I'm not in the habit of marking variables as final.  While I understand judicious use could allow for optimized code, that's unlikely in this method.  That any variable is marked as final in my code is either an artifact of my own refactoring (ie, I changed the method name, then changed the parameter type) or an attempt at consistency in the code base.

  Frankly the use of "final" baffles me in a lot of cases in this project but I chocked it up to stylistic differences.  I'd be happy to be educated on this point.