On January 28, 2026, the Rome Common Council spent a long stretch of a meeting debating $70,000 in window blinds for City Hall. Later that same night, three transfers of money between city funds passed with no discussion at all. It looks backwards until you read the rule in the city's own audited statements: the council can't cut salaries, debt payments, or revenue estimates, and it can't add to any line. Every cost driving Rome's budget gap sits outside the authority of the Common Council. This episode also traces the one line in every budget book where the city writes down how much it needs to cover the deficit. That number has grown from $1.3 million in 2022 to $3.7 million in 2025. And a sentence from an April council meeting is slated to add more than $17 million to the existing debt.