Where the Money Flowed — Audited Actuals

How to read this

The ACFR's Statement of Activities is built around one question the budget never answers: after counting the fees and grants each function earns for itself, what does it really cost the taxpayer?

The table above is that statement, made legible. Sewer, water, transit, and housing fully fund themselves through charges and grants. Public works and community services cover roughly two-thirds of their own cost. Public safety earns almost nothing on its own — its $82.7M net cost is why property and sales taxes exist. In FY2024, the city's entire $121.6M of taxes went, in effect, to cover the $125.9M net cost of governmental activities.

Why these numbers differ from the budget lenses

• Actuals vs. plan. This is what happened in FY2023-24; the budget lenses show what was appropriated for FY2025-26.
• Accrual vs. appropriation. Accrual expense includes depreciation and actuarially measured pension expense, and capitalizes asset purchases instead of expensing them. Public safety here is $94.8M against $104.0M of budgeted police + fire appropriations — different measures of the same thing.
• Consolidation. Money the city charges itself disappears government-wide. The clearest case: "excise tax" is $9.4M in the budget but $2.9M here, because Measure G is largely a charge on the city's own utility funds.
• The surplus is not a windfall. The $29.1M added to net position is dominated by restricted capital grants and enterprise results. Citywide net position is $898.5M, but 81% is capital assets and 16% is restricted — unrestricted is about 2%, and was negative from 2015 (when GASB 68 put pension liabilities on the balance sheet) until FY2021-22.

Methodology & sources

All figures are exact dollars from the audited Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024: the Statement of Activities (p. 24) and Management's Discussion and Analysis (pp. 7-9). Every function's expense, program revenue, and net cost reconciles to the statement's printed totals: $288,060,946 of expense, $317,148,027 of revenue, $29,087,081 change in net position. Interfund transfers net to zero government-wide and are excluded; the Note 21 error correction is a restatement, not a current-year flow.