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Details:  City Budgets

Opponents' claim #1:
Deep in million $$$ debt for years.

Short answer:
Truth:  The CFA forecasts that the city will experience multimillion dollar budget surpluses.
Fiscal sensitivity analyses in the CFA conservatively predict budget surpluses, not deficits, accumulating $12 million to $49 million dollars by 2015.  Annual surpluses average $2.3 million per year for current conditions.

Some additional details:

Click on these images or the text links below them to see actual predictions of the CFA sensitivity analyses.

Projected Annual Budget Surplus	Cumulative Budget Surplus

About the new bar budget bar chart on the opponents' web site:


Truth:  Click either of these icons to see a valid comparison          

The opponents' bar chart isn't just a case of apples and oranges, it's more like apples and kiwi fruits.  Here are the main reasons why:

• The Folsom and South Lake Tahoe budgets include their fire departments. The El Dorado Hills fire department will remain a separate entity, it's not in the EDH city budget. If the Fire Department budget is added to the initial city budget it doubles to about $29 million in the new city's base year.
  
• Consider the future of the El Dorado Hills budget:  The CFA estimates conservatively that revnues will grow 42% in 9 years. See Table 2, page 13 of the CFA). That much growth isn't
  
• History of the City of Folsom dates back to 1849. On the time scale of urban development it's quite mature, El Dorado Hills is a youngster with different urban circumstances. For example, Folsom's FY 05-06 budget includes $40.6 million for Enterprise Fund operations and $25 million for Special Revenue Funds.
  
• South Lake Tahoe is so odd that experts won't compare any city to it. It has a permanent population of about 24,000. (yes, the chart's number is wrong -- it includes the Tahoe Basin population that's in unincorporated El Dorado County land.) However, it has an enormous itinerant population of tourists, skiers, gamblers, and so on. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency estimates about 200,000 people visit the Tahoe Basin each summer. They're highly mobile and most visit or pass through South Lake Tahoe.
  
  SLT also budgets for many additional services:  Marine police patrol on Lake Tahoe, operating an airport, clearing snow from streets and roads in the winter. Their police department makes it known that they handle lots of tourists who take excess advantage of 24-hour drink service in the casinos on the Nevada side of the city line. Thus they have 2.3 sworn officers per thousand population while we currently have less than 1 from the Sheriff, much less than 1 from the CHP.

Here are comparisons with other cities cited in the CFA
from tables 1 and 2 of the Comparative City Analysis appendix.
These compare General Fund revenues.



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