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).
Taxpayers have a fundamental right to know how their money is being managed. Three conditions define a best-practice state regime for local government financial reporting. First, the state should require all local governments above a meaningful revenue threshold to produce independently audited financial statements annually. Second, the state should enforce a prompt filing deadline with…
A bill quietly moving through the Legislature would gut California’s 2013 pension reforms and plunge the state back toward the kind of fiscal crisis that forced lawmakers to enact the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act (PEPRA) in an effort to stabilize a system that was spiraling out of control. AB 1383 (McKinnor) would expand the…
Last week, KCRA 3 in Sacramento reported that the Newsom administration’s January budget contained a roughly $2 billion accounting error tied to CalPERS pension contributions. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office flagged the problem in February. Legislative leaders knew. The public didn’t find out until April. The story is genuinely newsworthy, but not for the reason…
San Francisco and Portland are the only two US cities that tax companies if the pay ratio between the CEO and other employees is “too high.”. After agreeing to lower this tax in 2024 via Proposition M, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its organized labor allies are pushing a ballot measure to raise…