Ooopsies

Far be it for me to come down too hard on people for, like, typos and stuff.  It's fine to make mistakes. I really just am interested in why these happened. 

The council must adopt a budget for 2019 by Dec. 1. The Landrieu administration normally presented its proposed budget in October, which gave the council nearly two months to deliberate. This year, the Cantrell administration submitted its proposal on Nov. 1 — the legal deadline.

The city’s website uploaded a new version of the proposal on Thursday, which city officials say corrects the mistakes of the prior iteration.

The changes aren’t minor. For example, in the first version of the budget, non-recurring revenue from 2017 was listed at $10 million. In the new version, the number was increased to about $50 million. In the first version, general fund revenues were predicted to increase 13.5% from 2018 to 2019. In the new version, that rise was reduced to 1.8%.

“What this did was put us behind the magic eight ball when looking at the year-over-year changes,” said Councilman Joseph Giarrusso.

In an email to the council, Cantrell’s top deputy, Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montano, said that only numbers from 2017 and 2018 were changed. The forecasts for 2019 were not affected, he said.

The email doesn't really clarify anything about how the errors happened. In the Q&A, Montano talks about "clerical errors" which sounds like staff made a boo boo. And, again, boo boos are fine. It's better if you can explain how they happened, though. What happened? Did somebody's cat walk all over the spreadsheet one night? Did we lose our concentration and hit the wrong button because "Baby Shark" was stuck in our head?  Tell us a story that humanizes the error and we will happily move on.  Also, as the article points out at the top of that block quote, maybe try and get the thing out on time so people can look this stuff over. Anyway, no big deal.  This time.