BATON ROUGE — Discussion about deconsolidation among members of the Baton Rouge Metro Council has lingered across several recent meetings.

During Wednesday night's meeting, Councilman Cleve Dunn asked the finance department for a line-item breakdown of individual expenses for both the city and parish governments.

"We need to know what a solely Baton Rouge budget looks like. We need to know what a solely East Baton Rouge Parish budget looks like, and how does that affect services, how does that affect budgets and things of that nature," Dunn said.

City-Parish Finance Director Angie Savoy said producing those figures will not be easy.

"The complexity of this analysis and evaluation report is very daunting, as you mentioned, not only the revenue and expenditures, but then you have assets, liabilities, and legacy costs," Savoy said.

City officials said the review may require hiring an outside consultant and could take up to 18 months to present to the council.

"This is unprecedented. We in over 200 years of the city of Baton Rouge; we probably 40-50 years of this consolidated government. So it will be tough to untangle; I don't deny that, but we need to do it. There are a lot of tough things, but we need to do it. We need to do it for the taxpayers; we need to do it for residents because as we continue to see cities break away, again Baton Rouge is being left out of the conversation," Dunn said.

Several residents said they also want to explore what deconsolidation might mean for the area.

"I just want my area to look like all the other areas, so I am asking for you to take a serious look, not so much as maybe deconsolidation, but look at what's happening," one resident said.

The finance department is scheduled to present the council with next steps for producing the financial reports at the Nov. 10 Metropolitan Council meeting.