By the Coral Gables Gazette editorial board

Last week, we asked Coral Gables to show its plan for the next budget: to explain, before adopting a spending plan that holds the tax rate flat, how the city would absorb the revenue it could lose if voters expand the state’s homestead exemption in November.

When officials discussed that question publicly Wednesday, the city did not give one answer. It gave three.

Deputy Finance Director Paula Rodriguez told commissioners the proposed exemption expansion would cost the city $5.7 million in fiscal 2028 and $11.4 million the year after. City Manager Peter Iglesias, describing the same threat later in the meeting, said the loss would be $5.7 million in 2028 and $5.7 million again in 2029, for a total of $11.4 million. Mayor Vince Lago, in his own remarks, said the estimate rose from $5.7 million in the first year to about $12 million in the second.

Three officials, discussing the single largest fiscal risk the city has identified, produced three different public descriptions of what that risk actually is.

To be fair to the city, the underlying budget document already contains the right number. The city’s own materials put the projected loss at $5.7 million in fiscal 2028 and $11.4 million in fiscal 2029 and beyond, matching what Rodriguez told commissioners.

This is a case of the city having one and failing to say it the same way twice in the same room.

That distinction matters, and so does the credit the city has otherwise earned.

The budget under discussion holds the millage rate flat for a 12th consecutive year, adds a single new position despite real increases in health care and personnel costs, and, according to Finance Director Diana Gomez, keeps the city’s pension plan on track to be fully funded within the next several years.

Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson told colleagues that state lawmakers had described Coral Gables as a model for restraint compared with municipalities that raised rates and spending together. None of that should be dismissed. By most measures available to it, the city has run a careful budget.

What Wednesday showed is that careful budgeting and careful communication are different.

Lago has proposed a blue-ribbon committee to study long-term spending reductions before the exemption’s impact arrives, an idea with real merit if it is given a genuine mandate rather than a symbolic one. But a committee is only as useful as the baseline it works from.

If the people appointed to find $11.4 million in flexibility, or to weigh which “nice to have” programs survive, cannot first agree with the city’s own staff on whether the number is $11.4 million, $12 million or something else entirely, the committee will spend its early meetings resolving a disagreement that should never have reached it.

The fix requires discipline in presenting the analysis the city has already done.

Before the commission votes on the proposed millage rate, and before it finalizes the blue-ribbon committee’s charge, the city manager’s office should issue a single, plainly worded statement of the projected impact, year by year, reconciled across every department that discusses it in public.

The statement should say what the city projects for fiscal 2027, fiscal 2028 and fiscal 2029; whether each figure is annual or cumulative; whether the loss is recurring; and what assumptions the estimate relies on.

That same statement should also keep separate three ideas the workshop at times blended together: holding the current tax rate flat, reducing the millage rate voluntarily, and absorbing a state-driven reduction in taxable revenue. Those are related questions, but they are not the same question, and residents can reasonably support one while questioning another. They cannot do that if the city’s own discussion treats all three as a single number.

If members of the administration disagree on the figure, that disagreement should be resolved before the next public meeting, not aired for the first time in front of commissioners and residents who are being asked to trust the number enough to act on it.

Commissioner Melissa Castro said Wednesday that she intends to propose a modest tax reduction this year, in her words, to show residents “we care.”

Whatever the commission ultimately decides on the rate, residents deserve a more basic form of care first: a government that can describe the size of the problem it is asking them to prepare for in the same terms twice.

A city cannot ask for trust on hard choices still to come while giving three answers to a question it has already answered once, correctly, in writing.