard for his successor. By 2010, the city expects its fund balance will have dwindled to about $31 million, a level the city thinks it can maintain through the end of the five-year plan.

But that, Monson said, does not necessarily signal a flawed budget. The sluggish economy will likely do the most harm to the city in 2009 and 2010, while a recovery would help stabilize the city's finances in the latter half of the five-year plan, Monson said.

The deal Council approved yesterday also settled one of the few budget disputes between Nutter and Council this year: the fate of the working-poor wage-tax credit championed by the late Councilman David Cohen.

The credit was set to begin in 2013 until Nutter proposed eliminating it entirely. Council objected, and in the end Nutter agreed to restore the tax credit, so long as it didn't begin until 2014. The credit will also be considerably smaller than Cohen had intended.

Inquirer staff writer Marcia Gelbart contributed to this article.