The Georgetown budget has been on a roller-coaster ride the last 10 years because of the collapse of the housing market and near financial collapse of the major US banks and the subsequent recession. The following chart shows the budget over the last 10 years.
Even with the non-linearity of the budget over time, it increased at a 8% annual rate. A more realistic picture of the budget growth can be observed over the last 4 years as the economy recovered. Here is that chart:
Whoa - look at that growth rate, 12.4% compounded annually. At that rate the budget doubles in 6 years! There will be many "excuses" put forward justifying this growth in the budget, including taking over Chisholm Trail water service, the Emergency Medical Service and more bond funded projects. These are not justifications for an increasing budget, each function and project has been deliberately and consciously added by the council knowing full-well that they would grow the budget.
Finally, let us look at the population growth rate. The census bureau just revised upward, the population numbers for Georgetown for the last 5 years. We will use those most recent population estimates to compute the growth rate.
Thus it is observed that the population is increasing at a 4.8% annual rate over the last 5 years. With inflation increasing at a 2.3% rate over the last 10 years or so, the budget should increase no more than population growth + inflation, which is 7.1%.
The City Council needs to seriously reduce the budget to a level consistent with population growth + inflation. That is likely not doable in a single year, but, that budget growth curve needs to be bent toward the sustainable goal of population growth + inflation.
Contact your councilperson and let them know that the budget growth needs to be reined-in.
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