City hall released a four-year budget Tuesday that shows many departments stretching thin to serve a growing public that has greater demands, while many councillors fear faster population growth will make balancing finances even harder.

Some council conservatives who would normally rail against four straight 4.7-per-cent hikes to property tax now say that level is realistic, or perhaps even too low.

“We’re not going to be able to hold the line,” said Coun. Andre Chabot, who predicts a five-point increase.

“There’s been too many approvals. Too much incremental budgeting that’s happened along the way that we’re going to have to respond to.”

While much talk among councillors Tuesday dwelled on a search for more “efficiencies” and outsourcing more work to the private sector, there was almost as much chatter about areas in which they’re considering spending more. Those include transit, where service increases fall well short of goals; police, whose officer levels aren’t budgeted to increase at all between 2015 and 2018; and the parks department, where the budget doesn’t at all seem to account for replanting and repairing the city-owned trees damaged in September’s snowstorm.

BY THE NUMBERS: CALGARY'S NEXT FOUR YEAR BUDGET

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The other challenge the city faces is its sheer size. The budget was based on yearly populations increases of 25,000, but last week city manager Jeff Fielding warned council to expect 40,000 new Calgarians to serve every year — rates that the property tax revenues cannot accommodate.

That could lead to hard choices in latter years of the four-year cycle, unless the provincial or federal government comes through with new funding deals politicians have long pleaded for.

Even finding further savings in the budget may not result in tax relief, said Coun. Ward Sutherland, vice-chairman of council’s priorities and finance committee.

“As we’re doing reductions, the population increase is going to eat up those reductions. It’s not that simple that we simply cut,” he told reporters.

The budget does include some savings in Calgary’s parks and roads department, based on “zero-based” reviews that encouraged contracting out some services to the private sector. The city will review other departments for such cost-trimming exercises, though city unions are decrying the trend toward more outsourcing.

The zero-based reviews so far have come up with a few million dollars of savings in an operating budget that will eclipse $4 billion for the first time next year.

“The solution is not a massive re-engineering of all services. The solution is to fix the revenue side,” Mayor Naheed Nenshi told reporters.

In budget debates that begin Nov. 24, the mayor isn’t keen on gaining more revenue from taxpayers beyond the proposed 4.7-per-cent hike. It amounts to $6.30 more per month next year for the typical home.

“I would love to lower it. Every now and then we find a rabbit here and there in a hat and we can move it, 0.1 per cent or 0.2 per cent here and there,” Nenshi said. “But my sense is that council understands that Calgarians demand these services and they value these services and we’ve got to find a way to keep providing them.”

Only three councillors voted against setting the 4.7-per-cent increase as a target in May, including Coun. Joe Magliocca.