CENTER FOR PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY
The Center for Public Accountability promotes fiscal transparency and sustainability by providing financial data and analysis of California’s cities, counties and school districts, and offers a roadmap to sound governance for California’s local elected officials.
CPC’s Local Fiscal Health Dashboard provides a clear view of the financial health of California cities, counties and school districts. The interactive database allows users to track how elected officials are managing local budgets, support ongoing budget decision making and identify financial red flags.
Using public data from Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports (ACFR) that local governments are required to submit each year. The dashboard provides key financial metrics to empower local elected officials, analysts, reporters and citizens to better understand how local governments are performing and spotlight concerning financial trends.
Former California State Senator John Moorlach’s widely recognized financial ranking report card provides detailed rankings on the financial standing of California cities, counties, and school districts. Moorlach’s rankings are derived by dividing a city’s unrestricted net position — which reflects the available resources that the city can use for general purposes, such as public services, operations, and includes assets and liabilities — by their population. Together with the dashboard, these rankings provide an additional lens for understanding and comparing local fiscal health across jurisdictions.
Marc Joffe is President of the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association. After a long career in the financial industry, including a senior director role at Moody’s Analytics, he transitioned to policy research at California Policy Center and Reason Foundation. Joffe earned an MBA from New York University and an MPA from San Francisco State University.
Mark Moses has thirty years of experience in local government administration and finance. He is the author of The Municipal Financial Crisis – A Framework for Understanding and Fixing Government Budgeting (Palgrave Macmillan, January 2022).
Besides making billionaires pay their “fair share”, the case for Proposition 40 revolves around offsetting “catastrophic” federal Medi-Cal cuts. These cuts will likely be reversed by an incoming Democratic Congress, but, regardless, the expected cuts are not as catastrophic as Prop 40 advocates make them out to be. Last September, the campaign that later qualified…
With local tax and bond measures on the ballot across California, voters can use California Policy Center’s Local Fiscal Health Dashboard to examine the financial condition of the local governments asking them for more money. CPC has updated the dashboard with the latest available financial data for fiscal year 2025, assigning each jurisdiction a fiscal…
Many think of the League of Women Voters as an unbiased source of voter information. But, in the Bay Area at least, nothing could be further from the truth. LWV Bay Area has received funding from local transit agencies and is earning that support by campaigning on behalf of their $17 billion transit sales tax….
Teachers’ unions have squeezed education budgets across California without academic gains to compensate. Many California school districts face precarious financial circumstances especially if the state revenue boom from AI slows down. Recently, the state’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, faced a budget crisis after their local union pressured the district to accept a costly…