The New Orleans City Council voted 5-2 to double water and sewer rates over the next eight years.

The proposed rate increase has roiled city politics in recent days after Council President Stacy Head called on her six colleagues to postpone the vote in order to obtain more information.

The city’s Sewerage & Water Board resisted efforts by Head and the independent Bureau of Governmental Research to explain how it would spend the $583 million in extra money it would collect through a 10 percent annual increase over eight years.

On Wednesday, at a special City Council hearing, water system officials finally spelled out some of the details. That came several hours after the Bureau of Governmental Research analyzed the proposed rate hike.

The Lens live-blogged the meeting:

Tyler Bridges covers Louisiana politics and public policy for The Lens. He returned to New Orleans in 2012 after spending the previous year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where he studied digital journalism....