text: "While the city, with its property tax revenue rising, has steadily increased its spending on parks operations in recent years, virtually all of the added money has gone toward increased pay and bene­fits for employees and to rising materials costs, city budget figures show.
  ~
  The city’s parks staff has remained flat at 79 full-time-­equivalent workers in recent years, while the total labor cost of those workers has increased 21 percent — $8.2 million from $6.8 million — since 2013-14, according to the figures."
  
  This pencils out to something like a 7% increase in costs per annum. In other words, unsustainable. I support parks as much as anyone, but the city needs to get a handle on costs before asking for more tax dollars.