A few years back, someone at a budget meeting I was covering (these things bleed together in the memory after a while, so I don’t remember who or where) said that as a rule, you could expect municipal budgets to go up between three and five percent every year.
Sometimes it would be a little more, he said, and sometimes it would be a little less, but plan on that sort of annual increase and you’ll usually be in the ballpark and it will always even out over a few years.
That roughly matches what I’ve seen in several towns during the last decade, so I was expecting something in that range when I walked into Mayor Louras’s office Monday and asked him how much the city budget was going up.
He was nice enough to show me the numbers before he started in with the mockery.