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Accessibility
The city has lots of information- but it's often difficult to find if you don't know what you're looking for, or structured so it's not easy to understand. I will highlight key information in graphical form for each budget cycle.
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For this cycle, the key things to understand are *why* the city is in a budget deficit, and *what* it is cutting to get back to a balanced budget this year. Longer term, we need to understand the structural factors that will lead to increasing deficits year after year.
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Finally, I highlight some charts from the city's budget that show how it is earning money and where it is spending it.
Why is Pinole in a budget deficit this year?
Because of rising benefits costs, increased salaries, and most of all CalPERS earning a loss on their investments and the city needing to backfill that loss. $700,000 of the city's $1.3 million dollar baseline budget deficit is due to CalPERS earning a loss.​
How is Pinole balancing the budget?
Pinole is solving this year's budget deficit by freezing the police department vacant sergeant's position, cutting the general reserve, reducing funding for the City Clerk's, City Attorney's and Human Resources' travel and training, and reducing funding for the City Council intern program. For your comparison, you can see cuts by department before the final budget adjustments and after, with the final cuts being labeled as such.
What is causing Pinole's Long-Term Deficit?
This chart is from the Baker Tilly presentation at the Special Budget Workshop on April 30th, 2024- figure 2, page 10 of the agenda packet, which you can find here. It shows the anticipated fund balance of the General Fund if no action is taken, where all numbers shown should be multiplied by ten for their actual value (so -$20,000 is in fact -$200,000 and so on). As you can see, the city's deficit exhausts the general fund balance by 2028 in this scenario.
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As the report states, this is due to "the cost of the addressing increasing employer contributions to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS); postemployment benefits (OPEB) for retired City employees’ medical insurance coverage; recent organizational changes in the past few years that have resulted in additional costs relating to increased staffing and MOU increases; and the exhaustion of the City’s Section 115 pension liability trust fund." (page 9)
How does Pinole Earn Money?
Focusing on the General Fund, we can see that the primary source of revenue is Sales taxes at 35%, with Property taxes at 23%, Intergovernmental taxes at 9%, the Utility Users Tax at 8 %, transfers in from one-time sources at 9%, fees for Dispatch at 7%, and other taxes and revenue sources adding up to about 9 %. This chart is from page 44 of the adopted budget.
Where does Pinole Spend money?
Focusing on the General Fund (as most other sources are restricted to a particular use), we can see that the police department receives 31% of expenditures, public works gets 28%, Fire gets 18%, non-departmental expenditures get 9%, and everything else combined gets 13%. This chart is from page 45 of the adopted budget.