A busy weekend at City Hall for those of us who didn’t have to worry about electricity. The city’s hotel consultants released their report (all 225 pages of it), while we also got the latest bad news about the budget – how does laying off one out every five employees sound?

Wamre is out of town this week, so you’ll have to settle for a quick overview of the hotel report, which uses the word occupancy 173 times. Think they’re concerned about that? And you’d figure we could have gotten more for our money than the two-year-old unemployment statistics that the report quotes. Expect to see the first paying guests at the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012, assuming the economy picks up.

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What’s left to say about the budget, other than that the news keeps getting worse and worse? Branch libraries open just 23 hours a week, 311 service cut in half. The scary part about all this? We live in a low-tax, small-government city. It’s not like this is Manhattan or Los Angeles. How much is there to cut?