Truth in City Budgeting Needed

City officials continue to try to justify the out-of-control growth of the city budget by claiming our population growth requires greater capital investments to meet future service needs.  Yet, while the city's population has increased by 23 percent over the last four years, the budget has increased 60 percent.

Let us break that down into actual numbers:

    The Georgetown population in 2010 was 47,995. It was 59,102 in 2014. That is an increase of 11,107 people in four years which is a 23 percent increase. These are the latest U.S. Census Bureau numbers.

    The budget in 2012 was $178.3M.  It is proposed to be $284.7M in 2016.  This is a $106.4M increase--a 60 percent increase--in just four years.

So this growth clearly is NOT a one-year bump in the budget.  A significant unsustainable trend has been established.

Looking at the second level of the budget, it can be seen that $73,175,500 is in the budget for capital improvements.  Of that amount, $39,503,000 is new debt for 2016.  This new debt is a combination of voter approved General Obligation Bonds($24.7M), non-voter approved Certificates of Obligation($4.998M) and Utility Revenue Bonds($9.805M)  The taxpayer pays for General Obligation and Certificates of Obligation debt, and rate-payers pay the utility debt.  The property tax payer and the rate-payer are usually the same people, though not entirely.

To show this is a long-term problem, let us look at the City's debt:

     Examining the growth of the debt from 2005 to 2015, the latest figures available, the debt has grown from $72.7M to $185.9M.  That equates to almost a 10 percent annual growth rate in the debt over the past 10 years.

     Using the latest population numbers the city was home to 38,348 in 2005 and 59,102 in 2014.  The annual growth rate of the population over those years was 4.9 percent.

Thus, the argument that the city budget has to grow at a high rate to accommodate the population growth does not stand up to scrutiny. The principal element in the budget driving budget growth are the capital improvements--which are funded by debt. Debt has been growing twice as fast as population for the last 10 years! Simple math proves this divergence is unsustainable.